'Twas the night before Christmas

And all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring,
Not even a Butterfly



It was certainly imobile when I first noticed it, parked inconveniently to one side of the carpet in the corridor just inside the front door, with its wings close together in a vertical plane.. Everyone was walking carelessly around it and I feared for its safety, but when I tried to pick it up I found it was gripping the carpet firmly and wouldn't move. I placed a blue plastic punnet over it to give it what little protection I could, but found later that I had made a grieveous, if pardonable mistake. The cats became fascinated by the faint outline of the butterfly that could just be seen through the plastic and spent most of their time crouched by the punnet batting it with their claws. I noticed in passing that it had dropped its wings down into the open position, and picked up the punnet. It was no longer gripping the carpet and I was able to pick it up, but found that it was either dead, or doing a briiliant impression of rigor mortis. So I put it on the tree.



The second photo is almost an afterthought. It cropped up in the background as I was taking shots of the butterfly, so I took a shot of it all alone. I think it is of a town in Switzerland. I bought it in a junk shop in WIncanton a few years ago, and one of my aims is to go there one day, if I can ever find out where it is.

I still have thoughts like that. I have a set of things in my mind that I am going to be or do when I grow up. If I ever do.

Season's greetings to all of you.

Home for Christmas

I set off at 3:30 and travelled the almost unseen roads with very little company. I'm glad I made the decision I did. It might at first seem mad to most people to set off on a 270-mile journey through freezing fog in the darkness, but I reasoned that most other people would have opted for the sensible choice, and there's only one thing worse than having to drive in the whiteness of the fog; it's having to do it with several thousand other drivers in close proximity. I prefer to take risks in relative solitude.

I passed Stonehenge soon after daybreak, although I couldn't see it, but the slanting track that crosses the A303 was solid with parked cars. Somewhere over there in the white mist were dedicated souls celebrating some almost-forgotten pagan occasion; probably the shortest day in the year. I think that we ought to all celebrate the Solstices and Equinoxes in preference to the religious festivals, it might remind a few more of us that we all live on a ball of rock speeding around a ball of fire in a sea of nothingness. Life is as fragile as it is tenacious. But the dominant religion of the western hemisphere hijacked an older date for various reasons, some good, some bad.

I am intrigued by words that have double meanings, or get hijacked and turned into descriptions almost antithetical to their earlier purpose. In Sweden years ago I was amused to find that the word 'Gift' can mean either married, or poisoned. I tried my best to make up a pun on this duality, but the Swedes chose to ignore it. It almost seemed as though they didn't even see the contradiction. 'Orient' is another word that has a much earlier meaning than we may be aware of. We tend to use it to either refer to China, or to the action of aligning a map with the ground it is supposed to represent. We usually to do that by looking for the indication of which direction north lies in.

A long time ago we probably didn't have the idea of North, because without a compass you only have a vague idea of exactly which way it lies. But everyone can see where the sun comes up, and it does it each day, time and time again. Yet for some strange reason we pay more attention to the vertical lines on our maps than we do to the horizontal ones.

"Where are you going?"
"To the East"
"What are you seeking there?"
"Knowledge"

Go West, (young man)

... there's gold in the YMCA

I, (insert name) Sopwith-Camel, hereby claim this blog (enter blog title here) What-goes-up, and all the characters who sail in it, greedily awaiting all sorts of good things that come to those who nail their colours to the Technorati mast in return for aiding them in their quest to be the masters of the blog-world and hopefully convince Google that it's an even bigger thing than YouTube and therefore worth the Moolah. Sing Ho! for the life of a Blog.

(Make your mark kere) Fires five-second burst from Vickers guns. Consider it marked.

