Wounded in Wales

I’d been to Barafundle Bay many times before, of course, but I hadn’t got lost in the sand dunes since, oh, when would it have been? We debated this as we tried to discern, with the aid of the rapidly disintegrating National Trust leaflet and my brother’s iPhone, which of the five sandy paths before us was most likely to take us towards the Permissive Path which would lead us down to the Eastern Arm of Bosherstone Ponds. In sand dunes, maps don’t help – people think they need to go that way or this way, set out through the scrub and before you know it you have a new path, one never to appear on any map.


The first time, we decided, could have been about 1949 or 50, when he was a babe in arms. But he remembered something more recent. “I got stung by a wasp.” This must have been four or five years later. “We’ll watch out for it, then,” I said. “You don’t want it to sting you again.” “Or one of its ancestors.” “Or descendents even.” He remembered being terrified by the steep descent from the walk across from Stackpole down to the beach; there probably wasn’t a wall back then, but even so it’s only about sixty feet. Heights, we agreed, reduce as one gets taller. Cliffs Kill! Said the banal sign at Stackpole. “No they don’t. It’s the injuries when you fall off them that kill.”

Barafundle is the greatest beach in the world, everyone knows that. Sweeping soft sand, a gentle curve of shore, serrated granite cliffs to each side, even a promontory with a hole through it, dunes behind stretching back forever. No car park, so only those who know how to walk can get there. But we couldn’t linger: we had to get to Bosherstone, the Lily Ponds, and the pub.

It’s remarkable that no injuries had been incurred yet, as we entered the pub. Brambles, nettles, gorse, tree roots, a plethora of dangerous-looking insects – and actually, probably, the occasional adder. Threats aplenty. True, Val had fallen off a chair back at the caravan the day before and grazed (and possibly nettle-stung – to my shame I found I had no antihistamine cream in my pathetic medical stock) her arm (and she already had a bad back), and I had arrived on Thursday with the tail-end of a fit of gastro-enteritis, contained by industrial administrations of cement pills and pink gungey stuff – but otherwise, unscathed.

The first wound occurred in the gents’ toilet back at Stackpole Quay. A door, I discovered, when presented open edge-on, is almost invisible. Invisible enough, at any rate, to draw blood when it encounters a fast-moving sandaled toe. Middle toe, right foot, since you ask. National Trust cafes don’t stock plasters, nor any form of medication apart from tissues. Their outside seating areas do however, stock a plentiful supply of wasps. Evasive and distractive actions were taken over the tea and scones (“put the jam over there”), and nobody got stung.

Sunday afternoon, after they’d left and I was having a post-lunch snooze on the sofa in the van, occasionally opening my eyes to peruse my sea view and compare it to the Barafundle in my mind, I woke up to a pricking sensation in the shin of my right leg (the one with the busted toe). I looked down. There was a glowing red patch spreading out from a white core. “Hmm,” I thought. “That’s a wasp sting.”

Sympathy for insects

On one of my three favourite blogs, The Last Word on Nothing, Ann has been conducting a campaign against the admittedly sometimes abhorrent behaviour of some of our arthropodal cousins.  Some of it makes gruesome reading.  But, in the interests of balance, I thought I'd pass on this delightful snippet from today's Guardian:   Zombie carpenter ant fungus

Enjoy your meal.

Caravan diaries (cont'd)

I came home a day earlier than I'd intended, to avoid the Pembrokeshire rain.  I couldn't face a rainy Monday sitting in the caravan staring out at the grey Pembrokeshire drizzle.  Pembrokeshire rain is about as depressing as rain gets.  I remember a family August holiday in 1958 when it rained Pembrokeshire rain constantly for three weeks.  The parents were, I imagine, desperate for diversions for us three kids, not to mention themselves - but they never showed it, or if they did, I never noticed.  I spent the whole time writing an imitation Peter Cheyney Lemmy Caution detective novel, with a pencil.  Now, I'm sitting here in Reading wishing for rain, preferably of the Pembrokeshire sort.

