Unclear Physics

It says here that doubt is being cast on the Supersymmetry hypothesis, which is supposed to fill the gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics.    Just in case you’d forgotten, the Standard Model is meant to explain how the Universe came to exist, and why it continues to do so despite all indications to the contrary.  The discovery of the Higgs boson last year was hailed as near-proof that the theory was on the right track.

But there are indeed a couple of gaps in this Standard Model, which Supersymmetry might be able to fill.  First, it only explains 4% of the matter and energy we actually see and feel, and consist of  – the other 96% is unexplained and undetectable, and so classed by physicists, with an honest if despairing frankness, as ‘dark’.  Bit of a shortfall, you might think.

The other slight shortcoming is Gravity.  You know, that stuff that glues you to the ground, defines ‘up’ and ‘down’, and incidentally makes the earth revolve around the sun, the sun hold its place in the galaxy, and the galaxy adhere to the rest of the universe.  You have to wonder how the theorists missed that one, don’t you? 

But that’s not the point.  Supersymmetry theory (and I have to confess that the details start to* elude me at this point), if proven, would fill these gaps.  Problem is, theories need to be verified by evidence, and so far the Large Hadron Collider** has abjectly failed to detect the anti-particles that would do the job.  So experimenters are bouncing the issue back into the theorists’ side of the court: perhaps the theory is yet another blind alley, like phlogiston and the steady-state universe and the green-cheese moon.  The theorists respond that it’s your experiments that aren’t good enough: you’ll have to build a Larger Collider, or make this one Collide a bit quicker, or just keep trying.  And so it goes on. 

Physicists seem to be up there with economists in their propensity to complain about the perverse failure of the real world to do as they tell it.  Does it matter?  Well, that question was probably asked when they came up with quantum mechanics, and many might have answered ‘no’.  But then we wouldn’t have had transistors and their offshoots, and you wouldn’t be reading this.  (So maybe ‘no’ was right…)

Meanwhile, what I want to know is: what is ‘electric charge’?  Nobody seems to know.

 

*If you believe those two words, then I can get away with pretty much anything…

** What happens to all those Small and Medium-sized Hadrons, I used to wonder, until someone put me right.

A haiku

 

Here's a little moth.

Do moths eat cloth? Is that a

Myth?  I've no idea.

'that which eats away at anything, gradually and silently.'
'a fragile frivolous creature, readily dazzled into destruction.'

Horses no longer for courses

I was saddened, though not surprised, to read that at least a thousand horses have been killed over the last six years for failing to jump over an obstacle which proved too difficult for them, and which, to put it bluntly, had been designed to precisely that purpose.  If you don’t accept that contention, just consider – when you watch a steeplechase, is part of the excitement praying that your preferred horse will make it over the next fence?

I used the word ‘killed’ above in place of the euphemistic ‘destroyed’, or even worse ‘elective euthanasia’ (ugh!), which even the Observer’s report didn’t see the need to question.  The British Horseracing Authority, which puts the case for the defence, should be renamed the ‘British Weaselwords Authority’.   After trying to undermine the bare facts with the last refuge of the modern-day scoundrel, percentages (those 1,000 dead horses are a mere 0.2% of the total number of runs over fences, so that’s all right then), they assert, with a straight face, that “[t]horoughbred racehorses are not animals that take well to being turned out to a field … and sometimes the most humane option is to put them down.”  (Substitute “kill them” for the last three words, please.) 

I’d say the most humane option is not to make them do it.  Although I wouldn’t call myself an enthusiast (or a gambler – which is what it’s really all about), I greatly enjoy watching a flat race, almost as much as I imagine the horses enjoy running it.  But jump races have always made me a bit queasy, and learning that the death toll is getting worse rather than better doesn’t assuage this reaction one bit.

*

I was born in the Year of the Horse, and they sense this.  Whenever I’m near them, they seem to single me out, with a smile and a wink.  Once, I was walking (on a designated footpath)with companions across a field in Pembrokeshire in which three beautiful horses were running free.  The others were a bit nervous, but I was enthralled; until the young colt ran up to me, grabbed me by the sleeve and insistently tried to get me to join in.  I eventually got free (one of the older ones might have come over and had a quiet word, I’m not sure), and bore a little bruise on my upper arm for several days afterwards.  I saw it as a badge of honour.

I’ve never ridden a horse: something I’d add to my bucket list, if I had one.  I have ridden a camel, though, and a donkey.  And a tram.

 

Hobbies Part II

On reflection, I’ve decided not spell out the details of the end of my adventures in philately.  To do so would entail introducing someone who was involved, but could be identifiable to at least a few of my readers and might, for all I know, actually be one of them.  Best let it lie.  Suffice to say that I no longer possess that Penny Black.

Instead, here are some pursuits* I have followed for a while over the years, which could have turned into hobbies had I possessed the requisite obsessiveness:

Chess

Poetry

Drawing

Astronomy

Train sets

Wine-making

Home brewing

Cruciverbalism

Model aeroplanes

 And a few I’m sure I’ll never go anywhere near:

Acting

Camping

Weaving

Beekeeping

Phillumeny

Bungee jumping

Flower pressing

* Drawn from my Chambers Crossword Lists book.

 

 

Hobby (Part I)

‘A favourite pursuit followed as an amusement.’

If I accept this dictionary definition, then I’ve had, and have, dozens of hobbies.  But the definition is far too loose, and misses the crucial element of a true hobby, which is obsession.  In my sense, I’ve only ever had the one, which was – guess what – stamp collecting.

