The Internet of Thinks

Driving back from Wales through the drizzle, lorry spray, lane-hoppers and self-fulfilling prophesies on the traffic displays, I rather fancied one of these driverless cars we hear about.  I know the technology’s not quite perfected yet, but Moore’s Law assures me that it will be by next Friday.

So, I’m wishing I was sitting in the back seat, nodding off while my car navigates the roadworks  between junctions 14 and 13, imagining the near future…

I’ve been down the pub in the next-but-several village, and I know I’m three pints over the limit.  Or four.  Or several.  I can still work a phone, though, so I tap up the SmartCar app and tell Siri: “Car!  Come here!”  Car, of course, knows where ‘here’ is – it’s where the phone is – so she checks her charge, backs out of the car park of some pub in the, or a, previous village and sets off down the lane.

This is when Car’s GPS gets hacked or confused and decides that the best route is via Zeebrugge.  Car makes her way to Felixstowe, crosses the North Sea on a ferry she’s booked through O&P, does a three-point and pulls onto the car deck for the return trip.  Being the precision-engineered artefact she is, she stops exactly 5 millimeters behind the vehicle in front, which then reverses.  Car instantaneously does the same.  Unfortunately, the human driver of the 18-wheeler behind is less precision-engineered, and rams into her backside.

The insurance claim is ongoing.  The latest I heard, the software developer at Goggle was being held to account.  Meanwhile, I’d summoned a driverless Ubre taxi, which delivered me safely to Tavistock, where I was informed by my fridge back in Norfolk that I was getting low on cottage cheese.

Human error?  Yes, it always is.  The question being, which human?

Weather Window

Sheila, whose eightieth it was, has four children, about a dozen grandchildren, and a good smattering of great-grandchildren.  As far as I could tell, they were all there, including the two youngest great-grands, five and seven weeks old.  Then there were cousins, nieces and nephews, friends from all over the globe, and hangers-on like me.  I’d guess about forty humans in all, plus the dogs.

Being almost all Welsh, they almost all talked almost all the time (all right, not the two babies, though I think they’re working on it), not too bothered about whether anyone was listening, which makes for a great party.  I talked to quite a few of them, I think, but don’t ask me what about – it’s called ‘craic’ in Ireland, ‘liming’ in Tobago, I don’t know what in Welsh or English.  The fun point is that the performance outweighs the content.

The drive down the M4 on Friday was one of the worst in my living memory.  Driving through pelting rain and the resulting road spray and road blindness is mentally and physically exhausting, especially as most motorway users don’t know how to do it.  The journey back today was, if anything, even worse.  The M4 powers-that-maybe had decided to switch on all the ‘50’ signs, put up a message saying ‘POOR DRIVING CONDITIONS’, and (in my unfair estimation) pootle off down the pub.  The result, of course, is that Sunday drivers react to the signs rather than the actual conditions.  I have proved this theory over and over again.  As soon as the warnings of a problem disappear, so does the problem.

But miraculously, the 24 hours in between delivered the best weather Pembrokeshire is capable of.  The heavens shone on Sheila’s party.   I’m sure she noticed, but she didn’t remark on it, at least not in my hearing.  Most of the time she was too busy laughing.

Age Difference…

I’m going to my caravan neighbour Sheila’s eightieth birthday barbecue on Saturday.  I’ve been to one or two of these Welsh birthday bashes down there before, so I know what to expect.  The finale, around midnight, will be massed singing in which I will timorously join.  If I can still find my vocal chords, that is.


Anyway, I needed to get her a card, so on a racing dash round Waitrose this morning I grabbed this from the ‘age-related’ section, without really looking at it.

I’m tempted to give it to her anyway, to see if she notices, or feels complimented.  Probably better not, what do you think?

SeenTV – the answer, and other stories

So I get there later than planned, sort myself out, have some food and a drink (didn’t open the Pelorus, that’s still there for some other celebration), and decide, perversely, to switch on the TV which I know is beyond doubt kaput, and of course the damn thing lights up, perfectly, twinkling innocently at me as if to say ‘sorry, did you ask me something?’

