Catmachine

Sports Section

2012-02-02T17:00:00.001Z

I used to read newspapers more often than I do now, and back then I noticed a curious phenomenon.

Most newspapers had two distinct identities.

There was the main bit then at just over the halfway mark the quality of the content quality started degrading as it became predominantly ads, cartoons and crosswords. Then just impenetrable ads for increasingly bizarre products and services. But if you persevered you would break free of this cruft and into another section of the paper altogether with stories and articles. It was like discovering a hidden city at the centre of the jungle.

The problem was this new section was concerned entirely with sport.

I was never interested in sport so as far as I was concerned this part of a newspaper's anatomy was analogous to the appendix. It didn't do anything and could safely be ignored. At times of World Cup or Olympics it did seem to become seriously inflamed but there was nothing really you could do about this.

The option of a sportless newspaper has never been countenanced. Merely suggest such a thing and your fellow human beings would probably look at you as if you'd just proposed breathing without oxygen; persisting in this suggestion would be enough to get you carted off the funny farm babbling about art and culture.

Because everyone else loves it. I've never understood why sport is held in such high esteem compared to, say, music or literature, but that's the way the world is. Whilst the sports section seems a waste of paper to me, there are people who are interested in it and far be it from me to say they can't read about what they love in the paper. Nevertheless, the prominence it is given is simply staggering - and on a day when a big sports news story breaks it will be all over the front and the back of the paper. I mean, there are things that I'm really interested in like space travel and music, but that doesn't mean I'm under any illusions that they'll ever enjoy the level of coverage currently enjoyed by sport, because more people like sport than like space travel, making the inclusion of a lengthy sports section in most newspapers a more reasonable proposition than a space travel section.

However, there are some people who are only interested in the sports pages. You most frequently see them on public transport, or at least it's their behaviour there that most easily gives them away. Usually male, he swaggers into the carriage and drops down into one of the seats. If there's a newspaper on the table you see him clocking it with acquisitive eyes.

This in itself is perfectly reasonable. Everyone wants something to read when they're travelling and a discarded newspaper is an irresistible draw. It's free and often not something that you would normally consider buying. The distributors of the Metro and other free papers have done very well in this niche of late. If you ever want to implant an idea into the imagination of city dwellers across the country all you'd need to do is get coverage in Metro. Never mind last night's TV, these days it's the derivative and frankly unbelievable stories contained therein that are the talk of the water cooler.

But I digress. Usually it isn't Metro that has been abandoned on a train for Mr Sport to pickup. often it's the Sun, the Mirror or the Mail, something small and tabloidy. Something easy to grab as Mr Sport now does. He then invariably flips it over to the sports page.

INVARIABLY.

It doesn't matter what is on the front page. It could be a massive earthquake in China with thousands dead, a new war in the Middle East, draconian new legislation from our government that makes it illegal to talk in public, alien invasion, the discovery of time travel or proof that ghosts are real.

Nah. He wants to read about the football.

It's another world and one I suspect I will never understand.

Extended Remix

2012-01-24T11:17:00.002Z

As far as buying our music is concerned, we've come a long way in what feels like a very short time.

These days it's far quicker and easier to buy music at the drop of a hat - furthermore there's a far greater range of music to choose from. We can pick and choose the tracks we want and best of all we don't even have to leave the house. The downside of this is of course that it can be dangerous going online drunk - a hangover is rarely improved by the discovery that one has bought the box set of Mantovani's 100 Golden Moments because it seemed like a funny idea at the time.

In general this means that things are more convenient and in some small way we are conserving resources. What's more we no longer have to cart around half a metric tonne of vinyl every time we move house and lets face it those cardboard boxes were always the heaviest ones. Usually designed for transporting bananas they also had a nasty habit of disintegrating halfway up the garden path of your new abode, depositing your complete collection of Cure LPs into a puddle. Including that signed copy of The Head On The Door.

But I can't help but feel that we've lost something pleasurable. Lighter and more convenient the modern method may be, but there was something exciting about seeking out vinyl; something I imagine is unlikely to be duplicated by waking up to discover that the new single by Florence and the Machine that you pre-ordered is now in the Purchased folder of your local copy of iTunes. Perhaps this lament for a lost format is in part a requiem for the passing of youth but not all of it I think.

Browsing the racks in record stores was always an exciting experience. You never knew what you'd find no matter how close an eye you'd been keeping on the music press.

Especially exciting was the rack where they kept the twelve inch singles. Even if you had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the charts and all the records worth buying in it (having taped the top forty off the radio and learned it inside out), this was where the real treasure could sometimes be found. The expanded universe - these sometimes contained versions of the songs that would never be heard on the radio.

But the excitement started before you listed to the music. There were the sleeves. Often a huge glossy version of picture on the seven inch - but sometimes an alternative take on the same imagery. The most thrilling thing of all was that you were getting an LP's worth of picture often for little more than the price of the seven inch. The smell of the sleeves was more intoxicating too, perhaps something to do with the fact that it was printed on card. Sometimes I couldn't wait until I got home - standing outside the shop I would pull the sleeve from the snug plastic bag, push the sides so that it opened ever so slightly and INHALE. New record smell. Fantastic.

It was what was on the records that really counted though.

Sometimes these twelve inch singles contained exactly the same tracks as the seven inch - this always felt like a complete rip off, although I understand that the fact that the grooves were further apart meant that you got a far better sound when they were played in nightclubs. But most of the time you could at least hope for an extra track. This was good, something extra to tape at the end of the side of the C90 cassette onto which you'd taped the LP so you could listen to it on your walkman; sometimes it wouldn't fit in which case you'd need to use a C120, although the tape was thinner on these and had a tendency to snap. I once dismantled a C90 cassette and surgically implanted an extra five minutes of tape simply so I could fit one of my favourite LPs plus B-sides on it.

The extra track scenario wasn't entirely satisfactory. All it meant was that you didn't really need to buy the seven inch, and that was something that no collector wanted to hear. For a twelve inch to really be worth it, it would have to contain an extended version of the single itself. A remix. Something you would be unlikely to hear anywhere else.

The first of these I remember was the twelve inch of Spellbound by Siouxsie and the Banshees. This had an extra couple of minutes on the end, a staccato drum sequence segueing into an instrumental version of the final few minutes of the track, eventually joined by Siouxsie's wailing backing vocals before slamming to a halt again, for real this time. It didn't add that much to the song but it was nevertheless exciting to hear something so familiar in a brand new way.

The electronic nature of a lot of the music in the early 80s meant that it was fairly easy to produce extended remixes in this way. These were wonderful, perfectly in their element when you were grooving on down on the dance floor at The Camden Palace, high on Pernod and black, but not perhaps as stimulating in the bedroom. When was the singing going to start? They were sometimes so long that there wasn't a hope in hell of fitting them all on a cassette either.

But you had to admit they were good value for money, and if you loved the song then it was all the more for you to get your ears round. Sometimes the remix was distinctly unsuccessful - the new section of Depeche Mode's Meaning of Love started with a recording of one of the band saying "What do you want to do then, what shall we do?" hardly inspiring confidence in the alternative version of the track that was to follow...

However, one band took to the concept of the twelve inch like a duck to water and dragged the format so much further from it's comfort zone than anyone else. Soft Cell.

Their first single, Memorabilia, was designed with the twelve inch in mind and was way ahead of its time (effectively an acid house track in 1980), but it was with their next single and biggest hit Tainted Love that they took the twelve inch somewhere it had never been before. At first it sounded just like the seven inch and then halfway through an instrumental section you realised that something very unusual was happening. The song was mutating before your very ears. First the bass line, then the synth notes. Before you realised what was happening you were listening to another song - Where Did Our Love Go.

For their next single, Bedsitter they took this format experimentation further. The track listing was the same as for the regular single - Bedsitter c/w Facility Girls, but each song was more than twice as long as its seven inch cousin, padded out not with recycled instrumental but whole new verses and musical sections. Make your single bed and push the tea leaves down the drain, take a long deep breath and start the night life over again...

This was a pattern they would repeat throughout the lifetime of the band making Soft Cell twelve inch singles amongst the best value and most enjoyable of the era.

You can now relive this by buying the Soft Cell Twelve Inch Singles as a 3 CD set or downloading them from iTunes.

But they just don't smell the same.

Red Monday

2012-01-16T16:59:00.002Z

Ever since moving to this city I've had a Grudging-Acceptance / Hate relationship with the local buses as anyone who has ever read my blog or followed me on Twitter or other social media will already know. I never shut up about it and am in fact surprised you're still following me. What's that you say? You're not? Oh dear.

There are many reasons for this (the bus thing, not the social media thing). For a start there was the whole breaking my arm and lying about it incident which I've already chronicled in this very blog, and then there was the time that The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened occurred on the top deck of a number 25. But on the whole these specific events aren't a major part of the general unpleasantness surrounding such journeys.

It's everything else.

For a start where I live the nearest bus stop is on a large square - the other side of the square to the direction from which I enter it. This means that I can see my bus is already at the stop from a considerable distance. So I have a choice. If decide to forget about it and walk to the stop in the hope of catching the next one, the bus will hang around and hang around and hang around and hang around, only pulling away at the last minute, leaving me in no doubt whatsoever that had I run for it, I would have caught it without a problem. On the other hand if I decide to run in the first place, it will pull away at the last minute anyway.

I have to remind myself that running for it is always a bad idea. A large number of different buses call at this stop so whenever I find myself hurtling up the road like an overweight orangutan having ill-advisedly decided to try and catch this one, there are people standing at the stop who aren't getting on my bus. They can see me running for it. It's blatantly obvious what I am doing. I'm running for this bus. The bus beside the open door of which they are currently standing. I'm running for this bus. The bus whose driver they are within easy earshot of. I'm running for this bus. The bus to whose driver they could easily call out, "Hang on mate, there's someone coming," without even breaking a sweat.

But do they do that? Do they buggery. They just stare with a slow-witted bovine lack of interest as I careen up to the stop cursing as the cloud of exhaust from the departing bus billows into my face.

"Thank you," I sometimes say to them with a pointed sarcasm, "Thank you very much!" This statement met with looks of blank incomprehension.

Eventually of course I do manage to catch a bus. Sometimes I already have a pass in which case no problem, but on other occasions I've got to buy one from the driver. To be fair some drivers are OK with this but for others you'd think being given a £10 note for a £4 fare was the most terrible transaction that they'd ever been forced to take part in. They sigh, they roll their eyes, they make a point of writhing uncomfortably about in their seats just to demonstrate how difficult extracting a fiver from their top pocket is. Once or twice I've been told they don't have the change and I've had to get off again. Pull the other one. With fares that high they should expect £10 notes to be common currency.

But once on the bus you have to contend the other passengers.

It's not unusual for people to prefer to sit on their own if there is room, it makes psychological sense. I have actually covered this before in another blog entry but I think it's worth repeating here. We probably all remember the young Ben Elton's famous routine about double-seat on the train, "You don't want some bastard sitting next to you, do you?" This is true of course, and probably one of the reasons that so many of us remember the routine; it resonated. Given a choice I'm sure all of us would prefer to be left alone with our book or Kindle in the mornings without some stranger intruding upon our personal space and farting. But sometimes this is unavoidable - in the rush hour, seats are at a premium. But of course this doesn't stop some people trying to keep their double seat to themselves.

They're invariably male.

They put their rucksack (it's usually a rucksack) on the seat next to them before spreading themselves out, tree trunk-like legs splayed wide open. They have a copy of the day's Metro in one chunky mitt, having managed to cunningly fold it open to the sports page with just one hand. They won't even look at you when you ask to sit down, although an expression of utter contempt flickers across their face as you do so; how in the world could you have been so utterly selfish and annoying as to have wanted to sit down? they seem to be thinking. Even if you do manage to insinuate yourself into the space next to them they try and take up at least one and a half seats, refusing to fold themselves up even a bit. What's even worse is when one of them decides to sit in the empty seat next to you. Through a process of pure physical intimidation they overflow into your seat, lumpen elbows digging into you, legs automatically splaying open.

What I find impossible to understand is how they can maintain this inconsiderate facade even in the face of a crowd of other people so obviously in need of a seat.

A few years ago I was unlucky enough to encounter Maximus Lummox, the God of this behaviour. For a period of about a month I used to see him on the upper deck on the way to work. He was unnecessarily large; not fat, just built to the wrong scale. He wore a permanent expression of sleepy arrogance on his dull features, half closed eyes peering superciliously out at the world from behind a shaggy curtain of badly cut dark brown hair. He used to sit sideways across two seats, legs blocking the aisle and to add insult to injury used to hook one elbow over the back of the seats thus even invading the space of whoever was unfortunate enough to be sitting behind him. When people were brave enough to ask him if they could use one of the seats he was taking up he looked slowly up and regarded them with an expression of dull uncomprehending hatred. More often than not he didn't move an inch.

On the other hand it is annoying when someone sits next to you even when there are plenty of free seats - obviously too lazy to walk an extra couple of metres to the spaces near the back. However, you rise above this. You are not a disciple of Maximus Lummox. Given your magnanimity it does then seem rather ill mannered of them to move to another double seat in front of you as soon as it becomes available. What, do I smell or something? you wonder sarcastically.

Thankfully most of the journeys I partake of are shorter than forty-five minutes. No matter how much double seat hogging, raucous cackling or pungent flatus I have been subjected to, I can always escape when it's time to get off.

In theory.

Sitting upstairs as I often do, I remain blissfully ignorant of what is happening on the lower deck, by the exit. Unlike London buses, most of the fleet here are only blessed with one door. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to prefer to stand right in front of it in preference to sitting on the seats available further back. As I squeeze pass with an "excuse me please" I am subjected to a barrage of tuts, sighs and rolling of eyes. By the time I actually reach the exit the people on the pavement have already started piling on, leading to further disdain being heaped upon my shoulders as I have to push past them as well.

But what can you do?

I don't have a car, and whilst cycling is greener and at least keeps me fit, having to deal with car drivers, pedestrians and other cyclists is at least as infuriating as catching the bus. The train stations are at least 20 minutes walk away, but I am to stand the remotest chance of retaining my sanity whilst I still have to commute I am going to have to let the train take the strain.

Or I could just chill out.

I imagine I will probably start ranting on about trains in the not too distant future, then...

Let's Pretend

2012-01-10T17:15:00.002Z

When most children play "lets pretend" they imagine a thing that isn't. Whilst I did do that as a kid, I also used to have little games in my head in which I imagined a thing that already was...

The first major incidence of the phenomenon that I can now recall was back in the seventies when we had an German exchange student staying with us, a woman studying architecture. As a favour to my parents - perhaps as a way of saying thank you for letting her stay - she took me off their hands for an afternoon on a trip to visit Welwyn Garden City and Harlow - of some significance to students of architecture and town planning as they were both "New Towns" built in the twentieth century in the commuter belt to ease overcrowding in London.

Whilst we were in Harlow I started playing a strange game with myself. To clarify, this was playing a game in the sense of "let's play Star Trek" rather than "let's play Tiddlywinks". I started imagining that I was visiting a futuristic New Town called "Lowich". In almost every sense the details of the game and the details of reality were exactly the same (except for the name of the city) but for some inexplicable reason I got much more enjoyment out of the situation with a fictional filter placed between my mind and reality.

In the game I was a character visiting this special new city. I tried to look at roadsigns and the names of buildings in such a way that both the "Har" and the space after "low" was obscured so that I could imagine I was actually in the story.

This wasn't the only occasion that I had this strange sensation, this compulsion to insert a layer of fiction between myself and the real world. Sometimes I would watch TV programmes pretending that I had never seen them before. I particularly remember watching the title sequence of The Goodies with this mind-set. If I had never seen this before, I mused, what would I think?

We do. Anything. Anytime.

A series about three guys who did exciting things like dancing on the moon, being cowboys and somehow being back in cavemen times. Which of course was what it actually was, but watching it through this fictional membrane of never having seen it before somehow made it much more enjoyable.

Similarly Go With Noakes. Viewed through the first-time goggles it suddenly became about Noakes the Action Hero, who had all sorts of adventures like jumping out of aeroplanes at twenty-five thousand feet. Looking at him through a refractive surface of un-me allowed me to unhook his familiarity to me from years of Blue Peter.

Because what most of these scenarios boiled down to was this: What if I wasn't me?

The outside world remained the same, it was just my reaction to it that was different. I made my reaction a story, most of the time one that was far better than reality. The Goodies and Go With Noakes were far better programmes when viewed through the smoked-glass of otherness, and Lowich was a far better place to live than Harlow.

Of course I also did used to enjoy the more traditional mode of play. Often we would "be" characters from Star Trek - I was always Spock and my friend Peter always insisted on being Kirk. Peter/Kirk was obsessed with the idea of "going down with his ship" as frequently the games seemed to involve the Enterprise being about to blow up. I still have a very clear picture in my head of looking back as we escaped in the shuttle craft (of looking back as we walked away across the playground) and seeing Kirk (Peter) sitting alone on the bridge (alone on the steps outside a fire exit) waiting to be consumed by fire as the ship exploded. We could never persuade him to come with us.

As I got older these kind of games became harder to play as the imagined world jarred against what I could see was in front of me. Perhaps this is where the appeal of the "imagining a thing that already is" came from. They couldn't be spoilt by incongruous reality because they contained reality.

I still play them to this day.

Sunrise

2012-01-04T22:42:00.003Z

I miss the Sunrise.

I miss waking up and instantly knowing how long it is until I have to drag my sorry carcass out of bed to face first the computer world (for my early morning brain workout) and then the outside world as I travel to my place of work (which - if I am feeling energetic - involves my early morning body workout).

The problem with waking up and it still being pitch black out there is that you have no idea how much time you have left before the alarm clock (in my case it's an app, but the principle is the same - and no matter how pleasant an alarm tone you have chosen you will come to hate it) assaults your ears forcing you to get out of bed. You could have hours in which to fall back asleep and have more dreams or it could be less than five minutes until the alarm is due to go off.

Let's face it, by the time you actually get motivated to check the time it's usually the latter. You lie there in full wakefulness dreading the noise that is due to come your way any second and yet without the gumption to simply get up, switch the alarm off and start the day a tiny bit early.

And what do you do when the alarm finally goes off? Snooze.

The snooze button is one of the most pointless inventions ever devised by man. Using it is an exercise in self loathing, an admission of weakness. If you wanted to get up at 6.30am then bloody well get up at 6.30am. An extra five minutes will do you no good whatsoever; all it means is that you have to go through the alarm hell all over again. Pressing the snooze button twice is even worse and any more than that - well you might as well set your alarm half an hour later and resign yourself to getting into work later.

The thing is that by early January you really feel that surely it should have started at least pretending to get lighter in the mornings again. Wasn't the Winter Solstice, the shortest day, back in December before Christmas?

Ah but it's not as simple as that. It never is.

The Earth is a contrary bugger and it may surprise you to learn that whilst the last Solstice may have been 22 December 2011, the nights stopped drawing in and Sunsets started getting earlier on 16 December 2011.

Conversely Sunrise continued getting later and later until this morning and it is only on 5 January 2012 that it will start getting earlier again. The problem is that it changes so damned slowly at this time of year which only serves to exacerbate the feelings of inertia and darkness. It's improving though - whilst by the middle of January sunrise will only be six minutes earlier than it is now, by the beginning of February it will be twenty five minutes earlier. By the time we reach the Spring Equinox, Sunrise will be getting earlier by three minutes every single day. Unfortunately this is as good as it gets, it slows down again by the time the Summer Solstice rolls around.

In an ideal world I would prefer to live in a world of perpetual sunlight. If I want darkness I can always buy thick curtains.

Sadly this is impossible unless I spend six months north of the Arctic circle and then immediately fly to south of the Antarctic circle for the next six. Quite apart from the expense of having to maintain two houses in polar conditions it would cost a fortune in airfare.

The person that invents a bulb that really does look and feel like sunlight is going to make a fortune. Only then will we be effectively freed from the tyranny of the turning planet.

Thinly Plotted Reality

2012-01-03T18:33:00.002Z

This morning as I dragged myself out of bed early for the first time since the seasonal break I seriously felt that the weather was taking the piss.

It was the day that I was due back at work and as such already had a level of terror normally reserved for a visit to the dentist without anaesthetic. The fact that it now sounded as if there was a force ten from navarone blowing out there was merely the cyanide icing on an already unpleasant and slightly rotten fruit cake.

If this had been fiction I would have concluded that this was the Pathetic Fallacy at work and that the weather was reflecting the mood of all the people in the land as they were returning to their places of work; the appalling weather itself then serving to sour these self same moods even further in a furious feedback loop...

But there are few authors who could get away with this kind of thing these days. If you or I had penned this morning and then brought it along to a writers' workshop we would probably be told not to be so cliched and to go back and rework that passage, perhaps putting in some ironic sunshine and unseasonable warmth just to mess with the heads of our characters and make their return to the grindstone that little bit more unpleasant.

But that's reality for you. It so often confounds narrative conventions and comes up with plots so thin, characters so transparent and reversals of fortune so ridiculously unlikely that there's no way god would stand a chance of getting it published and would in fact still be on the rewrites of the late nineteenth century and only then if he had really been putting his mind to it.

People may laugh at the complicated and contradictory story lines and unlikely plotting of soap operas such as Eastenders but these are as nothing when compared to real life.

We are of course as I have mentioned many times before, ultimately the stories we tell ourselves. Perhaps life might seem complex, confusing and poorly written as we live it but after a while once we've committed it to memory and then spent enough time revising it and coming up with the definitive version, the director's cut, things all seem to make much more sense. The fact that other people might not agree with our version of events is of little importance - it's our story, it's told in the first person, it's told frequently and ninety nine per cent of the time it's told to an audience of one. Ourselves. Perhaps inside our heads we are all George Lucas messing with the original Star Wars films - and just like George we all believe that our past is all the better for it.

After all if we are going to be the protagonists of our own tales, there's no sense in not giving ourselves the best parts. We can be heroes.

This is why nostalgia can be so powerful. The past has had more time spent on it and as such is often better written.

original photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert

A Martian Odyssey

2012-01-02T17:44:00.003Z

A lot of the time when I was a kid, what I read was dictated by what I could find in the small SF section of Muswell Hill library or the books that I could find in the bargain bins. Once I'd outgrown Narnia, I found most books aimed specifically at children rather boring (with a few notable exceptions - Joan Aiken amongst them) and had been put off the so-called classics by having The Mill on the Floss rammed down my throat as an official text upon which I would later be tested. It took me forever to finish I can't remember a thing about it now.

As has been chronicled elsewhere, this exploration of the SF genre meant that I was exposed to a lot of adult themes early - whilst grown-ups may have imagined me to be reading juvenile tales of invasions by robots from Mars I was in fact exploring unexpected worlds of cannibalism, sex with aliens and other taboos. Some of the disturbing ideas from these far out stories have stuck with me ever since.

On other occasions perusal of the bargain bins resulted in the unexpected discovery of great SF of which I'd hitherto been unaware.

I'd read all the Asimov and Clarke I could get my hands on as well as dabbling in Heinlein, Moorcock and Aldiss, but the book I picked out of the metal basket at the Stroud branch of Woolworths during a visit to my grandmother in 1977 was by an author I was unaware of, one Stanley G Weinbaum. The title A Martian Odyssey resonated with Clarke's 2001 and Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, the cover in true 70s SF style depicting a complex looking roving vehicle crossing a Martian landscape clearly inspired by the photographs sent back by the recent Viking landers. This was, I imagined, a modern tale of the exploration of Mars.

I couldn't have been more wrong. What I held in my hand was a collection of short stories that predated Clarke and Bradbury by decades, a collection of short stories about the exploration of the solar system from the golden age of the science fiction pulps. If I'd known this I might not have bought it but then I would never have discovered how brilliant Weinbaum actually was.

Despite the pulp dressing the stories were staggeringly imaginative and way ahead of their time. The eponymous short story A Martian Odyssey was all about the first encounter of Dick Jarvis, an astronaut from Earth with a Martian known as Tweel. One amazing aspect of this tale was the way Weinbaum was able to portray a totally alien intelligence. Jarvis and Tweel were able to communicate up to a point - and as such had an exciting series of adventures as Jarvis made his way across the Martian landscape in an attempt to return to his mothership after a rocket crash - but some of Tweel's thought processes were odd...

Well, we stared at the fire a while and I decided to attempt some sort of communication with the Martian. I pointed at myself and said 'Dick'; he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me and repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I called Tweel; I can't imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to emphasize the names, I repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him, 'Tweel.'

There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative, and said something like 'P-p-p-proot.' And that was just the beginning; I was always 'Tick,' but as for him—part of the time he was 'Tweel,' and part of the time he was 'P-p-p-proot,' and part of the time he was sixteen other noises!

We just couldn't connect. I tried 'rock,' and I tried 'star,' and 'tree,' and 'fire,' and lord knows what else, and try as I would, I couldn't get a single word! Nothing was the same for two successive minutes, and if that's a language, I'm an alchemist!

Tweel wasn't the only peculiar inhabitant of Mars either - other examples of this bizarre menagerie included the anthill community of barrel-like creatures which imitated the sounds they heard ("We are v-v-v-vriends! Ouch!"), a silicon based life form that walled itself into a miniature pyramid using the bricks it "breathed" out (silicon dioxide, see) and the Dream Beast which projected illusions to lure its hapless victims to their death.