Meanwhile, down there, the Pointyheads have arrived.  They don't appear very often, but when they do they are even better entertainment than the rabbits, the woodpeckers (who persist in trying to chop down the poles holding up the electric power lines) or the incompetent jetskiers.  The Pointyheads arrive with three bikes strapped vertically on the top of their old 4x4.  Mr Pointyhead is very tall, skeletally thin, and has a very pointy head, even without his helmet.  He spends an hour (I timed it) removing the bikes from the car roof and stowing them behind one of his two toolsheds (which are never opened).  Mrs and Ms Pointyhead disappear into their caravan and are never seen again.  Various other mysterious procedures take place over the next few hours (two inexplicable eight-foot long poles are removed from the caravan and ensconsed behind the toolsheds), interspersed by long intervals where Mr Pointyhead stands very still and stares perplexedly at whatever it is he's just done.  Next morning he gets out his super-hi-tech racing bike, rides it round the field a couple of times to make sure its seven or eight moving parts have survived the journey, and whizzes off down the slope to ... 

Well, wherever he's going, really. 

I was in two minds ...

... (always a good place to be if you want to get through twice the work, as long as you avoid the white coats) whether to write about el sistema or the banks.  So I (we?) decided to do both.

 

Mind # 1: well, that's easy.   This tells you all you need to know, to kick off, about this inspirational Venezuelan project that's transforming the lives of deprived kids, in every way from the economically physical to the emotionally behavioural, through the medium of music - and which has just started up a spinoff in a degenerated part of Scotland.  Just have a look, I promise you'll love it and want to dig deeper.

 

Oh dear, the banks.  Mind # 2  is off to pour itself a glass of wine, because anaesthesis is the only way to deal with this sad but important quagmire.  Fortunately, thanks to a little-known internet portal, I have direct access to the questions that were spinning through the deep subconscious nightmare minds of the CEOs in the lead-up days to their profit declarations.  Space doesn't permit a full list, nor does credulity (nor ennui), but here are just a few.  Beancounters' responses shown in [brackets].

• How does charging risky businesses three times as much interest as non-risky ones help them to become less risky?  [They piss off to an even more stupid bank, or go bust.  WGAF?]
• Should I tell the shareholders how much of the £7bn (HSBC) came from derivatives trading or short selling?  [Probably not.]
• Should we be offering £1bn of the £7bn to flood relief in NW Pakistan?  There'd still be six left over for us.  [Where?  OK, put us down for 100K.]
• How does selling 318 branches help anybody who lives near them?  [Dunno, ask Brussels.  Glad to be shot of 'em.]
• Yes, but how does it help the customers?  [Don't understand.  Who?]
• What am I here for?  [To serve us.]
• Is there a God?  [Oh yes.  But not on our balance sheet.]

Loss of E

Ages ago, I wrote a post bewailing the (temporary, as it turned out) loss of the letter Q from my keyboard, and as a punchline thanked the lord it wasn't E.  Rosie commented 'hop it gts fixd', which still makes me laugh when I think of it, as I did for absolutely no reason just now.

So, how many words can you put down, on your blog or in your book, without using that lost button?  Intriguing, I think.  An author, long ago, did a full book of it.  So far, I can just about attain this short paragraph.  What a stupid task to try, what a daft ambition!  I'm going to stop this right now, it's starting to turn a bit silly, not to say into an addiction ...  I'm off for a gin.  And tonic.  Chrs.

Orange Colored Sky

I was sitting around, minding my business - when I stepped outside, an hour after sunset and the thunderstorm, and the sky was full of bright orange clouds ...  Nat King Cole and Stan Kenton

Rationality

Watch the behaviour of my pigeons, as they decide whether or not to come down and have a much needed drink from my blanket-weeded pond, and then if so, how to go about it.  It's high comedy, up there with the best of Buster Keaton or Jaques Tati.  And the reason?  They're not applying normal human rules of rational behaviour (well, they're not normal humans, to be fair - that applies to Keaton, Tati and the birds), and that makes them look funny.  Comedians obviously know and exploit this (pigeons don't, they just do it because that's how pigeons are.  So I shouldn't really laugh at them, but WTF.).