Well, I wasn’t having that, so I unplugged it, carted it down to the shore, and cast it off the rock promontory into the depths of Carmarthen Bay, where it swam out towards Swansea and torpedoed a tanker at anchor off the Mumbles waiting for a parking space at Milford Haven…

No, that didn’t happen.  I switched it off again.  Cheeky blighter.  Instead I stuck the iPod in its dock, hit shuffle and found ‘Clean Up Woman’ by Betty Wright and ‘My Way’ (no, not that one!) by Eddie Cochran, and wondered why music sounds so much better down there than up here, though the sound system cost a tenth as much.  (I know the answer.)

Steve the Teeve turned up spot on time, which wasn’t hard as we’d agreed on ‘sometime Wednesday afternoon’.   Pembrokeshire operates on its own timeframe, which makes the folk nicer, I think.  It can work against you, of course, if you’re on a tight schedule; but I very rarely am, down there: that’s the whole point!

So I now have a shiny new freesat dish, which means that the nasty metal pole that used to vertically bisect the front window is gone (tucked away under the van in case anyone else might want it, I’ll ask Joseph next time) and I have an unimpeded view of Monkstone Point.  (Except for those bloody sycamore trees.)

I got away quite early this morning, reached Carmarthen and realised I’d forgotten to turn off the gas and water.  I toyed with phoning Joseph and asking him to do it, but I don’t like stacking up favours, so I turned round and went back.  I’m glad I did.  It gave me a bonus glimpse of that view.  And I had the cup of coffee I’d foregone first time round.

Seen TV? I’ll let you know…

I seem to going through one of those spells when stuff over which I have no control starts behaving, if not plain wrongly, then at least alarmingly unexpectedly.  This happens every year or two; I’m probably just unlucky in having bought the various chunks of stuff at just the right times for their built-in obsolescence curves to all peak simultaneously.  At least that’s what it feels like.

My iPhone, for example, gave me the jitters this afternoon by getting confused about whether or not I’d installed the latest iOS update, and threatening dire consequences if I hadn’t.  Then sending me another text telling me to ignore the previous one because everything was probably all right.  (I paraphrase, but it was the implied ‘probably’ that threw me.)

Just as I was busy ignoring that, the phone told me I had to dial 121 for a new voicemail, so I did, and the lady told me I had no new voicemails.  Eek!

And this computer has taken to showing me random green flashes, like a kind of off-kilter Northern Lights, when I open the lid.  It’s going wrong, obviously, and will get replaced, but it’ll have to hang on till mid-August when Windows 10 comes on-shelf, because I’m beggared if I’m gonna body-surf through the horror rip-tide of W8 just to get to that remote, enticing shore.  So it’s down to you, computer.  I’m learning to remember to leave the lid open, but habits are not instantly breakable.

Oh, (and this is where I came in), last time I was down there, the TV in the caravan finally broke down.  I mean, really down.  It’s been glitching for a couple of years, and I’ve got through a truckload of remote batteries which have often done the trick, but not this time.  Zilch.  Nada.  Niente …  you know the rest.

So I’ve bought a new TV, and a Freesat box into the bargain, and I’ll be off down the M4 on Tuesday, to celebrate the evening in solitary style with a bottle of Cloudy Bay Pelorus, which I know is in the fridge there (assuming the latter hasn’t snuffed it too, aaargh!), before the man I’ve booked turns up Wednesday afternoon to install it all.  His name is Steven, which is as good a piece of anagrammatic nominative determinism as they come, innit?

That’s as long as that amber light in the car doesn’t come on again.

A very interesting number, 73

I was musing about memory, and memories, and it’s occurred to me that celebrating the day of your actual physical birth, which you probably can’t remember, is pretty meaningless.  What counts is when you first became aware, which you can only construe as your earliest memory.  I was nearly three when I helped my father to hang out the huge Union Jack over the front garden to celebrate the end of the War.  (He couldn’t have done it without me.)  So I’ll be just over seventy next week!

There may be a flaw in this approach.  If there is, please don’t tell me.

Numb and Number

The relationship between me and mathematics has been like that between a stalker and their victim – aware of each other, but hoping never to meet face to face.  (In this simile, which will not be pursued further, maths is the stalker.)  The concept of the stuff fascinates me, but I don’t understand a bit* of it.