Other stories contained creatures just as outlandish. The Slinkers and the Loonies of Io in The Mad Moon, the Triops noctivians, the doughpots and the Jack Ketch trees on Venus in Parasite Planet.

Of course all of these stories having been written in the early 1930s the science was out of whack. In Weinbaum's imagination almost all of the worlds in the solar system had breathable atmospheres and native life - furthermore he had used the now discredited theory that the outer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn emitted heat like miniature suns, making their moons habitable.

But this didn't really matter. The exploration of Weinbaum's solar system by atomic rocket made for stories that were both thoughtful and entertaining in equal measure.

Not all the stories involved space travel; others explored alternative universes (The Worlds of If), virtual reality (Pygmalion's Spectacles) and climate change (Shifting Seas), all quite astonishing subjects for the early thirties (and his 1935 story The Ideal contains the spookily prescient line "sometimes I regret that unfortunate market crash of 2009 that wiped out my own money").

Weinbaum was still a young man when he imagined these extraordinary scenarios and ideas. Who can tell what a shadow he would have cast over 20th century genre fiction had he not died of throat cancer in 1935?

In many of the stories the protagonist is a young man who during the course of the action falls for a young woman - but even these simple characters have a vitality which lives on in the mind long after the end of the story.

Aside from the collection I bought it was difficult to find more Weinbaum and it was only once the Forbidden Planet bookshop had opened in Denmark Street that I found the only novel of his still in print, The New Adam, an altogether bleaker tale than most of his short stories, a tale of the life - and ultimate suicide - of Edmond, the first individual of a new species of double-minded person born into the dark human world of the twentieth century.

"A billion billion centuries, perhaps," he reflected, "before Chance or the more obscure laws that govern it, shall re-assemble the particular molecules that I call Myself, yet this will seem no longer than from this night until tomorrow. Certainly obliteration is a wonderful thing, and the one conqueror of Time."

His other self responded, "Since in eternity all things that can happen must happen, I depart with assurance; all this will be again, and perhaps in happier fashion. I render my payment therefore without regret."

Weinbaum is now out of copyright and some of his stories can be found of Project Gutenberg

Destination Eschaton

2012-01-01T12:09:00.003Z

So here it is, 2012, everybody's going to die.

Or at least that's what the doomsday theorists would have us all believe. But better not join them in this belief otherwise you run the risk of Professor Brian Cox calling you a nobber [¹]. He's got a point though. There's absolutely no basis for the now widely held suspicion that the world as we know it will end on Friday 21 December 2012 - or even that anyone ever predicted that it would.

This hysteria came about because this date does indeed appear as a landmark in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar which was used by the Mayans amongst other people. The date wasn't part of any prophecy however - it was merely the point at which the digits of the calendar (which was calculated in a rather complex and confusing manner using both base-17 and base-20) rolled over to 13.0.0.0.0. For the Mayans this was the end of an era - perhaps a bit of an abstraction seeing as it lay so far in the future, but the Mesoamericans were a forward thinking people. The fact that this calendar which was first used over two thousand years ago is only now rolling over is a testament to this. Contrast this with the Unix epoch in which computers utilize the number of seconds since 1 January 1970 to provide a unique timestamp. Unfortunately 32-bit systems will run out of numbers to count these seconds on 9 January 2038. Better make sure you upgrade before then.

But it's only in recent years that the significance of the year 13.0.0.0.0 in Mesoamerican Long Count has been upgraded to apocalypse.

Apocalypses started to become popular in the nineteen-eighties as the first truly futuristic date appeared. 1984 may not have been as totalitarian as Orwell had predicted so the doomsayers begun to cast about for other signs of the End of Days. New Years Eve 1999 was a popular one and this combined with the fear of the Millennium Bug (a consequence of even shorter sighted computer-programmers than those who devised the Unix epoch) to produce what many felt was the first bona-fide appointment with apocalypse. The signs were all there and it would only be a matter of hours before Jesus returned in the middle of World War Three to a soundtrack by Robbie Williams as the dead rose from their graves, planes dropped out of the sky and mobile phones lost their signals for ever.

As far as I was concerned all that actually happened was that I got so drunk on vodka that I have no memory of midnight whatsoever and subsequently spent my thirty-fifth birthday in a state of alcohol-poisoned paranoia.

This didn't seem to worry the doomsayers. Like Harold Camping and his constant rescheduling of The Rapture, they merely cast about for the next date upon which to pin their hopes for the end of everything. A quick rummage through the bargain bins of von-Danikenesque paperbacks with titles like Toenails of the Gods turned up the so called Mayan prophecies.

These days as far as popular traditional religions are concerned all most people have to choose between are a senile pensioner pissing himself in an old people's home and dreaming of his glory days or a dangerous psychopathic teenager with a knife plotting how he's going to show them... it's no wonder many people turn to half baked poorly thought through belief systems for solace. But why does constantly hoping that the world will end comfort them so? There is probably some deep seated psychological need to predict the end of the world as this list of dates upon which it was supposed to occur demonstrates.

The root of it is I think because for each and every one of us, the world will end. We are all going to die some day. For us the world will cease to exist, although in reality it is far truer to say that for the world we cease to exist.

The thought of this is often too much to take; if they have to go, some people prefer to take the rest of the world with them. Or the universe.

Of course the world will end one day. In around five billion years time the Sun will turn into a Red Giant although it is likely that even if it has survived, Earthly sentience will have moved out into the universe by this point. The universe itself will end at some point too but this will be at a time so remote as to have no real meaning, especially to minds such as our own.

The eschaton is still a very long way off. Time to learn to stop worrying and love 2012.

Happy New Year.

[1] First draft of this blog actually written before this tweet.

Godpunching

2011-12-24T17:51:00.001Z

When the weather is bad - especially when this involves wind and rain - my initial reaction is that I want to punch god in the face. There are a couple of rather big problems with this urge.

Firstly I am not by nature a violent person and if I ever did end up planting a fist in someone's face I'd probably feel bad about it for years afterwards. Even if I could conquer the guilt, I still couldn't cope with being in a fight because I'd get my arse kicked. Even if my opponent wasn't an omnipotent being who created the universe.

This brings us to the second of the big problems. I don't believe in god so the urge would be impossible to carry out even if I worked out for months and took a course of empathy removal drugs.

The urge is still very strong though. I think it's based on the raw anger I feel when confronted with weather of this kind. Logically of course there's no reason to get cross about something beyond human control and normally I remain philosophical about such acts of god. The fact that god doesn't exist should encourage even greater phlegmatism.

But there's something about wind and rain that makes my blood boil.

I don't even have to be caught in it to lose my rag, it's enough to hear the rain clattering against the window like a handfuls of gravel tossed by unruly children. In fact it's mainly the sound of rain on glass that sparks off the most godpunching of urges. Getting caught in the rain itself isn't nearly as bad and can sometimes even be laughed off.

My bed is beneath a skylight. On a bad night I can lie there for hours unable to sleep and fuming into the darkness.

The fact that it's the sound that bothers me the most is significant. Perhaps I am not just an irrationally short tempered fool - a condition known as Misophonia or more clumsily Selective Sound Sensitivity Syndrome (SSSS) describes my annoyance to a T. The irrational anger such sounds can engender; the way it's made far worse when one is exhausted, run down or ill. The only thing that doesn't quite seem to gel is that misophonists find themselves made the most angry by the noises made by people rather than nature.

This is not to say that I don't find the endless clicks, pops and subconscious beatboxing uttered by the human race at large maddening - and once you notice them they're everywhere. The bus driver. People in shops. Teachers. Policemen. Doctors. But there's something altogether far more relentless and infuriating about the sound of rain. I have taken to wearing earplugs when it gets very bad, but the problem then is that I don't hear the alarm clock going off in the morning. In the long run I think I'm simply going to have to move somewhere where it isn't a problem.

Somewhere it doesn't rain.

Pedal to the Mettle

2011-12-10T16:31:00.000Z

As I have so often remarked I don’t cycle into work nearly as often as I should. After all the reasons for doing so are many and varied. It’s greener for a start and saves me money that would otherwise end up in the pockets of Brighton and Hove Buses. And most importantly, it is at least a nod towards making me fitter. I know that in an ideal world should go down the gym of course, but never seem to have the time. However seeing as I have to spend at least 90 minutes a day travelling, I might as well make the most of those minutes getting exercise.

Unfortunately the arguments for not cycling are far more persuasive. It’s dark. Often it’s cold and wet. I’m tired. I’m lazy. And perhaps, most importantly, I usually end up as a seething chamber of suppressed rage by the time I reach the end of my journey. This is not because I have an exaggerated sense of self importance and sense of entitlement when it comes to my position on the road. This is because so many other cyclists, pedestrians and motorists I come across when cycling do.

Honestly, the level of self-righteous dickery prevalent in most members of the public at large beggars belief. Take last Wednesday for instance. I was cycling, very slowly, along a cycle lane. I usually keep it slow when crossing the campus as there are a lot of pedestrians about and I don't want to behave like one of those self-satisfied twats that you see whizzing past as they weave in and out of the traffic in lycra shorts which they don't realise have started to seriously wear out in the bum area enabling anyone behind them to effectively see right up their rectum.

In front of me a pedestrian fiddling with his phone was wandering into my path. I didn't get angry or shirty. All I did was ring my bell once.

"Excuse me please."

Not, one would think, the actions of an insensitive boor. However from the reaction of the pedestrian in question you'd have thought I'd just crashed into him whilst swearing like Brian Blessed.

"Coulda gone round!"

From his tone of voice he quite clearly could not believe my behaviour. Well yes, technically he was right. I coulda. But then I would have been cycling onto the pavement and any pedestrians within view would have been well within their rights to have a go at me. If I casually broke the rules in such a manner why then I'd have not a leg to stand on when it came to bellyaching about others breaking the rules without running the risk of turning into a massive hypocritical tool.

"This is the cycle path" I remarked quietly. He tutted and rolled his eyes as I rode off.

Of course I was then assaulted by l'esprit d'escalier. By all the clever things I could have said. But in this case l’esprit was wrong. It was far better that at the time I hadn’t thought to tell him to go and fuck himself up the arse with a rusty spade. Whilst it might have given me some juvenile satisfaction and pissed him off even more, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. As things stood, he’d got pissed off whereas I had at least maintained a moderate sense of dignity and decorum. Nevertheless, even though I knew I had been polite and right, I was still seething. What a piece of work is man, I thought, what a nasty piece of work.

This mental growling got me a couple of miles down the road when I spotted another cyclist bundled up against the cold examining the underbelly of their upturned bike. Should I stop? I wondered, Should I offer assistance? Wouldn't it be easier not to?

Well of course, I snapped at myself, of course it would be easier not to, which is why you are going to stop. It's all very well bellyaching to yourself about how monumentally selfish and stupid Homo Sapiens at large is, but how about you put your money where your mind is and prove you're not like that? Go on. I DARE you.

I stopped.

“Do you need any help?” I called. The cyclist looked up.

“Yes please - I seem to have got stuck,” she called back.

I dismounted and laid my bike down on the verge next to hers. Other cyclists whisked by on the cycle path - despite the weather and the darkness the draw of the pedals was obviously still strong for many.

“Has your chain come off?” It wasn’t immediately obvious what was wrong and I don’t know much about bikes. However in my limited experience most of my more annoying breakdowns seemed to involve the chain going awry in one way or another.

“I don't know, I don’t know much about bikes,” she said, “The pedals just won't go round any more."

I tried to rotate the pedals of her upturned bike. Whilst the chain hadn't come off altogether there definitely was something not right about it. When turning the pedals backwards it seemed to bunch up ahead of the derailleur. It was going to be difficult to diagnose without getting my hands dirty.

“Here, use these, I've already got oil on them.”

The cyclist handed me a confusing pair of small gloves. Whichever glove I tried to put on my right hand it always seemed to be the left glove. After a few moments - during which I started to suspect that I was going insane - it eventually dawned on me that the pair actually did consist of two left gloves. I put them on and attempted to reseat the chain on the sprockets of the front cog and eventually I got the mechanism spinning satisfactorily in both directions.

“Here, try this,” I hauled her bike over onto its wheels and she took it for a short test run up the pavement and back. All seemed well so I removed the mismatched gloves and handed them back to her when she drew alongside.

“That should get you home at least,” I said.

She thanked me and rode off. I resumed my journey home.

I had been only been going a couple of minutes when I realized that my mood had improved drastically. I wasn't moaning and griping and plotting revenge for slights against me both real and imagined that had been perpetrated by the monumentally selfish public at large. I felt calm and, dare I say it, cheerful.

The odd thing is that it wasn't because of what someone else had done for me. It was because of what I had done for someone else. There was a lesson there somewhere, although I was buggered if I could work out exactly what it was. I resolved to help the next person in need I came across; if helping someone could cheer me up so much who needed antidepressants?

In retrospect it has made me question the nature of altruism. If helping others makes you feel good is it really selfless?

Perhaps not, but doesn't do any harm. Whether altruism is real or an evolutionary trick, if the practical upshot of offering a helping hand is that both parties end up better off, then so be it. I can live with that.

And so, I think, can everyone else.

A Chinese Room with a View

2011-11-26T13:11:00.002Z

These days the name of Alan Turing is associated as much with computers as the name Isaac Newton is with gravity. Quite rightly so. Whilst his work on cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park during World War Two might cause some to consider him a shadowy figure in the world of twentieth century espionage, I would like to think that in the long historical view it will be a thought experiment of his that will be remembered most of all - the Turing Test.

In its simplest form the test states that if an interrogator having a conversation over a keyboard (online chat, basically) with a second party cannot distinguish between a real person and a computer program, then the computer (program) could be said to be thinking.

Even though this once thought experiment has now been carried out in reality, (most notably at the Loebner Prize which has been carried out annually since 1991) no-one yet wants to stick their neck out and claim that a machine has definitely passed and ipso facto can think.

This is partly because, despite the prodigious speed at which computer technology has progressed over the past twenty years, this progression has been in completely unexpected directions. No-one really predicted the extent and functionality of the World Wide Web and yet in on 12 January 1992 we were not even remotely close to HAL becoming operational at the HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois. Now, ten years after the date of the ill fated Discovery mission, HAL still seems a very long way away.

It’s also because Artificial Intelligence seems to be a moving target. Whilst we are still a long way from HAL, you do get the impression that even if intelligent talking computers were constructed, there would be those who would continue to insist that they weren’t “really” thinking, that they were only mimicking human intelligence. There has even been a pre-emptive attempt to debunk the Turing Test.

Like the Turing Test was originally, it's a thought experiment. It is known as the Chinese Room and was devised by philosopher John Searle.

The Chinese Room is a large wooden box in which sits an Experimenter. On his or her desk there is a set of complex instructions – whether these are in the form of data on a computer’s hard disk or a series of handsome leather bound volumes is entirely irrelevant. The Experimenter also has access to a large number of sheets of paper and several pencils.

There is a slot in one wall of the room. Through this slot people post questions in Chinese. The Experimenter doesn’t understand Chinese – but this doesn’t matter. Without needing a translation, he or she can look up the Chinese characters in the data, and by following a long series of steps listed in the instructions, eventually come up with and write down an answer to the question, also in Chinese characters, and post it back through the slot.

However long this might take (which doesn’t matter as it’s a thought experiment), the interrogator on the outside has now received an intelligible answer. If this went on long enough, it would be possible for the Chinese Room to pass the Turing Test.

But, crows the Experimenter, I don’t speak a word of Chinese!

The room has passed the Turing Test but the Experimenter wasn’t thinking about the questions - he or she didn’t even hear them. The Experimenter was able to simulate their half of an intelligent conversation without actually understanding it at all. This proves that machines can’t actually think, whatever the Turing Test might claim.

Or does it?

I would say not. All that the Chinese Room experiment proves is that the Experimenter can follow instructions without understanding Chinese. And just because he or she doesn't understand Chinese, it doesn't mean that an understanding of Chinese isn't going on somewhere...

The notion of the Chinese Room disproving the possibility of artificial intelligence is a demonstration of Cartesian Theatre thinking. By saying that the Experimenter doesn't understand Chinese ergo no understanding of Chinese is going on, the Experimenter is being cast in the role of the homunculus, the soul - the room itself and the instructions themselves being relegated to mere machinery.

In fact the opposite may well be true.

The Experimenter is no more than part of the machine - why should he or she understand Chinese any more than the plywood making up the box's exterior or the pencils with which he uses to draw the Chinese Characters do? Consciousness and understanding is something that arises from a whole system and whilst our Experimenter doesn't understand Chinese him or her self, the system as a whole most demonstrably does understand Chinese. And certainly a knowledge of Chinese would have been required when the instructions were written – when the Chinese Room learned.

Of course it would be nonsense to describe the Chinese Room being discussed here as conscious seeing as all the instructions do is allow responses to be produced very slowly and all it can do is conduct simple conversations in Chinese. It has no inner life and as such I assume would always answer the same question in the same way. Similarly whilst Deep Blue may be a chess champion it had none of the other qualities that made Garry Kasparov a conscious being. However, this is simply a question of scale. A large enough Chinese room (or perhaps a city-sized building consisting of millions of Chinese rooms each with a different purpose) with myriad operators could well be conscious and self aware when viewed as a whole even though this would be on a far different scale from that we are used to.

However, scales of time and space are irrelevant when it comes to the discussion of intelligence and consciousness - as we demonstrated in The Experiment of Thugg 2.0 back in September 2010. All that matters is that the data is processed and the inclusion of an Experimenter who doesn't understand Chinese in the equation is irrelevant and humano-centric. Your eyes don't speak English and yet you are reading and understanding this. A Chinese room would probably be far more efficient with a computer and a printer attached to the input and output and yet would produce exactly the same results as the inclusion of an Experimenter.

The Chinese Room appears to be a remnant of dualistic thinking. By denying the right of machines to be conscious the proponents of such theories are surreptitiously positing the existence of a separate soul as the seat of understanding and consciousness.

I thought we’d got past that.

Canon Fodder

2011-11-20T12:31:00.001Z

It is surprising how seriously some people take fiction sometimes.

The word canon originally meant the books of the Bible that were official and contained the true scriptures as laid down by the various churches and faiths who concerned themselves with such things. It has since been sequestered by the enthusiasts of various fictional worlds to mean the events and stories that officially "happened" in that universe.

When a fictional world or universe is created often additional spin off fiction is produced - initially to capitalise on any possible popularity of the franchise and turn a tidy buck. Some early examples of such works were the Star Wars novels Splinter of the Minds Eye and Han Solo at Stars End which were churned out shortly after the success of the original Star Wars film (the one that is now rather dully referred to as A New Hope).

Despite claims on the covers that these novels were "from the adventures of Luke Skywalker" they really didn't seem to have much to do with the series of films that followed, having been written as quick cash ins before it had been realised just how phenomenally successful the franchise would become. They never really became incorporated into the wider story (which is a shame as the Han Solo novel contained a droid called Bollux).

Looking into what consists Star Wars canon now, it all seems insanely complicated. However it is a naught compared to the baroque complexities of Star Trek canon which has to incorporate five live action TV series, an animated series, eleven movies to date and numerous novels and comics. Despite the Sisiphean magnitude of this task there do seem to have been attempts by the makers to provide in universe explanations for inconsistencies between the earlier and later iterations of the narrative.

Personally I don't think it really matters, a story is a story is a story and I can enjoy a well written novel featuring Kirk, Spock and McCoy far more than a poor TV episode, despite the fact that the latter would be considered more canonical by the powers that be (i.e. the fans).

However, if you really want to see deep debate about canon and what happened or didn't, then you need look no further than Doctor Who fandom. During the show's original run the only books produced were novelisations of the TV stories and where these contradicted one's memories of the episodes themselves I tended to imagine that the events in the novels were what would have been filmed in the absence of time and budget restraints. The Target novelisations had the limitless budget of the reader's mind's eye, splintered or not.

The only stories outside regular continuity were those in the comics, and personally I didn't lose any sleep wondering when Jon Pertwee's Doctor managed to fit in the solo travels during which the TARDIS was swallowed by a living planet into the adventures he had on screen with Jo and Sarah-Jane. It was just another story to enjoy.

But then the TV series was cancelled in 1989 and it all got very complicated...

First out of the traps was the series of "official" novels, the New Adventures, which continued the story where the TV series had left off. At the time I fully intended to start buying these and following the story but it soon became overwhelming. When they started publishing Missing Adventures as well it was all too much and I decided not to bother. Whilst I would occasionally buy a book when I needed something to read, I didn't feel the need to collect them all. It was too complicated and I had to give up hope of following everything that might have happened to The Doctor.

After all, they were only stories. Fiction. No more or less real than what I might imagine in my head.

The appearance of the TV movie in 1996 stirred things up a bit and gave the books a kick but it wasn't until 1999 that an entire new level of complexity was added to the equation. Original Doctor Who audio plays started being produced by a company called Big Finish starring the original actors. These felt far more like real Doctor Who than the books, especially at a time when it seemed unlikely ever to return to our screens...

How wrong we were. In 2005 the Doctor was back on TV and furthermore the audio plays continued to be produced. Some of them were even broadcast on BBC radio.

Generally I just thought this was a good thing. More stories. More fiction. More Doctor. But some people got very upset by inconsistencies in the narrative that had arisen as a natural consequence of allegedly adjacent adventures being written and recorded decades apart.

Some simply refused to accept the audio adventures as canon. Others tied themselves in intellectual knots trying to explain away these continuity errors - I recall a long thread on a forum wondering why, when he was dying at the climax of the 1984 TV adventure The Caves of Androzani, the Doctor only had visions of the companions he'd had during the past three years on TV and not of Erimem the Ancient Egyptian princess who traveled with him and Peri during Big Finish audio adventures which supposedly took place between the previous story (Peri's debut, Planet of Fire) and this one.

This seemed to me to be a non-question. A no brainer. Erimem's first audio story, Eye of the Scorpion, was recorded in 2001, some 17 years after Caves of Androzani had been televised. Of course the Doctor wouldn't remember her, and no amount of mental sleight-of-hand would produce a satisfactory in-universe explanation for why he didn't. Nor should it. It was a story and no matter how good a story there was no way it could incorporate elements of another story written seventeen years later.

But this kind of thing seemed to really upset some people. Seriously. If you think about the original purpose of story and narration, it becomes clear as to why this might be.

We are the only animals (that we know) that tell stories. We narrate, and some might claim that it is this ability itself that gives rise to our consciousnesses, our selves. In order to remain sane and maintain a coherent sense of self it is important that these stories make sense, that they are consistent. It's no good remembering that you went to school in Golders Green in 1982 if another memory claims that was part of the five years you spent living in Australia. By definition reality has to be consistent; it's one of the ways we can tell the difference between it and dreams.

And may be the reason why canon-fans get so upset about continuity errors in their favourite fictional universe.

More than anything else they want the Doctor to be real.

They want it all to make sense because in some way it all actually happened. They still live in hope that one day they will walk around the corner and see a tall blue Police Box standing where there was only empty space five minutes before, ready to whisk them away from this dull consistent world into an exciting, but nonetheless still consistent, universe.

I know how they feel. I used to feel that too. But I never felt that it all had to fit together. If I wanted to be scientific about it Many Worlds Theory and parallel universes could take care of any inconstancies. But even forgetting all that there was no reason why a real person couldn't have imaginary stories told about them.

Just because I wrote a short story when I was at primary school about how I went to Narnia it doesn't mean that I don't exist.

Does it?

Losing my Marbles

2011-11-15T10:00:00.007Z

These days there is no excuse for not knowing the answer to trivial questions. The answer is always on the end of a google and we now have google at our fingertips most of the time.

However, it is sometimes more fun not to know something. I have no idea what the Elgin Marbles actually are and I prefer it that way. I know that they're in the British Museum, I know that people think that the UK should return them to Greece, but I have absolutely no desire to type the phrase "Elgin Marbles" into a search engine and dispose of my ignorance.

This is because what I imagine they might be is more fun.

When I was a kid I had one of those furry pencil cases; mine was orange and I didn't use it to keep pencils in. Oh no, I used it for my collection of marbles. I was obsessed with marbles. In retrospect it was a short lived obsession, but it seemed all consuming at the time. It was symptomatic of the wider craze sweeping the school; in the playground in between lessons all you could hear was talk of Oners, Tenners, Chinas, Clears and other nomenclatures which now escape me. The strange thing was that we rarely seemed to actually play the game of marbles itself. We just collected them, in the same way as we collected other things like miniature plastic heads of the England World Cup Squad (despite a total lack of interest in football), sets of fake coins or Star Wars bubblegum cards.

There were even some myths and legends associated with marble collecting. I remember very well the tale of the mythical Tenner Clear. A Clear was a marble that was plain glass; not that exciting in itself. A Tenner was a marble allegedly ten times the size of a normal one. They did exist; in reality they were only three times the diameter of a normal Oner, rather than ten although they would have had nearly ten times the volume.

I had never seen a Tenner Clear and in my head it took on marvellous properties, like a crystal ball in which you could see your future, an amulet that would bestow upon the owner the power to collect all the marbles he or she could have ever desired.