So it was interesting to read an  interview the other day with Ricky Gervais, a comedian who has made a bit of a career out of that sort of (fictional) exploitation of irrational incongruity, in which he banged on at length, and quite funnily, about the sanctity of 'facts'.  In a nutshell, you're allowed to say 'he wasn't funny' (opinion), but not 'nobody laughed' (fact; of course facts, as I understand the word, have to be verifiable, maybe actually nobody did laugh ...  but that's leading me further into the murky streams of the scientific method than I have space to dip right now ...)

(the plain people of ireland : will ye come to the point now? We're tired of all this philosophisation.)

Oh yes, sorry.  Rationality is the inability to hold six contradictory opinions before breakfast.  Contradiction is easily detected, by the application of one or two elementary logical constructs, the best of which is the syllogism.  So when Nick Clegg says that a) our troops will be out by 2014 (first premise), b) our troops will be out only when conditions on the ground permit (second premise), this syllogism leads to only one conclusion: conditions on the ground will permit withdrawal by 2014.  No other conclusion is admissible.  So why didn't he say that? 

Two explanations are possible.  One, he doesn't understand the simple rules of logic.  Or, two, he's trying to disguise a lie with rhetoric.  I suspect both.

Why isn't simple logic a mandatory subject on the national curriculum?  Oh no, of course, they're abolishing that, aren't they?  Just don't tell the pigeons.

Odd-numbered organs and octopi

I posted a few weeks ago to the effect that the bee might be the only creature with an odd number (greater than one) of organs, i.e. three eyes (turns out it's actually five, of two different sorts - thanks Sue!).

I now find, courtesy of Paul the World Cup predictor, that an octopus has three hearts.  How about that for over-redundancy?  Even BP didn't think of putting in more than one blow-out preventer.  They do, however, meet the second definition of octopus in my beloved dictionary, which is "a person or organisation with widespread influence".

Chambers usually avoids value judgements, as dictionaries should, so isn't explicit about the nature of the "widespread influence" in question; but I imagine I can see or hear the raised eyebrow and the sniff.  You wouldn't call BP an octopus as a compliment, would you?  Actually, it's a slight - BP doesn't have even one heart.

Sadly, your average octopus apparently lives for only three to five years, despite all those hearts (it must be exhausting keeping all those tentacles going, though).  This analogy is starting to wear a bit thin, isn't it?  So, to close on a lighter note, a prize to the first to answer this question: "what's the plural of octopus?"

A visit to the Globe Theatre on the Occasion of the World Cup Final

ACT ONE

Tim:
Hot, how hot, how hot, how humid, hot!
And that’s just here in my cool windowed plot!
Withstand that walk to Great Western’s fell lair,
Train, taxi, sun on my thinning hair?
And that’s just Journey – then six hours or more
Of Good Will’s Henry, One and Two of Four.
How shall we survive?

Paul:
If England’s weak
Faltering knights by miracle should make
The semis, nay the finals, ‘gainst the Hun
(or whoso else hath made it through by then)
Faith, then I swear by fab Capello’s pox
At home I’ll bide and watch it on the box.

Caro:
Don’t be such wimps! The tickets all are paid
For, months ago, we’re seated in the shade
(I think), and at the breaks your fevered brains
By ale shall slaked be.

Rachel:
I’d prefer champagne.

ACT TWO

Tim:
How can these words so dry and old on th’page
I read last week, (to capture and assuage
The need, should heat o’ercome me, to attend) –
How a simple actor, Allam, doth befriend
Us, dry ‘Sir John’ to Falstaff’s wit-fired heat – ?

Rachel:
I thought it was really good.
Caro:
Me too. Let’s eat.

Paul:
Another?
Tim:
Sounds good –
Rachel:
I need a wee –
Ben:
Don’t tell me the score –
Tim:
– sounds good to me.

ACT THREE

Epilogue:
Proud Spain has won, the cup bestowed
Foul and fair, the plays are played
Great Western ploughs its weary road
Back to hotspurred homes – but stay!
Shall we replay, xenophobes?
Or
Shall we return to Shakespeare’s Globe?