My parents had no experience of bringing up a boy, and my father probably had few memories of his own upbringing, which in any case would have been very different, in the 1920s, to mine in the 1950s.  He certainly had evolved his own set of hobbies by the time I was eight or nine  – woodworking, gardening, fiddling with electrical stuff  – but I’m sure he didn’t think of these as hobbies: they were just the fabric of his life, things ‘done’ rather than ‘followed’.

I was a compliant child until I reached puberty, and took a natural interest in whatever was placed in front of me, so when it was suggested that I might like to take up stamp collecting, I just went along with it.  The idea was prompted by the fact that a particular aunt, Maud maybe, had ‘collected stamps’ and decreed, as late Victorian aunts did, that Timothy might like to inherit her collection and make something more of it.  My mother (who was in charge but also in awe) had no choice but to pass this early bequest on to me; I had a look, saw an opportunity for some sorting and classification*, and got stuck in.

Aunt Maud’s stamp collection was, I rapidly saw, a chaotic mess.  It seemed reasonable to try and make sense of this, so I did, sorting by country, then (having acquired a Stanley Gibbons catalogue) by date, issue, colour variations, perforations …  After a few months, I decided to specialise in what was then called ‘British Empire’.  In 1953, I was gifted a full set of mint Coronation stamps, from every Colony and Dominion.  But what I craved was a Penny Black.  I saved up pocket money for months, and finally went to the stamp shop in Boscombe and bought one, with a rather unusual red revenue postmark, for £2.

 

Part II will follow tomorrow.

 

* Perhaps my only true enduring hobby.

Petrol flow theory

I was going to analyse why reducing the number of pumps from twelve to six has improved the level of service at my local filling station, but I can't be bothered.

Here are the hi-res state of the art graphics of the before and after configurations.  (Not to scale.)  Work it out for yourselves.

BEFORE:

 

 

AFTER:

 

 

 

 

Sloppy Journalism

I’ve just caught up with last Sunday’s Observer, where an article suggested that Spotify are ripping off music makers because they only pay 0.004p per play, whereas Radio 2 pay something like £59.75.  One famous musician, and one or two self-serving unknown ones, burbled about how exploitative this was, getting their arithmetic completely wrong.  But what pissed me off was the biased reporting.

In particular, qualifiers such as ‘just’ (in relation to Spotify’s payment) and ‘in contrast’ (re the BBC’s) were bandied about as if they added any value or information to the report.  In fact, all they added was a slant which doesn’t belong in news reporting.

To be specific, the factual content was that, for a million listens on Spotify, the artist would earn about £4,000 (0.004p per listen), whereas, if a million people happened to be listening to R2 at the time, the artist would earn about £60 (0.000006p per listen).  Put this way, Spotify looks like a bloody good deal to me.

More on wasps

I was going to write about how it is that reducing the number of pumps from twelve to six has increased the efficiency of my local petrol station, but this is much more interesting.

Why is this wasp so hooked on this chair?  He's been regularly coming back to it for two days now.  Okay, there's a smear of something that could be vaguely sugary, but even so.  And why hasn't he brought his mates along?   They only live next door, I'm told by my neighbour.

Seagulls at Sunset

This chalet in West Bay is called ‘Sunset’. 

 

Here’s why.

 

 

‘Sunset’ is on the northern edge of the lagoon formed when the river Brit meets a kind of barrier with sluice gates which prevents it, I suppose, from washing away the rest of the town or something.  On the other side of the lagoon, you can people-watch for hours – they cross and re-cross the bridge, and as you gradually relax into a more natural pace of life you can spin imaginings about who they are, where they’re off to or returning from, whether they will get or have got whatever it was they are or were hoping for…   But mostly you can watch seagulls.

I’ve always thought of them as sea-thugs, and I haven’t entirely modified this opinion.  In their natural element, the air, they’re certainly graceful, even beautiful, like penguins in the water; but standing still they are menacing, their cold staring eyes looking as if they’ve been reincarnated from somewhere down the Jurassic Coast and want to take revenge.  (They are dinosaurs, you know.)  And floating, they just look petulant.

The pit bulls of the shore.  You can see about ten of them in this picture,

but there would often be thirty or forty.  You will know from the media of their aggressiveness and uncalled-for territoriality, but it’s a bit scary to see them operating at full tilt, against each other.  A few hours’ observation, though, revealed some subtleties.  There seemed to be two separate flocks, and a queuing system was in operation.  One bunch would graze, squabbling, on the plankton or whatever it is, whilst the others would perch on a couple of nearby rooftops, garnishing them with guava as they waited their turn at the feeding grounds.

And the noise!  I worked out after a while that they have a vocabulary of five words, four of which mean “I’m angry!” [on a scale from “I’m rather cross” to “I’m spitting feathers (yours!”)], and the fifth of which means “please, I didn’t mean to [insert infringement as appropriate, e.g. ‘steal your chip’, ‘crap on your car’, ‘crash-land on your breakfast table’]”.  (I discovered their attempt at a dawn chorus later.)

Finally, they’re devious.  Oh yes.  This particular character had devised a trick of perching on the wall, looking as plaintive as a Jurassic throwback is capable of looking.  It had only one leg.  We were starting to feel some sympathy for this evident runt-of-the-litter, being tempted to toss it a crust, when I caught it in the act:

 

The little bleeder was faking it!  Talk about refugees on the Underground!  I half expected it to hold up a sign saying “CRIPPLED.  HOMELESS.  FOUR CHICKS.  PLEASE HELP ME”, before flying off to one of those penthouses across the bay.