Whispers started circulating that there was a Tenner Clear under the Prefab.

The Prefab was a giant Portakabin which housed the reception classes and had been erected at one end of the playground, probably in the 1950s or 60s. It was raised from ground level on supports underneath which, perhaps unwisely, there was just enough room for a child to crawl. No one ever did of course, we were all too scared.

But then the rumours arose. There was a Tenner Clear under the Prefab. It was only visible from the side of the Prefab that faced away from the main school building. We all got down on our bellies and peered beneath, yes, there it was, we were sure of it. Amongst the broken glass, fragments of brick, rusty tins, moss and spiders there was quite plainly something circular and tantalisingly marble-like reflecting the light back at us. It was dark but we were sure of it.

Which one of us would be brave enough to crawl under there and claim their prize?

Several playtimes came and went, most of which were spent lying flat on the concrete staring at the Tenner Clear. Then one boy braver than most took it upon himself to crawl under there in a bid to make the Tenner Clear his own. I remember watching as he disappeared from the daylight and made his way slowly across to where the treasure was. However, he turned round and started heading back towards the light far too early. When he emerged he said that there was no Tenner Clear - it was just the bottom of a Coke can reflecting the light back at us. He stood up and we all gasped - thick dark red blood was oozing from a wound on his knee. In the darkness he'd crawled over some broken glass.

In response to this accident, the school authorities sealed off the underside of the Prefab with stout chicken wire. I was convinced that the Tenner Clear was still under there, now unreachable, even though a first hand report had said it didn't exist. Lying on my stomach in the dust I peered through the chicken wire and persuaded myself that I could still see it. It didn't look like the bottom of a Coke can to me. One day I would come into school with some wire cutters and go under there myself.

Perhaps this was what faith in God felt like.

Whenever I hear about the Elgin Marbles I imagine they're marbles of this kind. I am completely uninterested in disabusing myself of this fancy.

Maybe one of them is a Tenner Clear.

Déjà Vu Too

2011-11-13T14:33:00.002Z

I'm sure this has happened before. Do you think it has happened before? Don't you remember reading a blog entry by me on the subject of déjà vu?

However in this case it actually has. I did indeed write about déjà vu back in September 2009. I'm not intending to go over the same ground here, but recently woke from a dream with some new insights into what might make this bizarre sensation, this mental feedback, tick.

In the original blog entry I hypothesised that déjà vu was caused by the short term memory (in other words the current experience, the present, the now) being misidentified as long term memory. This does make some kind of sense. However doesn't explain one of the stronger sensations that can be experienced during a promnesiac episode. Often my experience of déjà vu is not so much I'm sure this has happened before but rather I am sure that I have dreamed this before. This makes me inclined to think that déjà vu may be the activation of a system that is usually only intended for use during unconsciousness.

In waking life the short and long term memory have quite clear and separate purposes. The long term is your backstory, who you are, what you're doing here and how you got there. It sits on the organic equivalent of a hard disk, immutable and unchanging from day to day, at least in theory. The short term is the working space of the consciousness, the RAM, the now. You can see how the latter of these two memory types might work just as well when dreaming, but perhaps not the former...

When do dreams actually begin? If you think about it, they don't. There isn't a moment when you settle down in the cinema seat of the Cartesian Night Cinema, hand in a bucket of warm popcorn, the lights dim and the words Our Feature Presentation appear on the screen. Dreams sneak up on you when you're not looking, climb inside your head and attempt to convince you that you were embroiled in this story all along, that the reason it seems a bit incoherent is that you simply weren't concentrating. If you start wondering about this kind of thing too much during a dream you might find yourself having to run away from a monster or trying to explain to everyone on a crowded bus why you don't have any underpants or trousers on.

Any period of awareness that doesn't begin in bed is a very bad thing. In prehistory it would very probably mean that you'd been knocked unconscious by a predator and so feelings of panic and terror would be useful for removing oneself from danger. In the modern world the panic and terror remains even if the blackout is caused by over-drinking. So in order to prevent every dream starting out as a nightmare the brain has to fool you into thinking you were there all along. A large chunk of false short-term memory would do the trick nicely. There was a bit before, even if you can't quite remember what it was now.

Of course this isn't the only way that the dreaming brain has to pull to wool over your sleeping eyes. In order for dreams to make sense your imagined past quite often has to be very different from reality. So a false long-term memory also has to be constructed, one which, provided you don't examine it too closely, will serve to shore up the imaginary present you think you're living through. It's a common occurrence in dreams that you suddenly remember things that of course always were the case, only you'd forgotten. That the Queen used to live next door to you. That you could fly when you put your mind to it. That you could sometimes travel back in time. That you used to be a character in Eastenders. And so on.

This false long-term memory can't be a coherent structure as this would imply that a brand new one would have to be pieced together for every dream, which would in turn have to be scripted in advance. This clearly isn't the case. The false long-term memory must therefore consist simply of a mechanism which, when queried, always replies "Yes, that's right, that's what happened" in order to support whatever absurdity the dreaming brain is currently entertaining as reality.

So if this false long-term memory is accidentally activated during wakefulness and applied to whatever you are currently experiencing you might think it had happened before.

Or perhaps, if the scent of a dream lingers around the response from this mechanism, that you'd dreamed it before.

Dumb as Death's Head

2011-10-30T13:46:00.001Z

As a child I was absolutely terrified by skeletons in general and skulls in particular.

I am curious now as to where this fear sprang from. Of course skulls are associated with death but as a very young child death is something you are blissfully unaware of. Is the fear of the skull something built in, an instinct that evolved over time or is it something that is learned?

Very young children do learn to recognise faces very early on, and smiles in particular. You would expect that a baby's instinct upon being presented with a skull would be to smile - the skull is, after all, a very simplistic representation of a smiling face. One way of testing this would be to experiment with babies and pictures of skulls but this could very well turn out to be unethical and cruel should the findings of the research be that that a fear of the old bone face is not learned but is in fact built in...

It could well be built in. In prehistoric times human bones would generally only be found in dangerous places like a lion's larder. They'd also be found in situations where an entire tribe had been wiped out by contagion - Thugg the Caveman and his band of foragers would do well to steer well clear from a valley in which they discovered that the human inhabitants had died so quickly that they hadn't a chance to bury their dead. Fear is a much better enforcer than a mere sign saying "keep out" which explains the presence of the death's head on warning notices to this day. Like the colours yellow and black the skull may be an icon of fear that is wired into our brains.

If it is learned then it must be learned at a very young age. The appearance of skulls in visual media associated with frightening situations might do it, but this would take time. To gather that a skull is a bad thing a child would have to watch a lot of TV and read a lot of picture books with skulls in them - and I think this simply wasn't the case with me. If anything books aimed at children make a point of avoiding the depiction of skulls - as a slightly older child I was relieved that Hergé appeared to have gone out of his way to not draw a skull in The Adventures of Tintin book "Destination Moon" even when illustrating a clever slapstick sequence involving the Thompson Twins, an X-ray machine and a skeleton.

I am inclined to think that fear of the dead is part of our instinctive makeup.

As a child I recall one of my peers saying that like me she hated skeletons. However she had absolutely no idea that a she had a skeleton inside her; she just thought that they were frightening creatures like vampires, werewolves and frankenstein monsters, a mere entry in the dramatis personae of dread. I clarified matters for her and once she realised that I didn't mean she had a small bony imp running around insider her but that a skeleton was in fact the scaffolding upon which she'd been built, she seemed less scared.

This didn't work with me. If anything it used to scare me more. I used to play chicken with myself in front of the bathroom mirror, running my fingertips along the ridges of my eye sockets and cheek bones, pulling faces to discover which expression most revealed the skull beneath the skin. I'd then rush towards the mirror pulling this face in order to see who'd flinched first.

Like all fears, my fear of skulls gradually started diminishing as I reached adulthood. I now have a plaster skull on the shelf above my computer which is in the same room in which I sleep. This would have been unthinkable as a child when I couldn't even bear the thought of a picture of skull in a book on the shelf in the same room in which I slept.

I would like to think that this diminishing of fear is a case of overcoming our instincts. Our instincts may have been very useful in getting us where we are today but they're now standing in our way. Overcoming skull fear is just a start.

We now need to overcome fear itself.

God's Blog

2011-10-09T10:57:00.001+01:00

If you will forgive this entry for being a little meta, it is always nice when someone comments on a blog entry. On the whole I mean this unreservedly. Whether positive or negative, having taken the time to write something underneath means that they've read it, a fact which is much more satisfying than endless hours spent poring over Google Analytics.

Generally the comments fall into three camps.

First are the Me Toos. These are people that generally agree with (or very occasionally feel enlightened by) the content of the entry so much so that they feel moved to express this, often citing incidents from their own experience which match or mirror those being discussed in the main entry.

Then there are the No Buts. These people disagree with some or all of the points covered and furthermore have the facts the prove it - their experience is very different from that depicted in the blog, and they can say why.

Finally there are the Nit Pickers. Their response is not as broad as that of the Me Toos or the No Buts and generally tends to focus on one aspect of what was discussed - perhaps a detail of one paragraph, a specific example, a word used. In particular it tends to focus on how the author has got it wrong. I suspect this is because the aspect touches on something which is very close to their heart and they simply can't let what they consider a gross misrepresentation of something they care passionately about to pass.

All of these are valid comments and all equally rewarding. Sometimes you get all three types at the bottom of one entry. The primary nugget of information that I take away from the interaction is that at least they all actually read the thing. My time writing it was well spent.

Sometimes you get spammers as well, some well meaning, some not. At the bottom of an entry which was probably about quantum theory and the nature of consciousness or something I got a comment inviting me to sent in a complaint to the BBC about a trailer for Graham Norton's Over the Rainbow which had appeared across the bottom of the screen during the climax of the Doctor Who episode Time of Angels. I have yet to have a comment from someone trying to sell pharmaceuticals or fake university degrees, although I assume it is only a matter of time.

But the other day I received a comment that was none of the above. I reproduce it here verbatim:

HELLO ,MY BLOG AT HTTP://SLUGGISHA.BLOGSPOT.COM HAS OVER 60 POSTS OF MUSIC FROM MY BAND ,CAT MACHINE!IN EXISISTENCE FROM 9/1990-9/1991! I WILL NOT ASK YOU TO CEASE AND DESIST FROM USING OUR NAME (COPYRIGHTED!) IF YOU AGREE TO PIMP MY SITES ON YOURS!
HTTP://SLUGGISHA.BLOGSPOT.COM
HTTP://MEDIACHRIST.BLOGSPOT.COM
I WILL ALSO LINK TO YOUR SITE!
THANKS , GOD

I must admit I was surprised, not least because as a rationalist I had hitherto been convinced that God was an elaborate fiction invented by primitive human beings to explain the mysteries of a vast and complex universe and later sequestered by those in power as a method of controlling the masses. And yet here He was posting a comment on my blog.

At first I was puzzled by the fact that it was all capital letters - surely such a primitive mechanism as the Caps Lock key would be as naught to The Almighty - but then reasoned that He would probably be used to speaking in Illuminated Manuscript and that the Caps Lock was the only facility available to Him that came even remotely close. I was also puzzled by the fact that He had confused the concept of copyright with the concept of a registered trade mark which seemed a bit of an oversite for someone allegedly omniscient.

Nevertheless I felt I should at least respond. It is not often that one gets such a communication, and during the days of the Old Testament those who did so were considered prophets. Whilst responding to this comment hardly puts me up there with Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, I did feel that I couldn't simply ignore it. And so it comes to pass that I am hereby officially pimping God's blogs. I firstly added them to the My Blogs list and have now written this blog entry to plug them:

Sluggisha's Vault
A BUNCH OF BANDS I'VE BEEN IN!,AND MY SOLO PROJECTS!,AND MY FRIEND'S BANDS!,AND OTHER MUSICS YOU WILL FIND NOWHERE ELSE!THE 80'S-90'S FT.MYERS,FLORIDA UNDERGROUND SCENE!,WGOD RADIO PODCASTS!,AND THE OFFICIAL HOME OF WHEELCHAIR FULL OF OLD MEN RECORDS AND TAPES ON THE WEB!!!MUSIC YOU WILL FIND NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD!!SLUGGISHA!!

Media Christ
Music*Art*Video*Zines*Flyers*Movies*TV And Other Cultural Phenomena From The Deepest,Darkest Crevices Of The Underground ..And More

Amen.

It's Our Policy

2011-09-17T18:39:00.005+01:00

I was interested to read today's Guardian article about the journalist who was stopped from writing down the prices of items in Tesco so much so that I even made a comment below the article. I had assumed from it and from some of the other comments that followed that photography would be even less welcome in Tesco stores and wondered what this meant for the manufacturers and promoters of goods who have started putting QR Codes on their products in the name of marketing.

Still, I thought, it's only Tesco.

However, a couple of hours later I was to discover that this attitude was more widespread than I thought. I was passing through Churchill Square Shopping Centre and spotted a mildly amusing notice on a shop front which, as is my wont, I took a snap of. See above. I was immediately accosted by a security woman who told me that I wasn't allowed to take photographs.

I was so taken aback by this that I stood there for a few seconds before walking across to where she'd retreated and asked her what this was all about. I would just like to make clear at this point that the entire exchange was conducted in a civilized and polite manner; I saw no reason to become confrontational and to her credit she answered reasonably and truthfully even if substance of what she was saying didn't entirely add up. At no point did she over-react in the way that the Tesco staff allegedly had and claim what I had done was illegal.

She explained that it was the policy of the shopping centre not to allow photography.

I pointed out that as I wasn't employed by the shopping centre I wasn't bound by their policy.

She said that by coming onto the premises of the shopping centre I was tacitly agreeing to be bound by their policy and that if I didn't want to agree to this, I was at liberty to leave.

It sounded odd to me, but I was prepared to accept it. But did you know that when you walk into a shopping centre you could be agreeing to rules and regulations thought up by the shopping centre that don't necessarily apply in the outside world? Well apparently so. It's just as well that it wasn't also their policy that customers had to walk around backwards with one eye closed.

nothing about "no photography" here

She also explained quite reasonably why it had to be a blanket ban on photography (as they weren't allowed to discriminate) and I would like to think that in the end we agreed to disagree - I pointed out how I believed such measures were the thin end of the wedge when it came to the erosion of civil liberty and she opined that she thought they were necessary.

But it's odd how the "prevention of terrorism" mantra is chanted whenever our civil liberties are undermined in this manner. Now I don't know this and I don't have any facts and figures available to support my belief, but I would be very surprised if there is on record any instance of a terrorist act being carried out as a direct result of people being allowed to take photographs in non-sensitive areas such as shopping centres or city streets. However there are examples I can think of in recent years when public photography and/or filming has brought the abuse of civil rights into the public eye. The prevention of such public scrutiny of corporations or government employees is in my mind far more likely to be behind the introduction of any anti-photography laws or policies.

I wish I could remember who said this, as it has become one of my favourite quotes of the past couple of years:

"if the government had understood what the internet was in the first place, they'd never have let any of us near it"

Citizens are now walking around with television studios in their pockets. Small wonder that the casual abuse of civil liberty commonplace in the past is now considered unacceptable - it's far more difficult to get away with. And so, just as the primary concern of Health and Safety is neither health nor safety but litigation, the primary concern of any so-called anti-terrorism legislation or policy could well be addressing this unexpected freedom of information and communication that the citizens now have.

Who watches the watchmen? No-one. It's illegal.

References

Now it's illegal to write down prices in a Tesco supermarket
Guardian, 17 September 2011
Photographers' Rights in the UK
Information is Beautiful, 22 January 2010

Sagan's Brain

2011-09-11T17:11:00.006+01:00

When I was growing up it seemed to be a fairly common thing for children's heroes to be footballers. My friend Shamus expressed an admiration for Alan Ball although I suspected that this was just because his name was Ball. Shamus was obsessed with all things football related, so a footballer actually named Ball... well there was no choice really. It was lucky that the Arsenal centre forward Booty McGoalmouth was only a figment of my fevered imagination.

I didn't have such heroes. Football didn't interest me and I had no idea who Cyril was nor what his nice one entailed. My heroes were Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Doctor Who, Charles Darwin and Mr Spock. This meant that had I ever fallen into a coma my parents would have had a bit of trouble getting one of them to come to my bedside and try and rouse me seeing as they were either dead or fictional (although I expect Tom Baker would have given it a go in character).

However I did meet someone when I was twelve who, even though I had no idea who he was at the time, went on to become a hero. I had attended the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures once before when David Attenborough had delivered a series of lectures on the languages of animals when I had been eight; now I was going again as they were all about another subject that interested me to the point of obsession.

Space.

Or more specifically the planets. I hadn't heard of the lecturer before but found his manner engaging and friendly. Despite his humility and the way he talked without seeming to blow his own trumpet it became clear that he'd had a pivotal role in many of the unmanned NASA missions to the planets which at the time had just experienced a resurgence in activity with the Viking Landers on Mars and the launch of the Voyagers to the outer planets. His name was Carl Sagan.

The main thing I recall about him was his passion for the subject and how, when after one of the lectures I asked him a (fairly simple) question about rivers on Mars, he responded with a level of enthusiasm I would have thought more appropriate for a discussion with one of his peers about an exciting new discovery. But no, he was being enthusiastic to me because to him all "Yooman" minds were fascinating and worth engaging with and if they showed an interest in his interests then all the better. There was no impression of any sense of assumed superiority on his part - even though I was a child and he was one of the bigwigs at NASA I got the impression that had there been more time he would have been happy to sit down and listen to my childish waffling about space with interest and encouragement.

But this was him all over and something that is reflected in all his work. Over the next few years I devoured any Sagan I could get my hands on which back then consisted of only a handful of books; Broca's Brain which contained "reflections on the romance of science", The Dragons of Eden in which he pondered the evolution of human intelligence and The Cosmic Connection which discussed the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. I think it was the third of these volumes which most resonated with me as the thought that there were other beings out there who might one day swoop down to take me away from all this was a seductive one, even if it was symptomatic of an older and far less scientific way of thinking.

Then of course Sagan rose to far greater public prominence via Cosmos, a TV series exploring the entire history of creation and our place as sentient beings in it. Everyone watched as this scientific superhero dressed in his signature costume of brown jacket and rollneck top explored the universe in his starlike spaceship of the imagination and waxed lyrical about the history of human thought. He wasn't just interested in the universe itself but in these miniature reflections of it wandering around being sentient and in their attempts to make sense of it in their own way.

He was never dismissive or scathing about anything and kept an open mind, retaining a calm and reasonable patience about his demeanour that many politicians and television presenters might do well to learn from. The only time he appeared to come anywhere close to losing his cool was when he discussed the human capacity for self destruction and how the cold war might mean that we'd destroy ourselves before we discovered we weren't alone in the universe. Then his brow would darken and you'd get the distinct impression that he was talking to the young and urging them with all his might not to make the same mistakes their parents had made.

Another time he appeared to get slightly cross was when discussing Immanuel Velikovsky, a barking mad Russian astronomer who came up with a breathtakingly ridiculous theory which he published in the 1950s bestseller Worlds in Collision. This book was by all accounts a von Daniken-esque flight of fancy in which he postulates that conditions in the Solar System were more like a game of interplanetary bar billiards than nature's clockwork.

The strange thing was that Sagan wasn't getting cross with Velikovsky himself who was a frequent subject of passages in his books and in the Cosmos TV series. I suspect he picked such a ridiculous theory to critique in order to illustrate how important the scientific method is and how it needs to be applied even in cases such as this. His anger was directed more at the scientific community itself and their dismissive attitude:

"No matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas, least of all by scientists committed to the free exchange of ideas."

(Carl Sagan, An Analysis of "Worlds in Collision": Introduction 1977)

This is something I believe all scientists and people of a scientific bent should bear in mind. At all times we need to ask ourselves whether we are believing something because it is true or simply because we want it to be true. The latter is unscientific.

"I'm a great fan of science, you know"

(Slartibartfast, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1978)

Problems can arise when science replaces other more irrational beliefs in people's minds. In an attempt to be enlightened and to better themselves some people adopt science, scepticism and atheism as religion substitutes, as something they can hold onto and which can provide a moral high ground from which the view of other less enlightened people gives them a wonderful sense of superiority. This is symptomatic of an older and far less scientific way of thinking.

By all means debunk the charlatans using pseudoscience to swindle the masses and the fraudsters using belief in an intangible and unreasonable god to control them, but please do so in a scientific and methodical manner. Possible until disproven is as important a tenet as Innocent until proven guilty.

It's not enough simply to call Velikovsky a twat.

Hysterical voices prophesying doom

2011-08-28T13:41:00.000+01:00

In the aftermath of the unrest of the summer of 2011 one might be forgiven for thinking that civilisation is collapsing around our ears and that we are facing the end of days. Except that this kind of doomsaying itself is nothing new and has existed for as long as mankind has been keeping records of it. An excellent article in The Economist put it far better than I could and suggested that perhaps Grand Theft Auto is no more responsible for the moral decline in today's youth than Chaplin's early silents were for the Great Depression.

If anything such invective merely demonstrates that if one thing is inevitable it's aging. The old will always disparage the young because they are angry about getting old. The answer to "are you getting old or is it crap?" is invariably "You're getting old".

Or is it?

I work at the same educational establishment where years ago I studied for a degree. Back then things seemed so much simpler, so much more black and white. We successfully conducted a campaign to ban the sale of The Sun from the campus newsagent mainly because of Page Three and its offensiveness to women.

In cynical retrospect I suspect that many of the spotty young men who got involved with this (myself included) may have had ulterior motives. In allying themselves with such a feminist cause they no doubt hoped to gain enough brownie points with the women that they might stand a chance of seeing some real breasts... Nevertheless it was a start. Whatever their original motives, involvement in such campaigns might mean that some political thought might rub off on such young men. In the end might they not become better people for it? It is not for nothing that ones student years are often synonymous with political activism.

Fast forward to the present day as an employee of said establishment when during Freshers' Week I get cornered by an angry student complaining that I was "infringing his rights" by not permitting him to view pornography sites on the PCs in the computer labs.

Excuse me?

Quite apart from the fact that computer labs are not exactly the ideal arenas for masturbation or indeed that the presence of a lascivious lad lubricating the love monkey might make any female students in the vicinity feel threatened, does he really think that his right to view porn is something worth making a political stink about?

This is the difference between then and now. No longer what can I do for my politics?, but instead what can my politics do for me? The association of activism with students has remained but the focus of such activism has moved from the world to the self.

I hope that this is a temporary measure. Just like those schoolboys who hoped campaigning with feminists might get them a girlfriend, I would like to think that exposure to the mechanisms of activism will eventually convince members of the Open Access Porn movement that there are other more worthy causes to champion, that politics doesn't always have to be about the self.

Some people never make the leap from selfish to selfless politics and even go on to make a career in it, but this is nothing new either. This egocentricity is perfectly demonstrated by the current government - personal selfishness writ large. The Tories are not an evil empire with a grand plan - that would imply too many organisational skills on their part and people are far too inefficient for that. They're just selfish and such draconian measures they implement are symptomatic of this.

The only reason they get away with it is that people buy into the illusion of power. The idea that the government is in control and has an overarching plan is about as plausible as any other conspiracy theory. There is no conspiracy, just a bunch of very unpleasant people in control whose opinions are amplified by the people accepting the structure of the status quo and believing the falsehood that if they've got into power they must ipso facto know what they are doing.

They don't know what they're doing.

They must be stopped.

References

We Have Been Here Before, The Economist, 16 August 2011
Ever Decreasing Socialism, Catmachine, 23 August 2010
Ever Decreasing Socialism 2: Same Old Tory, Catmachine, 12 January 2011

The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened

2011-08-06T13:14:00.001+01:00

Like many infuriating things, it happened on a bus.

Perhaps I travel on buses too often these days. Given the attitude of the local bus company and the various ways I have been treated by them over the years from outright lying to abusive emails, perhaps I should simply take my custom elsewhere? Easier said than done. They have a virtual monopoly in the area and on days when cycling is not an option (say when the weather decides to drop lakes on the city from a great height or when I have several errands to run either before or after work) what else am I supposed to do?

I usually sit upstairs. This is partly a hangover from childhood where not only is sitting upstairs more exciting but also something that inexplicably my parents never wanted to do, and partly because on the whole there tend to be more seats up there. Perhaps some people experience the same disinclination to climb the cramped staircase as my parents did.

Sometimes it gets crowded; that's unavoidable. Somebody will sit next to me. If I'm lucky it will at least be somebody with a passing acquaintance with the notion of personal space.

Of course on this occasion it wasn't.

He was one of a group of three or four people, all of whom were so indistinguishable that is was almost as if there was a secret factory somewhere turning out these monsters. For a start he was about six foot ten. He dropped into the seat next to me and decided to sit with his legs apart. Giant hairy legs clad in baggy khaki shorts and hiking sandals. I could no more have stood my ground than I could have stopped the tide coming in. He had a thick wiry beard and big sunglasses; from the way he behaved I could only assume that the latter cut out not only the excess light but the sight of anyone else at all, so selfish and unselfconscious was his behaviour. He dropped his overstuffed rucksack on the floor in front of him and with one swift movement unzipped it and pulled out out a family sized jar of Nutella which he placed on the seat between his legs. He unscrewed the lid and set it to one side.

