What goes up...

is often a lot of hot air. In my mind I soar like an eagle, but my friends say I waddle like a duck.

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Location: No Man's Land, Disputed Ground

Flights of Fancy on the Winds of Whimsy

Monday, January 29, 2007

Synchronicity

A long time ago, when I was living in Penzance, a friend used to pronounce synchronicity as 'synchronosity', as though it derived from the term 'synchronous'. Many people, possibly because of an unconcscious link with the term 'synergy', regard synchronicity as applying only to happy coincidences. Not so, it can cover unpleasant events as well. And, just like buses, synchronicity seems to come in clumps and clusters.

A couple of posts ago I related how a friend and I discussed the year-on-year increases in traffic levels that had lead to us each experiencing longer journey times to and from Berkshire. The next Monday after that post, my journey time between Wiltshire and Lincolnshire increased by 30 minutes. Road works had sprung up on two seperate locations on the A34, and at the M1/M18 junction. I sulked about it after I crawled into work 30 minutes late, and resigned myself to having to leave home 30 minutes earlier each Monday morning for the next three months.

Later that day, I was skimming through the local news on the BBC website, checking Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset because I live at the confluence of those three counties, Lincolnshire because I currently spend more time up there than at home, and Berkshire, because I still keep in touch with a few friends from the times I lived and worked there. Under Berkshire, I saw an article about a cyclist found dead in the road with a wing mirror close by, presumed to be the victim of a hit and run. The place of the accident was where I had recently worked. I thought little more of it.

At the end of the week, sitting at home picking through the mail, the phone rang. it was my friend of the commuting conversation, with bad news. The cyclist had been someone who had sat next to me for two years. Police had arrested several people who had apparently been in the vehicle at the time of the accident,

This news came in a week when the Home Secretary had advised Judges to remember some Home Office guidelines suggesting that only the most dangerous convicted persons needed to be sent to jail. It comes at a time when more and more hit-and-run incidents seem to occur.

Motoring accidents are accepted as inevitable, unlike train accidents, which usually result in a public inquiry and the near-conviction of those at the top of companies judged to have been in a position of responsibility. No such inquiries seem to result from accidents between motor vehicles and pedestrians or cyclists, unless enough incidents occur to warrant placing a speed camera. By a cruel twist, the roads at each end of the fatal stretch in question have speed cameras, but not the road where the accident happened.

However, I do not think the speed limit or absence of a camera is really the issue in this case. What is repugnant to me is the action of driving away from an incident with no thought for the victim. A prompt phone call might have resulted in a life saved, rather than an attempt to keep a licence. But it seems some people in this country have different priorities. Are they going to be judged suitable to be sent to prison as 'a danger to the public', or will they be seen as only requiring a fine and suspension?

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Tony Blair on trial.

I watched 'The Trial of Tony Blair' last week. It came from the same source as 'A very Social Secretary', which I had started watching gleefully a few months ago, but ended up feeling some degree of sympathy for David Blunkett. I couldn't feel any similar degree of sympathy for Blair, and that is puzzling.

There has to be some measure of good in everybody, that is human nature. Sometimes the goodness in a person takes time to be appreciated, and sometimes the same process of time can reverse the picture, and the actions of a man can become questionable.

Until I watched 'A very Social Secretary', my opinion of David Blunkett was coloured mainly by the way the media were presenting him; a rather intransigent man with a mission to stamp down hard upon terrorism, no matter what the sacrifices others (us) might have to make. The play showed that, far from being a coldly-calculating puppeteer, he was as much caught up in the tide of things as the rest of us. It also showed me that a strong desire to do good, coupled with too much power, might be just as bad as an evil man determined to have his way with the world.

However, after his second fall from grace, 'Gunner' Blunkett seems to have been able to throw off the heavy mantle of responsibility and revert to being 'one of us'. His reaction to a proposal to use evesdropping equipment to monitor people's conversations on the streets was to suggest it was an invasion of privacy. He gave no hint that he might be aware of the irony of the situation, so perhaps the memories of his time in office have faded with the reversal of the corruption that the power had laid upon him. As with the potrayal of him in the play as on over-emotional and un-fulfilled male, this human lapse left me thinking that he was after all a warm and caring human being.