I’ve just almost finished a marvellous book which massively reinforces the fascination, and even, possibly, an itsy smidgeon of the understanding.  (Well, it couldn’t reduce it, could it?)  It’s called ‘The Information’, by James Gleick (Fourth Estate, 2011), and is basically a history of, well, information – its nature, how it is (or isn’t) communicated (from African talking drums to quantum computing) and, most importantly, how mathematics and information are essentially the same thing.

That’s all I’m going to say about this book, except that once or twice (all right, 150ish times), after surf-navigating a particularly turbulent stretch, my neurons and synapses (they’re in there!) felt distinctly numb.

Just a couple of snippets that particularly grabbed me:

A guy called G. G. Berry, with Bertrand Russell, cheekily constructed the Berry paradox, which goes something like this.  Q: Is it possible to name the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables?  A: Yes: you’ve just done that.  But ‘the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables’ actually contains eighteen syllables.  So the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables has just been named in fewer than nineteen syllables.

That was obviously a philosophers’ in-joke, but ‘interesting’ and ‘uninteresting’ numbers are more, um, interesting.  An ‘interesting’ number, in the jargon, boils down to being one that can be expressed by an algorithm.  Hence  ‘5’ is ‘the third prime number’, ‘121’ is ‘11^2’.   The really interesting ones come when the algorithm is shorter than the number, thus facilitating data compression with all its essential benefits for information exchange.  But the really really interesting numbers are the ‘uninteresting’ ones, because they are random.  There’s no algorithm from which you can derive the number.  ‘Random’ numbers are a building block of modern internet security.  But the really really really interesting question is: how do you know they’re random?  Couldn’t it be that you just haven’t found the algorithm yet?  Vast resources at NSA and GCHQ are being devoted to cracking that one.

And finally, a quote: “What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?”  Andrew Wynter, ‘The Electric Telegraph’, 1845.

Sorry, that’s three snippets.  Three is more than a couple.  Like I said, numbers and me, duh.

 

*Carefully chosen word.

The Persistence of Memory

We all know how Dali put it, probably making ironic comments or raising profound questions about the mutability and erodibility of Time, or not, you decide.  But the phrase popped into my mind from quite another direction, that of tomato protection.

Z and I had been discussing and comparing notes about memory: things like ‘have I cleaned my teeth?’, through ‘did I have a shower?’, all the way to ‘who are you, again?’  We concluded (I think, I can’t remember exactly and I’m sure she’ll correct me if I’m wrong, ha) that if one’s memory is indeed failing, one will by definition be the last person to know; and that it might therefore be incumbent on others to gently point it out. 

Anyway, after Z had left, I went out to water the tomatoes, and noticed that some perverse beast (almost certainly a blackbird, though I’ve never caught him at it) had once again been digging deep holes in the compost in the planter, all around the fledgling plants.  I remembered (I did!) that the other day, when I’d been down to the rarely-visited shed to get a rake to gather up the early dropping apples, I’d noticed what looked like some chicken wire lurking beneath the undergrowth.  That might do, I thought.

So I dragged it out, and guess what, it had been carefully cut to size and shape for the sole, obvious purpose of laying it across tomato plants, in this planter, to protect them from marauding blackbirds.   Try as I may, I have absolutely no memory of doing that, although it can’t have been more than ten years ago.  I don’t know whether to be pleased or disturbed by this.

Familiarity

One of the joys of a caravan visit, for me, is that very little changes.  Sometimes familiarity and continuity, though they can easily tip over into boredom or indolence, are what’s needed.

So, it was good that the rain started at Port Talbot (it always does, if it’s going to), and the sun came out just as I crossed the border from Carmarthenshire into Pembrokeshire (it sometimes does, if it’s going to).

And my caravan neighbours (who I call B & B to remind me of their names) were welcomingly there, as they always are every weekend (they only come from Pont Abraham, 45 minutes, alright for some).  And there were the usual seventeen (I counted!) rabbits mowing away when I filled the first glass of the evening.  (I say the usual seventeen; I’d guess they’re different ones from fifteen years ago, but I don’t know for sure; and neither do they.)