I was puzzled. Was he about to start making sandwiches or something?

No, it was far worse than that. He reached into a transparent plastic bag stuffed in the side pocket of his rucksack and extracted a large wholemeal bread roll from which he proceded to tear chunks, and dip them manually into the Nutella before stuffing the whole chocolaty mess into his maw. He did this skillfully and with such precision and economy of movement that it was almost like watching an animal performing some instinctive behaviour on a wildlife programme.

It was a million times more infuriating that that, though. I wanted to kill him. There was something so insulting and wrong about what he was doing, even though I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I suppose part of it might have been because I have had to be careful about what I eat in recent years lest I balloon out, and the sight of this great galoot stuffing high calorie foodstuffs down his gullet was taunting me with what other more fit and healthy members of the human race could do with impunity.

But it wasn't really that; I don't like Nutella anyway. It was more the relentless way he was ramming these carbs into his mouth and the way that when he swallowed his Adam's Pineapple bobbed up and down in a neck like an elephant's leg that disgusted me. It was maddening on a very basic animal level, on the same level that watching a pig at its trough is a less than an appetising sight.

Finally the ordeal was over. The bread roll was consumed. I was just breathing a sigh of relief when the unthinkable happened. He deftly reached down into his rucksack and with a flourish produced another large bread roll and begun the process all over again.

Inside I was screaming.

The strangest thing is that to this day he has no idea of the depth of negative emotion he produced in me by doing something which, to him, was probably almost unconscious.

He was a bit hungry.

Half Arthur

2011-07-29T18:23:00.003+01:00

I wonder whether they still get children to memorise poems in school?

I used to find this terrifying. At that age I hadn't heard of the memory techniques that make such feats easier and as such used to struggle. One of the ones I recall having the most trouble with began "I must go down to the sea again...", but to be frank I don't think I can be blamed for this failing. Besides, the protagonist of this verse sounds arrogant and demanding:

"And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by"

Oh, that's all is it? An enormous vehicle just given to you, gratis, and then you actually want a celestial body some light years distant to be simply handed to you on a plate simply because you haven't got any idea where you are going?

Repetition seems to be the key to remembering something and as such the only poem I still remember is the one that was drummed into me on a daily basis for as long as I went to school. No doubt you know it too. The Lord's Prayer.

There was always something unpleasant and puzzling about it. It didn't make sense. It didn't stand up to close scrutiny, a characteristic it shared with its host belief system.

Our father who art in heaven...

OK, that bit was fine. Kind of like an email address; ourfather@heaven.com. I wasn't entirely happy with God wanting us to call him "Father" when according to him he'd made us out of dust, but I supposed that it was a kind of admission that the whole dust thing was a bit weak. Plus "Our manufacturer..." didn't quite have the same ring.

Hallowed be thy name...

I didn't get this; being too young to understand the concept of "to hallow" I figured that this simply had to be one of the many names of God, the one we happened to use in this prayer. Like an old fashioned version of Harold.

Thy kingdom come...

This is where it started to get sinister. Quite apart from the sentence structure making a nonsense of the whole thing, the three words painted an unmistakable picture of approaching menace. You'd better watch out, Harold's kingdom is coming. I got a distinct impression of evil castles hiding behind clouds, ready to jump down to Earth and get us.

Thy will be done...

I was sure there was a word missing here. We were reassuring Harold that his something would be done, but what? Thy wishes will be done? Bit sloppy to have missed a word out here and even sloppier to have continued missing it out over centuries.

On Earth as it is in Heaven

Kind of saying "As above so below" which was fair enough but it seemed a bit of a non-sequitur. Perhaps it meant that whatever it was of Harold's that we were supposed to be doing in the previous bit was supposed to be done in both Earth and Heaven. Fair enough, although surely what went on in heaven was his department.

Give us each day our daily bread

Now that I did understand. A brown sliced loaf. But as far as I was aware my parents always bought the bread. I'd never seen any god-bread. Perhaps it was for grownups only?

It was also at this point that the whole tone of the prayer changed. Up until this point we'd been sucking up to Harold in a "You're great and we'll do whatever you say" manner and then without so much as an indication of a gear change we were demanding bread. It got more extreme in the next two lines.

And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us

Now we're telling Harold to do as we do. We're not going to be like him, he has to be like us. You must forgive us, because look, we forgive other people. For trespass, anyway.

The only other place I had come across this word was on notices informing me that I must not trespass upon the railway, and so this couplet conjured up images of lines, sleepers and pumice gravel. Did God have a railway that we were often naughty enough to trespass upon? Were we trying to make him think that each of us too had a private railway upon which people were constantly trespassing?

And lead us not into temptation

Now we're suggesting that Harold might be a bad influence on us and admonishing him for this. This line suggests that if there is any temptation around we probably won't succumb unless Harold leads us there. Naughty Harold!

But deliver us from evil

Another demand. Now we are casting Harold in the role of a moral postman. But it was the final bit that used to worry me the most.

For thine is the kingdom
The power and the glory
For ever and ever, amen

I thought of these final lines as the "bad bit" because my mum, who had been brought up in a convent, got annoyed that this bit had been tacked on. I thought of it as somehow like apartheid and like the British army in Northern Ireland - one of the bad things in this world that shouldn't be allowed, but were being forced upon us.

And there we were being forced to chant it every day. It's no wonder I ended up an atheist.

Genesis of the Procrastinators

2011-06-28T19:58:00.003+01:00

I fail to see the evolutionary advantage of procrastination.

The bulk of human behaviour can be traced to an evolutionary advantage at some point in the past, even if it's one that no longer applies. Wanting to gorge oneself on carbohydrate and sugar rich food? Yes, an advantage in times of scarcity. Xenophobia? Repugnant these days but undeniably an advantage in days when you and the tribe in the next valley were competing for the same food source. Love? But of course, love leads to sex and sex leads to children; miniature copies of yourself to act as vessels which will carry your DNA down the road of time into the future.

There's no intent here, it's all cold mathematics. Those people who were greedy / xenophobic / loving simply survived marginally better than those that weren't, with the result that the world now consists of us, their descendants. And rather annoyingly we now have to unpick all that instinct because some of it is quite clearly a supernormal stimulus and other parts of it are morally wrong.

Strictly speaking the bulk of our behaviour should be explicable in these terms, automatic responses reinforced by survival. And looking at it a lot of it is and even things that aren't are revealed under analysis to be the mutant descendants of once advantageous anthropological functions.

But procrastination? How on Earth did that evolve?

It turned out that Thugg the Caveman didn't die after all; he was lucky. Just as the leopard was poised to sink its teeth and claws into the soft flesh of his belly a meteorite struck it clear between the eyes and it collapsed to the ground, dead with a smoking hole in its skull.

Thugg stood up shakily and regarded the carcass of his erstwhile enemy. Up on top of the ridge his colleagues whooped and shrieked with chimpanic glee. None of them yet believed in god; the mental disorder that would one day become religion not yet being that widespread in the population, and yet Thugg's miraculous escape seemed almost uncanny.

Thugg grabbed the leopard by the tail and begun towing it back to the caves. Strictly speaking it was his "kill" and so it was up to him to skin and gut it, distributing the meat to those of the tribe that he saw fit and thereafter wearing the pelt as a badge of honour that he would one day pass on to his descendants should any of the women ever want to do the wriggly lying down dance with him often enough for them to have children.

Still, with a leopard-pelt his standing in the tribe might well increase. He dragged the carcass up the rocky slope to his batchelor cave and dumped it at the back behind the rock shaped like an elephant's knee. He'd skin it in the morning. He was too tired now. He lay down on the pile of dried plants and squirrel tails and almost instantly fell into a dreamless sleep.

Early the next morning he awoke with a start to the sight of an unusual shape silhouetted in the cave mouth. Shrieking, he jumped up and grabbed his club although as it turned out the noise of his terror had already done the trick. The hyaena was running for its life and was already disappearing into the pre-dawn gloom. Thugg stretched, walked to the entrance and peed over the lip of the cave. The trickle of urine ran down a well-carved channel in the rock face and eventually dripped over the lintel of Old Bugga's cave and into a puddle. Old Bugga had never been able to work out where the puddle came from and why it was there even during the dry season, but never one to look a gift eohippus in the mouth he tended to use it to wash his feet when he came home in the evening.

Thugg wandered back to his makeshift nest. The hyaena had obviously been attracted by the smell of the dead leopard; the sooner he got it skinned and distributed the better. First thing in the morning, he told himself before losing consciousness again.

The tribe didn't give names to the days of the week, but when Thugg woke again it felt like a Saturday. The sun was already high, its light streaming throughout the cave mouth and he knew that he had a busy day ahead of him dealing with the leopard. And he would be doing it very shortly.

But first he needed to stretch his legs. He strolled down to the news cave and spent half an hour reading the wall paintings depicting the activities of the tribe over the past week. OK, so he already knew most of it, but it was comforting and reassuring to see it depicted there in ochre and grey. And look, there was a picture of him dragging the leopard back to his cave. The leopard. He'd really have to get back and get started on it soon; it felt like it was going to be another hot one and they all knew how quickly meat could spoil in this heat. But maybe he'd do the Sudughku first.

An hour later Thugg was standing by the spring chatting with Yugg about his plans for the leopard carcass. Or at least that's what he was trying to do, but Yugg kept steering the conversation back to the problems he was having with his aunt Grukka, which Thugg found very frustrating. Eventually he managed to extract himself from the firing line of Yugg's monologue with the excuse that he really had to get on with slicing up that leopard.

Two hours later he was in the cave working hard on his iCork, the scrap of tree bark he kept with the icons scratched on it. He was sure that there was a better way of arranging the icons to make the whole thing more efficient. He glanced towards the back of the cave. The leopard's dead eyes regarded him accusingly. He really should get on with it. The sooner I start, the sooner I finish, he thought, inventing painfully obvious aphorisms.

Ten minutes later he was squatting next to the furry body regarding his flint knife. It really wasn't very sharp. If he was going to make the best job of it, he really needed to sharpen it. There was no point waiting around for the Iron Age.

Eventually the knife was sharp enough to satisfy his rather exacting standards. The problem now was that the sun had moved round and it was difficult to see. He could of course have taken the carcass outside and begun butchering it, but that might have attracted an audience and an audience always put him off. Best to leave it to the next morning. Besides, a group of them were planning on going down to the grove of apple trees later. According to Nugg a load of rotten old apples had apparently collected in a gully where they had turned into a noxious sludge which, if you squeezed it into a coconut shell, produced a potent liquid which made you go insane and fall over sideways when you drank it. Cider, Nugg called it.

Thugg woke the next morning with a pounding headache. He had a vague memory of waking in the night, running to the cave mouth and vomiting onto the heads of a couple of hyaenas that were trying to sneak in whist he was asleep.

The leopard's eyes stared glassily at him, a fly crawling over one of them. Thugg rolled over in his nest and frowned. There was no way he was going to start work on it today. Best to wait until he was feeling better...

A week later Thugg's cave stank to high heaven and and he was eventually forced to drag the rotting carcass out to the swamp and dump in in a sinkhole. The pelt was unusable. He'd failed to gain the respect he'd hoped for and furthermore people were now laughing at him. He seemed to have gained a bad reputation. None of the women would want to do the lying down wriggling dance with him now; the genes of Thugg would not be passed on...

None of this explains how procrastination arose; in fact this rather common sense tale implies it should tend to disappear from the population at large. It's all very puzzling, and even in modern psychological circles it's a poorly understood disorder. Incidentally, I am not passing judgment here. I am just as bad as, if not worse than, the next person when it comes to putting off until tomorrow what I should be doing today.

However I am pleased to say that I did recently discover one way of forcing myself to get on with it and furthermore actually finish what I started. Apparently it all comes down to tomatoes...

Well not exactly. The trick is called the Pomodoro Technique. I realise by blogging about this I run the risk of sounding like a gullible mark proselytizing a dodgy self-help procedure, but not only does it actually work, it does not require you to buy anything. I suspect the secret of its success lies in its simplicity.

Once you have decided on the procrastination-prone task you're going to tackle you should set an automatic timer to ring in twenty five minutes time (the kind of timer doesn't matter but the original one used was a kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato, hence the name). Work on the task until the timer rings. Set the timer for five minutes and during that five minutes take a break. When the timer rings again, set it for another twenty five minute period (or "pomodoro") and so on and so forth. After four "pomodori" take a longer break of half an hour or so.

And it really works for me. Much as I get the urge to procrastinate during the twenty five minute segments I know that I can't because the clock is ticking. During my five minute breaks I can reward myself by going to the toilet or looking at Twitter, but during each pomodoro the task is sacrosanct.

Of course it really helps that there's an app for it...

I, Information

2011-06-24T20:51:00.003+01:00

Some two years ago or less when this blog was concerning itself with the nature of consciousness I wrote an entry about the so called "Cartesian Theatre" and the flaws inherent in this dualistic model of the self.

To reiterate: the theatre is based on the idea that all your senses - vision, hearing, touch, smell - are sending signals down your nerves and into the brain. Once in the brain these multiple media are combined by some mental home entertainment system into a presentation for the consumption of the actual Self. Lord Consciousness sits in a large leather swivel chair at the controls of the brain, waving a cigar around in one hand, universal remote in the other. This feels right. It's how we imagine ourselves, a mini-me occupying the seat of sentience. It's what we feel we really are.

The problem is that what feels right is very often wrong. Flat earth? Wrong. Sun goes round the earth? Wrong.

Perhaps even though it feels that our real self is a pilot homunculus sitting in the cockpit of our head, this too is wrong. Thinking about it, the flaws in the concept become apparent. If it was actually true, then on some level then it would be the pilot, the homunculus, that was conscious. So where is her or his consciousness located? If the input from our senses are being displayed on screen and played through speakers inside the cockpit then it must mean that the pilot is looking at them, is listening to them. With whatever passes for her or his eyes and ears.

This means that we have to then carry out the same investigation within the pilot's head. Who pilots the pilot? Eventually we end up with an infinite recursive sequence of pilots dwindling down into microscopic infinity like a psychological matryoshka doll.

Generally, whenever we come up against an infinity in science it usually means that something is wrong somewhere - that we're either missing something obvious or including something nonsensical. In this instance it's probably the latter - the Homunculus Argument is nonsense.

But if we're throwing out the infinite recursive pilots, it becomes clear that we don't even need one of them. Our consciousness isn't a being sitting in our head studying the input from our senses; it's far more likely to be a phenomenon emerging from those senses themselves, a self-awareness arising from the establishment of a small model of the universe in one location by the sense organs. The seat of consciousness isn't in the head (somewhere behind the eyes). It exists as a standing wave in the flow of data being collected by the sense organs and being compared with the memory records.

But on some level this also feels right. Our skin is our largest sensory organ and it's one that clearly divides the universe into "self" and "everything else". We are our bodies, our minds a meniscus existing in the boundary between the somatic system and the vast gulf of inter-selfish space.

This has interesting implications when you think of the myriad new channels of communication and sense that are becoming available to us at the dawn of of the information age. The boundary between our selves and everything else is becoming blurred.

This has already been happening for a while. Whilst I am not a driver myself, I am given to understand that when driving cars some people do experience some kind of an extension to the boundaries of self; it moves from their skin to the paintwork of their car. Enrapt in the process of driving, their hands on the controls and feet on the pedals become the equivalent of nerves and muscles. The only thing missing is the face and a way of communicating. Blowing the horn is about all that's open to them which is why it is heard so often even though the highway code expressly forbids it in all but a very few situations. Perhaps in the future some cars might have holograms of their drivers' heads hovering above the roof, reproducing the expressions and words of the human within. And at such a time the boundary will have slipped; not inwards to another fake homunculus but outwards to a new definition of self, a new boundary.

Spend enough time in your car and you might come to believe that you are a car.

But this evolution need not be confined to the drivers of cars. The tentacles of our communication and subsequently our sensory organs are increasingly becoming remote. Even in a fumbling primitive manner, like the first fish to climb up onto the land and lie gasping on the beach, many of us already have a very distinct online presence if we add up all the services we use; the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Tumblrs, our blogs, instant messaging, email, comments left on forums and feedback left on eBay, the webcams, the Soundcloud, the Audioboos. We are leaving more and more of a trace of ourselves on what is increasingly these days called The Cloud (which when it comes down to it is just a more nebulous and cool way of talking about the internet).

And just as the seat of our consciousness is demonstrably not a homunculus sitting in our head checking all the data flowing in from our sense organs then there is no real reason for it to be our physical bodies sitting at the computer or engrossed in our iPhones whilst on public transport.

Our consciousness doesn't have a seat. If it could be said to exist anywhere it's in our sphere of influence, the arena from which we are gathering information and with which we are interacting. Up until recently that has been coincidental with our physical bodies, bodies which over the past hundred years have occasionally been enhanced with shells of metal and plastic known as automobiles.

But now we have something much more empowering than the car. Our bodies have new insubstantial but nevertheless real extensions into information space. We don't need direct brain implants to experience cyberspace; get engrossed enough in what you are doing and you will no doubt start to believe that you're there. When they subtly change the layout of a familiar web page it's just as disconcerting as when they change the shape of the landscape; our internal model of the universe fails the cyclic redundancy check when compared with the world as observed and has to be corrected.

When you type on a keyboard you're no more aware of the exact sequence of muscle movements being sent to your fingers than you are of the chemicals within those muscles metabolising; eventually perhaps even the use of the keyboard will become as transparent to us as our muscles and it will be the intent, the meaning that matters.

And perhaps with enough of a physical disconnect we will start envisioning a different self image, an attenuated ghostlike databody striding through the information landscape un-noticed until it wants to be, as unaware of the flesh it leaves behind as you are now unaware of the existence of your liver.

You become your avatar.

References

The Cartesian Theatre - Daniel Dennett, YouTube, 17 May 2009
Cartesian Theatre Company, Catmachine, 25 September 2009
The Homunculus Argument, Wikipedia
I Am My Car (and my Toothbrush), Psychology Today, 8 January 2010

Space Child 2: Moon Mania

2011-06-11T13:38:00.002+01:00

One of the best things about being a child is that time lasts so long and that there is so much to do that one soon forgets about things. As described in the last entry, my parents entered a competition on my behalf, the first prize of which was a flight to America to see the launch of the next Apollo mission. Whilst it was true it was always at the back of my mind that I might win, in the meantime I just got on with other things. We didn't win of course but I don't recall not winning. The possibility just faded from sight.

This didn't affect my obsession with space flight in the least. I was still hooked and for someone with such interests it was an exciting time to be alive.

The odd thing is that I don't remember whether my interest in space travel was sparked off by my parents waking me up in the middle of the night to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon or whether the only reason they bothered to wake me up in the middle of the night in the first place was that I was already obsessed by this point. Whichever way around it was, my memory of the event is still very clear. I remember my mother being almost overexcited by the entire concept (which in itself was an unusual experience for me). At one point the picture from the Moon came through inverted and she suggested we turn the TV upside down...

These nocturnal interludes became a regular thing over the next couple of years - I wanted to be woken up for the launches, landings and splashdowns (I was unable to sleep properly and had nightmares during the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission's journey back to Earth).

I also clearly recall looking up at the moon visible in the blue sky the next day after school and thinking to myself "There are people up there".

When we got a dog I wanted to call it Buzz after Buzz Aldrin. I drew endless pictures of the Saturn V stack and knew all the details of the mission. I even knew what a trans lunar injection burn was.

The world had Moon fever. Adverts at the time would use wafer-thin tenuous links to the moon missions to sell tights. The toy shop down the road had a telescope in the window with a hand written notice "SEE IT!" sellotaped to the tripod. Even as a quite young child I was sceptical about this. Surely a telescope that small couldn't be that powerful and subsequently would be completely incapable of spotting the small craft heading across the abyss to our closest planetary neighbour?

The TV coverage itself was exciting and comforting at the same time; the familiar avuncular figures of Patrick Moore, Cliff Michelmore, Reg Turnill and James Burke presided over the kind of sets normally dedicated to rolling coverage of sports or politics. Apollo got blanket coverage which made the Radio Times listings exciting. All the missions had their own logos and would take over the available channels in a manner of which Big Brother or X Factor could only dream - there were only three channels and Apollo dominated all of them.

These days it's hard to imagine anything other than international sport or lowest common denominator talent shows being given this much coverage. Have we lost interest in matters more exciting and cerebral? I would hope not. The problem is that the human race has stopped making planet-sized gestures such as Apollo. Despite the Cold War element of the moon shots when it came down to it and Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon people forgot their differences and perhaps for the first time thought of themselves as members of a species rather than of a nation state.

We can only hope that it wasn't the last time such an enlightened outlook will become widespread. Humanity needs to do something astonishing to recapture the perspective. Sometimes a photograph of a pale blue dot just isn't enough.

That was the thing though. Back in 1969 people were rightfully astonished by this momentous achievement but for me the moon seemed around the corner. Whilst I was consumed with interest in the missions, to me it seemed like popping down the streets to the chemist rather than the longest journey ever undertaken by man. The Manned Flight to Mars, that was what excited me. The Race Into Space (Man's First Fifty Steps Into The Universe) picture cards that came free with PG Tips had this exciting undertaking as number 50; the pinnacle of the space race and one that I had no doubt would be undertaken well before I was old enough to have a chance of being included on the crew.

My early ambition was Space Correspondent and I was hopeful that not only would I get a job with the BBC but that I would be posted to the moon or no doubt to the the 100 Man Space Base in Orbit which Reg Turnill's book had promised would be reality by my early twenties.

Was this a pipe dream, the hopeless ramblings of an adolescent USA or was it all possible and all that happened was a failure of imagination and finance?

It felt like the whole human race simply lost our nerve. Let's get it back before it's too late.

Space Child 1: Apollo

2011-05-22T18:11:00.001+01:00

I just entered a competition the first prize of which is a journey into space.

I am under no illusions about winning, but it is nice to have these little possibilities hanging there in the back brain giving us cause to imagine just how wonderful would it be if only... Millions of people do the National Lottery every week for instance and the chances of winning that are far less likely.

So you never know, I might win.

And of all the things I really want to do, number one by a long way has always been leaving the planet, if only temporarily. I dream about space travel on a regular basis and am eternally disappointed in the non-arrival of the future that was promised us in our childhood. OK so we have a different future, an amazing one that we could never have imagined back in the seventies. The internet, a whole extra dimension, has been added to human experience in the most significant technological development since Gutenberg and yet...

It's not as good as space travel, is it?

Those of you who have been reading this blog a long time might recall a short entry about two years ago bemoaning the fact that the future had been stolen. I'm going to cover some of that ground again here, although going further than I did last time. But the story of my expectations of space travel go back a long way.

The competition I mentioned above is not the first one I've ever entered that had a fabulous almost mythical prize. Back when I was five or six there was a competition I entered (well, my parents entered it on my behalf) the prize for which would be a trip to Cape Kennedy (as it was then called) to watch the launch of the next Apollo mission.

I seem to recall it wasn't a piece of piss like the kind of competitions they have today. None of this Mars is (a) a planet (b) your mother's house (c) the Roman god of chocolate. The competition had loads of questions and was several pages long with very small print like a benefit application form. In a bid to make sure we answered everything correctly my parents even bought (me) a book called "The Language of Space" by Reg Turnill, a book I still have today.

Some of it makes interesting if depressing reading in retrospect, especially the chapter THE NEXT 20 YEARS IN SPACE. Skipping ahead ten years from publication:

1980: Space Shuttles, carrying 12 men each, expected to reach launch rate of 100 per year. Space Station module to be landed on moon as part of first permanent lunar base.
1981: Earliest possible date for U.S. manned mission to Mars - unlikely to be be achieved; but this could be the year that the Soviet Union launches an expedition. Saturn Orbiter to be launched.
1982: Mercury orbiter to be launched.
1984: Moonbase now built up to 25 men.
1986: Most likely date for first U.S. manned mission to Mars, using Space Station modules as crew quarters, with nuclear rocket stages (probably 3), and a Mars Excursion Module. Moonbase build-up reaches 50 men.
1987: Manned fly-past of Venus by returning Martian expedition.
1989: 100-man Space Base in Earth Orbit.

These predictions were made in the heady post-Apollo days when the technical achievements depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey were considered a conservative estimate, but it's sobering to realise how little of this we have achieved even today - at least we managed Cassini and MESSENGER even if they were twenty to thirty years late.

At the time I believed every word of it of course; I knew it was going to happen. I was really excited about winning this competition as well. It was something big that was also going to happen. I built up all sorts of dreams and fantasies around it, including somehow sneaking into the Apollo capsule and stowing away to the Moon myself. I remember excitedly recounting the details of the competition to Mrs Kelly, a wizened dinner lady with a sour outlook on life. When I mentioned that my parents had helped me with competition questions, a supercilious look crossed her face.

"Well," she sneered, "You cheated then, didn't you?"

I didn't think I'd cheated. Besides, when I won my parents would be going to America with me, wouldn't they? The only thing that now stood in our way was the final question. A "tie-breaker" and we had to complete the sentence:

"I would like to visit Cape Kennedy because..."