Value for money

I heard yesterday that the careers advisory service in a local authority near me, which goes into schools and tries to help teenagers, not just to find a job but also to explore and maybe overcome the social, familial and personal impediments to this goal, is to be closed down, on the grounds that it is deemed not to deliver "value for money".  In the conversation, I took an accountancy approach: I understand the money bit, it's their budget; but let's see the other side of the ledger, value: put a price, in pounds, on the swim or sink outcome, for the rest of their lives, of each of those kids, please - then and only then can you draw up that balance sheet.  These bastards need to be challenged on their own ground.

O.K., that's straightforward enough.  But, reflectively, I started to ponder this concept of "value".  If we're to take this onslaught seriously, we need counter-arguments.  And, given that by my own admission the "value" side isn't going to be couched in financial terms - I've just demonstrated the banal futility of that - then we need to shift the ground.  You put your money down - I'll call or raise you with my value.

So, as I often do, I resorted to the dictionary.  (Chambers, if you want to check up on me.)  "Value" is of course variously defined, but the most apposite one here, I think, is "intrinsic worth or goodness".  I'd settle for that, in a room with a bean-counter, but let's go a step further.  "Intrinsic: genuine, inherent, essential".  "Worth: moral excellence".  Moral excellence: ponder that, bean-counter ... and also a definition of worth that teeters toward poetry: "deserving, justifying, meriting, repaying or warranting consideration, attention, the effort, the journey, taking some action ..."

I rest my case.  And I didn't even get round to "goodness".

Funny how time slips away

A weird thing happened forty minutes ago (at least I think it's forty).  I usually watch the BBC1 six o'clock news, which lasts for just under half an hour, when we get the weather forecast and then across to the regional news.  (I'm sure you already know this, but bear with me, the timings are important, not least because the end of the weather is my Pablovian trigger to go and pour a G&T.)

Anyway, at 6.20, that's six twenty, Susan Powell was cued up to do the forecast, and George then handed us over to 'South Today'.  I wouldn't have minded this, I am still capable of overriding pre-programmed synapses even at my age - maybe there was a party political or charity appeal coming up - except that George said, handing over to Sally Taylor: 'and now it's coming up to half past six, and it's time to hand over to ...'

I checked my watch.  It's twenty past six.  I checked several other time sources, which agreed.  I switched off the TV, which was probably a mistake.  The BBC has stolen ten minutes, I thought.  I've just read 'Ghostwritten' by David Mitchell, which plays, amongst many others, with the idea  that time is not necessarily absolute or sequential, according to the physics; which didn't help.  But just for a moment there - and this is the good bit - I felt as if the ground, or the sky, or both, had tilted slightly as time momentarily slipped away.

Then I went and poured myself that gin.

Honeysuckle Rose (with Apples)

Immigration, football: are they connected?

No more the vuvu's wild zanzara whine
No more the fumbled backpass into space ...

(Sorry, I've been rereading Summoned by Bells, so everything I think tends to come out as Betjemanesque blank verse ('weary and worried the supermarket queue' etc etc)).

But, I was hearing on the radio just now from a healthcare professional about the difficulty of recruiting staff from overseas with the required language and technical skillsets ...  Well, lack of language and technical skill seems to be a required qualification in the English football context, doesn't it?   It's not an exact parallel: in healthcare it's the more menial skills that are hard to import, rather than the managerial ones; and we can't import the menial workers (i.e. players), because that wouldn't be cricket, and we're not Germany. 

But again, the common whinge about England's so-called team has been 'these are world-class players in the Premier League, why can't they perform as well in the national side?'  The answer, of course, is that in the Premier League club team they're surrounded by proper world-class-plus players, who enable them to shine in their own modest way - and who all happen to be immigrants.  Outside this sheltered world, they are revealed as, not so much professional carers, more the carehome patients they are, now, about to become.

Still, the Government is about to ban (well, severely restrict) immigration of skilled labour from outside the EU, so that should do the trick for 2014.

How many eyes make five?

My Collins 2010 Diary has a trivia/pub quiz question for each day of the year, with the answer conveniently printed, upside down, below the question.  The entry for 24 June is 'How many eyes does a bee have?'  Answer: 5.