So all in all, I wasn’t warming to them.  That is, until the real pit bulls turned up.  Human sort.  There were about eight of them – four male, two female, assorted sprogs.  Alpha Dweeb launched an inflatable dinghy and proceeded to row straight into the floating gulls, uttering his distinctive loud, hoarse, threatening cry, echoed by his onshore companions.  He circled the lagoon over and over for about an hour, plainly bent on disturbing as much peace as he could find, egged on by the rest of the pack.  The gulls at first shrugged and flew away, but some invisible line – who knows the mind of a seagull? – was crossed, and they decided enough was enough.

One by one, they started to swoop – at first at some height, then progressively lower, until they were no more than six feet up.  Alpha Dweeb thought this was hilarious, and began to swipe at them with his paddle, cackling.  I thought of calling out a warning – they can take out an eye or rip off an ear without breaking wing-flap – but decided it would be unfair to oblige the poor lads to have to hurl yet more abuse around, so I left well alone.  Eventually someone shouted “PUB!” (one of the few intelligible sounds I heard) and they packed up and left.

So, I still wouldn’t feed the gulls, but I did end up slightly more benevolent towards them.

Feeding the ducks is okay, though.

 

 

Do wasps eat anything?

Yes, apparently they eat midges.  (No, not Migs.)  I learned this from a man I found myself sharing a table with at a very long, very hot but very enjoyable garden party yesterday, over paella and fizzy liquid.  John was, he told us, a wasp expert in one of his several previous lives (you have to believe that, don’t you?), and explained at some length how they’ve had a bad press, because, well, because they eat midges.  Without wasps, we’d be midged to death.

Someone suggested that there are few wasps in the Western Isles, whereas there’s no shortage of them midges.  So what we need to do, I proposed, is reintroduce wasps to north-west Scotland, a bit like they did with red kites down here.  (Or nothing like they did with red kites down here, actually.)  Then they wouldn’t have to keep trying to eat us.  (The wasps, that is, not the red kites.  ‘They’ being the wasps, not the reintroducers. Or the midges.)

John had, understandably, no answer to that.  It was that kind of party.

Tomorrow, Dorset seagulls, I promise.

Black Spiderman

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. 

King-In-Waiting (maybe), bored out of his head by hyperactive underemployment, employs black spider to write irascible scrawls to anonymised government functionaries, believed to include ministers of the (yes!) Crown, about topics of personal interest, including (we may assume, since we can’t know): the number of motorcycle outriders needed to bring Windsor town centre to a standstill whenever he wants to visit mummy; the brand of nail scissors being used to manicure the lawns at Highgrove; or his Toothbrush-Batman’s* complaints about the difficulty of squeezing these new-fangled plastic tubes from the bottom up, the old lead ones were so much better.  There may be others.

All smacks of National Security to me.  But no, I stand corrected by no less a personage than the attorney general.  (Who, as a minister of the Crown, will one day report indirectly to aforesaid King-In-Waiting.  Maybe.)  No, the problem is as follows. 

The monarch is constitutionally obliged to be politically neutral.  The black spider letters, if published, would incontrovertibly demonstrate that the heir to the throne is no such thing.  Which we already know to be true.  Therefore, they can’t be published, otherwise we would all start believing what we already know to be true.   

Have I got it right?  I have, haven’t I?

What I tell you three times is true.

* See what I did there?

Lord Murray of Wimbledon

Or: Lord Cameron of Wherever?

Anyone remember Sir Fred Perry?  I thought not, because Fred wasn’t knighted for winning Wimbledon three successive times back in 1938.  He didn’t even get a *BE.  Perhaps Neville Chamberlain had a better sense of proportion than our current Prime Minister, who is on record as believing that he ‘can’t think of anyone more deserving of a knighthood [than Andy Murray].’ 

I can, but I’m not going to start the list here, because that would be to open up a can of all sorts and sizes of worms. 

I wouldn’t dream of denigrating Andy’s achievement, he’s a superb athlete and may well turn out to be one of the greatest tennis players ever.  But to be awarded a K for being the guy who broke a 76-year record of failure isn’t the marker I’d want to put on my CV. 

Especially if I were to acquire this honour for being the guy who broke the Curse of Cameron.

Still, a Mail headline is worth a few thousand votes, innit?

Crosswords

I haven’t delighted you enough recently on this subject, have I?  Tick the appropriate box:

□ NO!!

 □ Yes

 Oh, all right.  I decided recently (yesterday evening in fact, at about 9.45) that I needed a new hobby.  Or any hobby.  Collecting things is Out Of The Question.  (Yet more stuff?  I think not.)  Researching things requires long-range effort and concentration.  Also OOTQ.  (Checking the gin bottle and the tonic stock is as far as I care to go down that road.)  Then I remembered that, in my twenties, I occasionally used to compile crosswords.

I’d design my own grids (it took me a while to accept that they had to be symmetrical), fill them in somehow (which got easier when I was given a dictionary for my birthday), and then, the really fun bit, make up the clues.  My masterpiece, I vaguely remember, was defined as ‘Workers’ playtime?’, and involved Volkswagens, South African currency and comedy take-offs.  (‘BEER AND SKITTLES’, since you ask.)

Nobody ever actually solved these things, of course – that wasn’t the point.  (I offered one to a fellow-enthusiast at work once; he didn’t get a single answer.)  Nor, I accepted last night, would anyone have a punt at my new ones: apart from anything else, I don’t think I know anybody else who does cryptic crosswords on any regular basis.  (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

So, I spent the next two hours researching crossword compilation applications.  There are a few out there, but they don’t meet my exacting needs.  Actually, all I want is a set of ready-made grids which I can fill in on the computer.  If these happen to be standard Guardian grids, so much the better.  Ziltch.