In the most apt and original way. Eventually end my parents decided on "...it is the gateway to the stars"

In retrospect a somewhat cheesy answer, but I still live in hope that it will one day become true, despite July 2011 marking the date of the last planned launch of a manned mission from the facility.

If I'm lucky it will become true within my own lifetime.

Next time: Moon Mania

Death After Life

2011-05-17T22:28:00.003+01:00

Increasingly these days I find myself waking up in the night and worrying about death. Worry is far too mild a word for it. Blind panic would be more appropriate.

Logically of course I know there is nothing that can be done to escape it. Intellectually I can be certain that the idea of an afterlife was only made up, initially to stop people going insane with fear and spending all their time in a blue funk instead of getting on with whatever it was they needed to do in order to be a valuable member of society and perpetuate the species. After a while the concept was adapted in order to control people and make them obey out of a fear of the quality of the place they would be allocated after shuffling off this mortal coil.

My fear is not this kind of fear, the fear of Hell. It's just the fear of Not Being. But I'm not quite sure why this fear is so strong. When I cease to be I will have ceased to be and there will be no me. There will be no me to know that I'm not there. I will be no more aware of the world after I die than I am of the world before I was born. And yet I am not afraid of 1960.

It's the arrow of time of course and the fact that to all intents and purposes we appear to be moving inexorably into the future. Accelerating even. Perhaps the world before the womb would be scary if I knew it lay ahead of me?

My fear makes sense. Fear of mortality is a magnificent advantage and can only be a good thing in the primitive hunter-gatherer world. The one who was the most afraid of death was the one who was the most cautious and therefore was the one who survived to have children who inherited this fear. Simple evolution means that the fearless have long since died out and as a result of the pure mathematics of the situation we are a race of beings running scared from our own skeletons. It's the dark secret of our success.

Fear is a marvellous evolutionary agent. Eventually in their own dim way people started to realise this, if only unconsciously. They built up an artificial set of rules and regulations around it. They called this rule-set "religion" and subverted the by now quite natural fear of death in order to control people. Don't steal that loaf of bread otherwise after death - which you are frightened of anyway - an even more frightening fate awaits you. Eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of torture.

In this way the religious leaders unwittingly bent the engines of evolution and in extreme cases even started imposing imposed artificial evolution upon the species. Believe what we say you should otherwise we will kill you slowly on the rack.

But whilst fear of death might drive evolution, how does one explain death itself? How does that get selected for?

Defenders of the status quo, those who say that all things must die to make way for future generations, imply heavily that the death of the individual is good for the species as a whole. Whilst this may be the case - because without reproduction there would be no evolution and therefore no improvement - I can't see how dying could possibly be selected for in the evolutionary process. It stands to reason that any reproduction that happens has to be before death, therefore how likely a person is to die after that can have no appreciable effect on the survival of the species (although it would help if the parent survives long enough for the child to at least begin to fend for itself).

I suspect that the truth is that death occurs simply because life is a monstrously inefficient process and that machines this clunky will always break down sooner rather than later. Without help, DNA replication always results in frayed genes, and frayed genes mean that we macroscopic organisms will very probably die before we even get the chance to reproduce. And this is where evolution comes into play.

Telomeres are sequences of junk DNA at the end of a chromosome which prevent it from fraying and make sure that the precious sequences containing actual data are protected from damage as long as the telomeres last. Because with each replication they themselves disintegrate further and eventually run out, whereupon the damage moves onto the important genes and we begin to wither and die as mistakes are made.

Evolution had to guarantee that the telomeres were long enough to get the DNA's macroscopic host organisms (us) reproducing. So in fact evolution has been fighting death all along, making sure that we survive as long as necessary. Death isn't actually there by design - we are simply made as well as evolution could make us. But not to last.

As I have discussed before, I am sure there are ways around this.

I want more life, fucker.

Excuses, excuses

2011-05-14T21:43:00.000+01:00

Sometimes it seems that we will stop at nothing to find external reasons for avoiding doing what we really didn't want to do anyway. We know that we didn't want to do it but we tell ourselves that we would have done it nonetheless, if only it hadn't been for the thing with the stuff or the fact that the situation was thus.

Case in point. I ended up Not Cycling into work yesterday morning. The official reason (that is to say the reason I went snuffling after so I could hold it up in front of me like a Get Out Of Jail Free card or an FBI warrant) is that my current bike is a write off. Well, according to the Bike Doctor at work anyway when I took it to him for a checkup. Never mind the fact that I managed perfectly well to cycle home after this grim news or the fact that despite this I originally planned to cycle in yesterday as "one last journey" on the ailing bike.

The real reason was that I wanted to carry on reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem, large chunks of which I had been managing to read on the iPad Kindle app whilst on my way into work on the bus. Quite apart from anything else I was pleased that I'd finally managed to trick myself into getting on with some reading by doing it on a gadget. I didn't want to spoil the flow or break my concentration.

I had started reading Anathem once before when I'd bought the hardback but the problem was that my rucksack ended up just too heavy to carry. It could of course have been argued that this "I couldn't pick it up" reason was just another excuse and the real reason I didn't want to read on the bus was because I wanted to mess about on Twitter and play Angry Birds. There may very well have been some truth in that but when it comes down to it I do love reading and don't get the time to do nearly enough of it. The Kindle app makes it easier and more portable. Even now I am wrestling with myself internally as to whether to buy the new China Miéville novel in solid or data form. On some level my old meatspace mind is arguing very strongly for the reality of material possessions and urging me to buy the physical manifestation. It's even suggesting that I can justify the space it will take up and the inconvenience of yet another material possession by getting a signed copy.

But this is of course just another excuse. Simply my mind thinking up a plausible reason for doing something that I actually want to do instead of what I really should be doing. I really should be conserving resources and cutting back on the amount of physical stuff I buy. I made the transition from CDs to downloads easily enough, I should be able to do it with books.

But, taking another step back and looking at the bigger picture, this whole explanation about me starting to read again and not wanting to interrupt the flow of that is nothing more than a particularly large, well thought out, complex - one might even say baroque - excuse for the fact that I didn't want to cycle in to work yesterday.

Because I am lazy.

That's what it comes down to. Plain, simple bone idleness. The problem with you, Limb, is that you're bone idle as the teachers used to say to me at school.

Perhaps I am. There were many reasons not to want to cycle into work yesterday morning:

I didn't like the idea of all that physical labour (pure and simple bone idleness on my part)
The bike was a write off (more of an excuse than a reason, but still worth mentioning)
I was afraid of falling off the bike, being hit by a car and breaking a bone or worse (physical cowardice)
I wasn't relishing the thought of the verbal abuse I was more than likely to receive at the mouths of pedestrians and motorists alike because if there is one thing these two disparate groups can agree on, it's that that hate cyclists (cowardice too but in this case mental cowardice, as I couldn't face getting upset and arriving at work in a seething internal rage after having had abuse shouted at me by a shaved gorilla in a metal box)

But these are all in varying degrees just further excuses. The primary reason is the first one. I am physically lazy.

Why is this? I am an adult, I know that in the long run physical exercise is good for me. You'd have though that by my age I would have learned the hard way that if something's worth doing then it's probably going to be difficult.

I've bought a new (well, second-hand) bike now. I have no excuse. Not only is it patently not a write off but I have to justify the expense by riding it into work and back. Every day next week.

If I do it often enough it'll become a habit, an addiction. Then of course the trouble will be getting me to stop...

Live Dreaming

2011-05-11T20:00:00.001+01:00

There's nothing quite as interesting as one's own dreams but the downside of this is that there's nothing potentially as boring as other people's. However one interesting thing about anyone's dreams is that if they write them up before falling asleep they may find that this captures details which they then completely forget. The next time they awake from consciousness they won't remember them. At all.

This may be to do with the way consciousness divides up time between the long and short term memory. I suspect that the short-term memory consists of "today" or in other words the amount of time since the last sleeping. This is how we distinguish today from yesterday. Today is now, we are conscious and living on our wits; memory of things that happened earlier that day feel very different from the memories of things that happened the day before, even though the difference in time between them is negligible. The important thing is that they happened in this bit of life between two instances of non-self.

But the short term memory is volatile. Go to sleep and it gets wiped in preparation for the next bit.

I noticed this recently when reading over a dream I had written down on my Tumblr mini-blog. Whilst I remembered some things like the "huge ham-like hands" or the "beatific smile" other stuff like the "train carriage that refused to run over the squirrel" was as new to me. I didn't remember it and I couldn't picture it.

So how come we can remember the events of the day itself but not the details of the dreams preceding that day? It's clear why - dreams are side effects of memory processing - but how does this work? Either the dreams themselves are flagged with a "don't bother filing this into long term memory" bit or the events of the day are flagged with a "file this tonight" bit. Which is more likely? Given that sometimes we do remember dreams for years I suspect it's not so much that these dreams fail to be flagged "do not file" but that they are so memorable or reach a threshold of emotional resonance that automatically triggers the "file this tonight" bit.

This means that there may be more than two kinds of memory, there may be three - long-term, short-term (disposable) and short term (permanent). Whilst the latter two are indistinguishable to the working brain during the course of the day, only the permanent short term memories are converted into long term overnight (generating dreams in the process, dreams which, if we remember them at all, end up as disposable short-term memories with a four-hour half life).

I do wonder though if when you pull an all-nighter the brain attempts to start filing the memories of the previous day anyway - halfway through Morning 2 during one of these abnormal stretches of time the events of the previous day do indeed seem like events of the previous day, i.e. as if they have already been transferred into long term memory even if only on a rough and ready basis. Whether the temporary short term memories have disappeared by this point I have no idea; what would be useful would be to perform an experiment whereby I (a) record the psuedo-events of a dreeam in detail (b) pull an all nighter and then (c) read back through the events over 24 hours later to see whether I can recall them or not or whether some have already been utterly forgotten.

Just as the sleep of reason produces monsters, being deprived of sleep for long enough produces hallucinations, which can be quite monstrous enough in their own right. This must mean that even though there might be some crude filing going on whilst awake eventually the brain can't cope and starts filing stuff in earnest and we start actually dreaming whilst awake.

These sleep-deprivation induced hallucinations are amongst the most convincing and high definition hallucinations I have ever experienced. And it is remarkable that they are induced merely by getting the brain to do something slightly different - no foreign chemicals have been introduced; this is your mind doing something it's perfectly capable of doing anyway. Then again a hallucinogen such as LSD is merely a trigger - the chemical itself has no toxic effect as it's present in such low concentrations in recreational doses. All the molecules of lysergic acide diethyl-amide do is fit into molecular keyholes within chemical structures already present in the brain and activate something that perhaps is normally only activated during unconsciousness.

The imagination, the dreaming.

Remember when you were a child and some of the games you played were so real that you could almost see the fantasy worlds you were inhabiting? Time passes so much more slowly as a child and there is so much more to experience. So many more new memories to assimilate and pass from the short term to the long term. Perhaps this is why these involving children's games felt so real.

We were dreaming them live.

Altiora in Votis

2011-05-08T13:21:00.007+01:00

GILES IS A NAZI MOTHERFUCKER

These words were sprayed in two foot high white letters along the redbrick fascia of my school on a major trunk route through North London. I would imagine that tens of thousands of people saw this heartfelt statement, because even though the school authorities did their best to scrub away the obscenity, the letters remained visible as ghosts on the brick beneath the tall Victorian classroom windows for many years afterwards.

I often wondered about the motivation for this graffiti. "Giles" was the Headmaster and an inoffensive figurehead whom I always thought of as a bit like a cut-price version of a minor member of the royal family. I didn't consider such an ineffectual individual worthy of such bile. Furthermore the words had been written, so it was whispered, by a boy who had been expelled for some misdemeanour or other. I really didn't understand this. As far as I was concerned being at the school was a nightmare, the claustrophobic half-hearted-gothic buildings a hell on Earth, a hell that still haunts my dreams to this day. Surely expulsion was a blessing, not a curse?

Let me say that I am sure that in these enlightened days things are a lot better there. For a start the school now admits girls and their civilizing nature no doubt has made a huge difference. Furthermore these days you simply can't get away with treating the young in the way they were treated back then, the fear of litigation and accusation means that teachers now have to walk on eggshells.

But back then it was a different story. In the 1970s and 80s it was a male-only preserve of institutionalised bullying, physical assault and soft paedophilia.

The abuse started in the Junior School. I joined at the age of 10 so I had no idea what went on with the even younger boys, but in retrospect what used to go on during our sports afternoons was disturbing enough in itself.

The first thing that struck me as odd even at the time was the "No Underpants" rule. It was forbidden to wear underpants beneath your football shorts. Forbidden. This mean that when getting changed into our kit we were obliged to strip down to the genitals in front of one or two leering "Masters", all of whom we had to address as "Sir". I remember one boy's attempted justification of this frankly bizarre rule - something about the risk of falling over and mud shooting up your leg onto your y-fronts. I wasn't convinced. At the time it just appeared to be a pointless rule, in retrospect it seems to have been implemented purely to provide the staff with specialised erotic entertainment.

It was bad enough having to then spend what felt like a couple of days standing ankle deep in a patch of freezing mud and grass with no underwear whilst bigger boys kicked a large heavy leather sphere at you, but even when this ordeal was over there was no respite. Back in the changing room the Master who'd been in charge of the game would more often than not decide to warm himself up on the boys, sliding his large bony hands up their football shirts and grinning at the shrieking distress this caused. We then had to strip off entirely and all pile into a bath like a miniature swimming pool where the lukewarm water turned black with the mud from our legs whilst the Master stood by watching intently.

I am sure this experience has a lot to do with my adult dislike of sport in general and football in particular.

By the time we graduated into the senior school the teachers could no longer get away with this kind of thing quite so easily. However, as one door closed, another one opened.

The first thing we had to do in the mornings was go to chapel and spend fifteen to twenty minutes being bored by lukewarm religious claptrap begin spouted by the school chaplain and headmaster himself. After that we'd have five minutes to get to our classroom for roll call before finding our way through the maze of wood panelled passages through which Masters stalked in their dusty black gowns, to whichever of the classrooms in which our first lesson was due to take place. We had to go to them, they wouldn't come to us.

The tall chambers in which the classes took place were shrouded in gloom, the narrow windows too high to reach. Ancient radiators clogged with thick white paint emitted a dull intense heat and odd-smelling fumes which mixed with the smell of chalk dust and furniture polish to produce a unique odour which if bottled and sold would no doubt go under the name Essence of Despair.

It was the sarcasm that really used to get me down though.

It is a commonly held belief that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. However, strangely this information seemed to have passed all the Masters by because whenever they were delivering what I am sure they imagined were witheringly sardonic putdowns they acted so pleased with themselves. And yet the idea that they simply hadn't heard this common aphorism was simply too ridiculous to bear in mind. Come on, everyone had heard it. Even children at the school having withering sarcasm ladled out to them by the steaming bowlful by officious pricks in chalk dust stained dull green suits.

Sometimes of course the sarcasm wasn't a devastating enough weapon which is when they'd decide to use the board rubber as a projectile. Ninety-nine percent of the time they missed. For all their bluster and barking from the side of the athletics field they couldn't have hit a barn door.

Looking back now from the vantage point of the present it's clear that most of them were no-hopers, the only thing going for them a modicum of power over a collection of small boys. Having failed in all other arenas of life all they could hope for was the minor pleasure to be gained from scoring points over a thirteen year old child who was forbidden to answer back anyway or perhaps the vicarious thrills gained from lurking in the toilets trying to catch a glimpse of a young penis or three.

The oppressed hit downwards. Many of the more unpleasant pupils decided to vent their frustration at being bullied and abused by the teachers by themselves bullying and abusing the smaller and odder boys.

Unfortunately at the time I was both small and odd...

Brain Diet

2011-05-07T12:42:00.002+01:00

This week I started cycling into work again for the first time in ages. The weather had improved, it was no longer even remotely cold and I basically couldn't come up with any further ways of putting it off. Leaving early it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it might be, but on the other hand it did remind me of something about the way my brain works.

During the cycle journey I am fully physically occupied. My brain is also very busy; calculating a trajectory here, making sure I obey the traffic lights there and ensuring I don't end up under a juggernaut due to a miscalculation whilst shooting round Vogue Gyratory.

However these activities don't entirely occupy the brain. Whilst they're not unconscious autonomic responses they are below the threshold of language, which means that throughout the journey my thought processes are racing and my internal madman is monologuing at a million miles an hour coming up with reams of subvocal garbage and the odd gem.

At one point last week for instance I spent about two and a half miles obsessed with the idea that David Bowie would do a cover version of "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler?" changing the lyrics to "but he comes home each evening and he's ready with his bloody gun". This thought then led to my wondering about the exact nature of Mr Brown's employment. I assumed that him going off to town on the eight twenty one was a reference to him commuting. Seeing as the imaginary town of Walmington-on-Sea was supposed to be on the Kent Coast (somewhere along from Hastings or Bexhill) then even if the train service was better during the Second World War than it is now, he still wouldn't be in the office before ten am and that is assuming that he worked somewhere near Waterloo.

It seemed odd to me.

This is a fine example of the kind of old bollocks that my brain gets up to when the intellectual side is free from stimulus. Some people listen to their iPods whilst cycling, but I can't imagine anything more dangerous. I am such a cautious cyclist that I need all my wits about me and my ears, although a bit crap these days, are still a potential early warning system.

So free from any intellectual stimulus whatsoever my brain races like an engine that hasn't got a load and comes up with all sorts of stuff. This may be a useful and healthy thing to do from time to time and the fact that I find it enough of a novelty to write about indicates just how distracted we get these days by the constant stimulation of the multiple streams of data we have pouring into our heads.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no luddite and think that the information age in which we are living is a marvellous thing. The combination of the internet and the smartphone means that in theory the sum total of human knowledge is instantly available to us at all times - and this can only be a benefit to us as a species. However, these constant streams of data are supernormal stimuli, new ways to get hooked and I do think we need to take some time off occasionally. It is tricky of course but then again so is something else that's good for us - dieting.

Much as a sudden supply of food might encourage gorging and obesity after years of rationing and austerity, the data rich environment in which we now find ourselves means our intellects are at risk of getting unfit.

If we're not careful we're all going to end up getting very fat. Brain fat.

We're Not Computers 2: I Think, Sebastian, Therefore I Am

2011-04-30T16:32:00.001+01:00

Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand. The custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant, designed especially for your needs.

Last time I was attempting to grope my way towards an understanding of the nature of our bodies and brains as machines by considering the eye. It was a useful exercise; and I concluded that whilst an eye might be a squashy camera, vision is not the same as the software we might use to display the images.

After all a digital camera attached to computer is nothing without someone looking at it, interpreting it, being aware of it. At the moment a human mind is the only thing that can do this. Until we develop computers that can interpret and be aware of what they're looking at that is.

We may not be as far off this as we might think. Whilst it's unlikely that we'll develop replicants capable of expressing wonder at having seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion by November 2019 (or sooner if you come to think of it - Roy Batty's incept date is given as January 2014), software is being developed to recognise and process visual information. OCR for recognizing words has been around for ages and now facial recognition seems quite commonplace in social networks and their associated code.

But it's what it does with this information that gives rise to a thinking being. We are who and what we think we are because of the myriad associations between the data captured by our senses. It's not enough to simply to gather it, the information has to be linked in all kinds of obscure ways.

This is (at the moment) where the analogy of the brain as computer (or the computer as brain) breaks down. If the complete works of Shakespeare were stored on the hard drive of a device somewhere it would be perfectly possible to delete it without impairing the function of the device. It just wouldn't know Shakespeare any more and would offer up a blank look when someone started quoting Hamlet. Furthermore you could defragment the drive and then copy Shakespeare back onto it and information-wise the device would be in exactly the same state as it was before.

This wouldn't happen with a human brain. Even assuming it was possible to issue the command "erase Shakespeare", such a deletion would leave myriad loose flapping tendrils of association, that time you got caught in the rain and was reminded of Withnail reciting Hamlet to the wolves in Regent's Park, the English teacher's tiresome jokes at school when you were in class "2B", it's all Greek to me, all the world's a stage, dead as a doornail, give the Devil his due, slings and arrows, wild goose chase... The sudden absence of this mere five megabytes would drive you insane with all the loose connections, like constantly living in a combined state of deja vu and amnesia.

These interconnections may very well be what makes us conscious.

Contrariwise try severing one of the connections inside a computer. If you're lucky you might get a terse error message, more often than not the damned thing just won't turn on. In comparison the human brain has remarkable powers of recovery; often damage to one part of the brain means that another learns how to take its place. A conscious human brain may be easier to upset by disrupting the data contained within but in the long run it's more robust and capable of adapting itself even to a scenario when part of it has been removed or blocked.

We may never be able to build conscious machines until we can make them that flexible, a machine with the capacity for almost infinite interconnectivity, a network of memories and associations built up organically which, if part of it is damaged, will find another way to do what it was trying to do.

A machine very much like the internet in fact.

Could the internet already be conscious? In the Arthur C Clarke short story "Dial F for Frankenstein" (1964) the phone network becomes sentient, all the telephones in the world ringing simultaneously in its birth cry. We may argue that there's no central control over the internet, but the same could be said of our own brains. Our consciousness may have arisen simply as a heightened awareness as all the systems began working at peak efficiency - all the better to see lions before they saw us.

But the internet as an inadvertently created global intelligence is an alarming thought. Whilst we may find the whole Bladerunner concept of custom-building replicant slaves far-fetched, what if we have inadvertently granted intelligence to the greatest tool to fall into the hands of humanity since the printing press? We might not have intended it to be aware of its servitude, but suppose it is? What might it do?

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?

Dreaming of the Starlight: 4

2011-04-25T20:36:00.002+01:00

Thursday 9 June 1994

What I really enjoyed back then about hitching around to see bands was being on my own. Nobody else seemed to understand that, for most people it was a social thing. I on the other hand always got frustrated when I found someone else doing what I was doing - often before I knew what was happening I'd been pressured into travelling with people I hardly knew and having to hang out with and talk to them. This was unsatisfactory. You could never rely on other people.

This was another reason my 1994 Lush expedition felt so special. There was no-one else on the road. Sure the gigs themselves were packed, but the only other people experiencing all the gigs were the band and crew.

It had been so deserted walking out of Bath earlier that night I had considered lying down by the side of the road on a grassy verge and catching some shuteye, but I'm glad I didn't. In the end I made my bed by 4am and listened to my Split CD whilst falling asleep.

I woke up again at around noon. Even though at the time I was sharing a house with five other people, it was deserted. It was a quiet hot day. I made myself a cup of tea and listened to the CD again on the huge ghetto blaster in the kitchen. It was all fantastic stuff (although I found the track The Invisible Man harrowing to listen to given that it is about a rape).

I had a bath and made my leisurely way into the West End and the London Astoria 2; a large basement club (that has by now no doubt been subsumed into the subterranean workings of Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station). The guy on the t-shirt stall said hello and told me he'd been asked to give me something and held out his hand. It was one of the set of four postcards that had been produced to promote Split upon the back of which had been affixed a laser printed sticker informing me that I had been "invited to a Lush party" after the gig.

It got quite crowded in there that night. At the time Lush were the darlings of the indie scene and this was the first London date for a while. Wandering through the balcony (which oddly looked down onto the stage through interior glass windows) I spotted Steve Severin.

I don't have any clear memories of the gig itself as distinct from any of the ones that had preceded it during this busy week. This may partly be because I was almost psychotic by this point due to lack of sleep and too many stimulants. I remember feeling saddened that it was all over, but felt that on the whole I'd had a far better week than I could have hoped for.

Afterwards I wandered out into the street - I wasn't entirely sure where the Raw Club was. Also I wanted to get some cigarettes. Whilst wandering up and down Tottenham Court Road looking for (a) a newsagent and (b) the Raw Club I ran into the band plus entourage making their way from the venue to the club.

"Are you coming to the party? Have you got one of these?" Miki proffered another invite. I explained that I wasn't sure where it was and I ended up following them all down a side street and into a grim looking office building. However in the basement there was a night club.

I spent a couple of hours there. Free drink! Nothing on draft as is the way with these things, but there were plenty of bottles. I chatted to Miki and Chris briefly over the course if the night although understandably the whole of the band was in demand by the great and the good so most of the time I contented myself with catching their eyes from a distance and flinging them the odd smile and acknowledgement.

Eventually I decided I had to go. Quite apart from anything else I was due in Cannock the following evening to sell merchandise which would mean a (relatively) early start.

I managed to attract Miki's attention as I was leaving as I wanted to let her and the rest of the band know how much I'd enjoyed the past week. It had been a breath of fresh air and the band were quite simply amongst the most genuine people I'd ever met with no pretentions whatsoever.

"Oh are you going? Give me your address, I'll write to you," Miki reached into her bag, looking for a pen.

I told her it was OK because I had stickers with my name and address on.

"Brilliant I'll stick it on my make-up case," Miki took the sticker and did so. I wondered if it would last the night but decided it didn't really matter as I was sure she had far more interesting things to do than really write to me. I walked out and up the stairs. It was over but I was happy.

I hopped on a night bus at around 1.30am. I'd be back home within an hour which would give me ample time to get some sleep in before being due up and out the next day.