Is that it? What happens next? When does the party start? It's OK, I can wait, I've got enough fuel to circle around for a while. It is, after all, my ninth month of bloggery, so signing up to an official blog-support vehicle is perhaps the best end to such a gestation period. Apart from a moody spell a couple of months ago, (Rolling rolling rolling, keep those rails rolling, rolling rolling rolling, Rawhide!), I've managed to convince myself that blogging really is the cyber-world equivalent to sliced bread. You can treat this as a letter of intent, this blog is soaring.

My title has been misunderstood by almost all who've read it, but never mind, it's a phrase that means many things to many folks, and we all know there's nowt so queer as folks, particularly those who think they know a proverb when they see one. But now I've claimed it I've settled all pending dispute: it means what I say it means.

I should also say 'thank you' to the foul-mouthed little angel of the cyberverse who first inspired me to get started. Yes, I admit it, I was tempted into it. But who hasn't been?

And so I go up once again; my mission, to ride upon the winds of wim and wander through the clouds of whimsy, looking down upon the flat absurdness of the ground.

Switches off! Blog-checks away! Contact!

Testing Times

I was sitting in my office one morning, reading and deleting emails, when a parcel was delivered by a messenger who insisted on my signing his book without letting me first see what was in the small cardboard box.

"How do I know I want what's in it?" I asked, trying not to take the pen he offered me.

"You won't want it, it's nothing but trouble," he answered, 'that's why we have to make everybody sign first".

I took his pen and signed his form, and then managed to give him my own pen in return. It had run out of ink a week ago and I had vowed never again to go through the stationary requisition process.

Inside the box was a small machine with two wires ending in little clips, a dial, and a rotary handle like a musical box. There were also two rolls of labels, one with green writing, one with red writing, and a sheet of instructions.

I turned the handle several times, but it didn't play any tunes that I could hear, and when I touched the two clips at the ends of the wires they gave me a nasty shock that made me jump and bite my lip, so I read the instructions.

"Dear Recipient," they began, and I disliked the writer immediately. I am not a recipient, and I resent being labelled one by someone whom I have never met and who could not possibly see what I actually look like.

"Welcome to the world of Portable Appliance Testing (PAT)," they continued, and my hate for the writer rose up and boiled. If there is one thing I detest more than three-letter-acronyms it is people who insist on defining them where they are first used, instead of creating a glossary with all of the terms collected together for easy reference plus a table-of-contents to show where the glossary actually is.

"Please follow these instructions carefully. It is your responsibility to see that any portable electrical appliance in your workspace is PAT-tested and clearly shown as such". I winced at the ugly nature of the phrase 'Portable Appliance Testing-Tested' which resulted from the expansion of the acronym, but put my aesthetic feelings aside to concentrate on the responsibility being asked of me.

"Step 1: unplug the appliance to be tested". Very well, I thought, unplugging the aquarium. The steady bubbling stopped and the light under the hood went out. The fish stopped what they had been doing and looked at each other.

"Step 2: attach the clips to the two contacts at the bottom of the plug that are in common-orientation". I had no idea what the author intended by that last phrase, but I dutifully attached the clips to two of the metal bars that stuck out from the plug.

"Step 3: rotate the handle several times until a steady reading is shown by the needle". I did so, vigorously turning the handle until the needle moved across to a red portion of the dial, and kept winding for a few seconds in case the needle should show any inclination to waver. It stayed resolutely in the red.

"Step 4: observe the meter reading, and select a label according to the colour shown on the scale. Write the date and your initials on the label and attach it to the plug." I peeled off a red label and began to write on it, but the pen that the delivery man had left me ran out of ink, and I resolved to have words with him the next time we met. I stuck the label on the plug anyway.

"Step 5: Congratulations! You have just completed the test. If you stuck a green label on the plug then your appliance is safe to use for the next 12 months, providing that the label remains attached. If however the label was a red one the appliance is unsafe and should not be used". I looked at the aquarium. The fish had all turned upside down and were floating near to the surface. I felt relieved that I had found the faulty aquarium by means of this new tester instead of possibly getting a dangerous shock when feeding the fish.