So I emailed the Guardian’s crossword editor.  (Regular readers may have noticed that I can be a bit obsessive once I’ve snatched at a hook.)  To his eternal credit, Hugh replied by return – but the news wasn’t good.   Digital versions of their grids aren’t available to the general public.  My best plan, he suggested, was to photocopy or download the day’s puzzle from the paper and then use a pencil and a rubber.  Fair enough.  But I reckon I can do better than that.  I feel a highly customised Excel spreadsheet coming on.

Don’t watch this space (or 'light', as we setters call it) though.

 

Oh, all right – here’s another clue for you all: ‘Harry Potter? (7)’  (Need help?  The 5^th letter is K.)

 

The Politics of Parking

There are a lot of cars parked in the Close next to my house.  When the yellow lines were installed, eight years ago, my activist neighbours (unbeknown to me at the time) forced the Council to reserve a car-and-a-half sized unrestricted slot next to my back gate, so that I’d have space for visitors, should any ever turn up. 

Needless to say, that ‘reserved’ parking space is more or less permanently filled by one of three vehicles.  The considerate blue Micra, who always leaves me as much space as she can to get out of the drive; a white van (not the original one from three years ago, but nevertheless a van, and white); and the rusty old Spanish Renault, for which I have a soft spot.  None of these people live here, and initially they made me angry, until my neighbour opposite buttonholed me as I was on my way out one evening.

She’s elderly, like me, but acts the part.  She explained that she had difficulty backing out of her drive, because of those cars parked in ‘my’ space.  What did I think of the idea of asking the Council to extend the yellow lines right up to my gate, which would make it much easier for her?  A bit irritated, I pointed out that the space had been deliberately reserved for me, so that I had some on-street parking just like everybody else (including her).  “But you never use it, do you?” she replied.  I had no answer to that, so I just shrugged, muttered something non-committal and departed.  Needless to say, I never heard any more of it.

Shortly after that encounter, my neighbour took to parking in the road outside her house, rather than in her drive.  Obviously, this makes it much easier for her to make her getaway, and I sympathise with that.  It also makes it a bit harder for me to back out of my drive: this thought doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind, and I wouldn’t expect it to.  Nor do I particularly expect the incomer parkers to realise the consequences of their actions – they’re just looking after themselves.

There are several morals to this story, the main one being that no interactions are ever between just two parties, and that an objective assessment of the weighted balance between even these three simple sets of self-interest is nearly impossible, and probably not worth the bother.  I don’t know whether this thought depresses or enlivens me.

 

Handwriting

I had to look out some of my termly Reports from primary school, to confirm something I’ve always accepted as true: my handwriting is terrible.  The subject was labelled ‘Writing’, as distinct from ‘English Composition’, at which I seem to have done quite well (although ‘marred by untidiness’).  Here are some of the comments:

·         Poor – rather unsteady

·         Untidy – must try to slope all his letters the same way.

·         Uneven

·         Too much ink

·         Too large and irregular

·         Very poor and untidy

·         Probably tries too hard!

And a rare one:

·         Improving

My signature on official documents – cheques, the backs of new credit cards, contracts and suchlike – is similarly, let’s say, unsteady and uneven.  I blame this on a brief period during my banking career when I had to sign hundreds of ‘mail payment orders’ a day, at speed.  There’s a theory that people’s signatures evolve towards either a straight line or a circle; well, mine ended up as the contents of my green bin when the holly has just been pruned.  Complaints were received from banks around the world.

These actions and thoughts have been triggered by the arrival of my Book book, about which I wrote a few posts ago.  As a reminder, the idea is to record stuff about books – any stuff, there isn’t a plan – in this nice black-hard-covered A4 lined notebook, as a kind of archive.  My Book of Books.  Past, present, future; expectations, disappointments, love affairs.  I still like the idea, very much, but there’s one thing I hadn’t taken into account.  The blank first page is staring unblinkingly at me right now.  “If I’m to be what you think I am,” it’s saying, “you’re going to have to write considered words in me.  Preferably with a proper fountain pen, in properly sloped copperplate.”

I’m considering my considered reply.  At the moment it’s along the lines of “flip off, page one, I’ll scribble whatever I choose, with whatever writing utensil comes to hand.”  In fact, I’m just going to make some notes about ‘Lionel Asbo’, in a commensurate fashion.

At the same time, I can’t help thinking that the Book has a point.

 

Akaspa

This is a useful word, from the native American language Lakotah, which means ‘to be provoked beyond endurance.’  I reached a state of akaspa last Thursday, and have been ducking in and out of it ever since, the frequency depending on the arrival or non-arrival of communications from a couple of organisations.

I’m not going to name either of these organisations, because I don’t want to offer them the oxygen of publicity.  (To quote the great late Linda Smith, I wouldn’t offer them the oxygen of oxygen.)   Suffice to say, the first is a purveyor of satellite TV, the second of internet broadband, “connectivity”.  For their protection, let’s just call them ‘SK’ and ‘TB’.   (Those quotes around the C-word in the previous sentence are intended to convey irony, in blatant unsubtle shovel-loads.)  Let me explain.

Ten days ago, SK wrote to me announcing a dinky little box which, once installed, would allow me access ‘on demand’, on my TV, without involvement of a computer, to catch-up TV services like BBC iPlayer and many others.  (I’ve hardly ever used these services, to be honest, because I’m incapable of watching television on a laptop – I want to watch it on my lavish 42” Hitachi, thank you very much.)  Best, this little box will wirelessly connect directly to my home network router (supplied by TB), and thence to the internet. 