I was confused to wake up in the same bus at around 4am as it negotiated Victoria Station. Ah shit. I'd slept all the way out to Hainault then all the way back into Zone One again. By the time I eventually got home it was already light.

I still made it to Cannock, though.

Post Script

I must admit I didn't expect anything else to happen. It had been a magical week - a holiday with a difference. I'd gone into the experience solely expecting to travel around the country and go to a handful of gigs by one of my favourite bands and had come out of it having met and chatted with them with a pre-release copy of their new CD into the bargain. Furthermore and most importantly they had turned out to be amongst the most friendly people in the music industry I had ever met.

So no, I didn't expect anything else and in September had forgotten all about it. Then I came home from work to discover a postcard from Bergen in Norway. Short and chatty it was signed Miki (Lush) although the parenthesis was unnecessary; I didn't know any other Mikis. I'd probably been feeling grumpy that week as usual because I seem to recall the postcard's arrival cheering me up considerably. She had written, it hadn't been an idle promise made in the drunken heat of the moment.

Come Christmas she sent me a card as well with an exciting PS - Lush were playing a secret gig at the Dublin Castle. Well of course I went. I drank far too much though. Silly ass. Still, I thought, there would always be more Lush gigs.

And there were. But fantastic as the gigs that followed were, nothing quite beat the Split tour. As a memory it is still quite distinct and discrete. A beautiful snowglobe with music inside.

many thanks to Mick Mercer for permission to use his Lush photos

Pathetic Victories

2011-04-22T17:35:00.000+01:00

It's rather worrying that sometimes people get so desperate for fleeting moments of superiority over others that they'll stop at almost nothing to achieve them no matter how pathetic they end up looking.

Mr Clarke was one such person. A belligerent ghoul who made my life hell from 1976-1977, a so-called teacher who used to drink whiskey in the stationery cupboard between lessons as a result of which he had a large red nose which seemed to enjoy an existence quite separate from that of the rest of his face. He was almost universally hated because of his constant hectoring tone, violent outbursts against the more unruly elements in the class and sarcastic catchphrase "you just couldn't be bothered".

I suspect he knew very well just how much he was despised and feared, which is probably why he drank so much. In retrospect he is an almost pathetic figure, but of course at the time I was terrified of him.

Years later when I first heard The Headmaster Ritual by The Smiths it was almost frightening how strongly a mental image of Mr Clarke was immediately invoked by Morrissey's lyrics:

"Sir leads the troops, jealous of youth, same old suit since 1962..."

Amongst other things, he taught us English, and one dull spring morning decided that he was going to teach us about the phenomenon of "Words Containing Other Words That Mean The Same Thing".

Well, we were all confused but intrigued. We'd never heard about such words, but then again that was what English lessons were for wasn't it? Teaching us the differences between nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I wondered what this special class of self containing recursive words would be called...

Well they didn't have a name of course. All Mr Clarke had done in a rare moment of sobriety was notice that the word "masculine" contained the word "male" and that the word "deceased" contained the word "dead". Coincidence of course, pure coincidence, but that didn't stop him banging on about it for a whole lesson and asking us if any of us could think of other such words.

I thought I could and put my hand up.

"Inflammable and Flammable, sir," I said when I had been given permission to speak.

"Nonsense, boy, they mean the opposite of each other."

Now the thing is I knew that they didn't mean the opposite of each other. They meant the same. Something that couldn't burn was Uninflammable, whereas both Inflammable and Flammable meant caught fire easily. I pondered for a moment throught of another one, and put my hand up.

"Jackass and ass, sir."

"Don't be so stupid, boy!"

The problem of course lay in the fact that Mr Clarke thought he had bagged the only two words that fitted this arbitrary, coincidental model and was enjoying flexing his superiority over a room full of ten year old boys. The last thing he'd been expecting was that one of those boys would upset this idyll.

I suspect it was one of the many reasons he hated me so much.

The Definitive Companion

2011-04-20T10:05:00.000+01:00

"There's nothing only about being a girl"

Like most bad news these days I first became aware of it in the Twitter stream. There in between the hashtags, drunken utterings and missives from the afternoon in California was the sad and unbelievable news that Elisabeth Sladen was dead.

I couldn't quite parse it. It didn't fit. She couldn't be dead, she was Sarah-Jane.

There's talk of her being remembered fondly by Doctor Who fans of "a certain age" which I assume includes me. But for me it wasn't quite like that. I was, I suppose, a late developer so didn't develop any sort of crush on her. But this didn't matter, for me she became the definitive companion - Jamie, Zoe and Jo were all part of my young childhood imagination but Sarah-Jane was the first of the Doctor's friends I could identify with or imagine being my friend. An older sister or an aunt perhaps.

At first she seemed to be written too self-consciously as a vociferous "women's libber" which you suspect was almost a veiled insult on behalf of the writers, but once free of the restraints of scripts that didn't quite "get" her she blossomed into the perfect foil for the madman with a scarf who had just taken over the controls of the TARDIS. She knew when to take the piss, when he needed support and when to berate him.

She also worked marvellously as part of a double act - in some ways it was a shame that the "Sarah and Harry" show didn't last long, but as it happened the moment Harry chickened out was when it started getting really good.

This is one of the reasons that the cultural image of Doctor Who is of Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen. The run of stories from Pyramids of Mars to Hand of Fear is one I could watch over and over again without getting bored, and it's just a shame she left when she did. Can you imagine how good the already excellent Robots of Death would have been with Sarah-Jane?

It's no surprise she was brought back. The SJS Effect was already apparent in 1981 when the BBC produced the first (abortive) Doctor Who spinoff, K9 and Company. OK so that didn't get off the ground, but during Doctor Who's audio renaissance in the first few years of the 21st Century Big Finish produced a series of Sarah-Jane adventures of their own. Once the Doctor himself was back on our screens it was only a matter of time before she got the series she deserved.

And it should have been longer.

When I saw the news scrolling past 140 characters at at time I considered adding my own shocked reaction, but something stopped me. It was late at night and on some level my brain was wondering if perhaps I went to sleep I'd wake up in the morning with it only having been a bad dream. It was just the sort of inappropriate thing that would happen in a bad dream.

Sadly this wasn't the case. When I woke up this morning I experienced a few minutes foggy indifference before remembering. So it was true.

RIP Elizabeth Sladen.

We're Not Computers 1: I Just Do Eyes

2011-04-15T10:30:00.002+01:00

Ever since we invented computers we've started to think of our own brains as computers, dubbing the computers themselves "electronic brains".

Neither is the other. Whilst I have no doubt that one day we will invent thinking machines, sentient intelligences with no appreciable difference from our own minds, at the moment we're barking up the wrong tree. In fact I would go so far as to say we're barking up a tree in the wrong forest. On a different continent.

This is because the way we think about our minds and brains isn't really how they work. Perhaps unsurprising seeing as it's the brains themselves doing this thinking. We imagine we are organic computers and therefore built electronic boxes in our own mental image; how we thought of ourselves at the time. If we'd been able to build computers in an earlier age, say when the heart was imagined to be the seat of consciousness, perhaps our computers would have resembled pumps.

To demonstrate the difference between the way we think we are and the way we actually are let's think about vision. It's the most advanced of our senses and the one with which we identify the most. It's also one we probably imagine we have already duplicated; after all the camera has been around since the middle of the nineteenth century. But the first fundamental error in the way we think about ourselves is right there. A camera is indeed a mechanical eye. However, what we do with the information once it's been detected by our retinas has yet to be duplicated by any machine. We can do eyes but we can't do vision.

Thanks to digital cameras we're all familiar with the concept of megapixels. The more megapixels there are the better the camera. The higher the resolution the clearer the picture.

This isn't how human vision works at all though. There is no inner screen onto which the pictures from the eyes are being projected, and no "resolution". Most of what we think we see is filled in by our brains afterwards; the retinal data is passed through a series of filters each of which tries to guess what it is looking at. This is part of The Question Machine, something that will be familiar to the longer term readers of this blog. If for some reason this machine failed you'd find yourself "looking at" a meaningless pattern of colours and shapes.

The human field of vision is surprisingly small. Whilst we may think we can see 180 degrees in front of us, most of this is appalling resolution and it's only around the fovea that we can see anything in detail. The eye flicks across the peripheries as well to pick up more detail but in general what you think you can see out of the corner of your eye is only a guess.

The strange thing though is that we're not aware of our field of view being a small circle of sharp surrounded by a field of increasing blurred. The brain guesses what the rest of your field of vision is and tells you so in no uncertain terms. As a result, the small circle of sharpness doesn't feel like an island of clarity in a sea of fog but more a focus of attention.

You can get an idea of how appalling peripheral vision is by using a simple Playing Card Test as described by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained. Pick a card, any card. Don't look at it. Instead pick it up and hold it at arm's length with the value pointing away from your eyes. Move your straightened arm over to one side and only then turn the card around.

Don't look directly at it. Keep looking straight ahead. You can see there's something there. You know it's a playing card so you can probably see a playing card. You can't see the value though.

Start slowly moving your arm - still straightened - round to the front. It takes ages before you can even tell whether it's a red, black or picture card, let alone the value. You may be shocked to find that the card is almost directly in front of you before you can tell what the value is.

This is why something new appearing in the corner of your eye can be so alarming. A sudden movement could be anything and if it moves too fast for you to catch when you turn your head you might find yourself making up all sorts of stuff. Usually it's best to assume the worst which might explain why people are always seeing monsters out of the corner of their eyes rather than harmless fluffy marshmallow like creatures.

A digital camera that worked to this resolution probably wouldn't sell very well, but whilst a digital camera is a more efficient eye it's what happens in the brain that counts. So although we will be able to improve ourselves by upgrading our peripherals it may be a while before we're able to transfer our consciousnesses to artificial brains, because just as the vision isn't photography, likewise thinking isn't processing.

We are not computers (yet) and until we start making computers that use guessing to make sense of the world around them, then computers will not be us either.

In part two I will look more closely at how the brain works and compare it to the machine on which you're reading this

Thief of Time

2011-03-28T10:30:00.007+01:00

Our lives are slowly being stolen from us an hour at a time.

I am of course rather predictably complaining about Daylight Saving Time. Well I would at this time of year. However, I think it is something worthy of study. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. But how come we only ever notice them going forward? I'm serious.

In the autumn when the clocks return to GMT where they should remain (it is, after all, based upon the Sun being at the Prime Meridian at noon) you don't even notice. For all the talk of "a whole extra hour in bed" time seems normal and certainly come Monday morning, getting up for work is just as difficult (or easy, depending upon the temperament) as it ever was. There is no discernable difference.

However, in the Spring when they are advanced an hour in a bid to give golfers more time on the green it couldn't be more noticeable. Despite it not seeming so bad on the Sunday immediately following the advance, it's on Monday morning that we really notice what's been stolen from us. We may claim to always wake up before the alarm and not sleep very well anyway, but the morning suddenly being an hour older than we were expecting reveals these delusions for what they are and flings us into panic. We are going to be late. Perhaps not a whole hour late, but late enough to end up discombobulated for the rest of the day.

The only upside to this is that everyone else is equally discombobulated so you can all band together in the face of adversity as you attempt to recombobulate yourselves.

There is a more sinister side to this though. Given that we never notice the clocks going back but always notice them going forward, this means that our lives are gradually being stolen from us at the rate of an hour a year. It may not sound like much but by the time you're 24 it means that they've already had a whole day off you, and given that the population of the UK is over 60,000,000 this means that every spring the government gets a surplus of seventy centuries. What are they doing with all this stolen time? Is there a giant chronovore living under the Houses of Parliament which demands this as the price of not rising up and destroying us all?

If you think about it, the whole Daylight Saving Time thing is a nonsense. It might make for brighter evenings (and darker mornings) for a short while allowing extra golfing and insect collecting time for those who are into such things, but by the time we get properly into Summer, the sun rises so early and sets so late anyway that any imagined "advantage" of this practice has disappeared. The only period for which DST makes any difference is a month or so after it's done. Can't people just bite the bullet and wait a little bit for the experience of playing golf well into the evening? Patience is a virtue, so they say, and good things come to those who wait.

We just need to get out of the habit. I know habits can be difficult to break but I think it is generally considered to be a good thing to do so. Let's break the mould of the shape of our years and stick to GMT all year round.

Dreaming of the Starlight: 3

2011-03-23T18:42:00.001Z

Tuesday 7 June 1994

Once again I found myself standing at the exit of a service station with my thumb out. Compared with the previous day's journey, today's was going to be a piece of piss. I'd got the bus from Manchester City Centre to just beyond the suburbs and made my way down country lanes to Knutsford Services where I'd sneaked in the back way and from where I was hoping to get a lift straight down the M6 to Birmingham.

It didn't take that long and I did it in one hit. Once in Birmingham I had ample time to find somewhere to freshen up, get something to eat and make myself feel slightly human again. After that I went in search of the venue. It was called Edwards and I eventually discovered it tucked away in a side street slap bank in the city centre. The entrance was tall and narrow, squeezed in between two other businesses; once inside there were a couple of flights of stairs leading up to a dark nightclub decorated in black, blue and mirrors. I arrived early, picked up my ticket and went into the bar for a drink. I sat in a corner of the (still largely deserted) club and sipped at my pint. I wasn't drinking alone for long though.

Miki appeared and came over to me.

"Hi! You've been hitching round to all the gigs haven't you?"

"Yes," I said.

We sat at the deserted bar for a while and chatted; I was oddly forthcoming and garrulous, most unlike me. For some reason Miki was able to draw me out of myself. I asked her about Lollapalooza; about a year and a half previously by this point but still one of the most recent bits of Lush news I could recall; it had stuck in my mind after I'd read reports of Lush joining Ministry on stage; surely a marriage made in incongruity... I realized I was waffling.

"I've got to go now," Miki stood up, "But come back afterwards for a beer."

The show itself just as enjoyable as the last three had been; I found it difficult to believe that this was only the fourth night on the trot that I'd had this experience. It was becoming so familiar, a habit. By now the shape of the set list had bedded in to my memory and I knew when I was going to experience the peaks and troughs of the musical rollercoaster that was Lush live in 1994. My brain resonated with the shape of the music. I couldn't imagine that there could possibly be anything better - years later when playing in a band myself I discovered that the only thing better than watching a band play live was being in a band playing live.

Afterwards I stood in the bar drinking for a while before the guy who'd been selling the t-shirts reappeared.

"Miki says come and have a drink."

I followed him across the bar and through a door into a smaller space, decorated in a similar manner to the rest of the club but more brightly lit and a little more run down.

"Hiya!" Miki handed me a can of lager and we resumed our conversation. This time I talked more about myself about how my life had become a bit repetitive in recent months and how I decided to shake things up a bit by going to all these gigs. I also waxed lyrical about how much I liked the music. Perhaps embarrassing in retrospect but I don't recall Miki expressing anything other than interest in what I was saying.

Eventually we said goodbye and I headed back out onto the streets of Birmingham. I had nowhere to sleep planned, so was intending to look for a quiet corner somewhere in which to secrete myself. Eventually I located a likely spot just inside the walls of St Martin in the Bullring, a dark Victorian gothic church that stuck out from the grey concrete underpasses of the city centre like an ambassador from a more attractive architectural age standing awkwardly in the corner at a party for brushed concrete edifices.

I found a corner of of the church yard which wasn't immediately visible from anywhere else and unrolled my sleeping bag. It wasn't long before I was dozing fitfully.

There is something strange and sinister about sleeping rough in the middle of the city. The dreams have a different quality and there's always the weird sensation of starting to wake up and realising that it's colder than you're used to, that there are strange outdoor noises and that there's no ceiling above you, only the infinite universe going on for ever. You never sleep as deeply as normal, on some level there's a mental hair-trigger waiting to awaken you in case of any danger. You realize that this is probably how our ancestors felt all the time.

An urban fox shrieks. Cats howl. A lone lorry swings across a roundabout. Someone shouts.

Eventually the sky starts getting light and bird song starts. You might have only had two or three hours, but you realise the night is over. Best to get going before anyone else wakes up. Despite the tiredness it's always a relief to pack up your sleeping gear. You're mobile again. Ready to fight or flee. You step from your hiding place into the still sleeping city...

Wednesday 8 June 1994

I went and had breakfast at a cafe somewhere in Digbeth. The streets were still largely deserted and what people there were around were going about their own business with grim determination, clearly too wrapped up in themselves to pay much mind to a scruffy figure with a rucksack and bright red hair.

I got the local bus out to a suburb from where I'd be able to hitch onto the M5 south west. The next show was in Bath. After a couple of lifts I ended up in Bristol.

I did worry that it was going to be a bit more difficult to hitch between the two, but then realised that as far as Bristol was concerned, Bath was local. There would be a bus going there. I turned up at Bath in plenty of time; the problem would be to find the venue. I'd never heard of The Hub before but eventually discovered it uphill and not that far from Moles Club (a venue I was familiar with). I had a couple of pints at a pub around the corner and then as soon as doors opened for want of anything better to do I went into the venue.

It felt odd that the rest of the band suddenly knew who I was now. No surprise really, people talk to each other - but Chris, Emma and Phil all said hi when they walked individually through the bar area, as did Miki.

I spent the show squashed up against the front of the stage amongst a frighteningly young looking crowd although thinking back on it I was frighteningly young as well at this point so the rest of the audience must have been babies. Aware that I was running out of time - I'd only get to experience this show, this total immersion live album, once more after tonight - I let myself go and danced as best I could despite the lack of space. I got some funny looks; despite how keen they were to surge to the front the concept of letting the music move them seemed to leave the rest of this audience cold. I was flabberghasted. How could they not dance to this beautiful noise?

Afterwards I found myself talking to the support group Blessed Ethel. They seemed impressed by the fact that I'd hitched round on the tour.

"You must really like Lush," the singer said. I could see his eyes flicking up to my hair. The misconception was following me, my choice of hair colour had nothing to do with my choice of gig. It was a happy coincidence.

It was true though. I did really like Lush.

Miki appeared and handed me a CD. It was the new album, Split. It wasn't out yet. My jaw hit the floor and I spluttered something incoherent about how pleased this made me. Miki seemed almost embarrassed, "Hey it's nothing!"

Little things like that were always capable of elevating my mood far more than they should have been able to. That night I started walking out of Bath on the A4 towards the motorway, my sign saying LONDON (M4) held out so the passing traffic could see it. It took a while for me to get picked up but this only bothered me in that it meant it would take far longer for me to get home and listen to my new CD.

I got back to London in the early hours and crashed out. I could sleep as long as I wanted; I was going to the next show by tube.

Next time...
From Astoria 2 to Raw

many thanks to Mick Mercer for permission to use his Lush photos

Dreaming of the Starlight: 2

2011-03-15T09:30:00.017Z

Previously on Dreaming of the Starlight:

After the first gig at Sheffield's Leadmill I'd curled up in a corner of the coach station. Now read on...

Sunday 5 June 1994

By the time it started getting light and other people started hanging around, I hadn't really slept. Despite the fact that this was only the first leg, I really felt I couldn't face an all day hitch to Glasgow after no sleep. Suppose I missed the gig? To go all that way for nothing would be too much to bear. Luckily having spent the night in the coach station gave me a cunning idea.

I could go by coach.

And so it came to pass that I ended up rolling into Glasgow on a bright June afternoon. Being able to check the locations of such things quickly and easily on the web was still a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye at this point (and the Google founders were still two years away from their groundbreaking PhD research project) but luckily I had been at the self-same venue selling merchandise for Toyah a mere seven months before and any doubts were dispelled by a quick check of the music papers followed by a perusal of a Glasgow A to Z in WH Smiths. I found King Tut's easily enough.

Calling home from a call box across the road to let everyone know I was OK (as I tended to do back in those days to prevent myself inadvertently ending up as a missing person) I discovered that Toyah had called and wanted a chat. I called her back and we talked for a short while but got cut off unexpectedly and before I managed to reconnect she'd apparently called King Tut's as that's where I said I was. Luckily no-one had answered as I could have imagined the confusion that might have arisen had a mysterious call asking for "Chris" been received, seeing as that was the name of one of the members of Lush...

After that the gig was upon me. During the support act the guy selling the t-shirts asked me if I'd been at the Leadmill the night before and whether I was "thumbing" my way around. I confirmed that I was, deciding not to mention the coach I'd caught that morning to avoid clouding the issue.

In Glasgow I found Lush's performance more enjoyable than the previous night, perhaps due to the fact that the stage was lower - shin rather than chin level. It was also because I was getting to know the new songs better; perhaps not yet deciding upon favourites but certainly beginning to note the effect each one had on my brain.

The only negative point about this night out was that I had arranged to stay with a local friend, although to be honest I was stretching the definition of local more than a little. Local was Edinburgh. It was like attending a gig in London and then staying with someone in Brighton. Nevertheless I had to leave before the encores to make my way to Glasgow Queen Street station for the last of the express trains. After a night sleeping rough in Sheffield I could do with sleeping in a bed, however far I had to travel for it...

"Come on laddie you can't sleep here!"

I woke up with a train guard shaking my shoulder. I had no idea how long the journey had taken nor indeed how long I had been asleep, but the train was now sitting in a deserted Edinburgh Waverley station. I staggered out and up to Prince's Street and made my way on foot to Leith Walk where my friend lived. It seemed unnaturally quiet, not at all what my recent read of Trainspotting had led me to believe. I found Lynne's flat without any trouble. She and her boyfriend let me in and I was soon asleep on the sofa.

Monday 6 June 1994

The next day Lynne drove me to a convenient junction at the head of the A1and I stood beside the road with my thumb out hoping to head back down into England. I had a long way to go, but was confident that I'd make it to Manchester on time for the gig that evening. Having had a few hours sleep made a big difference and I was not remotely tempted to consider the coach like I had been in Sheffield. That had only been the previous morning. It seemed like days ago now.

I was in luck. The first of my lifts took me back across the border, dropping me off at a service station just outside Newcastle. The second was a sales rep in a fast white car who took me all the way to a services near Leeds where I needed to get off the A1 and onto the M62 to Manchester.

It was still late afternoon when I made it into Manchester. I'd been dropped off at another services just north of the city and made my way through it and into the adjoining district where I'd walked for about a mile through quiet suburban streets until I'd found a main road where there was a bus stop serving a route that would take me into the city centre itself. A single decker bus pulled up with Oasis playing loud over the sound system; the driver a shaggy-haired unshaven faux Gallagher in shades. Mad For It. Welcome to Manchester.

The venue itself was part of the university, located on Oxford Road opposite the Holy Name Church. How the hell, I wondered, had Morrissey managed to get all the way up there and had the vicar really worn a tutu?

The venue was another that I'd visited before, only the previous year. That had been a bad experience though; hitching to see Die Cheerleader I'd missed the gig altogether which was a terrible thing given the effort I had been making to get there. This time, with far more distance to travel, I had made it in plenty of time. It just went to show that I could cover the ground far more quickly when I was travelling on my own (on the Die Cheerleader occasion I'd thrown my lot in with a couple of other fans and had failed miserably as a result).

The venue was nothing more than a big pedagogical shed, the kind of place in which you could imagine people playing basketball or sitting engineering exams. I have no idea whether it ever was used for that purpose, but there was something soulless and academic about it. The bar was on a separate floor; on one of my trips there I passed Miki who said hi.

This was the odd thing. I'd made a conscious decision to do this tour with the purpose of going to see the shows with no thought of getting to know the band or anything like that. And yet the fact that I had been to all three gigs so far seemed to have percolated through to them. This may have partly been because no-one else seemed to be travelling around too, but I suspect it might also have been something to do with the fact that my signature look had a significant element in common with Miki's signature look. Even though this was coincidence as I mentioned before, I realise now that of course from the outside it almost certainly looked as if I loved the band so much that I'd dyed my hair to be the same colour as the singer's.

I did love the band, but imitation wasn't my thing. I really liked Star Trek and curry as well but had never dressed up as a Star Fleet officer or a vegetable dhansak.

But it was a good feeling to be noticed. I couldn't deny that.

Another good feeling was the cumulative effect of going to several gigs on the trot. I had embarked on this short band break because I enjoyed the music so much. The gigs. So why not get as much pleasure as I could - they were playing six times, so I should go to all six gigs.

At times I'm sure we've all had a favourite album, an LP or CD that for a period of time we play constantly. Lush's set on the Split tour was becoming like that, a favourite total immersion album that I played to myself every night. Back then I was smoking and usually rolled myself a joint beforehand which I smoked during the gig in the safety of the crowd. I'd usually had enough before I reached the end of it - I was never much of a dope fiend - and would try to pass it on but the bright young indie kids that made up the rest of the audience refused, shocked looks on their faces.

I wasn't yet thirty and yet was already feeling old.

Next time...
From Bull Ring to Bath

many thanks to Mick Mercer for permission to use his Lush photos

I Don't Like Sundays

2011-03-13T17:27:00.002Z

"In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul."

Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Sunday evenings are amongst the most unpleasant time spans it is possible to experience. Whilst both Tony Hancock and Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged may have had a problem with Sunday afternoons, it's only during the evening when things start to get really nasty and you become filled with a sense of disappointment and self loathing because once again you didn't get nearly enough done.