I passed this information on in a comment on a rather grumpy, bee-related post by a fellow-blogger, in the hope that it would cheer her up (I think it did!).  But then I wondered: can this be so?  If it is, then it's the only example I know of a creature having an odd number (one excepted, of course) of any organ.  (My blogging partner obviously did some exhaustive research on this phenomenon, because her follow-up comment was 'How strange is that?')

Wikipedia is oddly (sorry, no pun meant) reticent on the subject.  Its bee entry (which is suspiciously hard to find) doesn't mention eyes, except for a scary profile picture on which something called 'composite eye' is labelled.  They don't tell you how many components there are to this, but assuming that our bee has two composites, it would have to be two-and-a-half for each, wouldn't it?  This seems unlikely.  Perhaps my diary only counted one eye.  Hah, Collins!

The research must continue, given the power bees apparently have over the survival of our environment (not to mention the honey and its impact on bears of little brain).  But I can't do it.  My mind has shifted to the related, and equally challenging, topic of bee's knees.

Of course, the diary item was for ten days time, so as the Boss says, 'none of this has happened yet' ...

Rhythm

As I lay awake in my bed in the caravan, breathing, unable to sleep for the sound of the waves crushing the pebbles on the beach down below, and the way they counterpointed with my heartbeat as it pounded up into my ear through the pillow, I thought about the pulse of life, and where it comes from.  The sea, the breath, the heart.

We started in the sea, then crawled out, so that wave pulse must be somehow dissolved into our bodies.  We grew lungs and hearts that have to breath and beat rhythmically, or we die.  So those are where it comes from.

But then we learnt to walk!  And once you no longer need to walk just to survive, eventually you find out how to dance.  And once you've got the hang of walking and dancing, you have the fundaments of humanity.  Everything else follows.  So, civilisation is founded in the rhythm of the sea, isn't it?

I'll dance to that!

Caravan diaries

Remember this, anyone?  When I was his age, I fought my parents for the right to go swimming before the end of May.  Immersing oneself in icy water (and this was Bournemouth, tropical compared to Pembrokeshire) for hours on end was an essential desire.  I'm inclined to think, now, that I must have been mad (I put my feet in for about thirty seconds last Wednesday afternoon, on a scorching hot day at Wisemans Bridge, and they went white); but Cyrus would've stayed there, jumping waves, until the sun had set.  'Aren't you cold?' I asked him when he eventually deigned to come out; I can't express in words quite how his 'no' made me feel: 'old' is one of them, 'mad' perhaps another.  Are children madder than grown-ups?

The 50th birthday party on Saturday, in and around a caravan just up the field, was very Welsh.  Wales had just lost honourably to South Africa at the rugby, which lent an air of, how can I put it, celebratory desolation to the proceedings.   Ribaldry occurred (one lady, having selected a veggieburger and so accused of being a vegetarian, replies tartly 'I don't eat meat - ask my husband'), but the best part was the singing.  Three old guys (who all turned out to be younger than me) did three part harmonies, in beautiful tenor voices, to everything from maudlin welsh-language valley ballads through Tom-Jonesish slush to Buddy Holly and the Evs.  I joined in where I could, and was asked what I feel to be two highly complimentary questions: 'are you in a choir?' and 'are you Welsh?'

Main wildlife sightings: a little bird which I firmly believe to be a pied wagtail, though it doesn't wag as much ('incessantly') as the book says it should (perhaps it's reworking its image); and a baby rabbit, no bigger than your two hands, who bounced out from a hole onto the patio and then back, before I could grab it by the ears.

Pythagorean plant?

Anybody know what this is?

(And don't say 'some plant' if you want to retain my friendship.)  It seeded itself a few weeks ago and has been growing like a triffid. 

The reason I mention it is that it's the only plant I've ever seen that has worked out what a right angle is.  Take a closer look, from above:

Those leaves are at exact ninety degree angles to each other, in opposing pairs all the way down the stem, north-south, east-west, etcetera.  This is extraordinary.  Plants aren't supposed to be able to do geometry, are they?

Pythagoras discovered the right angle, on which, dare I say, much of human achievement has since been built.  (If you don't believe me, read 'Why does E=mc squared?' by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, which lucidly traces Einstein's theory of relativity directly from Pythagoras's famous theorem.  (You'll have to work your brain a bit though.))