So why didn't I get the same insight into Tony Blair after watching the play recently? Was it because it was a speculative work, and therefore didn't have the same sense of 'rightness' that Blunkett's story had engendered? It might have been fiction in that it was looking forwards, not backwards, and the future is as much an open book as the past is a closed one, but there were some wonderful touches to it that made the setting seem real. The irony of Cherie Blair discovering that her neighbourhood was now more Arabic than the Middle East made me laugh, but is a forward-looking insight as valid as a backwards-looking one?

Was it perhaps that the characters were't so close to life? Blair and Brown just didn't seem to be as accurately-portrayed to me as Blunkett and Campbell had been in the first -play. I don't mean that as a criticism of the actors, or of the writer, but I did not feel I was watching the actual men in the same way that I watched Blunkett.

Or was it that, although I had been able to empathise with Blunkett, I could find no way to empathise with Blair? Was he not human? Has he, because of his part in the Iraq debacle, crossed over the line that divides Churchill, Thatcher and Major from Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin? The play showed him haunted by visions of children in the war-torn ruins of their homes, puzzled because his intentions had been good but the results seemed to belie them.

In real life, Blair comes across as the opposite of Blunkett the Home Secretary. There is none of the arrogance that Blunkett showed. Blair always manages to sound as though he cares passionately not only about the issue, but about the cares of his audience. The most abrupt or discourteous thing I have ever seen him do is to brusquely move on from one journalist to the next when he didn't like the question. He doesn't seem like a man who could have blood on his hand. You can't imagine him barking over the phone to 'use machine-guns if you have to, I don't care'. And yet, 'a man can smile and smile, and be a villain still'. Am I seeing the image rather than the real man? Is there a real Blair to see?

I used to be an avid fan of Lexx, and have all of the episodes on tape. When I ever manage to get the time, I shall watch them again. In the earliest episodes was an insect life form with bad intentions towards the human race. It was characterised by jet-black eyes with no iris pattern at all, and when the insect life-force possessed other beings, they too lost their coloured eyes to the obsidian-flood. In the more recent 'Hogwatch', the central villain Mr. Tea-time (sorry. Mr Te Atame), also had one jet-black eye. Two or three years ago, whilst watching two appearances by Bush and Blair, I was struck by the black gaze that each turned upon the camera. It was as if each man was capable of dilating their pupils at will to the point where there was no iris left. Or are they aliens, intent on bringing about our downfall from within, just as His Shadow planned?

Or am I just over-tired and in need of a good long rest?

Thursday, January 18, 2007

And in the Blue/Black/Brown/Yellow window...

I haven't been watching Celebrity Big Brother this week. That puts me into a minority already, I know. I only watched it once, when Leo Sayer demanded to view his contract. Instead, I've been watching the news reports about the show. What has fascinated me is that a single incident on television has captured the headlines and gripped people's attentions not just in Britain, but halfway around the world, and looks like only briefly being displaced from the top spot by the actual storms that have just hit us.

I wonder if anyone appreciates just how brilliant the Channel 4 team have been? They have got thier program elevated to the point where it has been mentioned in parliamentary debates and the prime minister forced to acknowledge that there are discussions on sofas outside of his own cosy room at number 10 that can have earth-shattering ramifications. They have got their program onto the must-discuss list in a country where the chancellor is now unable to walk down the street without being asked to give his opinion on what's been happening on it. They have managed to push the botched execution in Iraq firmly down the list, and even managed to overshadow the news that the senate in America is gearing up to challenge the Bush plan for death or glory in Iraq. They have nearly doubled the viewing audience in this country alone, and have obviously got it high on the list of possible exports to overseas markets.

And, as far as I can see, they've done it without it (the program) actually being racist. As they (the C4 spokespersons) have said, it was really a bit of cattiness between females, with a hint of class division thrown in. There was no actual name-calling, none of the taunts you heard during some of the football matches, just some hints at different customs and accents and spellings of names. Almost normal, in fact. After all, it is supposed to be reality TV.

Perhaps we've gone overboard on this notion of racial abuse. Is it wrong to taunt members of the Asian communities, but OK to poke fun at the difference between the North and South in this country, wrong to make jokes about how foreign foods are cooked but OK to lampoon the dining habits of the upper english classes with crooked fingers as they drink their teas? Some people would say that the challenges and arguments in the CBB house show that Shilpa Shetty has actually been accepted as an equal by the other members; someone else might have just been ignored. And for a celebrity, what could be worse than that?