Then there’s Joseph.*  As well as being familiar, as he should be after fifteen years, he can be surprising.  This time, I needed to get rid of some very old, completely unsittable-on, plastic chairs, which I’d proved wouldn’t fit in the boot without some help.  As he explained, Joseph can’t take stuff to the tip anymore without incurring a charge, and his informal deal with the bin collectors has fallen through since they installed CCTV on the back of the lorries.  (I won’t repeat his remarks on this topic.)  He said he’d have a think. 

Half an hour later, he turned up at the caravan, toting an angle grinder.  ‘We’ll just chop their legs off, shall we?’

The journey home this morning was familiar too.  As soon as I’d crossed the Severn bridge, the rain stopped and the sun peeked out.

  

*Not his real name, he’s a very private person.

 

Guitar Heroes

As I’ve decided to become a musician again, my darling 50-year-old Fender Telecaster has gone into guitar hospital to have its innards fixed.  The outside, at least the cosmetic as opposed to functional parts, is beyond salvation, its battle scars and makeovers being part of its life story, not to be resprayed or botoxed over.  (This is starting to sound a bit self-referential, but.)  But it does have to do its job, and plugging it into an amp does need to result in more than electronic crackles.

Anyway, in preparation for that, I’d been picking it up and picking a bit.  Which has led me to ponder on the guitar players I most wish I’d been, or at least wish I could play like.  So here are three:

Scotty Moore.  When Elvis walked into Sam Phillips’ studio that fateful day in 1954, Sam rapidly put together a scratch studio group to back him.  Scotty was the lynchpin, and produced some great country-tinged fingerpicking licks that, to this day, I find it hard to unravel. 

But after the great RCA sell-out (Sam got, I think, $34,000 for the lot, artist and recordings; the illegal immigrant ‘Colonel Tom Parker’ got the right to squeeze every squeezable cent out of ‘his discovery’, slowly eroding and then destroying the talent in the process), the sound had to harden up, and Scotty jumped in with both hands.  But he was too much of a natural-born musician to treat this new-fangled rock’n’roll stuff as mere noise, as most people out of their teens did.

Take his solo on  'Too Much', from 1956.   He starts with four bars of a vicious chordal chromatic up-and-down run, as rock-n-roll as it comes, then wanders off into territory more usually inhabited, at the time, by West Coast cool jazz exponents like Stan Getz, before bringing it back down again with a snippet of that good ol’ country pickin’.   Sheer genius!  Scotty later claimed that the middle bit was an accident, as the song was in an unfamiliar key (B flat) and he’d got lost; but I don’t believe him.

Steve Cropper.  From somebody who was, I submit, the real and very present power behind the newly-ascended  King’s throne (imagine ‘Hound Dog’ without the guitar), to an equally powerful but much less evident contributor.   If you’ve heard anything by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, or any other Memphis soul masterpiece from the sixties, you’ve heard Steve, in his role as a member of Booker T and the MGs, the Stax house rhythm section.   I was going to use the word ‘minimalism’, but that’s not it; ‘precision’ is closer, or just plain ‘rightness’.  I’ve chosen, of course, 'Green Onions' – he only plays about ten notes, but they’re all the right ones, necessarily in the right order.

Link Wray.  Finally, a guitarist who, although he had a long, illustrious career as a master picker (I remember a long-ago documentary in which Link and Chet Atkins traded finger-style licks for several minutes, competing and laughing out loud at each other’s audacity), is remembered for just one ground-breaking single from 1958 – but what a single!  If you’ve seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about: 'Rumble'.  It’s been said that without this record, the future of popular music would have been very different – no heavy metal, no punk – you may have your views on whether or not this would have been a good thing, but you can’t deny its power.  It hit me between the ears when I first heard it, and I still love it.

 

When I said I wish I could play like them, of course I can, at least some of the simpler stuff.  (I could teach anyone to play ‘Rumble’, even if they’d never touched a guitar in their life.)  What I really meant was: I wish I’d been there.  I wish I’d thought of it first! 

