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

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Saved by my own obsession

I have become a compulsive diarist. I use a local instance of Apache on my laptop and desktop machines to run a couple of Wikis into which I can rattle away each day about what I have done, felt, seen, imagined, dreamt of. I used to scribble into little notebooks before we had easily-available personal computers. The trouble with those is that they're not so easy to search, and, in my case, also not so easy to read. But I have several large chunks of my past now typed up in the wikis, either from transcriptions of notes and cassette recording collected over the years, or from reconstructions where I have sat back and thought hard about certain times in my life which were critical.

I wasn't always like this of course. I mean, it's not as if I was born recording

B-1 Dear diary: I can tell you, I'm pissed off, whatever it is, I'm not happy. It's now four days since she last ate pickled onions. What's the point in getting me interested in something and then forgetting to eat it? And why is she moving around so much? I'm sure it got suddenly light in here, that hasn't happened before.

B 0 Fuck! You Bitch! Fuck! Did I want that? Did I hell! What's all this row about? I can't even think above it. Tell that dipstick woman to stop that silly noise! Who's slapping me? I'm not a carpet. Bloody hell, couldn't you have let me know in advance? Give me peace. Oh, something to suck? Must I? If it'll keep you all happy and stop you making that bloody row, then I suppose I must. Sigh.

B+1 Dear Diary: I am NOT pleased. Not one bit. What's all this shit thing about? I mean, just how humiliated do you want me to be? It stinks! And who designed me so that the only way I can say I've had enough or need to take a breath and pause for thought is to puke all down my front? What shithead dreamt up this for a life?


And so on.

But, probably fortunately, I didn't bother about the diary thing until much later. That's not to say I haven't got memories. I do actually have one distinct memory from my infancy. I was sitting staring out from inside a car up to a railway bridge high above, and a steam engine is crossing slowly over from left to right. It is a dirty grey colour, and the steam bursting up from the chimney fascinates me.I also know, although I can't see it, that I am in my father's arms, not my mother's.

From talking to her, I would have been about thirteen months old at this time, because from when I was born until I was one year old, we lived in the countryside, and then for just a few weeks moved into a flat in Three Bridge, where there were lots of railway lines running high above the streets, and a few weeks later on. we moved back out into the countryside again. And, yes, my father used to have me tucked inside his jacket when he drove the car and my mother was not there, she scolded him about both taking me out without her being there, and about the risk to me behind the steering wheel.

What really fascinates me about that memory is that, for a long time as a child, I had no "inner vision" faculty. I couldn't understand when people talked about picturing something inside their heads, or seeing something in their mind. I dreamt, of course, and I wondered if that was what they were talking about, but I never see things when I was awake. So when I did finally start to see things in my mind's eye, I spent a lot of time fascinated by this new phenomenon. But that was when I was nearly ten. Up till then, I read, avidly, and stored up descriptions of things in my mind as sets of words and phrases, not as images.

There was another strange thing about myself that I puzzled over; I couldn't feel things about myself. Someone, such as a doctor, would ask me "where does it hurt?", and I couldn't tell them. I didn't know where something actually was inside me that was hurting, I only knew that an arm or a stomach hurt, but exactly where, I didn't know. Again, sometime around ten, all that changed; when I fell backwards only a few feet from a tree and broke my arm. Suddenly I knew exactly where it was hurting, I could put my other hand on the very place. From that day on, I not only knew where my own pains lay, but I could also feel someone else's pain if I saw something happen to them.

So, of course, I now value my sight, both external and internal, and any threat to it is almost a threat to my very core, I do not see how I could be if I could not see, do you see? (Si senor, we see). And I also value my feelings, because I can remember what it was to be unable to really feel with any precision.

(Just re-reading that lot before getting to the point, I am struck by the fact that Little Petal might be right when she says that I am Borderline Autistic. I always thought she simply said that because it was a mummy-thing to say, a way of classifying awkward behaviour into some term or label that she could then say "Oh, that's it!" and then feel that she knew how to deal with me. But even if she is, by some strange fluke, right, it's too late to do anything about it now, isn't it?)

So, then, today, after I had worked three very hard long hours in the morning, carrying large lumps of masonry round from one part of the site to another, and then smashing them up with a sledgehammer to make the hardcore over which we were going to pour concrete, I realised I was starving. I could feel exactly where inside of me the pangs originated from. I was too hungry to think of carrying on for another couple of hours to finish everything and then go back to eat, and so I set off to the nearest garage where I thought I might fill up the car with petrol and fill up myself with some bread and cheese. I set off in the car and reached the nearest garage. They had petrol, but they only sold crisps. I set off for the next garage, which I knew had a shop, and got there to find that half of their pumps were closed off, the concrete was being jack-hammered up, and there was a queue of cars waiting to use the two remaining pumps.

So I roared off home, put the kettle on, put some red kidney beans in a saucepan, emptied a can of chopped tomatoes with olives in on top of the beans, dashed a bit of Thai curry spice over it all, and went to sit at the computer to check emails and read a few blogs.

Something was wrong. I didn't notice it while I was reading the BBC news website, because they only have a few words per line and so there is no need to scan from left to right much, but when I went onto a friend's blog and started to read his posts, I found that the words began to squirm and vanish as I tried to read them. I could read the one or two words immediately in front of me, but as I tried to read further along the line, there was a sensation of something quickly flitting between myself and the words. I took off my glasses, cleaned them, and tried again. It was still the same.

I don't read a word at a time, or read out loud inside my head, I scan whole sentences rapidly and the words are just there inside me. I couldn't make it work when I had to physically move my head along to see each word in turn; although I could read each word, they meant nothing to me. I shook my head, and had several more tries, but I had lost the ability to read and make sense of what I was seeing.

I began to panic, wondering if I had, as a result of the hard physical shocks as I swung the sledgehammer to smash up the bricks and concrete, detached a retina. I can only read with my left eye as a result of a fall down the stairs when I was a baby, and so there was nothing to be gained from covering my left eye and trying to read with just my right eye, the letters and words were just squiggles. I sat there, wondering if I should go up to the hospital, when I smelt the sweet tang of tomatoes. My lunch was ready. I decided to eat it anyway, no matter what I was then going to have to do.

While I was eating it, I had a memory of something earlier in my life, not exactly the same, but similar in a way. I had been riding hard in Norway, crossing the high mountains towards the sea, to a place called Alta. I was riding through the night, but because of the midnight sun it was effectively daylight, and I had decided to press on against the wind and not stop until I reached Alta, because of the bleakness of the landscape I was passing through. I reached Alta just before eight in the morning, and as I wandered through the empty streets, I found that my vision had been flickering, as though my eyes were switching off for just a fraction of a second. I remembered that I had stopped at a garage which was open and bought two packets of biscuits, one digestives, the other shortbread, and had wolfed them both down in less than five minutes, and had then gone back to the garage and bought a bottle of lemonade and guzzled that down in almost one go. I had ridden for too long against the wind without stopping for food or water or a breather. I had drained all my internal reserves.

And as I sat there, the food now eaten, the hot blackcurrant now drunk, I found I could see the letters a little more clearly, and I was able to bring up the wikki in which I keep the notes for my journey tale. I had indeed been shaky and flaky at Alta, and my notes said that about ten minutes after wolfing down the biscuits and lemonade, the flickering had stopped.

So then, my past had confirmed that this was probably just a similar case; I had worked too long at too furious a pace, and when I had stopped for food it was already too late. I had burnt up large amounts of glucose, which is apparently the only food that the brain can use (according to the anti-Atkins diet people), and I was also probably dehydrated from sweating copiously, and the eyes are nearly all water, so I had probably also had the fluid in the lenses thicken or increase in salinity. There was no need to go to the hospital, or even to the doctors for a checkup. I wasn't going to be visually-impaired for the rest of my life. I just had to learn how to take slightly better care of myself. Again. My obsession with keeping notes on myself from times gone by had, once again, stopped me from dashing around in a blind panic.