I unplugged the computer monitor and repeated the test. It too gave a red reading, and I marked it accordingly. I tried all the other pieces of equipment and was amazed to find that not a single one was safe to use. It certainly justified the time I had been forced to set aside for this task. I forgave the writer his sins, grave as they were; it would have been ungrateful not to have done otherwise. I, and many others, doubtless owed him our lives.

I had one red label left on the roll but all of the green ones still unused, and on an impulse, connected the two clips to each other and turned the handle. The dial showed green, even after a particularly vigorous burst of cranking. I put a green label on it, repacked it in the box, and went to find the messenger to get my pen back.

Back in the darkness again

I had anticipated that the clock change would put an end to my evening bike rides. The cars on the Lincolnshire roads go too fast for my liking, and I know myself how poorly a cyclist stands out on a murky night when the driver has other things to pay attention to. After a few weeks spent stuck indoors in the hotel room I got itchy feet, and also worried about the weight gain that had to be directly due to the lack of exercise. I still couldn't face the prospect of joining a health club and dressing up in garish spandex or lycra to go and waggle strange bits of chrome steel and brushed aluminium about, so I pulled on my scruffy fleece top and ragged cords and stomped off into the night.

The orange streetlights ended after a few hundred yards to leave the footpath wandering off into the blackness. I had my flourescent jacket on to wake the cars up to my presence, and a small wind-up torch with ultra-bright LED's so that I could pick out details in the ground when the car headlights cast inky-black shadows ahead of me. It seemed strange that I should be able to see the least when there was the most light.

I became tired of the intermittent roar of tyres and the flickering lights and enforced pauses while I waited for them to pass. After a few hundred yards of jerky progress I saw a track to my left as more lights flashed by. I knew that it was a dead-end, running down between fields and past a sewage works to a field beside the river that flowed on to the village, but that meant I couldn't get lost. I set off in the darkness, ocassionally flicking on the torch to check what was in front of me.

After several minutes I realised that I could actually see things in the blackness; in fact nothing was really dark at all. Several patches even seemed to shimmer or glow with a whitish sheen, even though the moonless sky was completely covered by clouds. I put the torch back in my pocket and walked slowly down past the dark shapes of the fir trees around the sewage farm, across the soft grass of the field, and stood beside the slow-moving waters of the river. After a while the chill prompted me to get moving again, and I walked back up the track to the road, without any stumbles or mishaps. It was possible to see in the dark.

The next evening I decided to go much further afield. I hurried along the footpath to where a track branched off to ran for a couple of miles through woods to a different road, which then lead back to the hotel. Once again, as soon as I left the pavement behind I could put the torch back in my pocket and walk slowly but steadily through a strange faintly-glowing world. Sometimes the path ahead of me shone and twinkled, and at other times it was a black ribbon that stood out amidst the faint glows of leaves and twigs and grasses around it.

Up ahead of me I heard a single bark from a dog, and saw a brief flash of light, and the yellow loom of a flourescent jacket. As I got nearer the light swung off to the left. I looked up a side lane to see someone with a similar torch to mine picking their way uphill. I carried on away from them and the darkness fell again, and with it the faint shimmering glows and glitterings that we never see by day.

Somewhere, an owl hooted with a random pattern of pauses and calls. I listened for a reply, but it was singing to itself. The hedge-edged lane became a sandy footpath winding in and out of scrubby trees, mostly silver birch and hawthorn from what I remembered of my daylight rides along the route in the opposite direction to that in which I was now walking. The path now was discernable as the darkest of a selection of shades. I stopped once or twice to listen and glance back behind me. I felt strangely conspicuous wearing my yellow waistcoat with the silver reflective flashes, feeling that I must be glowing like a beacon in the predatory eyes that ought to be filling the night-time woods.