Can’t wait to get the Tele back…

P.S. I’ve no idea whether the Spotify links will work for you.

 

 

To Do Or Not To Do?

I have three ‘to-do’ lists in my head, which I think of as ‘Must’, ‘Should’ and ‘Would Like’.  I also have a physical one, which vacillates between the whiteboard in the kitchen (which I did away with two years ago, then reinstated two months ago because after the decorators had been, my kitchen was briefly ‘terribly house-and-garden’ and not to be sullied with Post-It stickers) and Post-It stickers.

‘Musts’, on the face of it, are easy, but they break down when you break them down into their sub-categories, which I might (no, hell, will, it’s me writing this stuff!) call internally- and externally imposed ‘musts’.  Internally-imposed musts are things like ‘must go shopping’ or ‘must clean the loo’. You either do them or things start to get unsustainable.  Externally-imposed musts are trickier (‘must phone Sheila (because she’s expecting me to)’, or ‘must check minutes of last meeting (otherwise people will frown and I’ll blush’).  They’re not quite ‘shoulds’, but veering in that direction if I’m not carefully self-disciplined.

‘Would Likes’, or ‘Wants’, (such as ‘get new Dylan album*’ or ‘re-learn the guitar’ or ‘sort out those 1990s photo albums’) are easy.  They will happen.  The only constraint is time and energy (of both of which one has either to assume an unlimited supply, or to give up). 

Genuine ‘Shoulds’ are the hardest, because they are moral obligations which no-one else will notice if they go unfulfilled.  For this reason, I obviously can’t give any examples here.

The modern world moulds and constrains us to live our lives in lists.  Butterflies and rainbows don’t seem to have this problem.  I suppose I’ll have to carry on learning the game, until it doesn’t matter any more.

 

*Interesting.  Dylan sings 30’s torch songs, and proves that, though he’s no Tony Bennett, he can still hit several of the notes.  But I can’t forgive his slaughter of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

Puglian Pecularities part 2

All right, the food:

Sea urchins.  These were featured in a BBC programme about Puglia a couple of months ago.  Apparently they’re best eaten live, straight from the sea, like oysters.  Sliced and cooked in a pasta sauce, they don’t taste of anything much, except the sea, like oysters.

Supermarket vegetable pricing.  You know how you have to delve through nested layers of blurry pictures on a touchscreen to find an aubergine?  Not in the Famila supermarket in San Vito.  Each item that has to be weighed has its own unique number: Melanzane (aubergines)?  035.  Just put it on the scale, key in the number, out pops the sticky ticket.  Brilliant!

Chickens.  The local chickens are tiny by Brit standards, but one is just right for two people.  And they taste like chickens used to taste in my childhood.  I asked what they were fed on and was told: ‘Quello che c’é’– whatever’s around.  And they’re about €4 each.

Italian meal structure.  It’s now permissible to have less than four courses for lunch. 

But it’s possible to have four courses for dinner.  Ristorante dell’Annunziata (I think) in Ceglie does antipasti (twelve of them!), primo (big bowl of linguine or bean puree), secondo (I chose rabbit stew) and dolce, for €20.  All local fare and recipes.  Carafe of local Primitivo plonk included. 