I am glad that I will still be able to look at things, because so much of the life that I love is intensely visual, despite my love of converting it into words that look or sound or feel somehow appropriate. I would hate to have to live with a little voice in my ears constantly trying to describe to me what was happening out there, outside of me, in the great blue. I would miss things like this video clip, (which I found quite accidentally when I went searching YouTube for a Talking Heads song to use in the Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) post. I couldn't find the song I wanted, and instead happened upon the Al Stewart song from The Year of the Cat, which was far more appropriate anyway.)

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Saturday, February 21, 2009

Oh Brave New Mobile World (2)

Roaming Rights

This is the middle part, the belly of the beast, and I have just found some fluff in its' navel. Excuse me for one moment while I deal with it.


I roam,
You roam,
He - She - it skips happily about
between the masts


(There is a subtle warning at the very end of this piece, I shall tell you now. It is to do with this being the second part in a trilogy, and there being two previous (yes, two) parts which you should have really read first.)

(And here is another subtle warning: I am teasing; there is a hand upon the far end of those tantalising pieces of string, I am expecting that the cat will make a grab.)

I have become intrigued by the thought that cats are happy because they have no long-term memory. They can play happily, (as two of mine are now doing, one either side of the falls of the table-cloth, dabbing with their paws at the spot where they last thought the other was,) without getting bored. Why do I think that they have no long-term memory? Because (heh), even in adulthood, they still play as (heheh,) a kitten does, with a piece of string, or a dead leaf which has floated down from a plant. The world is still mysterious, the magic is still there for them. If they had an accumulation of memories, as we big people do, then they would remember that "Oh, it is just a leaf", or, "oh, it is only the tabby behind the cloth".

And yet, cats obviously do have some form of long-term memory, since they remember where they live, and who feeds them. One of mine, I have been told by Little Petal, would sit on the mat inside the front door and wail in lament for a day after I had gone out in the dark of a Monday morning and hurried off to Lincolnshire. Also, as I have proved to an initially scornful Little Petal, they can remember their names. I chose a time when all three cats were dozing in front of the fire, and then, one by one, very softly whispered a particular name, and the cat in question twitched an ear as it slept. I did it again for the next, and again for the third, to firmly cement my victory in both of our minds. Cats obviously do have a long-term memory.

In fact, they sometimes seem to show the opposite of what I proposed two paragraphs ago; they have a long-term memory, but no short-term one. Consider, (and those of you with no cats will have to either trust me, or find a friend with cats and hang around long enough to see for yourself); a cat rushes into the room in a playful mood, makes a dart towards a scrap of paper that has been slyly pretending to be a mouse, and then, with no warning or signs of deliberation, stops, turns around, and busily chews at something in the fur on its' back. That done, it will probably look around other parts of itself, snuffling and snorting into its' belly-fur or washing around its' flanks with its' tongue. And then again, it will suddenly, in mid-lick, catch sight of something, perhaps a piece of paper slyly pretending to be a mouse, crouch, wiggle, and leap. So, are they happy because they have no short-term memory to nag at them and remind them that the washing-up still hasn't been done and why is the postman late and where is that other sock? Is it, perhaps, a kindness to leave Alzheimer's suffers as they are?

I have entered by this strange door into Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) not to surprise and alarm you, but because I am becoming more and more concerned about how far people have started to move away from what you might call the natural world, in which the animals and plants still live, as they always have, unconcerned about ominous mutterings in the sub-conscious, or loud alarmed screaming from the media. Animals and plants are not mortgagized, financialized, gadgetized, new-terminologized. You don't see many dogs wandering with a mobile phone pressed to their ear barking at odd intervals.

I still have my very first mobile, a Motorola flip-phone, heavy as a brick, it seems today, and too large to carry in your inside pocket. I did, laughingly, carry it down my trousers once, until someone pointed out to me that the radio waves might be telling my gonads weird tales and giving them the wrong ideas. Oops. One of these days I am going to have to make sure that my seeds will tell their story straight and true, or, at least, with no more devious concealment than I myself would wish to put into my tellings of things I have done and undone. Oh, you say, they're radio waves, they're harmless; if they weren't, the governments would not allow them to be used. What, ban them to protect us from harming or being harmed? Like they ban electricity and cars and drugs and guns and knives? As a thought here, perhaps radio waves haven't been around for long enough for us to observe some subtle changes in the genes. After all, it was only really yesterday that Marconi flashed his message over the big pond. But I believe that nothing truly evil persists for long enough to truly harm the world irrevocably. Nothing lasts for ever.

And then, from one cat-like moment to another, I cease unraveling that skein of woolly thought and return to chasing the idea of people wandering around the streets apparently talking out loud to themselves. There was a time when someone prowling the streets gibbering and gesturing and laughing or swearing with nobody by their side was too poor or too disturbed to take part in the world that the rest of us lived in, but now it is the opposite: only the poor and disturbed are not wearing bluetooth headsets so that not even the mobile phone is visible to let you know that they're not in a bizarre mental fugue but actually participating in a loud and noisy manner in the great game of Life. Life without talk-time has become unthinkable. Life without mail and online-shopping and downloadable entertainment is not a life worth living. There are chips with everything, (and of course, spam), but it is the chips and their own contained silicone thoughts which drive our world these days. And we have to tell each other, endlessly, what it is that we are doing, (as cats, by way of greeting, smell each others' arseholes just to find out what the other had for dinner.)

Cut to - Mrs and Mrs Brave New Mobile World, curled up asleep in their bed, their bluetooth headsets on, their mobiles' keypads on the pillows with the key-locks on to guard against an inadvertent fumble, both busily talking in their sleep, dreaming out loud into the great wide world. We watch them as they lie there, breathing regularly, twitching irregularly, muttering and mumbling and seeing who knows what behind their eyelids? We ought, I think, to reach out and stroke them, to let them know that the world will not harm them, they are still loved. Someone will still care for them and make the thunder go away.

But is this to be the end of us? Stuck at home locked up into little mobile cells where the least we can do is bluetooth each other? No. Nothing lasts for ever. Everything comes and goes, sometimes smoothly sliding away and sometimes jerking abruptly, but one thing always leads to another. Consider: years ago, when I was at Lowestoft, CB radio became all the rage, and the airwaves began to come alive at night with the crackles and hisses as cars full of teenagers shot around the town babbling excitedly to anyone out there; each other, truckers rumbling onwards through the darkness, amused Swedes and Germans when the clouds played skip-games with the frequencies and the babblings hopped for miles across the water-waves instead of rushing harmlessly out into space. And when these teenagers got bored with driving, or realised they couldn't afford the petrol any more, they would congregate in their cars beside the sea on the now-deserted carparks where the sea-siders had clustered in the daytime. Still full of the need to communicate, they would use their CB sets to talk to each other as they sat in their cars. But, because of the reception problems caused by the transmitting and receiving antennae almost touching each other, they couldn't use the airwaves, so they turned a switch and used loudspeakers instead, and, sitting in the darkness in their cosy little metal cells, shouted at each other, like prisoners on a barred row would do.

Life has now become a shopping spree through the malls of gadgetland as we race ahead like lemmings into the sea of expectations. I have had to phrase that phrase with great care, because there are those among us who are literalists, and if I were to have uttered the usual analogy including the cliff, (which I have not uttered), those literalists would all be clamouring to tell me, tell you, tell us all, that lemmings do not do that thing with cliffs for which they are remembered. Just so, my little literalist, the little furry ones do not dive and tumble. But here we come to the poetic point, is the mental image of a thing which isn't true any less valid than that of one which is? You all, I am sure, got the picture I intended, and saw a vision of Brave New Mobile Worlders running herdlike towards the sea where all their promises are held, and toppling over the edge of unsustainable ambition. I love change, in most of its forms, but I have seen that some of the changes being forced upon us have been purely for the benefit of those who make and sell and tax us on glittering things.

Oh but, wait a moment, is it really that simple? Are we but mere puppets jerking at and on the strings being tugged around by the cunning ones above who clothe us and feed us and tell us how to behave and take out money from us? Is the world that frightening? Or do those whom the paranoid believe manipulate us for their own gains really only follow, themselves, the directions that the "marketplace" says it is willing to be lead along? A top might think the bottom is writhing compliant at their feet, but in reality, they can only do to their partner that which the partner wishes to be done to them. Does the one control the other, or the other control the one? Are they both playing a game in which the rules are subtle and the instructions tacit? (I'll pull the string if you want me to, pretend I'm not here.)