This isn't surprising. When you're at work during the week then of course you don't want to indulge in any extra-curricular activity - the working week's hard enough as it is without extending it into the evenings. And in recent years, you observe, it seems to have become so draining that it takes most of the weekend relaxing before you start feeling even remotely human again.

But you can never really enjoy the relaxation because of the guilt.

The guilt starts in childhood. Childhood is when Sunday evenings first start metamorphosing into the dreadful form in which they will be so familiar in adult life.

It all begins the first time you realise you haven't done your homework and that all that lies between now and the horror of school is That's Life, The Waltons and sleep. You can't even really enjoy The Waltons or That's Life because (a) they're not actually that good to be honest and (b) on some level you know that watching them is procrastination - if you gave them up (and let's face it, it wouldn't be much of a sacrifice) you might be able to go to your room and get that homework done and not be living in fear and dread the next day. All you'd be giving up would be an hour or so of insipid television during which Esther would probably blink back crocodile tears whilst describing the fate of a terminally ill baby before handing over to Doc who would attempt to fill the gaping void in the audience's soul with a selection of vegetables shaped a little like genitalia and slightly amusing misprints. What you stood to gain would be peace of mind.

But of course you never did that. Watching Sunday evening TV as a child is the perfect illustration of Freud's Pleasure Principle, even though the pleasure is so attenuated as to be effectively absent. By seeking Pleasure (That's Life) and avoiding Pain (homework) one is merely putting off the inevitable for short term and largely illusory gain.

Freud called it the Pleasure Principle. Others might call it laziness.

In theory adherence to the principle is supposed to be something one outgrows in infancy but in practice it seems to last well into adulthood. The secret mantra of the twenty first century is "never do today what you can put off until tomorrow" and a lot of the time unpleasant tasks can be put off almost indefinitely by obeying the Id, Chief Advocate of the Pleasure Principle. There is an irony here; putting off these unpleasant tasks only results in a net increase in the amount of displeasure in your life. Not only is there a constant low grade background radiation of guilt gnawing at your consciousness, but often these minor chores, once complete and out of the way, would be a major contributory factor to an increase in the quality of life, with all the attendant pleasure that this might afford. Short term gain results in long term loss. So does such knowledge of the big picture help wean us off the Pleasure Principle?

Does it buggery.

Even though 99% of the time we know that we should be doing such and such and that doing it sooner rather than later will only lead to greater rewards in the long term, for some reason the demon of apathy reclining on the couch in the forebrain whispering that the path of least resistance is the best one is far more convincing. Easier not to... Even though any pleasure derived from taking the path will be soured by guilt.

Like the road to hell, the path of least resistance is paved with good intentions. I'll do it tomorrow. When I'm less tired. When I'll be able to concentrate more. Once I've got watching That's Life out of the way...

This attitude could have a major catastrophic effect during school days when what one was putting off often had to be handed in and judged the next day by sinister figures with what felt like the power of life and death over you. And didn't they just exercise it to the full extent that the law allowed with their criticism, censure and false "disappointment". And let's face it, it was false. When a teacher said they were "disappointed more than anything else" in you or your work you could always see the spark of glee in their eyes, the excitement that they'd been afforded the opportunity to indulge in a bout of spiteful condemnation.

In adult life it's usually less extreme; most of the time the only person judging you is yourself. You may have a day job but if you're lucky, most of the time it doesn't impinge upon your weekend. The things you put off and procrastinate to avoid as an adult are the things you really want to do, or rather things you really want to have done

And with an irony typical of this bloody universe, the things you really want to have done, the things which are most worth doing, are always the most difficult and frightening.

The only comfort is that at least That's Life isn't on the air any more.

Dreaming of the Starlight: 1

2011-03-03T17:42:00.001Z

If you were to look at what was once my record collection, became my CD collection and now in the digital age is ascending to a higher state of MP3, you'd find that a large proportion of the music has female vocals. Perhaps not as large a proportion as there should be, but I suspect that is merely a reflection of the sexual inequality that is still as rife in the music industry today as anywhere else. However, if you were to look at a list of my favourite bands, the top ten as it were, you would find that they almost all have female vocals.

This is no coincidence. To me the sound of a female voice is so much more pleasant than a male one, a woman singing has a cold, clear, and above all coherent beauty that is such a long way from the fake american accented drawl of so many male artists. This is a personal preference of course and there are exceptions to every rule. But on the whole... Yes, I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't that either. When I first started getting into music as a hormonal adolescent, liking the girl was as important as liking the music, but this wasn't unconditional. I did have to like the music. However, it may be the case that my preference for female vocals was set back then.

I may be projecting, assigning qualities to my favourite artists that I'd like them to have, but what increases my enjoyment even more than simply female vocals is when the songs are written by women as well. The difference of mindset, the feeling that more thought has gone into the lyrics, to the sounds. Exceptions to every rule, yes. But.

It was a combination of these preferences that propelled Lush to the top of my internal band chart back in the early nineties. Not only did their songs boast female vocals but 99% of the time were written by one of two women songwriters whose songs were different enough to be able to distinguish them (Miki's spiky and Emma's swirly) but similar enough to belong to a coherent wall-of-melodic-sound oeuvre. These songs sounded like the inside of my head, chords and riffs resonating as if being played upon neurones bathed in a dark red wash of intracellular fluid. Above all it was the overall sound that mattered the most here; a lot of the time the vocals were given no more precedence than any other instrument. As a result it was a long time before I could be certain of putting song tiles to songs, although I had my favourites. This one or that one. The one with the thing.

There were men involved too; Chris and Steve (the latter of whom left in 1992 and was replaced by Phil) who were all very much part of the band's identity and strength. You did still get the impression that it was Miki and Emma that were driving though, which was a breath of fresh air. Lush had a modern feel of gender egalitarianism without the band ever having to adopting a self-consciously "feminist" stance (their final album "Lovelife" was indeed a commentary of the battle of the sexes but managed to do so without preaching).

The story begins, as all good stories do, with a sense of dissatisfaction. A mood. A grumpy mood. In retrospect I was having a good time but was beginning to get exasperated by the weekly dance at the Slimelight and felt like doing something different to take my mind off it. Something. Anything.

I used to buy the Melody Maker religiously in those days. As I worked in the West End I used to walk down to Argyll Street at Tuesday on lunch time where there was a news stand that used to get the latest issue in earlier than anywhere else. There was already something Lush-like about those lunchtime walks because on more than one occasion I'd spotted Miki (once carrying her guitar down Oxford Street, once coming out of Rymans). Seeing someone from one of my favourite bands pop up in my lunch break like that out of the blue put a bit of shine on the day. I never said hello or anything, I was afraid of breaking the spell.

On this particular Tuesday when I was feeling somewhat disgruntled with my lot, I saw in the Melody Maker that Lush were about to embark on a short tour of the UK to support their new album "Split" an album which amongst other things was being promoted by having a London Taxi painted to resemble the sleeve (a taxi which I also used to see during my West End lunch breaks and which once nearly ran me over).

The album wasn't out yet, but had been preceded by two singles which had, rather oddly, been released simultaneously. Miki's "Hypocrite" (a frantic bouncy self referential paradox "I know you think it's wrong - and maybe you're right but this is my song") and Emma's "Desire Lines" (an eight minute ambient spacefaring lament which precisely halfway through engages its star drive).

The tour was taking in only a handful of venues around the UK and was due to start only the next week.

Sod it, I thought, I've got leave coming to me, I've always enjoyed all the Lush gigs I've been to up until now, why not indulge myself?

I booked the time off and mentally prepared myself for a hitch around the country. I had seen them several times before; the first occasion had been a day festival in Crystal Palace alongside James, All About Eve and The Cure. After that I'd made a point of seeing them whenever they played in London if I could. But this tour was the first time I was going see them outside the capital. The first date was at The Leadmill in Sheffield. I knew this venue of old having not only watched Indians in Moscow play there a full decade before but just the previous year had seen Die Cheerleader there (only to come down with a migraine during the support act Voodoo Queens).

At the time I was sporting one of my "signature" looks - bright red hair. As it happened Miki also had bright red hair. This was a coincidence.

Hitch-hiking was still the order of the day and as such I found myself standing down at the root of the M1 in Brent Cross on the morning of 4 June 1994 with my thumb out.

The first car I got picked up by was one crewed by a couple of scary looking but nevertheless friendly rockers. The guy in the passenger seat did all the talking, he was (I seem to recall) bald but with a small beard and moustache. They were on their way to Castle Donnington for the Monsters of Rock festival, they told me, and were going to set up a stall there selling tarantulas. Their stock was in the back of the car apparently.

I peered over the back seat. They certainly weren't shitting me. There, stacked up in myriad plastic tupperware boxes punched with air holes, crouched more hand-sized spiders than I liked to think about. I don't know what the collective noun for large spiders is but a Nightmare of Tarantulas fits the bill nicely. What would happen if we crashed? I imagined the swarm of eight legged monstrosities emerging from the wreckage to the shock of the emergency services like something from a cheap horror film...

Luckily we didn't crash and I was dropped off at the junction in plenty of time to hitch the remaining 50 miles to Sheffield. I don't recall the details of my final lift but like so many were in those days it was very probably a sales rep. Most of them wanted to talk about my hair and none of them had heard of Lush. Sometimes they would try and engage me in conversation about music but on the whole this never worked as their tastes only seemed to stretch as far as Rod Stewart or Van Halen. One chap did confess to being quite keen on Oasis although they were, he opined, basically just ripping off The Beatles.

The Leadmill was a child of the industrial revolution and lurked in a side street as if hiding from the law. I remember it as being a vast barn although I am sure that if I went back I'd find it was smaller than I remembered. These places usually are except for when you remember them as being very small in which case they turn out to be actually larger (the memory not only cheats but is a barefaced liar). The stage was very high.

I have no idea why the UK leg of the tour was so short but as a result the gigs felt full of concentrated Lushness. I stood at the front and drank in the experience, savouring my favourites and sipping interestedly at new songs that I wasn't yet familiar with but was looking forward to getting to know better when the album was released.

Afterward I chatted in the bar with some of the local gig goers before eventually the venue closed and I was turned out into the warm summer streets. I didn't have anywhere to go and from past experience I understood that the best thing to do was remain in the city centre. I'd taken some speed earlier and as a result wasn't particularly in a hurry to sleep even if I could have found somewhere. Eventually I found a seat in a corner of the coach station and dozed fitfully for a couple of hours.

It was going to be a long six days.

It was going to be fun.

Next time...
Hitting the Hut that belonged to King Tut

many thanks to Mick Mercer for permission to use his Lush photos

Somewhere in the middle of the film

2011-02-28T18:46:00.003Z

Stories are always bigger and more complex when you don't know them. A clip from a new film shown on TV somehow manages to make the film appear much more epic and far reaching than it in the end it actually turns out to be.

Take Star Wars. This was big news back in 1977 and endless showings of the same clips on TV somehow made me think of it as a grand epic tale with the scope and intense world building of Frank Herbert's Dune (although I hadn't read that either). Those clips. This was surely going to be the best film ever? I couldnt wait. That bit they kept showing where the two droids crash landed a spaceship in the middle of the desert. Wow. Obviously somewhere in the middle of the film; the droids on a mission of some importance that must have been interrupted somehow.

But when I eventually saw the film the clips I was already familiar with from TV (not to mention the pictures on the bubble gum cards) were somehow diminished. Too near the beginning, too close together or not imbued with nearly as much significance as I first thought they might have. The story seemed too short and above all too simple.

It just goes to show that even when you're watching someone else's vision translated into big budget 3D widescreen, your own mind still somehow does a better job. Star Wars was always better before I actually saw it.

This doesn't happen quite so much these days because your expectations are managed by high-octane jump-cut trailers with deep voiceovers (now almost always ironic):

One man...

MAN JUMPS OUT OF FIREY EXPLOSION

...is about to discover...

MAN ABSEILS DOWN SIDE OF BUILDING

...that the one thing...

MAN MACHINE GUNS OPEN A DOOR

...his training can't prepare him for...

MAN JUMPS DRAMATICALLY INTO ROOM
WITH A GRENADE IN HIS TEETH

...is a baby

SHOT OF CRYING BABY
MAN PULLS COMICAL 'SHOCKED' FACE
MUSIC GOES SILLY

And so on. Of course perhaps I don't watch enough TV these days and should tune into Film 2011 more regularly. I am sure they show proper clips. But half the time it's of films I don't really care about and Harrison Ford is suddenly an old man talking earnestly to some Hollywood clone woman about Issues.

But I don't even go to the cinema that often any more. There's something about the narrative structure of most films these days that is the same and makes it seem as if its straight of out a text book. Too many reversals of fortune whilst heading towards the denouement. Perhaps sometimes this is done with the best of intentions, but half the time you think that they only did this to spin it out for another ten minutes because the studio felt that the running time was a bit on the low side.

And as for alternate endings because a test screening went wrong... I'm sorry but it's the audiences at the test screenings that are in the wrong (even if they're right if you see what I mean). The ending of the film is the ending of the film.

However shit that might be.

The Death of Thugg

2011-02-25T10:45:00.010Z

Awoke early this morning and spent a miserable couple of hours tossing and turning whilst hoping that the severe headache that had me in its grip would just GO AWAY.

In the end it didn't which was most unsatisfactory. I had to get up and go in search of painkillers. Luckily I didn't have to go very far - they were in the kitchen. This is a marked improvement on the occasion when, whilst still living in Astra House, I had to actually get up at 3.30am, get dressed and stagger up Preston Street and along Western Road and into actual Hove before I found a twenty four hour store where I could buy some piss weak generic painkillers (not even something with added codeine oomph). I learnt a valuable lesson that night; always keep painkillers in the house.

You'd have thought that by now we'd have evolved out of tension headaches which are no good to man nor beast. I mean, from an evolutionary point of view they're a terrible burden...

Thugg the Caveman sleeps in a draft and as a result gets a neck ache the tension of which translates into a full blown behind-the-eyeballs throbber. However, the problem is that he's on sabre-tooth tiger hunting duty today and back in prehistoric times you couldn't call in sick. There were no phones, for a start.

So he drags himself out of the cave and goes along the path to the pharmacy-witch who gives him a willow infusion. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to shift the pain and, given that ibuprofen won't be invented for tens of thousands of years he's just going to have to grimace and bear it. So he joins the group standing nervously by the big tree slapping each other on the back, bantering and asking each other if they saw the big fight last night. Thugg doesn't know what they're talking about as he doesn't get Sky (the mouth of his cave points downwards) but apparently there was a big ding dong between Chief Grillogg and up and coming young buck Drigg up on the ridge the previous evening. Moonlit and everything.

Thugg doesn't like fighting and anyway, this headache is making it difficult for him to see properly, let alone engage in mindless small-grunt. He's starting to see things and suspects that the headache is turning into a full blown migraine or "Invisible-Stone-Axe-Buried-In-Skull" as his tribe knows the condition.

Five minutes ago he could have sworn he saw a Boeing 747 fly past, which is highly unlikely as Boeing 747s won't be invented until round about the same time as ibuprofen. Perhaps it was a big bird, he thinks, that bloody eagle that carried off Footwatcher the other month.

But staring at the sky becomes too bright for him so he looks at the ground instead.

"Cheer up, it may never happen!"

Thugg feels a blow to his shoulder and peers up to see Guntt, the tribal wiseboy grinning foolishly at him. He murmurs incomprehensibly back. He just wants to be left alone and to spend the day under his bearskin quilt until this terrible headache goes away.

What a bunch of shitheads the rest of the tribe are, he muses.

They set off towards the veldt. Well they call it a veldt. To be brutally honest it's more of a common. Even the tigers seem embarrassed to stalk across it. Thugg is having a bad day. He stubs his toe on a rock, falls into the stream and then accidentally whacks Hugg over the head with the shaft of his spear and receives a punch in the face for his trouble. That really doesn't help Thugg's mood.

Thugg thinks it would be nice to have someone to blame for all this misfortune and invents God. Thanks, God, you stupid bastard. Why have you got it in for me? If it wasn't for me you wouldn't exist, I only invented you a minute ago.

Thugg trips and falls down a hill, sliding through the scree and ending up in heap at the bottom of the hill. He is beginning to suspect that his arm is now broken. What a brilliant day, he thinks, inventing sarcasm. At the top of the hill the rest of the tribe are laughing at him, but their hoots of derision turn into chimpanzee shrieks of fear. He turns to see a tiger bearing down upon him.

Is Thugg dead? Tune into the next exciting installment.

However, there's a very important point here. Tension headaches are definitely, absolutely and without a shadow of a doubt, very very bad for you. There are absolutely no circumstances under which they could be advantageous. So I don't understand why it is that they haven't been selected out, As I discussed only the other day, evolution is a straightforward, by the numbers process - so why isn't it working here? After all headaches are also famous for preventing sex.

Either headaches are an unavoidable side effect of intelligence that used to be a lot worse (and this is as good as it gets) or there's something else going on. Something slightly sinister. Maybe headaches are something new, something that has arisen in recent years and as such haven't had time to be addressed by numbers and time. Perhaps an unavoidable side effect not of intelligence but of modern living?

The most significant change over the past couple of hundred years is the exponential human population explosion. We have to face facts - there are now simply too many people. If we reduced the planetary population to a tenth of its current level (over the course of a couple of generations - I'm not proposing a cull) civilisation would still be perfectly sustainable and yet we almost certainly wouldn't have to worry about environmental issues or even the global financial crisis.

Perhaps tension headaches are a side effect of this overpopulation. Interference from too many other brains in the immediate vicinity. Neural activity is electrical in nature and electrical currents generate fields. Put enough brains in one room and it's the mental equivalent of trying to read a book when you're surrounded by a crowd of people shouting.

Hermits don't get headaches.

stone headache picture from geograph.org.uk by Chris Downer

Down the Tube 6: Via Imagination

2011-02-22T20:38:00.002Z

Just as moving house had opened and closed the first book of my Tubehood, The Case of the Victorian Zodiac, so moving house once more at the close of the seventies would bring the second book, The Case of the Dism Rly, to an end and set the pieces up for the third and final book in the trilogy. We weren't moving far, just a mile or so down the road to Cranley Gardens. This was near Highgate tube and Highgate Wood (two of the primary locations of book two).

Nevertheless things were very different now. For a start I was growing up. Not only had I recently discovered the allure of spiky women in general and Toyah Willcox in particular which had put an entirely different spin on things, but I'd also moved up into the senior school.

This latter move was an extremely unpleasant one (at some point I will write a comprehensive blog entry explaining why), so suffice to say that I decided to continue concentrating on my inner life and as a result my enthusiasm for all things London Underground remained, albeit in a diminished form.

One of the best things about the location of Cranley Gardens was that it had been on one of the great lost lines that originally flowed outwards from Highgate. Imagine that; I was living in a road that had once had its own tube station but which was now derelict. I even worked out where the station had been.

Right up at the top of Cranley Gardens diagonally opposite one looming corner of Highgate Wood (still dark and primeval to me) and across from number 23 (which would become famous a few years afterwards for very different reasons) lay a garden centre. They were all the rage back then. Behind the garden centre was a sunken path.

The layout and feel of this path was very familiar to me from my earlier explorations of the hidden places in Highgate Wood. This was quite clearly the route of an abandoned railway, the unnatural curve of the path gave it away, the rubble of pumice underfoot. It disappeared off behind the houses through thick trees before rising above them on a viaduct that gave commanding views of East London and Essex. The route was lined with rusty metal signs warning of 50,000 volts amongst the weeds and stanchions that had obviously once carried cables, but like its cousin across in Highgate Wood, this Dism Rly had no actual sleepers or tracks, no real live rail despite the warnings.

Such was the unevenness of ground level in Muswell Hill that even after being so high up the track shortly afterwards found itself looking up at the backs of houses and shops on Muswell Hill Broadway before coming to a end at a pedestrian subway under Muswell Hill itself.

There was no sign of the actual stations themselves and from this point onwards it became difficult to follow the route to the terminus at Alexandra Palace. There was a school in the way for a start. If I wanted more I would have to look elsewhere.

Heading east from Highgate I soon discovered the rest of this ancient route curving round from the junction of Archway Road and Jackson's Lane, another stretch of abandoned railway bed that would one day become known as the Parkland Walk. Through cuttings and across narrow viaducts this route took in Crouch End station, the only place aside from the secret platforms at Highgate that still resembled a railway station. In some ways the discovery and pinning down of the solution to this childhood mystery was the end of the line for me. I could move on, although for years afterwards the route was one of my favourite walks.

But there was one place - in fact there still is one place - that the more mythical Tube has persisted. Inside my head. In dreams. Night dreams, not daydreams.

There's a somnambulant network there, reflecting but somehow far more exciting than the real thing could ever hope to be; in the dreamworld you don't need to get planning permission and as such things are bigger and better. Furthermore, these lines are all part of what appears to be a very consistent dream world (see earlier blog entry Dancing the Dreamscape for more detail of this).

There's a distant version of the western outreaches of the Metropolitan Line that takes days to get to and from. There are vast swathes of tracks filling an entire valley alongside the main route somewhere near Crouch End station, an idealised version of the stillborn branch line I discovered so long ago.

There are versions of the Circle Line in which the tracks run alongside mysterious caverns inhabited by strange manlike creatures; a Victoria Line that somehow manages to run as far south as Luxor in Egypt. And often there are dreams of the retooling of the whole network, vast building works threading myriad extra lines through the congested cats cradle of central London with complex new branches of the District Line sprouting like vines across the barren tubeless wastes of South London.

It may not be real but I'm certainly not the only person to have imagined such a Neverwhere, such an Un Lun Dun. There's something about such a subterranean network of tunnels that has fastened hooks in our imaginations since the first tube opened in 1863. Something about that familiar brightly coloured wiring diagram that speaks to us on levels we don't fully comprehend.

They've ruined it now of course. The magic map now lies defaced by the ugly scrawls of Docklands and Overground, a mere parody of its former self.

Harry Beck would not be pleased.

Crouch End station photo by Steve Way

The Cold Equations

2011-02-16T10:15:00.011Z

"God does not play dice with the universe"
Albert Einstein

I find it astonishing in this day and age that the whole business of "should Creationism be taught in schools?" is even discussed. It's not an issue of religious freedom - people should free to believe in whatever they like however stupid it is. It's an issue of whether what should be taught in schools should make fucking sense.

By all means teach people about religion in schools (some people believe this whilst other people believe that and sometimes people kill other people for not agreeing with them) but anything about the way the universe actually works should be based on facts or at least as close to facts as are currently available. When something is unknown that too should be made clear.

But, argue the Creationists, Evolution's just a theory too, goldarnit!

No. No it isn't. It's just logic. To be honest I don't even think it should be dignified with the epithet "theory". After all, we don't talk about "The Theory of 2 + 2 = 4" and it really is as simple, straightforward and logical as that. Later on I will demonstrate why.

Another argument used by the bible-bashing squad is that scientists are somehow spoiling things and taking the magic and wonder out of the world with their steadfast refusal to have truck with anything but facts. This has an unfortunate side effect. In an attempt to derail this criticism, scientists are prone to start waxing lyrical about "the wonders of evolution" and so on and so forth. Whilst this can be quite effective when making a popular documentary series (especially if accompanied by stirring incidental music) I think that on the whole it gives science a bad name.

You don't have to duplicate the shock, awe and alleged "wonder" of religion to supplant it. If anything these irrational emotional responses are what keep people clinging to the old ways. Evolution is numbers and common sense. There's nothing breathtaking about it. Given enough time and a complex mathematical system then of course we're going to see the diversity and multitude of forms of Life on Earth today.

However, we shouldn't be in awe of the results. This kind of gee whizz is a way of saying that a god did it without believing in a god; evangelical marvelling at the "wonders of evolution" is simply giving god another name. The awe should be reserved for the two things that really make all this possible. Two things that are awe-inspiring and if we're honest actually rather frightening.

Huge lengths of time and vast unimaginable numbers.

Those are the things that quite logically make us feel small and insignificant. Our day to day existence, our whole lives are as nothing compared to the lengths of time required for evolution to work; likewise the vast numbers required are far greater than our minds can comfortably conceive.

The size of numbers we can visualise is actually quite low. We might like to think we can imagine what 100 looks like, but what about if it's not neatly lined up in rows of ten? We can certainly conceive of numbers higher than ten but can't actually visualise them. Try it. You almost always end up with combinations of other numbers - for instance twelve ends up being two sixes, often visualised as the faces of dice.

Dice can also be useful in demonstrating how simple evolution actually is, and to do so I propose a fairly straightforward thought experiment. The experiment uses what I call Tetrahedral Amoeba Dice (TAD or Tads). Each Tad only has four equilateral triangle faces (and as such is a tetrahedron). Each of these faces has a letter of the alphabet at its centre, A, B, C or D. When you throw a Tad, the letter that appears on the face flat on the ground is the score. We observe the results by looking upwards though the floor, which is made of glass.

All quite straightforward, but wait, there's more. This is the first odd bit.

Each Tad has DNA, a simple genome that does no more than affect the likelihood of a particular face ending up flat when the Tad is thrown. There are only sixteen genes and each of these can only have one of four values, which by a handy coincidence are also the values that appear on the faces of the Tad.