Puglian Peculiarities

1. The weather was poor by Puglian standards.  On the first Monday night there was a scary thunderstorm, which took out the electricity supply for about fourteen hours.  (We were informed on Tuesday morning that it wouldn’t be back on before 4 p.m.; it was actually restored at 2.30.  This way of exceeding a target is a very Italian phenomenon.)  Then, in week two, the wind kicked in.  If we’d been purely after a lounger-and-pool holiday it would have been a downer, but as it was it got us out and about, dilettante culture vultures.
2. Road signs are idiosyncratic.  You’d think that finding your way through a small town like Carovigno, which is basically a high street surrounded by off-white low-rise suburbs, would be a doddle.  Not so – the signposts clearly say ‘Brindisi’, so you follow them and find yourself in a dead industrial estate, or a litter-strewn cul de sac…  Part of the problem is that they haven’t fully adopted the convention that an arrow pointing vertically means ‘straight on’.  So you get two arrows, one on each side of the junction, one pointing left and one right; if you miss one of these, you erroneously turn left or right.  And finding your way back from this error is an existential challenge.  I swear that they reconfigure the roads whilst I’m executing the seven-point turn.  It took an hour to get out of Otranto onto the coast road and find that gorgeous beach I’d remembered from all those years ago. When I finally got there, it reminded me of Studland.
3. Baroque is everywhere, especially in Lecce.  Those totally bonkers facades, gargoyles, pediments or whatever they are (see photo #1 in the previous post for a snippet) make you wonder what those guys were on.  It surely wasn’t religion.
4. I managed to swim in the villa pool most days – not very far, admittedly, because of my dodgy right arm – but still a breakthrough.  I’d have loved to have surfed in the Adriatic, but that’s not easy when a) the tallest wave is about nine inches and b) I’d forgotten to take my togs.
5. Two-stage plane trips were a first for me.  We changed at Rome going out, Milan on the return, with several hours hanging around in airports – not fun!  But the luggage made it through both ways, which I consider to be a miracle of logistical efficiency. 
6. And I haven’t even mentioned the food…!

 

Highway 55* Revisited

I first visited Puglia in the summer of 1969, during a final tour, backing a singer called Maurizio, in the death throes of what was left of Dave Anthony’s Moods.  We’d come there from the nightmare of the Calabria toe, where in small hilltowns the police patrolled at night in fours, with dogs, and black-clad young women hid their children behind their legs and their faces behind veils at the approach of this bunch of harmless would-be capelloni hippies, and you had to get Davide, the roadie, to persuade a suspicious café to sell you a horsemeat steak.

Puglia wasn’t a bit like that.  Enlightenment was the word I used to myself, back then, and it was a good one: the area was full of light, both literally and figuratively.  I remember a late night conversation with a university student in Lecce, in which he summed up the difference: “They are Arabs, we are Greeks”.  Politically incorrect nowadays, perhaps, and historically broad-brush – Puglia has been invaded more times, by more alien forces, than perhaps anywhere else in Europe, including Britain – but it nailed it at least at one level.

 

So my recent visit was more than just a holiday.  I wanted to discover whether my hazily-recalled impressions from forty-five years ago were still real – was it still the same?  Or rather, did it still feel the same?

Well, the short answer is “Yes”.  I’ll share a few details of the trip next time, but meanwhile here are a few pictures.

*The E55 is the coastal near-motorway (I haven’t been able to discover what the E stands for, as Italian roads are officially A, S, R or P) which runs from Bari in the north to Lecce in the south, and hence will be much travelled by any motorised visitor to Puglia.

Getting Ready

I have a wimpish streak when it comes to getting on an aeroplane.*  I don’t do this very often nowadays, which makes it loom even more threateningly.  In a way, although the procedures are supposed to be much slicker nowadays, what with t’internet and that, I hanker after the good old days when you went up to Meadway Travel, sat down for a couple of hours with an expert called Jenny who did all the legwork and answered all your questions (including the ones you hadn’t thought of); and three days later a fat envelope dropped through the letterbox, you gave the contents a skim, read the bit which told you where and when to turn up and then forgot about it until departure day.  They supplied all the bits of paper which now you have to identify, download and (if you’re lucky and your version of Adobe is the same as theirs – possible but unlikely) print off.  And how is it that my question has never been Frequently Asked?

Anyway, all that’s sorted, so I’m distracting myself with details.  I went to Staples (you know, the wonderful shop where you buy your, erm, staples) for some luggage tags.  (They had a choice of colours, I chose white.)  I went to another wonderful shop called Clas Ohlson, which sells everything you can’t buy anywhere else, and got continental plug adapters, a two-way headphone splitter, and an alarm clock.  I added antihistamine cream and paracetamol to my packing list.  And a penknife.  Never travel without a penknife (in the hold, of course, not the carry-on): as I have noted before, it contains a corkscrew.  You have to be equipped for emergencies when travelling.  Grand Tourists used to have several trunks-full of just-in-case stuff sent luggage-in-advance.

I’m going to Puglia, just in case you wondered.   