So, it appears that this humble weed has, all by itself, grown one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect.  It deserves at least a name for that.  Anybody recognise it?

Caravan Diaries

Early on Friday evening I was sitting in the van, nursing a drink and studying the way the field slopes down to the sea, past half a dozen dark unoccupied caravans: at that time, I think I was the sole inhabitant of the park, something that always gives me a strange feeling, exhilaratingly creepy.

The field was full of rabbits.  Rabbits of all sizes from new-born bunnies to grand old bucks.  I counted 25, though that may include some duplicates.  Without going all horribly Watership Down on you, I can provide you with the following guidelines should you ever need to impersonate a rabbit in the spring:

1. Make sure no humans are in sight, come out onto your field and start eating grass.
2. Another rabbit will soon emerge close to you.  When this happens, abandon grass-eating and engage instead in acrobatic break-dancing with your partner, including somersaults.
3. For absolutely no reason, both abruptly cease leaping around and go back to eating grass.
4. Repeat until it gets too dark or a human appears (hint to humans: rabbits can't see through glass). 
5. Scarper off to your burrow, presumably to do whatever it is rabbits do in the dark.


On Saturday, returned from a low tide walk over to Monkstone Point with my friends, I'm back in the van, watching again, when a partridge (not a pheasant, I looked it up) strutted across the patio.  'Oh, hello', I couldn't stop myself saying.  The partridge looked superciliously up at me.  'And who are you, pray?'  it said.

We also saw a daddy blackbird plucking worms from the ground and feeding them to his nipper, who was several sizes bigger than him.

Never a dull moment!  And I haven't even started to tell you about the fridge.

Head or heart?

I'd done the simple calculation ages ago: there was no way that the LibDem was going to overtake either of the others.  The 2005 figures (rounded) were: Labour 19000 (45%), Cons 14000 (34%), LibDem 7000 (16%), on a turnout of 55% of an electorate of 72000.  So I had to vote tactically - Labour in order to keep out the Tory.  But it stuck in my craw.  I was about to search out a suitable clothespeg.

But this afternoon I decided to have a closer look (well, it was that or wash the kitchen floor).  I made a few not unreasonable assumptions, and came up with a surprising conclusion. 

The Labour vote in 05 was 8% down on 01, largely as an anti-war reaction.  That it wasn't down further was due to the popularity of our great constituency MP Martin Salter, who has now retired.  So I thought it reasonable to assume that the new Labour candidate would lose this personal vote, especially as he's been helicoptered in from Essex.  So, I thought, reduce let's Labour's share by another 12%.

Assume that the Tory vote here is more or less unchanged.  34% seems about right.  The candidate is local, and seems unobjectionable (apart from his politics).

Apply the national swing to the LibDems, so up from 16 to say 28%.   The candidate is, again, local.

All the above is based on the 2005 turnout of 55%.

But then, assume that turnout is going to increase dramatically.  This is a politically aware constituency (personal knowledge confirms this).  I have factored in a 75% turnout.  I've also, controversially, applied the increase in the ratio of 25% Labour, 25% Tory, 50% LibDem.  (I think this is ungenerous to the LibDems).

Running all that through the calculator, it comes out at near enough 17000 votes for each of the three parties.  Would you believe it?

So, guess what I'm doing tomorrow morning?  That's right, looking again at my maths, checking out the relative health of my head and my heart, then trolling across to Cranberry Road to cast my vote. 

Can we have the election right now please?

Should be easy.  There are red, blue and yellow buttons on my remote.  There's even a green one.  UKIP can press the 'off' button by mistake because they're pissed.  Everyone else can apply for a postal vote. 

I'm too tired to do an in-depth analysis of the content, so on artistic impression, in reverse order:

3: David Cameron.  Sweaty and shifty.  Consistently answered questions and challenges with evasions and accusations.
2: Gordon Brown.  Second rather than last mainly because he didn't smile so much.  But he did shake his head rather a lot. 
And the winner is -----
1: NICK CLEGG.  A pitch-perfect blinder of a performance.  In a word, charisma.

So there we have it.  As I said yesterday, now we've got that out of the way, this is where it gets nasty.