That’ll do me, I thought, and ordered it.  £21.95.  It arrived as expected  last Wednesday, and I set Thursday morning aside to install it.  Then the fight started.

You don’t want the details, do you?  No.  So let me just count the emails and ‘help’ messages (27),  time spent waiting in ‘chat’ queues (about 45 minutes – rather annoyingly, this tended to increase rather than decrease, and I almost smashed something valuable, such as my own teeth, when I slipped from fourth to sixth in the queue), and false hopes (“what you need to do is …”; no it isn’t…).  Finally, I got a definitive answer from SK: “change your Multiplexing method in your ASDL settings to ‘LCC-BASED.’”

Whew, at last, an answer!  Straightforward, eh?  All I have to do now is find out from TB how to do this.  Don’t bother your frazzled little head about what it means, or even whether it’s a safe move or might cause smoke to plume from the router.  Just tell me which buttons to press, please!

TB replied on Monday morning.  It seems it’s impossible to make this change, because to do so would require the co-operation of a sister organisation called TB-Op*nR**ch, who have a policy of never communicating with either their customers or their colleagues.  (I paraphrase.)  They are in a three-way Mexican stand-off.  So I’ve written back to SK to ask them whither the way forward, if any.  I await their reply.  And await.  And await.  My akaspa is subsiding, as it does.

*

In the supermarket car park this morning, I saw, not at all for the first time, a lovely pale blue 1960 Morris Minor 1000.  I vaguely know the man who owns it, and once had a conversation with him about upkeep.  “It’s easy,” he told me.  “Just change the oil and the filters and the plugs.  You can get them all still.”

Meta-watching – cuts both ways

I have very mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I’m instinctively supportive of the loudest popular response, which is to say, in effect, “You looking at me?  What you looking at, man?”  On the other hand, there are some nasty people out there, who should be prevented from doing nasty things.  On the third hand – and this may not be a completely rational attitude – I find it hard to trust anything William Hague says.  Perhaps he could get in touch to assuage my concern when he reads this.

What I don’t entirely understand is why the authorities are making such a big deal of it.  After all, we’ve all known it’s been happening, or has been poised to happen, for years, haven’t we?  Moore’s Law has been proven for decades, so its corollary – if the capability exists, it will be used – doesn’t take much thought to deduce.

So why are NSA and GCHQ and the rest so faffed about the fact that someone’s pointed out the obvious?  If it was me, I’d be shouting from the hilltops that there’s no point in you terrorists even thinking about it, because we know who you are and we’ll get you.  And publishing pictures of my datacentres, outlines of the algorithms I’m using, even your email addresses and phone numbers, to prove it.  Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not – if you don’t like it, sue me.  (After all, the rule of law cuts both ways.)

All this weak-kneed evasiveness and defensiveness just makes them look evasive and defensive.  After all, if Moore is right and pretty soon the capability will be free and downloadable from some site in Korea, you and I will be hacking GCHQ over our aperitifs before dinner, just for a laugh.

Dedicated Follower?

Well!  What I know about fashion could be written on the back of an H&M thong; but I see from today’s Guardian that David Cameron’s preferred version of ‘smart casual’ is a pale blue cotton shirt and un-ironed navy chinos.

Well again!  I have been wearing precisely that (not all the time, you understand, but quite often - as I type, in fact) for at least a decade.  Indeed, if you check out Google Earth’s aerial view of my back garden, you can just discern me ducking into the garage precisely thusly attired.  (You can’t see my shoes, though.  Nor his, but I bet they’re not M&S flip-flops.)

 I knew there was a lot of surveillance and stuff going on, but this smacks of desperation.  Hands off my style, Dave, or I’m going to have to employ one of those image consultants you hear about.  That’ll show you!

Still, at least I don’t roll my sleeves halfway up.  But I’m probably not as busy as him.

Gigs: The Flamingo

Sometime last year I started to post some reminiscences about my youthful days as a rock’n’roll superstar in that famous forgotten band Dave Anthony’s Moods.  A casual conversation with a friend, an email exchange with another, and a possible yet-again resurgence of interest (there may be a vinyl 45 rpm EP out later this year) rekindled me, and I was prompted to look back in my archives and throw out a little bit more.  So here’s a snippet of the beginning of my professional music career.  I don’t think I’ve posted it before, but if I’m wrong, please forgive the foibles of an old man.

The Gunnell brothers were said to own the West End club scene, to have it sewn up, Kray-style gangster model.  This was almost certainly not true, or at least exaggerated, but they did run a tight ship.  They had most of those bands who’d been our inspirations, like Georgie Fame or Zoot Money, on ironclad contracts.  Their offices were in Gerrard Street, from which their web, propelled by rumour and fear, spread across the land (or at least as far as Brixton).  We were in four sets of contract negotiation at the time, and at the interview, once we’d played coy, Rik smiled and said ‘you know you’ll end up with us eventually, don’t you?’, while Johnny stood at the door and fingered his cheek scar.  We smiled and trembled out of the office. 

The truth is that they loved the kind of music we were trying to do, and The Flamingo in Wardour Street was their showcase and nerve centre.  I’d visited a few times

There was a gig in transit from Bournemouth to London, in some kind of shed in Reading – I think we played a blinder, blinded by the prospects of this freedom we were storming into.  We then got to our new home, probably dumped onto the floor whatever kit we’d brought in the back of the old van, dropped ourselves to the floor and slept.  In fact, I remember that: drunk, exhilarated, falling onto the floor on top of some kind of sleeping bag package …

 

Then, the next night, playing our inaugural gig at the Flamingo.  Support to who knows who.  We were allowed into the so-called dressing room, a cupboard stage left, packed solid with musicians just come off or waiting (like us) to go on; when I went out to get a Coke I was punched in the face (not very hard) by a huge black guy who felt I’d hassled him, jumped a queue, something.  I said “sorry” – why? he’d assaulted me – he said something like “be careful ‘round here”, a warning I over-heeded perhaps for a while.  When I got back to the dressing room with my Coke, there was a rather funny smell in there.