 

*Multiply everything by ten when two aeroplanes (consecutive, not concurrent!) are involved.

Old Books

What do you do with old books?  I don’t mean the fly-by-night paperbacks I haul in periodically from Waterstone’s, read once and then recycle via the bookbank up at the tip.  (Or not, sometimes they get kept, reread and, rarely, find their way into the permanent library.)  No, I’m talking about really old books.

About sixty of them have been furnishing my dining room for twenty years or more, in a bookcase next to the fireplace.  They range from assorted Prayer books and semi-religious tracts (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, anyone?), through an almost-complete set of Dickens reissues (Unwin editions, 1930s I’d guess), to worthy tomes like The Origin of Species, Macaulay’s Essays on English History, and The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle.  Plus a fair smattering of Victorian verse anthologies, several Works of Shakespeare, and a possibly earlyish edition of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.  They’re all fairly tatty, almost certainly financially worthless and, most importantly, with one or two exceptions have never been read by anyone still alive.

I’m getting rid of them because I don’t think books ought to furnish a room.  I’m going to go slightly metaphysical on you now.  Books have no intrinsic value.  Their only worth is in the thoughts they express.  In turn, this value is circumscribed by the quality of both the thoughts themselves and their expression in a particular book.  But above all, if I’m right here, that worth dissolves into nothingness unless the book gets read.  I’m not going to read any of these sixty or so books, and I can’t find a way of enabling or persuading anyone else to do so.  So in every sense, they’re worthless.  So they’re landfill.  Right?

And yet.  And yet, perhaps they do contain, at least some of them, an ineluctable value beyond the paper, the cardboard and the words within them, read or not.  I skim through the flyleafs (flyleaves?) and find inscriptions which seem to carry their own stories, ones that will never be told but just might still exist in a memory or an imagination.  Certainly in an imagination, in fact: I find myself creating their lives and relationships even as I transcribe them.

Poetical Works by Moore: “Caroline Matthias on her 13^th birthday from her affectionate cousin J M Laws.  Jan 1861”

The May-Flower by Harriet Beecher Stowe:  “R. A. Scammell.  A birthday gift from A.G.  Feb 10^th 1882”

The Poetical Works of William Collins  “Edward Geo. Browne  Presented to him on the 26^th May 1834 by his friend and tutor J. Blern(?) Anstis(?) with the sincerest wishes for his welfare.  St Helier Jersey”

And in one of the Shakespeares: “E L Rea ‘02”  That’s my grandfather.

Caravan revisited, at last

As I hadn’t been able to go and shut down the caravan in the autumn, I'd entrusted the task to Joseph.  So I phoned him last week and left a message to make sure the various bits of plumbing would be on site for me to reinstall when I visited for the grand re-opening ceremony.  I’d planned an overnighter last Monday to do this, but this didn’t happen, mainly because of westerly gales, so there was a smidgeon of anxiety when we set out on Easter Saturday.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.  Good old Joseph had not only delivered the plumbing, he’d installed it too, almost certainly better than I’d have managed.  This man is a hero, as long as you keep on the right side of him.  I think I’ve written before about this – the caravan site is run as a benign, hands-off despotism, in which the rules often have to be uncovered by intuition rather than read from a lawbook.  Common sense usually prevails – for example, don’t fly kites, there are overhead power lines – but doesn’t necessarily suffice – always park across the slope, wheels turned uphill, because a car ran away and crashed into a van, about twenty years ago.

Bee had read a little item in the Telegraph (purely by chance, not her usual paper of choice) about standing stones in Mynydd Preseli, which was a good enough excuse to set off on Sunday to explore this wild piece of inland Pembrokeshire.  A quick map-skim revealed that the area is riddled with ancient monuments, including the birthplace of the Stonehenge bluestones, and sure enough we soon found Gors Fawr:

Not a hugely informative notice*, you’ll agree – if anyone knows the answer to the question, please do share it – and the stones themselves aren’t that impressive, but the setting more than makes up for that:

Our next find, however, after a fabulous fish’n’chip lunch in the garden of the Golden Lion pub at Newport, was the truly spectacular Pentre Ifan**:

It’s what remains of a prehistoric burial chamber, the covering earth having obviously long eroded away; but I couldn’t help imagining the delight of that ancient architect in achieving that exquisite tripodal balancing act.