I, myself, do not believe in paranoid conspiracy ideas. You cannot sell someone something they have not decided to want to have. First, you must encourage the want. To do that, you need to know what they might want, and you try different coloured wool, twitch the string in different places, leave it static and see if they make a move towards it or away from it. The world is a collaborative affair. We want, because we do. In the case of mobiles, mails, machines, we want it here and we want it now. Having to wait until we get home from work or shopping is no longer good enough, we will have lost the urge to play by the time we get back home to switch on the light and then switch on the light.

How have I got myself here, pondering upon gadgetry? I too have felt the desire to take my cyberlife with me, instead of leaving it at home while I roam. I need to call my "friends electric". I want to stand in the real world and laugh in amazement at something, then flit like a bat into the underworld of electronic dreams and, to a friend or two, go "LOL, you should see this!" Yes, I know, it's here, now. How long, I wonder, from fitting the first mobile phone with a camera, to the first up-skirt snap? How long was it until the first woman saw the winking eye and, on an impulse, flashed her tits at it? And why, oh why, did we move from that happy innocent abuse to the serious business of happy-slapping? Well, my cats, ingeniously, for they don't have phones to video that which they get up to, instead bring home live mice (and even rabbits), to torment in front of the other cats. That's entertainment, when you're feline and furry, and that's entertainment when you're big and clever.

Oh, wait, did I just see that idea move in the corner of my mind, as if it were a mouse? Let me pounce. I have seen the signs that hint the Brave New Mobile World is maybe not so far away after all. I have seen a small pack which, by laser, throws the image of a keyboard on a surface, and detects the points at which the fingers strike, and types the letter, typo or not.

(Is a message written upon a virtual keyboard real or imaginary?)

And, talking to another friend, we both believe a small device exists, perhaps a bit larger than a packet of cigarettes, (Oh absent friends, lest we forget), which, again using something like a laser, projects a screen with flickering images upon another convenient surface.

(Is the vision of an imaginary animal a real vision?)

And so, with those beside me, I could roam through one world and also roam through another. I have a phone-cum-computer, about the same size as a pack of cigarettes, (wail), and with those three packs, (nicotine-free), together with another pack of about the same size which contains power, (our three essential mobile packs are phone, keyboard, screen and ... Our four essential mobile packs...) I could be free. Oh yes, I could be free. I could roam, and still be home.

And so I have wiggled my arse and leaped playfully from one state, (of hate, where the mobile is a despised device to interrupt me,) to another, where it is to be desired, because it can connect me. Keyboards, which up till now are famed for stressful injuries and getting sticky when all sorts of fluids are dribbled into or spurted over them, are also the means by which to soothe and stroke and fuss and tease into states of delight. And television screens, massive magnets for the conscious faculty to rush towards and cling against, are also mirrors for the soul. Life is always like this, moving in and out of the swinging flap of contradictions, seeking food, seeking fun, seeking a warm place by the fire.

(In the land of endless contradictions, where poisons can save lives, and obsessions can be liberating, where the pure can be obscene, and the mouse can chase the cat about the screen.)

I, although I have hated the imposition of a mobile phone which can ring and startle me anytime it so desires, have also come to loathe the settled nature that the keyboard on the desk and the screen upon the wall have lead me into. I want to roam again, to free my mind and free my body too. I want to be out there, not locked in here. (Unless it's raining, and then I will be here.)

"Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall..."

The mobile world is here, will be here, and because it is heading in the small direction, not the massive one, is probably going to survive the coming times of turmoil, when large and heavy things will prove too costly to make and shape and ship and shop and stack and store and stare at. Once more, the essential world might end up fitting in a rucksack or a handbag. We have become such that we cannot do without them any more. I am glad, myself, I do not wish to see us go back into the stone age where all we can do is scrawl our visions on the wall with burnt twigs and hope that someday someone will find them.

And so here, at the tail end of the tale, is the subtle warning

Well, there is the obvious one about reading the preceding parts first, but also, there is the warning to those who think that they know the plot. "Brave New World", if you recall, ended horribly. (Well, I certainly thought so, and I would not go there nor send others into it.) I do not see this for my Brave New Mobile World. I do not see an end to life as we know it, to love, to playfulness and "unstructured activity time". My vision of the future, or for the future, is that this is yet another trip around the circle, the carousel which turns and turns and cannot be halted, such is its' momentum as it ceaselessly tries to catch up with its' tail. You can of course jump off, head for the hills and burrow into a hole in the ground with a collection of weapons and ammunition, and a stock of food, and wait until the crisis is over, when you will come out, tall, strong, virile, armed to the teeth and ready to protect all those semi-naked women flocking helplessly around in the ruins of the old world, following their instincts and flashing their tits at potential protectors. But women don't do that, you see? They are like cats, they will always find the cosy fire, the balls of wool to play with, the loving householders who will stroke them and feed them and let them roll around on the carpet showing their furry bits. Rambo getups? Eating raw meat from dead dogs and horses? Crushed berries for lip-gloss and burnt sticks for eye-shadow? Get real, you teenage twats, women do not like that, women are not like that. Well, the women I like don't and wouldn't, anyway.

It is just possible that any corrective actions required to stop this world wobbling slightly are not going to be coming from the financiers and scientists and manufacturers; their grey-headed woolly wisdom has been suddenly exposed as folly. No, the girlies, the courtesans, the so-called empty-headed bimbos will be the driving force behind the return to stability, but you might not know it unless you have studied the way of the cat, and can see that the hand which pulls the strings is really doing the bidding of the one upon the carpet. They, the girly ones, are simply doing the cosmic will, riding on the kamikaze, the divine wind, which blows where it would and wanders through the forests in search of particular trees. We are not going to die, our world is not going to the bottom of the cliff with an awful crash, wake up, it's just another disaster movie designed to entertain you for a few minutes after they've taken your money and given you your ticket. Go back and demand a different film? Possibly, (called dancing in the ballot-box), or go out of the theatre and into the adjoining one, which is showing something much better; (called I'm not going to play with this piece of string, you go and find a different one, and I'll let you know it it's the right one, aka "law of demand". (Shut up about the supply, you can not and should not supply that for which there is no demand.))

Like cats, when the house they have been currently inhabiting turns into a mental asylum, those without the depressing so-called "light of reality" blinding their minds from the inside out will just get up and go for a walk to find a warmer house where they can curl up without being trodden on by stampeding cattle bellowing and lowing about doom, gloom, and financial sodomy. But, (and here I am pleading to your departing tails,) do please keep in touch, (don't hide in the safe spots and sulk,) reach out and grab the string, be stroked, purr to me.

And now we come to the end of the middle, also known as the rump of the matter, where we can, especially in the case of cats, see a twinkling star that winks at us, and says, Falstaffian-like, "Show you my bottom? My fundamental? Well, here it is, now kiss it."

Do you feel tricked? Were you following the twitching string expecting me to pronounce upon the end of the current world or show you, cat's-arse-like, the beginnings of a new one? (Alice, oh Alice, leave Dinah for a moment; drink this, and then go into this little hole, there's a whole new world inside it.) Have you been slyly treated, mentally, so to speak, teased with a ball of fuzzy wool? Has an idea been put into your head in an unexpected way? Have you had your insight goosed? No, I think not, (well, I meant not). I have been playing with you all. You have been moused.

YHBM, PAW.

The Sopwith Camel puts down his keyboard, and stands by the fire, puzzling. What had he just got up to do? He watches the patterns in the carpet, seeing the firelight dance on the fender, and then, suddenly, sits down and starts to lick his balls.

And, from somewhere, there-there, anywhere at all, music starts. It is from an album called "The Year of the ..."

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Epiphany by Moonlight

Pleasant dreams are shattered by the wail of an alarm, hooting in the dark like an angry owl, and I sit up. The ship feels not quite right. The door crashes open and the bulky second engineer falls into my cabin, thrown violently inwards by the streaming light behind him.