 

Why can’t a computer be more like a car?

B received an email from X today.  It began ‘good morning!’, which isn’t X’s normal greeting, and contained a link.  Because they’d met yesterday at an emotionally charged event, B unwisely clicked on the link.  Very smart AV software warned her that this was a risky site, which had already tried to put a virus on her computer, and advised her to clean – mop it up and bin it.

At this point, B phoned me, because she’d had a similar problem last year which was even smarter.  The link didn’t just download its viral software, it also fairly accurately mimicked the AV system’s response: and if you accepted the spurious advice, it went ahead and installed the virus!  Well, you have to draw a line somewhere, I said, so go ahead and clean.  She did, and it seems to have worked.

What happened here is that, somehow, X’s address book had been stolen and used by criminals to disseminate their warped misanthropic excrement.  Why those people feel it’s necessary or appropriate to waste all that effort and brainpower is a question for the psychiatrists, not me.

When I get in my car tomorrow, I don’t expect it to behave any differently from today.  I don’t expect anyone (either BMW or someone pretending to be them) to have changed the layout of the pedals or the way the lights or the indicators function, overnight, without asking me.  Nor do I expect my next tank of petrol to behave at all unlike the previous one.  Until computers and their operating software (the car), and applications (the petrol), subject themselves to similar principles of self-regulation and quality control, IT will continue to be an infantile industry.

Just as a debating start point for tomorrow’s G8, can’t spam detection be lit through the same Prism as everything else seems to be?  That’d be a damned sight more helpful use of all that wasted effort, machinery and petrol.

The Book book

Or ‘The book Book’.  Either way, a brilliantly simple idea, thanks B. 

Instead of – or rather as well as – keeping a notepad beside you, on which anything from possibly-to-be-used-in-future-blog-post-quotes-from-newspapers, via debugging instructions or memorable song lyrics or transient phone numbers to data concerning books can be jotted, instead you can maintain a separate notebook (it should preferably be hard covered, A4) in which you write anything you like or dislike about books you’ve read, recently or in the past, or want to read in the future, or feel you should read, the main rule being that there are no rules, at least I think that’s how it’s meant to work (there may be a few others about inordinate punctuation and sentence length, also about the importance of strictly confining the scope to books, resisting the temptation to extend it to music, films, and other media –  otherwise running the risk of going full circle and ending up with a notepad beside you, on which anything from possibly-to-be-used-in-future-blog-post-quotes-from-newspapers, via debugging instructions or memorable song lyrics or transient phone numbers can be jotted, or even data concerning books), but I'm not sure about that, a bit more analysis might be needed, so don't wait up. 

Like I said, brilliantly simple.

Confusing blackbirds

I’d intended to write about a great idea (the book book – maybe tomorrow), but instead I’ve just amused myself for five wasted minutes in the garden, whistling imitations of my three or four local blackbirds’ songs.  (I’m a good whistler.)

They’re good whistlers too, and seem to be conducting conversations, across a range of a few hundred yards.  After my abject failure to transliterate the strange bee/donkey/ventilator Sound, I’m not going to go there: if you want to hear them, get your own blackbird-equipped garden.  (I should, in this day and age, be possessed of the means to record, store and upload soundclips, but I'm not.)

I know, it’s territorial marking and mating invitations.   So I’ve probably caused untold disruption – in fact, they seem to have gone quiet while they think about it – and I can expect them down the chimney any time later.

 

The Sound - on Bees, Badgers and Donkeys

I don’t mind a mystery, and I always rise to a challenge, but I’d prefer it not to be at 11.45 p.m. after a good dinner of seared cod and Jersey Royals followed by lashings of sumptuous conversation. 

Very soon after I got to bed, I noticed The Sound.  It was somewhere in the interstitial internodes between a terminally failing bumble bee trapped behind a Venetian blind, an irritated but bored lapdog in next door’s conservatory, and a constipated badger.  (I hasten to qualify that I can just about imagine the first two, but made up the third; funny the tricks your mind plays ‘round midnight.)  It went, roughly, “Brzz.  Brz-brz-brz.  (Pause.) Brzzzz!”  Or sometimes “Urmph-bzz.  Umph.  Bzz-umph-bzz.”  Then it would seem to be one side of a half-heard one-sided conversation between a one-sided drunken couple somewhere down the road: “Whad-umpya-bzzrfr?”   “Burmmm…”

I got up to look behind the blind and out of the window, and of course saw nothing.  And heard nothing either: whatever higher power was inflicting this mystery/challenge on me was several jumps ahead.  Eventually it seemed to stop, or I fell asleep, or both.

I raised it, just as a conversation point, like you do, over breakfast.  Opinions varied between worker bees in the soffits, a ventilator outlet flapping in the wind, and the donkeys for the next day’s Derby across the field.  The bees seem to be the most rational explanation, but I have a soft spot for the stabled donkeys.

The experience reminds me of when I was kept awake for hours in St Jean de Luz, in about 1992, by incessant thumping music from just outside the pension.  After an hour or so, assuming it to be some inconsiderate kids, I leant out of the window and shouted, in English, “For fuck’s sake, put a sock in it, will you?”, with precisely no effect.  Next day I discovered I’d been swearing at a disco at the sports field half a mile up the road.