Add in a re-(for me)-visit to one of my spiritual homes, Strumble Head:

All in all, a thoroughly rewarding day out.

Should've taken my shorts, though.

*You can find some more information, albeit mostly speculative, here.

**And here.

Dw i heb dy weld ti ers talwn!

Off to open up the caravan tomorrow, which will doubtless inspire me to resume blogging – SAD always sets in in March, and I need kickstarting, which a visit to West Wales usually achieves, especially when the weather is as good as promised.  I quite liked the Plaid Cymru lady in the debate, didn’t you?  And of course Nicola is a star.  What a shame they don’t want to be British.  If they were, I’d vote for one or other of them.

Meanwhile, a few Cameronisms which almost make you warm to him:

• In the brilliant documentary about Parliament the other week, he informed us that the place was “half church, half museum, and half public school.”
• At PMQ last week, he said “A straight answer deserves a straight question.”
• And in yesterday’s debate, he informed us that “There are three sides to this coin.”

Iechyd da!

Strictly, for the Birds?

Apparently what we lack is an Official, Elected, Government-approved National Bird.  I agree: what could be more important?

Wikipedia suggests that we already have one,, the Robin, but he/she’s never won a popular vote or official recognition. Several of our candidates are already taken – Denmark has nicked the Mute Swan (don’t tell Her Maj), and Sweden the Blackbird.  But, looking more closely, that shouldn’t be a problem – Golden Eagles are everywhere!  Even in Scotland.

Which leads me to two related thoughts.  One, can’t we cast the net a bit wider?  Does the bird have to live here, or even exist?  After all, our national animals seem to be the Lion (not particularly indigenous) and the Unicorn (not yet detected). 

And secondly, shouldn't a National Bird in some way be reflective of national character?  (Out of respect for my American friends, I say nothing about the Bald Eagle’s feeding habits.)  Just looking at the state of the Kingdom as we near our defining General Election, I’m surprised that the Magpie and the Ring-necked Parakeet aren’t on the list.

So, here’s my considered candidate for Britain’s National Bird:

The Map Is Not The Territory

Or to put it in more dynamic terms, ‘The Route Is Not The Destination’.

The other day, I was thinking about tarting up the appearance of my blog, in a probably vain bid to attract my readership back into double figures.  So I went to the appropriate place in the dashboard thingie, did what I thought I might want to do, and got ‘Error bX-evmf18’.

Guessing I might need some help in interpreting this, I mailed the Help Forum.  Sure enough, a prompt reply from a friendly expert suggested, amongst other things, that I try doing it in Chrome rather than IE.  I always obey techies as a first resort, and yes, it worked!  (As it happens, I ended up not making any changes, but that’s not the point.)

As a follow-up, whilst saying thank you, I wondered why this should be – why should the same program work differently depending on the browser I use to access it?  I got the somewhat unhelpful reply “Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera...all of these browsers render information differently, which is why you're seeing different behavior in different browsers”, which is really just a kind of rephrasing of my question, isn’t it?  So the experts don’t know either.

This anecdote is trivial, no serious harm done.  But it’s by no means a unique instance of this sort of stuff, and I can’t help but worry a bit.   We hear about the forthcoming ‘Internet of Things’, whereby, within the blink of an evolutionary eyelid (see Moore’s Law), our washing machines will be telling us to change our socks, our driverless cars will be deciding whether to run over the stray dog or the pram, and our wheelie bins will scold us for dropping a plastic bottle in the wrong one ...  And I think: are they serious??

For an industry that, after decades, can’t even agree on a set of standards for how to take us to our chosen destination without rebuilding the destination (‘Open Systems’; what were they again?), to expect us to buy into this infinitely more complex, dangerous, untried, hackable guff is either recklessly naïve or threateningly sinister.

Anyway, that’s what I think.  And now you’ll have to excuse me, my socks have just told my freezer that my toenails need cutting, and offered me a pickle fork to do the job, and are now trying to walk my feet jauntily into the dishwasher.