The fishroom is half-full of water, he says, but he cannot make the pumps draw it out, he says. He has tried both the main and standby pump, he says, and he has tried the secondary valve, he says. He has also checked, and the bilge pumps will not even pump out the engine-room bilge, he says. He sounds frightened. He looks frightened. He is much older than I am, but I know that he is as frightened now as he has ever been in all his life. Once more the ship does that little thing which does not feel quite right. Should I be frightened too?

I sleep in my boiler suit, as a matter of course, for just these occasions. What can I do? Tell him to go and sort it out for himself? He is not a thinker. Hope that someone else will come along and sort it out for us? We are miles from port, miles from land, and at sea there is no breakdown service. True, there are other trawlers out there within radio range, and should the cry go out "for those in peril", those closest to us not in peril would drop everything and charge to our assistance. Well, plod at 12 knots, actually, and in the worst case they would just pick up the pieces. If we were lucky, we would still be there bobbing amongst the flotsam.

So I get up, and as I do, the mate comes down from the wheelhouse. I ask him, was someone washing down the pounds in the fishroom? Yes, they were. Have they made sure they've turned off the hose? Ah, the second engineer says, perhaps it's still running. Go and check, I tell him, and don't just turn off the valve, pull the hose right up out of the hatch and throw it on the deck. Within less than a minute, the mystery is solved, the hose, still gushing, now lies harmlessly in the scuppers. We are, at least, un-holed, and not sinking deeper by the second, merely tricked by a lazy man and a faulty valve.

And so I have to now sort out the pumping system. There are two, a main and a backup, and I know the second engineer has already tried both, so I know the fault cannot lie in both of the pumps. There are two suction points for the fishroom, forward and aft, and a quick look tells me that the second engineer has at least tried each of those. And then the bright light of inspiration comes like a flash, and I know exactly what he has done wrong. He has tried one pump on the suction line, then switched to the second pump, then, in a rush, opened the valve which joins together the two separate pumping lines, thinking that he must try all options. The pump which is running is unable to draw water through the blockage in the fishroom bilges, so instead, it is sucking whatever it can through the crossover valve, and on the other side of that valve is the other pump, leading out to the ship's side; and the running pump, the water lines throttled by skin and scales, is breathing in air from the stationary pump instead. I close the discharge valve for the second pump, and watch as the water beneath the main engine vanishes. We will be saved, once I have worked out a plan for unblocking the fishroom bilge valves, themselves now under a couple of feet of water, their strum-boxes clogged with debris swept loose by the hosing down.

Return to now, or recently now, where the land stays put and there is no need for navigation lights.

I was used to those blinding flashes, epiphanies, when my mind would leap ahead of itself and suddenly see the answer, and I would then have to bring the vision back to my slower brain so that it, (I) could see the problem and try to tell myself how we were going to get out of this mess. I functioned best, I thought, when I was scared and under pressure to find the answer in a limited time.

I don't do that sort of thing anymore. In a way, I am glad. I was proud of my ability, and partly loved, but mostly loathed, the fear which made my talent shine. I have left it behind me. But I still have the calculating part of me that would see a way forwards, break it down into concurrent and consecutive steps, and then convey to all of those around just what it was that each of them must do.

Except, I have been told, I do not convey. I bark orders, I "scream", I "shout", I "dash about"; I terrify poor souls who are not used to there being no time to lose. But, I tell them, and myself, it is a survival trait. I did not want to die in the belly of a steel whale as it slowly glubbed beneath the waves. I practiced moving round the engine-room in the dark so that I could, if needed, restart the diesels when a violent wave had rolled the ship so far across it's beam that the oil pressure alarms or overspeed trips had shut them off, and the torch had chosen just that time to burn out the bulb. I stashed spare spanners at odd locations round the ship so I could get to one quickly, when the one I had been trying to use had slipped from my oily fingers and plummeted into the bilge. I was cunning, I was prepared, I was fore-armed, I was not going to die a stupid death.

I have tried to run my life ashore on similar principles. If there is something I have to rely upon, I make sure I have a backup, in case that thing should not be there when I want it. I have a spare battery, fully charged, and a set of jump-leads, so that I can start the car on a frosty morning without having to call the breakdown service to turn up with their jump-leads and their battery, and get me out of a hole which anyone with half a brain could have foreseen. I do not like being caught out. I keep my spanners in two places, I keep a torch somewhere that I know I can get to in the dark.

So then, to last week, when it all began, Little Petal's youngest daughter tells her mummy that daughter's car has burnt out the clutch, and she cannot possibly live without it. So mummy drives up to daughter's, gives her mummy's car, and the Sopwith Camel then stops what he is doing, and drives the fifty miles to pick up mummy, and the fifty miles back. They then drive over to absent brother's house and collect the large 4-wheel drive which brother has said S-C should use while he is away. My carefully planned itinerary for the thing I must get done by the end of the month is knocked back, more than the mere four hours the whole escapade has taken. But I brutally bark orders at myself and re-plan and once more settle down to do those things which I have to do, while Little Petal, now the only serious earner in our small cabbage-patch, drives my car up to work.

For a few (two) days, all is going to plan. Little Petal finds a garage to mend Little Petal's daughter's car. Not within a five mile radius of where Little Petal's daughter lives, for some strange reason, but the garage just up the hill from us where Little Petal takes her own car to get it fixed. How, I ask curiously, are you planning to get the car with no clutch the fifty miles it has to travel in order to be re-clutched here? Her plan, hatched in conjunction with her chicken-rearing daughter, is that daughter should get the car a few hundred metres down the lane from where she lives and then phone the recovery service, and say "Hayulp, hayulp, this dayummsel's in distress", and use the obliging truck to take the car to the place to which she was heading and has to reach no matter what. It is a cunning plan, and I say as much. I also think, but do not say, that both Little Petal and daughter could do with a good birching, both for their scurrilous ways, and for my private entertainment.

Then, one evening, comes the unexpected call. Little Petal, in my car, says that the clutch has failed, (my clutch), and she is waiting for the recovery truck to bring her, and it, back home. I say "Oh fuck bollocks cunt shit piss and arseholes of the western world, is there no end to this syphilitic stupidity?" But I also formulate a plan to get us out of this, and before she has managed to put down the phone, I tell her to contact the daughter with whom she shares the common bond of clutchlessness, (upon the reality of life), and prepare for a flying visit.

So, cometh the recovery truck with my now-dead car, steppeth up the biplane. Little Petal has actually thought, for once, and says that if we take up with us a 13mm socket, Little Petal's daughter's partner can take out the battery from their other defunct car, (the one they put aside when they got the soon-to-be-clutchless car), and possibly start it the next morning so that they can take the kids to school. For that is the main reason that they need their second car, they live in the country where the buses won't go, and that, in the eyes of the social services, is not an adequate excuse for their children missing lessons in how to speak abominable English but know all about Islam.

"Just that?" I ask, "One single socket?" So Little Petal calls her daughter who confirms that a single 13mm socket will do the trick, but when asked does it need to be 1/2" square drive or 3/8", just says "what?", and then says that her partner is not around to answer the question, he is outside looking for a fox. And so the Camel, wise to the capriciousness of fate, selects a deep 13mm socket and a ratchet which will fit it, and a 13mm combination spanner too, and an adjustable wrench, and sets off to drive the fifty miles to face his foes.

And arriving, parks younger brother's car facing the sulking blue Ford which is flat in the battery department, while Little Petal goes inside to talk with daughter about such things that man himself need not know. And, when Little Petal's daughter's partner looms out of the gloom and raises the bonnet, finds, to his chargrin, that he has failed the world. Gotham City lies helpless underneath the chuckling Joker, while Batman hangs caught upon the barbed wire in which his underpants, (worn outside), have snagged. The bolts which need to be undone are set deep at the base of the battery, and really need an extension bar as well as the deep socket. The Camel tries, and although he can fit the socket on each nut, and just about get the ratchet bar to move half an inch in the narrow space between bulkhead and battery, finds he is denied success. The bolts are not 13mm, but 1/2" AF, fractionally smaller, and they have been rounded by the previous use of the 13mm socket. Oh, fuck-bollocks, fuck-cunt, fuck-arseholes. (And today we have naming of parts). Fuck our souls, and then throw them back with the haddock, the plaice and the cod.