Road Placidity

I see the police are to be given powers to impose spot fines of up to £100 on tailgaters, middle-lane-hogs and the like.  Well, jolly good show, I say!  Here are a few other offences I’d add to the list:

·         Failing to raise a hand in recognition of someone giving way to them at a row of parked cars.

·         Pretending to make a gesture of thanks while in fact raising the middle finger of the left hand.

·         Blowing the horn after ten seconds when a driver lets a waiting vehicle out from a side street, thereby delaying the offender by twenty seconds from catching up with the half-mile tailback 200 yards ahead.

·         On the motorway, overtaking at two m.p.h. faster than the overtaken vehicle, and then reducing speed in front of them to two m.p.h. slower.

·         At a roundabout, not signalling left or right until actually turning left or right.

Any more, anybody?

A proportion, say 50%, of the fine should be donated by the state to the victim of these crimes, with the proviso that it must be spent, within six months, on something they wouldn’t otherwise have bought.  Should kickstart the economy.

The same principles should be applied to shopping trolleys.

Caravan Diaries, last weekend

On the way back from Porthgain to Wiseman’s Bridge (or Wisemansbridge as some have it), we stopped off at Narberth to pick up some essential supplies, mostly Schweppes tonic and yogurt.  Also fruit: some delicious cherries, and two ‘flat peaches’, from a wonderful shop called WiseBuys.  Have you come across flat peaches?  No, nor had I.  They’re very small, as peaches go, and, erm, flat.  And also delicious.  If your local fruitier doesn’t stock them, instruct him/her to do so.  They could be the next cranberry.

I wanted to show Narberth/Arberth off to B, so we wandered around a bit.  At the top of the high street, I noticed the bookshop.  It looked closed from a distance, but we approached anyway.  It’s open.  For reasons lost in time, the sign above the door reads ‘BOOKS Animal Kitchen BOOKS’.  If that doesn’t entice you in, what will?

The proprietor is there, just as he was a decade ago when I last visited: and I mean ‘just’; sitting behind the counter, reading a book.  “Look around,” he suggests.  “They’re arranged in categories.”  I am in no doubt that this is true, but it would take me some hours to analyse the non-Dewey system being applied, so we just wandered around in awe.  The shop measures maybe 200 square metres.  The aisles are elbow wide, if you’re slim.  And the books tower to head height, those that aren’t in floor level cardboard boxes.  There must be thousands of them. 

It’s impossible to choose one, so we drift back to the entrance.  On the way, B spots a book about Afghanistan that interests her, so picks it up.  As we’re about to pay, I see a copy of the ‘Tao Te Ching’, in poll position on the counter.  I read this when I was in my twenties, and had been thinking only the other day that I should read it again.   I reckon he assessed me as I walked in, thought “he’ll buy this, maybe,” fished it out and put it there. 

Back at the caravan, we finished cleaning the algae off the walls and the weeds from the patio, and planted up a couple of pots.  The television has packed up again, so we missed the weather forecast.  “The TV is hidden and nameless,” as Lao Tzu almost pointed out.

The Great Jimmy Gatz?

In preparation for not watching the latest cinematic attempt to turn perfection into something less, I reread the novel.  If you haven’t read it, either look away now or carry on reading – like Nick by the end, I don’t really care either way.

So, applying the rule of five:

1.      What’s great about him?  He and Daisy are in a child-child relationship, mediated by a controlling parent/child (Tom) and several powerless adults (Nick, Jordan, even Myrtle).  He’s an infantile manipulative wimp, who collapses under the least pressure.  He cheats even when he doesn’t need to.  He doesn’t even bother to make an appearance until page 54 (out of 188).  So what’s to love?

2.      Answer: precisely those flaws.  Scott proves – and remember, this was 1923 – the fragility of America.  Bubbles are designed to burst.   The genius is to condense that fragility into a single person, conceal him behind his own defences, and then prick him in such a way that you end up not even sure if there’d been a bubble in the first place.

3.      The strand of the novel.  It opens with ‘In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice …’ and ends with ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’  Although the peroration is impersonal, I like to think that Nick himself is being borne back; indeed, that the story is his as much as Jay’s or Daisy’s.

4.      Indeed, the more I reflect the more I think this is a fictional autobiographical narrative.  But then I have to admire Nick Carraway’s skilful ducking and weaving in and out.  Now you see him, now you don’t.  We don’t know what happens to him afterwards (did he marry that Midwest girl, who never gets a name?)  The others all end up either dead or gone; Nick himself fades away, in the last chapters, like a green light in the fog.

5.      The words.  Oh, the beauty of the sentences!  We all know the famous quotes, so just a couple of examples of perfection:

(page 101): ‘The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.  “Look at that”, she whispered. And then after a moment: “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”’

And (page 159): ‘He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.  But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.’

Oh, and all right, maybe the most poignantly banal phrase in literature, where Nick makes his peace with Tom, despite himself: ‘I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.’

Hughenden Manor

 Number three in what’s obviously a very very occasional series on stately homes, if you click the label.

It’s very frustrating when the infinite resources of the internet fail to yield up what I’d call basic information.  So I can’t tell you when Hughenden Manor was originally built, by whom, or why.  These probably quite boring facts have been overwhelmed by two items of history: Disraeli, and mapmaking.

Dizzy bought it in 1848 (from whom, I wonder), with a heavily leveraged mortgage (he was, and remained, on the verge of bankruptcy) granted by some of his aristocratic chums, and immediately gave it a complete makeover.  It shows.  The house looks big from the outside, but feels small inside, because it consists of a bewilderingly large number of rather poky rooms.  Clearly the idea was to give the impression of a Chatsworth or Cliveden; but the result is more like several posh suburban terraced properties, haphazardly knocked through.  This is part of its charm: I imagine it reveals a lot about the man’s character.  (I want to know more about him – can anyone recommend a good biography?) 