I reached the second road, and once again had to keep shielding my eyes from the glaring headlights as cars streaked past me. The gently glowing world had vanished with the rush and flash of our everyday world, but as I came into the orange glare of the village I found myself elated with the realisation that there was another world out there, waiting to be explored, needing nothing more than warm clothes and stout boots for access.

I am becoming a ghost.

Face to Face with Surreality

Early morning (pre-dawn to most of you), on the M1 beyond Leicester, the traffic suddenly starts to back up, and the middle and fast lanes drop back to 50mph. Up ahead are flashing yellow lights crawling along in the slow lane, and the lorries are coming out from behind them into the middle lane, chasing the cars from that lane out into the path of the white vans and super-fast Audis. As I plod slowly(I'm in a diesel) up to the dancing yellow lights I see a smokebox front and chimney, then wheels and cylinders and coupling rods. I am face to face with a railway engine going backwards along the M1.

A little further on is another low-loader, with a railway carriage on it. The steam engine was a 4-6-0, for those that care about such details, and somewhere there must have been yet another low-loader with the tender. I don't know if there were passengers on the coach, or a driver and fireman somewhere for the engine. For all I know they were all sitting in a dozen cars somewhere around the scattered convoy. Perhaps the railways have realised that all the old excuses about the wrong kinds of leaves and the wrong kinds of snow have worn out, and that the real reason for all the delays and slow-running is that they've got the wrong kind of tracks.

Trying to get back to reality for a moment, it is strange that, while we have a railway network that was designed to take steam engines and coaches, we have to move them around on the roads. Not just strange, but totally nonsensical. Why can't we have a joined-up transport system for our country? That's part of the problem, of course, they ripped up and closed down so many miles of track that the railway system no longer joins up with itself anywhere.

Maybe it is more surreal than I thought: the railways are in such a terrible state that railway coaches are going to be put onto low-loaders and driven around the country to try and relieve the bottlenecks. Next time I pass them I shall try waving to see if they've actually got passengers as well.

I would actually like a system where I could get up at 3:30 on a Monday morning, drive my car from my house to somewhere not too far away, where my car and I are loaded onto a wagon, which then sets off up the motorway system. Somewhere near to North Linconshire I could then wake up a few hours later when the wagon stops, start my engine, drive off the wagon and carry on the few short miles to where I work, having slept through all the chaos caused by the large lumbering load getting in the way of smaller lorries and vans and cars. I'd pay for it, if it was cheaper than actually doing the driving myself.

And if they decide to start charging us for using the roads, as somebody is now suggesting they might, is there going to be a charter for us road-users stating that we will have fair access to the roads in return for our payments? Because I for one will not be happy having to pay to crawl along behind obstructions that could, (and should) be on the rails.

I've had my obligatory couple of fines from cameras parked in vans by the road, (one of which was a con, because I was outside the 40mph limit they claimed I was exceeding, and only discovered it after paying up). What I want to see are fines levied on heavy vehicles that slow us down by crawling along at 30mph, or supermarket lorries running slow because (it is alleged), their drivers get a bonus for staying under 50mph on their tacho. If you're goung to charge people for using the roads, you should include the inconvenience factor in the assessment of their use, not just the distance travelled.

Whichever way you find me

I put Google Analytics onto my blog a few days ago, partly because I didn't know if anybody still cared about me. It looks like they don't, on the whole, (which makes the select few amongst you who do a bit more special than I first thought).

I was intrigued to find that several other blogs were shown as 'referral' links, which I took to mean that they must have a link to me on them which the visitor had followed, but when I visited several of those blogs, I was nowhere to be found.

I don't know exactly what is going on here, whether it's just a random jump to another blog in the ring or even just a DNS hiccup, and the visitor wanted something else entirely. But I'm intrigued enough to think that I should start to share some of these 'Hiccup Blog Links' with you just for fun. (Shall I call them Blinks?)

I'm not going to keep adding them on the left-hnd sidebar, this could get out of hand, so you'll just have to scour my forthcoming blog posts for urelles.

Chelsea Girl