But, in a flash, the Camel has seen the way out. The Ford can be rolled backwards down the lane to stand outside the front door if the clutchless car is first rolled a few feet towards the shed in which the chickens cluck and the cockerels crow. And then, with an extension lead from the nearby window, the battery charger can be plugged into the mains and clipped onto the battery, and lo, come dawn, come brum-brum.

The Camel communicates his wisdom to Little Petal's daughter's partner, which takes the form, spoken pleasantly, of "get the extension lead, make sure it will reach from the house to where we're going to push the car, and then come back and we'll do the deed." The Camel is a wily shaggy beast who won't thrash his strength away on a fool's errand.

Some minutes later, the Camel goes to look for Little Petal's daughter's partner, who is to be found standing by the chicken shed with a bright light, scanning the fields, looking for a fox. What news of leads is there? Ah, it seems, he says, that Little Petal's daughter does not know where the solitary extension lead is, and she says that the best thing to do is to make some space in the chicken shed and push the car into there. The Camel, glancing through the door, can see that it is more than a couple of hours work to redistribute chickens and coops to allow cooperative cohabitation with a car.

He steps back into to starlight and draws in a breath. He is about to utter, with force, with clarity, with conciseness, the suggestion that everybody; mothers, daughters, daughters of daughters, dogs, cats, chickens and possibly even cockroaches, get up and stop watching the TV or tootling their flutes and "find that fucking lead." Because it is cold outside, and the Camel, despite the fur, is starting to shiver and shake, and is worried that slight hypothermia is going to upset his special powers and make his balls shrink to naught but dried peas.

And in that brief intake of breath, glancing up into the beautiful starry sky, comes epiphany. It is a quiet and peaceful place, here in the middle of nothingness, and they are not foundering. The ground is firm, frosty even, but re-assuring. It will not open up and swallow, or buck and heave and wallow. The chickens, cockerels, cats, dogs, ducks, and progeny have no knowledge of the quiver inside that one feels when the world is about to turn turtle and slip away from you. Their world will not stop if the children miss a day at school, although some excuses might need to be made. Unlike the sea, though, the authorities can sometimes be persuaded to be merciful. There is no need to bring shock and awe into this little land.

And so the Camel bows his head, collects Little Petal from the house, makes sure her car starts, and drives slowly home in a convoy of two, a caravan crossing the chilly desert from one small oasis to another. Four more hours have gone, plans are yet again set back, the Camel has to meet deadlines which, although not as cruel as those set by the sea, are pitiless on ones who fail to meet their stipulations. Companies House have this year applied a decade's-worth of inflation to their penalties all at once, and whereas it used to be a fine of £100 for late filing of accounts, now it is more than seven times that much, and no remission, no chance of appeal. The money which has been spent on saving the banks from perishing in the storms of foolish greed has now to be reclaimed from elsewhere, and those on whom the burden of support will fall will be those who are least likely to unite and protest against the injustice.

And that's my second epiphany in the dark: we are not alone in this stormy night, but we are scattered on the waves, and they are picking us off one by one. Save Our Souls.

Put on the light, and then put on the light.

The least we can do is wave to each other.

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Friday, February 13, 2009

The current contractions ...

are just a sign that the moment of birth is approaching.

I wasn't a diarist during the last changeover in this country, so I am only left with one or two vivid, therefore specific, memories, and an otherwise sort of cloudy fuzz to remember how it was.

"Oh how we laughed and danced the night away"

I know Michael Foot shuffled away after being beaten by Margeret Thatcher in the elections, and I remember Jay remarking to me, as we sat up watching the confirmation of the polls, that he felt that Michael Foot was "leaving Parliament with an honourable record; he had lost because his campaign had been too honest".

After Foot came a blur, Kinnock danced but was out-danced. John Smith died, never a good way to try and overcome the other side, but blue-eyed baby Blair got them all dancing to a brand new song, and they took over the theatre for a while.

Now, the squirming has begun again, as the final thrashings of an experiment in pretending that the left can out-right the right leave squiggly patterns on the laboratory bench top.

Cameron is coming,
the sun will shine again,
let's strum upon our banjo's
"We won't get fooled again."


As if.

Just like Jay thought Michael Foot left parliament in honourable defeat, ( Labour plain-speaking beaten by Tory glitter), so there once was a man who has been described as "the first man to enter parliament with honest intentions." Guido Fawkes. He has a blog, you know.

Over here is a piece worth reading. Labour previously out-toried the tories to get into power, now the tories are prepared, (Guido thinks), to out-labour labour in order to have their turn at the wheel again. And if it means protecting us from being exposed to dissenting views, well, labour have done very well with protecting us from ourselves, so it seems the tories have realised that we can continue to put up with that to which we have become accustomed.

Old tune, new dance routine.

Plus ca change, mais c'est la meme chose

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Thursday, February 12, 2009

Et in absentia, elle

* The song is sung,
* the curtain rung;
* the play is over, for the night.
* And on the stage
* in fits of rage;
* three actors argue who is right.
* While, from a shelf
* a gleeful elf
* looks down, and giggles at the fight.
* Then; opening time,
* once more, they rhyme
* harmoniously, the world's to right.

(All the world's a stage: and as one poor sod found out recently, it has some unexpected exits)

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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Oh, Brave New Mobile World (1)

This is part one of a trilogy, but paradoxically, it is not the beginning. If you are new to this blog, I suggest you go back to read the prelude here first. This isn't a warning to the cocky, it's a word to the wise.

Nomads' Land

Where all paths lead one to roam...

Nomad's Land

When I was traveling on my bicycle, I left each spot unchanged when I moved on. True, the deadwood might have shrunk slightly, the ash in the fireplace might be a different colour, but I tore down , dug up or altered nothing of permanence. The land, however good or imperfect it might have been, was preserved, not destroyed, by my passing presence.

Nomads Land

The saddest thing about the acres of caravans in their parks is not the close proximity to each other, nor even the psychotically-rigid ordering of the rows, but the fact that many of them have had their wheels removed and now sit on concrete blocks. They are, to me, the graveyards of freedom. You ain't goin' nowhere...

Are Nomads mad? No? Are settlers unsettled in the head?

There are three nomads in this tale, two of whom are described below, and the third one is myself.

The difference between those wandering and those housed is that of living on the land, or living in the land. Nomads have very tiny roots, which at any time stretch far away back to places they have stopped at previously which had a special significance. Settlers have massive stumpy roots which dive down deep into the ground beneath their feet. (Hint: this is not a literal truth, it is a metaphor. Do not go around trying to chop peoples' feet off at ground level thinking it will make them free.) Both groups feel suspicion and animosity to the other. The settlers have always assumed that nomads are shifty thieving work-shy troublemakers who should be driven off as soon as possible. The nomads, generally less intolerant of the settlers because they only have to put up with each individual set of quirks and foibles for a short while, can be cavalier when it comes to respecting rights of access or privacy. But, as I say in my motto, nothing lasts for ever. If the place in which you're living gets taken over by deranged control freaks who want to tax you in order to raise enough money to monitor you and protect you from yourself, pack up and go somewhere saner. And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too...

I settled down twice, before settling (thrice). (When I settle three times, it's true). What a frightening thought, I could be living on a Snark. Or, what an exiting though, I could be a Snark.

I settled the first time close to the sea. I had a third share in a small sailing boat in which I could run away and pretend I was still free. I spoke to few who lived around me, and they in their turn said very little to me. I spoke to many people I met on the harbour and abroad, and swapped traveling tales with those who asked about my eccentric bicycle. I was happy for the two years I lived there.

I settled the second time on the flood plains of the Thames, near Reading. The sprawling estate in which I had one small maisonette was built on the site of the airfield where Douglas Bader piled a Bulldog into the ground and lost his legs. Various people walking their dogs in the tame wooded parts thought they might have come across them, but as there was no reward on offer, very few people bothered to press a claim, and anyway, Douglas had his wooden ones.