Whatever the rights and wrongs of what went on in those few televised hours, it has proved to be more news-worthy than the two graffiti-artists killed as they ran away from security staff, and more important than the reasons that prompted six men to try and achieve martyrdom in the London tubes. Life inside an artificial environment is proving to be more important than the 'real' world. OK, I know, Reality-TV is real. I just hadn't realised it was important.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Moses and the Broadband land

The last time I was working up in Berkshire, (I say 'up' because it is slightly North of me, and I am conditioned to think of North as uphill), I was talking with a friend who also commuted quite a way in to work. I drove 150 miles each day, he drove 90, and we were, as usual, moaning about the interminable traffic and never-ending roadworks.

When we compared travel times, we realised that there was a remarkable similarity between our experiences. Over the 8 or so years we had known each other, the journey time for each of us had increased by 30 minutes. Each successive year we had begun to get up a little bit earlier and get in the car, to continue arriving at our destination at the same time.

Because it was only 4 minutes a year we had each taken little notice of the trivial increase in the journey time, but the 30 minutes was now too large to ignore. There was nothing that either of us could do to reduce it, we each had discovered our shortest route, and the next-shortest alternate route, and so on, and could find no quicker way to commute than by using the steadily more clogged-up major trunk routes.

What puzzled me for a while was that there seemed to be no correlation between the increasae in journey time and the miles travelled. My increase was still 4 minutes a year, even though I travelled a much greater distance than he did. I can only assume that the delays occur in the more densely populated portions of Berkshire, so that my Wilts and Hants portions of the trip had almost no increase at all, and all of the problems occurred in the final third of my trip.

I used to work using phone lines and modems, making site visits only if I had to install software or run tests. I took part in tele-conferences, net-meetings, and e-mail discussions rather than pile into a crowded meeting room miles from where I lived.

And what was I doing? Helping develop the network of fibre-links, switches, power supplies and all the infrastructure that has helped to give us Broadband today. When we were working to install and troubleshoot our systems, we felt sure that what we were doing would help the human race, improve their quality of life, remove the need to travel in the rat-race of commuting for thousands of people.

Isn't it ironic that, although my efforts might indeed have allowed many people to work from home, I am not one of them?

Thursday, January 04, 2007

This week, I shall be mostly

wondering what I can do to help cut the carbon emissions.

There has been a spate of adverts on the TV lately, about turning down the thermostat, washing clothes at 5 degree less, only filling the kettle with enough water for one cup; all to do your bit to cut the fossil fuel bill.

My vote goes to the kid who's practicing for walking to and from school with mum instead of being driven there and back. Apart from the fact that it means one less 4x4 on the roads, it also will do the pair of them lots of good. Walking is in danger of becoming as medieval as witchcraft.

I walked to and from primary school, about a mile and a half each way, no matter what the weather, no matter what the time of year, although I remember we got let out early enough on winter afternoons to be home by dark. So did my brothers and my sister. When I got older I started cycling, until the college I was at was too far away for anything other than buses.

I could not imagine school without the journey each way, sometimes up and down the hill with the conker trees and the sweet shop in the hollow, sometimes through the fields by the pond with the sticklebacks, sometimes through the wood with the sandstone cave; if I had been denied those adventures I would have lost half of the enjoyment of my childhood.

OK, I appreciate that there are far more cars on the roads nowadays, and possibly far more predatory characters, but is it really the answer to all of humanities problems to hide them from our children? I'm not saying throw them in at the deep end and let them take the risks, God forbid, but I am worried that we have produced a generation accustomed to beng chauffered everywhere.

It can't be too good for the parents either, reduced to rat-running in order to fit their own lives in around the twice a day rush between school, home and shops. Hopefully mum is going to get fitter, healthier, and more adventurous.

I would love to be able to say that I am going to be walking to and from work for the next few weeks, but I can't. And I've already changed the thermostat setting, bought a smaller kettle, and changed all the lightbulbs to high-efficiency types. So what can I do to join in with everyone else? Simple, and pretty basic.

This year, I shall be wiping my arse in the dark to help do my bit for the environment.