The National Trust have curated it beautifully; they seem to be at their best with smaller places.  You can see objects – furniture, artifacts, pictures – close up.  You can touch them, and are trusted not to when it’d be silly or damaging.  Children can even play with a fragile Victorian zoetrope.  (I suspect the picture strips aren’t original though.)

So far, so stately.  They all have their quiddities.  The surprise, though, is downstairs.  Hughenden was, from 1941, the top secret base of Operation Hillside, the mission of which was to produce accurate maps of key targets in Germany so that Bomber Command could achieve ‘Bomber’ Harris’s objective of blanket-bombing the enemy into smithereens.  In 1932 Hitler had, in an early indication of his long-term plans, barred the production of up-to-date maps of Germany.  So once war broke out, squadrons of spy planes, Mosquitoes mostly, were sent over to take photos, which would become the raw material for a team of skilled map-drawers to create the best possible guidance for the bombers.  (See this fascinating first-hand account for much more.)

All this was classified until only last year, and the NT have done a superb job of reconstructing what it must have been like to be doing that work.  So much information seems to be coming out quite recently about the nitty-gritty of wartime operations.  You have to wonder why it’s been kept secret for so long.

Anyway, the gardens and woodlands of Hughenden are lovely.  The walled garden contains more healthy rhubarb than anyone could possibly eat, and some well advanced redcurrants.  And the views are wonderful.

 

Flex Your Molluscs

Scene: an old-style fishmongers’ somewhere in England.

Dramatis personae:

A Fishmonger.

A Customer.

Some Mussels.

The Customer is enquiring of the Fishmonger concerning the freshness and potential health risks of some Mussels.

CUSTOMER (C): A lot of these seem to be open.  Doesn’t that mean they’re dead, and will poison me?

FISHMONGER (F): You give them a sharp tap, like this.  (Raps a Mussel on the counter.)  It takes a moment, but see?  (The Mussel slowly closes its shell.) They’ll close up.  So that one’s alive.  Perfectly safe to eat.

C: Right.  (Raps another Mussel on the counter, and waits.  The shell stays open.)  So that one’s dead?

F: That one’s dead.  (Pause.)  But the dead ones are all right too, long as they haven’t been dead for too long.

C: I see.  (Pause.)  How long?

F: Oh, four or five hours.

C: Right.  (Pause.)  How do I tell how long they’ve been dead?  (Longer pause.)  I mean, you can’t ask them, can you?  (To the Mussel:)  Please Mr Mussel, how long have you been dead?

Pause.

F: I see what you mean.  (Begins to tap the open Mussels.)

C: Oh, don’t bother.

 

Author’s note:  Later, after they had been exquisitely prepared by C (who is B), I ate many of them.  They were delicious, and I’m still alive and well.  (Unlike the Mussels.)

Tax avoidance: something to add after all

Thinking further about this, I realised that at least one aspect doesn’t yet seem to have been discussed at all.  It’s this: what happens if all the loopholes get closed and the internet businesses are forced to pay their full corporation tax and whatever other dues they are currently dodging?  Will they a) hold up their hands, say ‘you got me bang to rights, guv’ and take the hit on their profits?  Or b) pass it on to their customers in the form of higher prices?

I suspect I know the answer, and here’s a clue: it’s not a).

If I’m right, what it boils down to is this: either the exchequer loses out, as at present; or the buying public does.  Makes the issue a little bit cloudier, doesn’t it?

Tax avoidance

Prompted by Z at the Razor-blade of Life, I was going to pen a rant on this subject, but Sir Simon Jenkins beat me to it here in today's Guardian.  Nothing to add.

Bouillabaisse – an update

Well, after last Friday, I know how to spell it, and, sort of, how to make it.  All I need to do now is find out how to pronounce it.  

It was agreed that cod cheeks are nearly as good as monkfish fillets, at a fraction of the price.  And that clams are a waste of space – you end up with empty shells.  Whole prawns too.  I’d rejected the giant nine-inch prawns (Dublin bay, langoustines, whatever they’re called) at £5.50 each, beautiful though they were, in favour of the smaller, though still huge, basic ones; but once you’ve picked the meat out of all that head and crawly bits and shell, you end up with quite a small bit of actual edible.  The picking’s fun, though: large finger bowls, plenty of napkins, and a sense of humour essential.

Also, is saffron the biggest con since Ponzi schemes?  (Answer, no, it predates them by centuries.  Or does it?  A question for another day.)   The stuff smells mildly nice and costs more, by weight, than avruga caviar.  Which, I told, at least tastes of something.  By the time you’ve diluted half a teaspoon of saffron into a litre of fish stock and white wine, all you’re left with is yellow.  Next time, I might try a pinch of that turmeric that’s been in the spice section for three years and probably doesn’t taste of much either by now.

I used Rick Stein’s recipe from ‘Taste of the Sea’, which worked fine, mostly, though it does contain a few quirks.  For example, you have to peel your tomatoes (no problem) and retain the skins – which are never seen again.  And he suggests that you should slice your mussels before adding them in the shell.  I somehow missed out the celery in the vegetable base, but I think I got away with it.

I have resolved to visit Frost’s in Smelly Alley more frequently (not hard, given twice in the past six years), buy whatever they tell me to, and take the meal from there.  Real-time cooking, as Keith Floyd used to say between slurps.