For the first time in my new way of living, I saw settled people at close-quarters. The man from whom I had bought my house had moved to a slightly bigger house four hundred yards away. I had moved nearly eighty miles and therefore knew nobody. When a gale flattened two of the fence panels at the back of my garden soon after I moved in, I was putting them back up again when the old owner stopped by to see what had gone wrong. As he chatted, another man with a donkey jacket and a flat-cap on his head came by, and said hello to the previous owner. As they chatted briefly, I made an attempt to join in. Flat cap man glanced once at me from the corner of his eye, and said to previous owner, with a jerk of his thumb towards me, "Who's he, then?" Previous owner told him, flat-cap grunted, and continued his conversation. I was not there (I was not their), I did not know how long I would have to live in the place before I was allowed to become their there. Things didn't change much during the three years I stayed there either. Paradoxically, living amongst a crowd, I was more alone than I'd ever been before.

I settled the third time, selling the modern maisonette at the trough of the housing slump, taking the loss and just having enough to buy the rambling and semi-decrepit building I still live in. Unlike the sprawling mass of houses at Woodley, I was now in the middle of nowhere, but, as if to keep me from feeling too adrift, I was still close to some sort of water. Far closer than I ought to have been, it turned out.

I found, as I explored my station, that the space beneath the suspended floor of what used to be the booking hall had flooded to a depth of a foot or more. Although the water level was three feet beneath the floorboards, there was no damp-proof course in the sleeper walls on which the floor timbers rested, and so they had rotted in several places. As if that wasn't enough, dry-rot and wet-rot had flourished, turning the timbers into dark sponges and shooting up the architraving above the floor level. I could not afford to pay for a builder to come in and make good the damage, so I did it myself. For several months I lived in a house where one room had no floor, just a maze of scaffold planks laid across the sleeper walls, with a mass of mud and clay four feet beneath them. I could not stop the water from coming up through the clay, and so I followed my instincts from years at sea and installed a bilge-pump.

The replacement timbers were almost done and the floor-boards about to go back down again when I slipped as I was stepping across one of the gaps, a timber which was only notched into place turned under my feet, and I crashed down into the mud and dislodged wood. I felt something in my chest crack. I drove up to the hospital, to be told it was a cracked rib, and they didn't do anything for those, not even a strapping. I would have to take it easy. I went back home and found ways of carrying in wood and coal one-handed to keep the fires going. The phone rang as I was sitting in a chair nursing my rib, and a few weeks contract work was offered to me in London, which I took, and pretended I was not in agony as I traveled on the trains or climbed the stairs. The doorbell rang one weekend when I was home, still nursing my rib, and someone was standing there, rather scruffy, saying that he was looking for a few day's work.

"What can you do?" I asked.
"Anything, so long as it doesn't involve killing animals."

Enter nomad number two, Andy the New-age Traveler.

Andy was one of the people you see camping on grassy triangles by the roadside, with a caravan or a coach or a double-decker bus. He had started out with a wooden gypsy caravan he had built himself, living beside it in a tent until it was capable of housing him and his girlfriend. He originally had an old Ferguson tractor with which he towed it around from place to place, but after a while the bug to become free of tax and MoT and fuel bit him, and he got a horse. He, like me, experienced disaster, going down a hill one day when the caravan threatened to over-run the horse and he was forced to swerve it off the road, smashing the frame and his girlfriend's arm. He was now parked up near to where I lived, on a patch of common land, trying to earn the money needed to buy some Ash with which to mend the frame.

I had money from the contract work, and he was willing to help me by doing the things I still couldn't do, such as push a plane along a 12-foot board or swing a pickaxe. As we worked, we listened to music, and talked. I played him Thomas Dolby's Astronauts and Heretics, and he appreciated the aptness of "I Live in a Suitcase", commenting that it was ironic that someone like myself who had traveled around by bicycle and lived beside the road should choose to settle down in a Railway Station. It was almost as if I was saying that this settlement was only temporary, and I was simply waiting for a train that would take me off on my travels again.

Andy was committed to organising the travelers so that they could continue living their nomadic lifestyle without being picked off individually by bailiffs and police and other authorities who were infuriated that someone should be able to live without an address or letterbox or door-knocker. Sadly, he wasn't going to see any of his dreams come to fruition. When his girlfriend left him and refused to let him see her, he killed himself in a black mood of depression. He was buried in the churchyard a few hundred yards from the place where he had last been camping. A prominent member of the village tried to prevent Andy having a space there, but the majority of the village insisted he should lie there. I threw the ritual clod of earth onto the coffin, and attended his wake that night. I sat in the darkness beside the roaring fire while other travelers cooked food and drank drink, and one or two fire-eaters performed. I spoke with his sister, who had traveled down from Berwick for the funeral, (his only relative who attended), and later on, she came home with me and we shared my bed. I should have performed better, but I was still feeling the grief of his passing.

The floor was done, the work came up faster than I had anticipated, the bicycle was set aside when I, Mr. Toad-like, fell in love with motor cars (again), and when I roared up to the Costcutter shop one day in my pride and joy, someone said "I heard you'd moved down here".

Nomad number three, Peter the Artist.

I first knew Peter when I was a teenager living in Hawkhurst. At the bottom of Station Road, on which we lived, (how uncanny, that recurrence of road-names), was a tall rambling gothic-style building with spindly balconies and turrets with windows from which I was sure ghostly eyes gazed out over the nearby row of more ordinary terraced houses. In the last one of these terraces, in the shadow of Castle Macabre, lived my best friend, with his brothers and sister, a dog with puppies, a television (which we didn't have), and his mother, who wore jumpers, short skirts and black woolen tights, an ensemble that still makes me rev up from tickover. Peter the artist was her lover. He made papier-mache caricature figures, a sort of fore-runner of the Spitting-Image puppets. Now, he was living near to me, still looking young and healthy despite the years which had gone by. I asked how he was doing, and found that he had given up art as a commercial venture, and instead was teaching art at an expensive school. And he was living in a yurt. (Yes, some of you have just gone "Oh a Yurt, isn't that what the ..", and I know you want me to gabble out the coincidence here but you're just going to have to wait for it.) He had chosen this path because he had become fed up with everyman beating a path to his door to stuff through it envelopes with bills, demands to submit personal details (again) to the electoral register, begging letters from banks asking him to borrow money, and he had up and decamped, and then, encamped. (Put out the trash, and then put out the trash).

And here it was that last week, reading the post about the mongol hordes, I had felt an eerie prickling on the back of my head as all the hairs stood up and I had the thought that there is something in the room with me, that there is something in the bottom left-hand corner of my mind saying "please sir, I know, I know, ask me sir", and that strange sensation of presque-vu that rippled through me, back through the Pookah post to the brief clip from the film when a Mr Wilson goes to the library to look up the definition of the word Pookah, and reads on the page in front of him "A pookah is a large, often invisible spirit, often taking the form of an animal to those who see him, given to mischievous and sometimes practical jokes, and how are you tonight, Mr Wilson?", and although it was the same sort of feeling, I'm not called Wilson, so what else was recently in my mind? (Please sir, please sir, it's yurt, sir).

And I remembered that a Yurt was the wood and felt tent in which the Mongols lived, a structure both robust enough to keep out the bitter desert weather and at the same time light enough to be dismantled and carried around on a horse to wherever else it was that the nomadic raiding tribes were going to make their base for a while. And I remembered Peter the artist and his yurt, and realised that history was repeating itself. The yurt was back again, (The yurt was back again...)

"Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat again the mistakes of History." George Santayana said something like that, the phrase has been twisted about somewhat by its stay in my own warped mind these many years, but the gist is correct.

It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time. The yurt is back in style again. There are raiders on binary horses coming back from the east. (Barak Obama, saviour of the western world, has just ordered a review into the threat of cyber-attack from the east. Digital arrows go whistling by).

I know that I have only given one example of the unsettled behaviour of settlers, and yes, flat-cap man was probably the most extreme example of bad-behaviour that one is likely to come across, but I don't want to catalog the faults of settlers, because there are too many of them around here who might recognise me, and they know where I live. I love my cats, and I have heard the story of a neighbourly dispute in the next village which turned sour and ended with a woman going out to her back garden one morning to find that her six pet rabbits had been strangled, gutted, skinned, and strung up on the fence. I would rather say that I have always found it easier to talk to strangers when they are nomads, and that I have always found the settlers around me to be a little stranger than I would have liked them to be. People who stay in one place for too long seem to undergo a change; they develop a defensive attitude and a suspicion of anyone who "doesn't come from round here", and I am worried that I too might be held fast to the not-so-waterlogged clay beneath me by horrible thick roots. I might have to chop them, because should I ever have to choose between fighting a bitter war against a rabbit-skinning settler and moving to somewhere less prickly, I would get up and go. My ass would be laden, my arse would be moving, if I was heading northwards my r's would be rolling.

And finally, back to the Brave New Mobile World, and another little sign which has also just begun to make sense to me. Say hello to Youtube. Say goodbye to the shelves full of video cases, the video recorder itself, the scribbled writing on the labels and possibly the notebook for the pathologically tidy recording of on which recorded tape the desired title may be found, and at what index number. I want to play you a piece of music, or show you a video, because it adds more to the post than two hundred words could do. Before Youtube, what could I have done? Invited you round a few at a time to sit in front of the television, mailed out the video tape to you one at a time like a chain letter? Done without it? The world is a richer place for getting our collections out of our homes and into shared access, not a poorer one.

I ought to play "I live in a suitcase" for you, in memory of Andy the New-age Traveler, but there are some pieces of music which I cannot listen to without feeling all the old emotions and pain and turmoil welling up again, and that song is one such piece. Instead, from the same album, here is another one, much more cheerful, triumphant, and because it records the smashing down of a wall, and the re-emergence of the east just as appropriate, if not more so.

For Andy Koch, still missed.



(And I'm still waiting for the right train to come along.)

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Sunday, February 08, 2009

Default Judgements

can throw up some wonderful absurdities. Here is a BBC news story of a man who, after receiving four parking fines from his local council, took them to court for causing him "mental distress". The council didn't bother to turn up to the court to put their case, and so the man was awarded a default judgment of £20,000.

He sent in bailiffs to the council offices to get his £20,000. After the bailiffs began unplugging all the computers, the council paid up, to prevent the seizure of their rather important file-server.

The story does not have a happy ending for Mr Noon, the man who bought the case, because the council did appear at a subsequent court hearing and pleaded their case, which I imagine went something along the lines of "it is the accepted business model that we, the council, collect money from those within our sphere of authority, not the other way round". The judge, predictably, agreed, and awarded the council £20,000 plus £7,500 costs.

If Mr Noon is quick enough, he may be able to spend all the money and therefore challenge the council's bailiffs to do their worst.

On a ludicrous note, should a policeman spot the man in question wandering up and down any red-light district trying to get rid of that £20,000 in a hurry, he would be able to go up and say "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, after cunt, Noon?"

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Oh, Brave New Mobile World

Prelude: The View into Nomads' land


Overture:

This is going to be a trilogy in four parts ( three parts and a prelude, duh), and is an examination into how the world is flowing from a state of permanency into a state of flux. If this scares you, then just remember my motto, Nothing lasts for ever. One day, in the future, the world will settle down again and stop shifting around under your feet. You just have to wait, and watch for your opportunity to jump onto a bit of solid ground that happens to be passing.

Watcher of the Skies, Watcher of all...

I have been watching out for signs lately. I've not been sure what I should have been looking for, that's caused me a lot of confusion. In the old days, I might have scanned the skies for patterns made by flights of birds, or studied the meandering paths left by the clouds. I might have kept an ear open for farmer's tales of two-headed calves being born, and what particular dialect the extra head spoke in. I might have plotted the instances of fish falling from the skies and muttered to myself "it Steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time". Because I'm not a cruel man I wouldn't have been gutting animals and scrabbling around amongst the bloody entrails, but if someone else less squeamish had muttered to me that they had found suggestive shapes amidst the slime I would have added that information into my cauldron.

But these things no longer apply, scrying now happens in front of a computer screen, not a glass ball. There is also, I believe, an electronic Planchette. The Tarot has been online for years. The I-ching program was one of the first things I wrote, years ago, when I graduated from a ZX-81 to a Tandy 100 which had enough memory to store the lengthy descriptions of the hexagrams.

As to why I am looking for signs, well, I believe that great things are afoot. (Come now, earth-creature, or you will be late...) The world is once again on the move. The old guard is changing.

(Gentlemen, he said, I don't need your organisation...)

What things (afoot, great, fore-mentioned) are these? Well, that's why I'm looking for the signs, because these changes aren't happening with fanfare and panoply. There will be no announcements in the papers or postings on the walls of fashionable establishments. So I keep looking, rummaging around the world and the web, trying not to drown in the mass of messages of banks, bailouts, protests, predictions, sleaze and scandal. Underneath all of that dross are tiny little flecks of news that, on their own, mean little, but they are the signs. If you can persuade these shimmering flecks to cluster in a cloud, it is possible that they will coalesce into a more meaningful picture.

The signs I have found haven't made much sense, so far. A friend of mine has scrapped his domains and hosted web-sites and put his own small webserver on the end of his broadband line using dynamic DNS. It means he could move tomorrow, plug the machine into the new ADSL line, update dynamic DNS and he's back on the web. It's the opposite of serverage, which is what another friend of mine is up to. She has just finished uploading her entire music collection to the web. She no longer has to carry around with her the bulk and weight of CD's and the necessary HiFi system. All she needs is a connection to the web. Just because they're doing the opposite to the other doesn't mean that either or both of them are wrong. I feel that each of them is right. They're taking off in different directions, but heading for the same wide sky.

(Into the Blue again...)

The signs I am seeing are telling me that people are starting to move around again. But this time, they're moving into cyberspace. Online shops are springing up while high-street stores are shutting down. People are starting to do more things in the cyberverse, such as using serverage to store their music collection. It's partly due to cost. In order to house and make use of my collection of music, my Wharfedale speakers and the amplifier and player, I need a room, with the necessary cost of rates, heating, the need to keep answering the electoral roll form. And I can't, when I'm at someone else's house, play them something from my collection unless I've thought in advance and taken it with me. I, in a sense, am the equivalent to one of the city-dwellers in the last days of the Roman empire, when the Huns appeared as if from nowhere and plundered where they would.

This new realisation was sparked off by something I spotted over on Zen's blog, and it has reminded me why I still keep him on my sidebar as a link (under Satori'l Eloquence). He posted recently his thoughts after reading a book on the rise of the Mongol empire under Ghengis Khan, and how the Roman Empire was powerless to oppose him, because the horsemen came and went at will, while the city-dwellers had to sit there and take whatever came their way, usually arrows. Until I read what he had written, I knew that I knew something, but I didn't know what it was. And now that I do know what I had been sensing was going on around me, it's time to write it all down before the event.

The next post, the first in a trilogy, could well be titled Nomads I have Known.

And if you still think I'm clutching at straws, then ask yourself this; why have the cream of the trolls left usenet? And where have they gone? (So long, and thanks for all the fish)

Or, why do I no longer bother listening to the radio? Why is it that I would rather go into SecondLife and sit in the garden there listening to the streaming audio? I do it by choice, I haven't been forced there by economic circumstances, I did it of my own free-will. (I choose, therefore I am)

I suggest that you now pop across to Zen's satori'l state and read his post, which is titled On Information.

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Friday, February 06, 2009

For one in transit...

Happy landings

What have I done?

I didn't realise, when I laughingly suggested Jeremy Clarkson would be a more suitable Prime Minister than Gordon Brown, that he might be reading my blog. According to the BBC news, he has told the Australians that Gordon Brown is "a one-eyed scottish idiot".

Did JC read my blog and suddenly think "now's my chance, with the S-C behind me I can't lose, let's go for it?"

I must make it perfectly clear that I in no way endorse all of JC's comments. I think it was unfair to target Mr Brown because he has only got sight in one eye, and also it is unfair, and possibly even racist, to pick on him because he is Scottish.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

A Mental Ramble on the Bachsicord

Winter's come, Winter's come, The sun has gone away.

The wonderful thing about the English weather is how it can divert attention from other business. In this case, by burying it under a nice clean white blanket which turns my untidy jumble of scrap wood for the fires into lovely smooth sculptures which hint at faeries and unicorns and other esoterica of the mental landscape.

We would be struggling to afford to heat the place if we had to rely on buying logs and coal, because everything has gone rocketing up in cost this year. Even though the oil prices have come back down again, the bottled gas which we use in our heaters still has the 55% increase in cost which occurred last summer. We are wearing thick clothes indoors and looking like South Park characters.

Now is the winter of our missed content.

But this is not a whining post, my salvation was above me. I am burning my collection of old newspapers. Some people lay down a cellar of wine to have something to look forward to, but I stored up an attic of pulp. Like wine, the pleasure from the use of it is fleeting, but welcome none the less. And they're not all the same. It has been a strange sensation seeing the past flickering past my eyes as each paper is fed into the flames. The cheap local papers, of course. The Times, The Observer, Private Eye, the Sun, even. I used to buy different papers sometimes just to see what life might feel like for the readers of each, and to muse upon the nature of the writers. The Financial Times. A friend with whom I worked on several contracts used to read the FT, because, as he said, "All the other papers are pushing some political message, but the people with money don't care for the politics of the world, they're just interested in the bottom line." So the FT told it like it was.

Sunday Sport 1994 Super Model had Sex with 3 MPs story to shock the commons! How innocent that sounds nowadays, with the forty-minute warning under our belts.

And, of course, the Gaurdians (sic). I kept those because of my love of crosswords. I could regularly complete nearly 80% of most puzzles, and used to refer back to previous works of a particular compiler if I got stuck. I gave up crosswords when I moved into my rambling old station. I had too much else to do to be able to sit around at leisure scratching my head. But I recently started doing them again.

Here come de fugue

I went to Australia last year, for two weeks early in November. Little Petal flew us out to stay with her son in Sydney, in his apartment in the Blue, the old immigration buildings down at Finger Wharf, where I was less impressed by the fact that Russell Crowe lived in the same building than I was with the giant bats who took to the air at dusk and glided majestically over the marina beneath us. The flight out there was torture, literally. I got off the plane with permanent cramp inside my knees. I had watched all the interesting movies, and some of the uninteresting ones, and was saved from having to chew my own limbs off by finding a cryptic crossword in the paper we had bought in the departure lounge.

My knees had just begun to stop hurting when we took to the air again, this time to fly down to Melbourne. The seats were wider, but I had bought another paper just in case. It was the day on which the convicted Bali bombers were executed. In the row of seats behind us, a nervous woman began to cry and sob that she wasn't able to do this, she couldn't go through this, and we hadn't even moved away from the boarding steps. The senior stewardess came down and interrogated her sharply, suggesting that, although we were still delayed due to terminal congestion, she wasn't about to add to the delay any further. The frightened woman's friends said they would keep her under control, and when I glanced round, they had bundled her up into a fetal shape and were cuddling her into quiescence. We flew, I solved, we landed, we got into a hired car and drove through Melbourne to the south, guided by the voice from the sat-nav.

On our return to Sydney, jet-lag gone, I thought we should have a little trip on our own, and so we rented a car and set off for the Blue Mountains, delighting in some of the apparent absurdities of Digital Denise, as I called our speaking sat-nav. As we headed into a crawling queue of cars on the dual-carriageway, she told us "in four hundred metres, turn right and go back." But we're still in Sydney! And the other side of the road, which also prohibited U-turns even if there wasn't a heavy barrier physically preventing it, was just as congested. Forcing her to re-calculate, I took a left and we headed away from the toll-road, through the middle of Sydney, and out to Penrith, and then up into the Blue Mountains.

If I could be anywhere now, other than here, it would be in Leura, where we first got out to walk around and found the wonderful toy museum, or Katoomba and the dizzying Echo Point, where we let the evening slide away into the warmth of the darkness and stretched out on the beds to watch TV in the motel by the railway line, or Lithgow with the wonderful remains of the Zig-Zag at the end of the Bells Line of Sight Road, where I bought a book of cryptic crossword puzzles so I could carry on doing them without having to also look at the depressing news in the paper.

A foog widdin de foog.

After our brief trip on our own we were off again with Little Petal's son and his partner (who confusingly has the same name as I do), this time by car to the Hunter Valley, for wine tasting. As we sat on the patio of the country club that evening, the lightning flickered in the distance, the wind suddenly swirled around, and heavy rain began to fall. Next morning, as we got in the car and briefly headed towards Queensland, the sat-nav said, "in one hundred metres, turn round and RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!" The catastrophic weather was wreaking havoc to the north, and yet again the papers were full of gloom and doom and disaster.

Do foog is done, back to de foog.

And soon, sadly, we left behind the home-from-home to so many other Brits, and once more squeezed ourselves into the torture-chairs for a return trip. I recently saw "Bride and Prejudice", a Bollywood glitter-fest, and laughed at the sight of the hero subverting the protection of the mother by offering her his much-wider upper-class seat so that he could sit beside her daughter. (Was that a new fugue, or just a variation on the current fugue, and if so, doesn't it perhaps get classed as a counter-fugue? Was it really just a cunning subterfugue?)

And, as I sat and shivered on Woking station at six in the morning, waiting for the first train back to Wiltshire, I found that I couldn't solve a single clue in the Guardian.

Five across, 5-3, cease this play on words, away with you! (solution below)

That was the fugue, that was

And so I'm burning my collection of newspapers, even those with part-solved crossword puzzles. Once again I'm too busy to have the time to switch off the world and immerse myself in utter escapism. The good thing about this funeral bonfire of my previous vanities, and apart from the transitory warmth, is that I'm turning away from the compulsive collecting which was firmly marking me out for old age. Nobody is likely to force their way into a silent house sometime in the future and find me dead for weeks surrounded by floor-to-ceiling piles of old papers.There is still hope for me. It was intriguing to go back in time to someone I once had been, but I realise now that I can never return completely. Heraclitus might have said "you cannot do the same crossword puzzle twice." My past is behind me, no longer in flames, but in ashes.

Bring on the Phoenix.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart and freeze.

(Fugue-off)

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Sunday, February 01, 2009

The Ivory Towers of Power

I've never been to New York. I have no idea what Wall Street looks like to a ground-dweller. But I have been to London. I have seen the towering offices of the financial companies, from which those who ran the whole sorry story of this current debacle gazed out over the minions from whom they borrowed money to play their games. I have never been in those towers myself, so I don't know quite how detached such a lofty perspective might give the beholder, but let's assume it does detach one from reality. I'm sure that plain old-fashioned greed wasn't the only explanation for the loss of billions. Perhaps being removed from the normal world affected their sense of perspective.

Likewise, I am beginning to suspect that New Labour have spent too much time in their offices and conferences, and have also lost their sense of perspective. Their minds have drifted into Ivory-Tower mode. Take., for example, Gordon Brown's reaction to the strikes over the use of Italian workers on a Lincolnshire contract, (as reported by the BBC news website).

Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland (An ivory tower in the land of ivory peaks -SC), Mr Brown said instead of spontaneous strike action, "what we've got to do over time, as I've always said, is that where there are jobs in this country, we need people with the skills, developed in this country".

He then went on to say that his government was using the apprenticeship scheme to ensure that enough people would be available with the right skills to take advantage of the upturn.

The problem is, those wildcat strikers we saw were not teenagers just out of school worried about their future, but middle aged people who are unlikely to qualify for the apprenticeships.

Are the older working generation going to be condemned to pushing long trains of trolleys around the supermarket car-parks?

Footnote:

There is a problem with seeing the world through the web; it changes almost as quickly as I blinked. I read the news article on the BBC site just after 9 am, wrote this post an hour later, came back to the news article to copy out the relevant passage, and found it had been revised. The quote about the apprenticeships had been removed. Someone had obviously decided it didn't belong in such close proximity to Gordon's quote from Davos. I wonder who that could have been?

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