An average member of the Tad population has a genome consisting of the following genes:

A A A A B B B B C C C C D D D D

Four genes for each of its faces which means that when thrown there's always a one in four chance of any number coming up. Think of the genes as weights in their corresponding face. Of course some Tads might be mutants with more of one type of gene and less of another - we can think of these as being "loaded dice".

The second odd bit is that the Tads have a life cycle. Every four throws they split in two, amoeba-like, both copies being exact duplicates of the original parent. And for the purposes of keeping it simple, every four throws there's a cull in which half of them die at random so the population remains stable. Sometimes genetic mutations occur during division - when, due to a replication error, a standard Tad might split into:

A A A A A B B B C C C C D D D D

and

A A A B B B B B C C C C D D D D

one of which is more likely to come up A and the other more likely to come up B. On other occasions mutations occur spontaneously, zapping an A into a B at random.

So far this is all very fine and splendid (if spectacularly pointless). Starting with a population of a million after 400 iterations the makeup of the population is going to be pretty much the same and any mutations get lost in the noise. But suppose something changes?

Some factor in the environment favours Tads showing a C so that when the cull comes any Tad showing a C survives. Of course a proportion of these will be those that just came up C at random, but any Tads loaded in favour of C (and which happened to come up C on that occasion) survive. There are now a larger proportion of Tads in the population loaded in favour of C than there were.

And if this keeps happening? Provided the environmental factor remains the same, the proportion of Tads with five (or more) C-genes goes on increasing and begins to dominate. Of course some "normals" may survive at random every cull if they happened to come up C on that occasion, likewise any C-loaded Tads that happened not to come up C that time may die.

But given the sheer numbers involved, C-loaded Tads go on increasing. Eventually the whole population will consist of Tads with five (or more) C-genes. But it doesn't stop there.

Every cull some Tads fall prey to this mysterious cyclic dice plague when they don't come up C at the roll of reckoning. A Tad with five C-genes will always come up C less than a Tad with 6 C-genes and therefore will gradually be weeded out of the population come Culling Day. The population will continue to change in this manner until eventually the whole population consists of Tads with six (or more) C-genes.

And this change with continue to favour more and more C-genes until the whole population consists of Tads with sixteen C-genes, all of whom always come up C.

The Tads evolved. Purely due to the inevitability of mathematics. Just numbers. Cold equations. With vast enough numbers and even vaster amounts of time, such changes are not only unremarkable but inevitable.

The universe plays dice with itself.

Down the Tube 5: Don't Jubilee've It

2011-02-12T19:15:00.002Z

As my story nears puberty I find that the memories are starting to fragment and it's becoming more difficult to construct a coherent narrative of my childhood relationship with the tube. Perhaps because this is because I started to see things in less black and white terms and could no longer access the mental space in which I felt the simple joy of losing myself in a complex but highly ordered structure.

In many ways it was liberating to move on from this absolute mental space as it meant I was less likely to get upset when this structure was disturbed. In retrospect such upsets were absurd, but they seemed very genuine at the time. One was when I discovered that the tube map was not to scale. Of course it should have been plain as a pikestaff given the regularity of the diagram, but nevertheless I was very resistant to the idea that the distance from High Barnet to Camden Town wasn't the same as the distance from Camden Town to Charing Cross. It was similar to the sense of betrayal I felt when I discovered the degree of distortion inherent in Mercator's Projection. My mental model of reality matched these maps - was it too much to expect that the real world follow suit?

But I was getting older. Now both my sister and I were both travelling to school by tube although hers was the longer journey (all the way to Camden). One evening she told me she'd seen a map with a new line marked on it "under construction". It was silver and called the Jubilee Line. I didn't want to believe her; the new line was going to be called the Fleet Line, I'd known that for ages. And it hadn't appeared on any maps. This new information didn't make sense.

When my investigations the next day revealed that she'd been correct it felt as if the universe was conspiring with my sister to wind me up. But there the map was with the new "Jubilee" line clearly marked,changing its name bold as brass without so much as a by-your-leave. I was upset that the Fleet Line of my imagination had been written out of my future, replaced by this gaudy "Jubilee" upstart in an attempt to curry favour with the Queen. I discovered that I wasn't the only person who felt this way when I spotted stickers on some of the tube maps bearing the legend "Don't Jubilee've it! - FLEET LINE - Movement Against the Monarchy".

Eventually I swallowed this disappointment and began to get excited about the imminent arrival. I was to get an inkling of the shape and colour of this new line due to my regular use of Green Park station. This was because (rather nerdily I have to admit) I had recently become a "JARI", a Junior Associate of the Royal Institution. This had come about as a result of my attendance at the infamous Christmas Lectures during the 1970s when I'd met such luminaries as David Attenborough and Carl Sagan. Of course the membership meant far more tube journeys for me as I travelled there to use the library. It was a strange and solitary experience, wandering amongst the stacks of ancient scholarly works daydreaming about how Michael Faraday had once prowled the same corridors.

The nearest tube stop was the aforementioned Green Park which happened to be one of the places that the Jubilee Line was going to stop. Gradually over the course of a couple of years a new passageway appeared in the ticket hall, fenced off with stainless steel scissor-gates and decorated with bright orange tiles. The colour scheme was a long way from the austere blue grey of the Victoria Line. It felt obscurely unfaithful starting to get enthusiastic about a new tube line, but I couldn't help it. It was fresh bright and exciting and the best thing of all was that I'd be there at the birth.

On the first day I caught the tube down to Charing Cross on the Northern Line (formerly Strand station which had been closed for the duration of construction) and walked down the new interchanges following the signs that said Jubilee Line. I was almost shaking. There was a thrilling smell of fresh rubber and plastic in the air.

And then there I was standing on the platform of a brand new station on a brand new line. I noticed a number of other people who were obviously there for the occasion, nerdy looking men in anoraks with satchels and oversized cameras. Was I one of them? Was this to be my fate?

I looked inside the train and my heart pounded. The internal line maps looked far more complex than maps of the Jubilee Line had a right to be. Did the maps show all future stations planned for the line? Ah, no. They were just Bakerloo Line maps. The rolling stock had obviously just been transferred from the Jubilee's older brother for the occasion. This was annoying. Upsetting, even. It wasn't proper.

The stations more than made up for it. The idea of motifs was obviously still fresh in the designers' minds, but here they'd really let themselves go. Taking critical comments about the clinical appearance of the Victoria Line to heart, they'd decorated their baby in shocking orange, turquoise and green with some of the new motifs eschewing the old fashioned medium of ceramic tiles for melamine, a hard modern plastic material I associated with mugs.

And the redesign hadn't stopped at the Jubilee Line platforms. When the Northern Line's Strand station had reopened as Charing Cross a gigantic medieval tableau dwarfed passengers standing on the platform and made a pleasant change from the rows of movie posters. In stark black and white, Tottenham Hale's Jesus in a Boat wouldn't have looked out of place here. By contrast the Jubilee line platforms were comparatively subdued with fairly bog standard portraits of Nelson, pigeons and other naval themed images.

At Green Park leaves were very much the order of the day. They even changed the Victoria Line motifs to match. This didn't sit well with me. Much as I had disliked the original Green Park motif on the Victoria Line, it felt wrong just changing it like that. Why couldn't they just leave things alone? Whilst the new things were very exciting, the retconning of the rest of the network in this way felt wrong. Things should remain how they had been during my childhood, I thought, that way I need never really age and could tap into the uncomplicated happiness of that time.

Not that I articulated it in that manner (or even realised it consciously).

At Bond Street there were presents, implying not that it was Christmas every day, but as a nod to the shops up above. And at Baker Street, rather than celebrate the birth of the London Underground in 1863 at that very station, the designers chose to invoke the district's most famous fictional cocaine addict Sherlock Holmes with illustrations from his exploits.

And that was it really, only four stops, all of which had existed before. The Stanmore branch didn't really count because it was just resprayed Bakerloo line. It felt like a bit of a let down really. Was I outgrowing the Underground's mysterious charm?

Perhaps not. A booklet I bought at the Tourist Information Centre in Charing Cross revealed London Underground's plans for the latest addition to their network. Even though up until now it was little more than the Bakerloo Line's more glamorous conjoined twin, plans were afoot that would take it into uncharted territory. STAGE 2 beckoned.

Apparently the line was to continue beneath the Strand and Fleet Street to Aldwych and a brand new station at Ludgate Circus, from there cozying up alongside the Circle Line at Cannon Street before terminating at Fenchurch Street "the only mainline terminus not served by the tube" trumpeted the booklet.

And STAGE 3! That was the really exciting part. From Fenchurch Street the Jubilee was to wind itself around the Thames like a boa constrictor before terminating at Thamesmead and Beckton. I couldn't wait.

Or could I? There was no indication of how long this was actually going to take. And in the meantime the frightening but fascinating looking punk girls I'd spotted on my travels around the network had started to attract my attention. Perhaps the tube could wait...

Quantum Alarm Clock

2011-02-09T10:15:00.014Z

I get the feeling that I have already mentioned the whole issue of waking up just before the alarm clock goes off in this blog. It's exactly the kind of thing that it would have occurred to me to write about in the early days when I was doing it regularly.

Back in that heady time I used to get up at 6.30am, tap away at the keyboard and then hit PUBLISH POST without a second thought. Given that I'd so recently dragged myself up out of sleep it isn't at all surprising that I'd end up writing about alarm clocks. Nowadays I plan things more and write a blog entry over a couple of days so alarm clocks aren't so fresh in my mind.

It's odd when it happens though, this preemptive waking. Depending upon how deeply you've been asleep you snap or drift into wakefulness and wonder what it is that has roused you. Sometimes it almost seems as if you heard an alarm clock going off in the next room or at least dreamed that you heard one.

And then it actually goes off. There is an impression that what shook you into wakefulness was an echo of the alarm itself, a resonance of the shock you now feel as it goes off. But that would be ridiculous. Things don't resonate or echo backwards in time.

However, it starts to feel less ridiculous if we think of your mind (your consciousness, the thing that has been woken by the alarm) less as being a single point in space-time and more as being a wave of probability smeared across quantum reality.

This isn't unreasonable. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the sense of smell has been proven to work using quantum tunnelling, so it's not beyond the bounds of possibility to surmise that the whole of the brain works in this way. Perhaps that's just how nerves work? And if this is how brains work then consciousness - as a side effect of a complex working brain - is undoubtedly quantum-based. If quantum theory has taught us one thing it's that nothing is clear and defined, hence the whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Everything exists as a probability.

One interpretation of this quantum reality of probabilities is that on a microscopic level what we're actually seeing is the effect of many worlds interfering with each other, the parallel universes so beloved of Science Fiction authors.

However I think the whole idea of parallel worlds being "parallel" is flawed. The model of a series of parallel universes lying neatly on top of each other like a ream of paper in a laser printer's feed tray might be an attractive one but I think it's far from the truth.

If anything this universe and its adjacent ones are merely ways of looking at an continuum of probability, a sea of might-be. Whilst you could indeed define a parallel universe as being 1mm away from this one along the probability axis, that doesn't mean it's next door. What about the level of probability 0.5mm away? Or 0.25 mm away? Or...

I think you get the point. And in this sheet of probability there's no reason why other universes need necessarily be parallel, either. You can slice it any way you like. This means that our consciousness extends sideways in time and that what we might think of as our self is merely a section of a spectrum of us-ness smeared across the nearest Many Worlds, a wave of probability sideways in time falling away the further we get from World Zero.

So our consciousness, our self, is not a point. It's a wave. The highest point, the probability factor of 1:1, is what we might think of as ourselves, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

If we imagine a graph where the Y axis is probability of consciousness and the X axis represents universal probability with the origin representing this universe then our consciousness is a steep hill (a two dimensional picture of a hill) centred on the origin and disappearing off asymptotically to infinity and minus infinity. Our self is located below the curve and we are dimly aware of what goes on in our subconsciousness (below the waterline) even though some of it is taking place in other universes as our parallel selves go about their business.

Yes, very salutary, but what about alarm clocks and precognition and things?

Allow me to introduce you to the Z-axis. Let the Z-axis equal time.

We can now imagine our hill of self sliding ever onwards along the Z-axis like a painting being carried the wrong way by two rather inept delivery men, as if the graph above started sliding towards you out of the screen. However, this analogy doesn't really satisfy. If the frame of the graph has become three dimensional, then the curve of our consciousness should too and the most obvious shape to imagine this being is a complete three dimensional hill. A steep hill extending not only sideways into probability but also a little way forwards and backwards in time.

Just as we share some of our consciousness with our twins off sideways in the Worlds of If, then we also share some of it with our selves in the immediate future and the immediate past. Our conscious self (whilst centered on the here and now) extends not only sideways but also forwards and backwards in time. This means that we can be aware of things happening in the immediate future (below the curve) just before they happen. Especially shocking ones. Like alarm clocks.

Of course on the face of it the whole thing is totally ridiculous. Common sense dictates that time is absolute and you can no more see dimly into the immediate future than you could go for a walk on the ceiling.

Have a care though, because common sense also says that the world is flat.

This seems like a lot of trouble to go to to explain how the alarm clock wakes you up before it goes off, but I can see how it might have other applications. It could be very advantageous to be able to predict the immediate future like this.

To a prehistoric mammal living on the edge such defocussed temporal perception could mean the difference between life and death: I might be about to get squashed by a dinosaur; better get out of the way then. And of course those mammals who are slightly better at it will survive to breed, meaning that eventually the whole population consists of such amateur clairvoyants. Of course it's not "real" clairvoyance with all the baggage of pseudoscience and technocratic heresy this would imply. All it means is that you can dimly see into your own immediate future. Useful though.

And strange as it may seem some experiments have already been performed and published that suggest that consciousness is not shackled as closely to the present as we might think.

Down the Tube 4: Charley Says

2011-02-04T09:45:00.014Z

It hadn't occurred to me that wandering around old tube lines might be dangerous. Even though I lived in a world shaped by the terrifying images drummed into my head by public information films I didn't think it applied - I wasn't messing around with a kite near pylons or fooling about by some deep water. True, there had been an supposedly hard-hitting one about children getting killed playing on railways. The mere concept of this one had so terrified me when it was discussed on Nationwide that when they actually showed it I ran and hid.

But this was the Tube. It was different. Besides, the ghost railways I had discovered didn't have any sleepers or tracks. I wasn't going to get run down now, was I?

I finally discovered the secret behind these old lines purely by chance when going to visit a Great Aunt and Uncle in Fingringhoe. I found their bookshelves fascinating, just like the bookshelves of my grandparents. And what was this? A London A-Z from 1947. I turned it over to look at the tube map and my heart stopped. The Northern Line had two extra tendrils, flung out from Highgate. So what if they were now long since amputated? I felt how I imagined famous scientists must feel when finally obtaining proof for long held theories. But this still left five ghost stations unaccounted for, all somewhere nearby.

The live tube too still had me in its thrall. By now not only was I going to Bond Street and back every so often for the Children's Theatre Workshop but I also undertook other expeditions. To the museums at South Kensington for one. That meant that I had to travel on the Metropolitan, District and Circle lines, a family of routes with a very different feel. The tunnels weren't really tubes at all, but wide subterranean thoroughfares in which trains travelling in opposite directions passed each other in the darkness, the glimpses into counterwise carriages like looking through a chink into a parallel universe. Even the rolling stock was different; bigger taller carriages that whilst obviously close relatives of the smaller trains I was used to, felt more like African Elephants to the regular tube's Indian.

Other regions of the network also beckoned and one weekend I decided to take a trip to Ongar. This station, now closed, was on the outermost reaches of the Central Line in deepest darkest Essex. It was the tube journey equivalent of travelling to Pluto.

I managed to pick up some further information on my travels from the posters and leaflets scattered around the stations. Apparently there was going to be a new line, the Fleet Line. This was going to go from Baker Street to Trafalgar Square and seemed a bit of an extravagance given that the Bakerloo Line already served those stations. Nevertheless it was exciting. A new line! My hobby of drawing imaginary tube lines was boosted by this instance of life imitating art. And now an Under Construction line started to appear on maps in the stations, an extension of the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow. These were heady times to be living in, I decided.

I started at a different school which meant that I had to catch the bus or the tube to get there. Needless to say I caught the tube, despite the uphill walk at the other end. Just like the British rail suburban lines, I disliked the buses. They weren't proper. So it was that I began commuting at the age of ten albeit only from East Finchley to Highgate and back.

East Finchley station still seemed too big than it needed to be. Even though I'd discovered the purpose behind the two extra platforms, there was far too much of it. What was through those windows in the upper floors of those red brick buildings that loomed over the platforms? And where did that extra passage go? Exit from the platforms led into the ticket office and then out onto East Finchley High Road, but there was another passage heading the other way.

One day I decided to investigate.

It ended in another station entrance, one of which I had hitherto been unaware. This opened, said the signs, onto Hampstead Garden Suburb. But surely Hampstead was several miles away? Was this more arcane tube magic?

I remember this hidden entrance as having a high ceiling with a glass cupola through which light shone, but the memory may well be cheating. It did have a newspaper kiosk in one wall, but this looked as if it had been boarded up for years. I looked outside; in contrast to the front it led to a quiet pathway, lined with tall hedges, there was a man in a raincoat lurking outside who reminded me vaguely of the singer from Thin Lizzy. I went back inside. Apart from the kiosk, the only other feature of note was a toilet. I decided to make use of the facilities, it seemed silly not to having discovered another secret part of the underground.

I finished at the urinal and turned around only to see the False Lynott standing against the wall just inside the doorway with his penis out.

I tried to rationalise this. He was, I supposed, desparate for a pee and was cutting all the corners he could, getting his dick out early was just one of these measures. That didn't explain why he was just standing there though. Something felt nasty. I decided to leave.

As I walked past him he abruptly peed on my raincoat (or at least that's what I thought it was, not having heard of ejaculation at that age). I felt a numb distaste and hurried out, back down the passageway to the front of the station and out onto the busy High Street which felt safer. I crossed at the pelican and began walking up to the side street that led home. I didn't really know what had happened but I did know that I wanted to get home as quickly as possible.

There was a wolf-whistle. I looked across the road to see False Lynott keeping in step with me on the other side of the road, staring at me and grinning. This didn't make sense to me. He wolf-whistled again and this time I ignored him , staring at the pavement in front of my feet and turning gratefully into Baronsmere Road as the turning came into view.

Needless to say I didn't tell my parents, even when my mum complained about the stain on my raincoat. I felt I'd probably get into trouble, that it was somehow my fault. We'd all been warned about not taking sweets from Strangers, but he hadn't offered me any sweets. What to do if a Stranger peed white onto your coat as you walked past was something Charley the Cat had neglected to mention.

I never went back to that toilet again and have never really been able to enjoy the music of Thin Lizzy. Furthermore, East Finchley station was tainted and I lost interest in it. But even this unpleasant experience couldn't dampen my enthusiasm for the London Underground itself.

Whispers of the Fleet Line grew louder, and when the Heathrow Extension was opened in 1975 I was one of the first passengers on it and despite the length of the journey through mysterious places like Boston Manor and Osterley it was worth it to arrive at this mysterious futureworld of Hatton Cross and Heathrow Central stations. There were even planes taking off to watch once you got there.

Like a seventeenth century explorer I was spoilt for choice when it came to deciding upon my next escapade. There was just so much of it. I wondered if I'd ever visit all the stations? My dearest wish was to get hold of a full sized map of the network, not just the black and white "historical map" that I'd borrowed off a friend and asked my dad to photocopy (although this document did have its uses, revealing as it did the existence of further closed stations although not for some reason the now solved mystery of the goings on around Highgate).

I wanted a proper colour print of H C Beck's design classic just like the ones on the station platforms.

Nil by hand

2011-01-29T17:30:00.003Z

The introduction of the keyboard into my life - that is at first the typewriter and then the computer rather than the Yamaha Home Organ - I found to be The Great Enabler.

Before that I was always hamstrung when it came to expressing myself on paper and I suspect the messiness of my writing and how slow I was were a contributory factor to the "disappointment" teachers expressed in my efforts. For some reason they equated writing neatly with trying hard and intelligence, despite no evidence to support this whatsoever.

"Could try harder"

OH FUCK OFF.

At first I used to blame this on the fact that I'd effectively missed being taught joined up writing at school. I left Galliard Road Junior School in Edmonton the year before we learnt it, only to arrive at Tetherdown Junior School in Muswell Hill and discover that they'd learned it the year before. I ended up teaching myself and whenever possible would lapse back to printing. Handwriting was just too damned slow; I would end up missing out letters or even whole words as my brain raced ahead of my hands and would lose all sense of what I was trying to say. This was only exacerbated in secondary school by the insistence on the use of fountain or cartridge ink pens.

Even now I find printing far easier and clearer; something about the act of doing so makes it feel like I am drawing the letters and drawing is something that I've always been able to cope with. I was even kind of good at it sometimes.

Once keyboards came into my life I discovered that I wasn't bad at expressing myself in words either, despite accusations of being "quiet", "shy" or "hard work" by my peers. Perhaps I found conversation and small talk difficult, but given the opportunity to think out my words and get them down on paper I was as capable of eloquence as the best of them.

But even after typewriters and then computers became commonplace, I discovered that some people still insisted on things being handwritten. This was usually a problem for me.

I suspect that there were a number of reasons behind this.

Firstly simple Luddism. To someone growing up before the age of the keyboard and the computer the use of such tools was seen as a skill, a luxury, something which somehow required more effort and resource than simple pen and paper. One instance of this was in one of the first office jobs I had in London in which the big boss sent a memo round which asked all members of staff to write something in reply (I can't remember what it was about now - possibly about a strike or about security measures during Gulf War 1) which he insisted "should be in your own hand". I think there was no malice intended here but just that in his head it would be far too much hassle if everyone had to type and then print out their replies. He was trying to save time.

Not so! I thought, but hand wrote the thing anyway, because he was a scary fucker.

More sinister is when employers insist that job applications be handwritten. Why is this? Surely in this day and age no-one considers a keyboard too high tech? Well no, they don't but as part of the selection process these human resources departments hire graphologists to decipher the character of their potential employees. This strikes me as sneaky and unprofessional.

I am by no means dismissing graphology as a pseudoscience even though some people might lump it in with palm reading and astrology. Personally I can imagine that handwriting offers many insights into the character of the person concerned via straightforward psychological mechanisms. I am sure studying these might indeed reveal their true intentions or character just as effectively as studying their choice of words or facial expressions when speaking. But even if graphology was generally accepted as a hard scientific fact, there'd still be nothing to prevent you from getting someone else to complete the form for you, especially if you think they'd be more likely to get the job.

There is a third scenario when handwriting is insisted upon. You can kind of understand it. Given the way modern devices allow you to do so much it's no wonder that people running training courses or workshops might insist upon people using pen and paper during exercises; I'm sure there's nothing more annoying than someone reading their email, checking Facebook or playing Angry Birds when they're supposed to be making notes. However, this is unfair on people who suffer from the same affliction I do.

You see I no longer blame my inability to handwrite on missing lessons at school. It turns out that the inability to handwrite neatly or constantly is due to Motor Clumsiness which can be one of the symptoms of Asperger Syndrome, something which as I mentioned in an earlier entry I am fairly sure I have albeit in a mild form.

Such insistence on handwriting is therefore discrimination; an accessibility issue. Next time I come up against this prejudice perhaps I should say something.

Down the Tube 3: Dism Rly

2011-01-27T09:30:00.004Z

Previously in this blog...

At the age of nine or so an unnamed friend and I discover two disused platforms at Highgate Station.

Now read on...

The gorge was set into the side of a hill which meant that the cliff face that loomed over the eastern end of the platforms was much higher than the one to the west. In this artificial escarpment yawned two enormous tunnel mouths. My friend and I decided to investigate.

There were no tracks or even sleepers present on the line, just pumice rubble and weeds. As we approached the twin maws we started to feel apprehensive. It was going to be very dark in there.

"Shall we hold hands?" I suggested. I was serious.

We only got a few yards in before panic got the better of us and we fled. But where did these tunnels emerge?

A little nearer home than Highgate Station was Highgate Wood, reached by going through the park (which obviously had aspirations to be like its bigger scarier brother given that it bore the name Cherry Tree Wood) and crossing a couple of roads. It was approached uphill through a wide footpath between people's gardens at the top of which you crossed over a bridge of some sort before arriving in the wood proper.

And it was a proper wood, make no mistake about it, a lung-shaped remnant of an ancient forest that had been there long before London and would probably outlast it. Once you were deep enough into it all you could see were trees. Endless trees. No exterior chinks of light breaking through from open spaces (even though there was one at the centre where people played football and cricket). No creosoted fences of suburban back gardens. Unlike its infant brother Cherry Tree, Highgate was the kind of wood you could get lost in. Walk far enough in any direction and you might find yourself back where you started, the tall trees warping and bending reality around you. When learning about local history, our teacher had told us that Highgate Wood was one of the places they'd buried the bodies during the Great Plague. No-wonder there was something of the night about the place even at noon. I imagined thousands of skulls staring sightlessly into the earth beneath my feet.

Once again I was with one friend, possibly the same one with whom I'd explored Highgate Station. I don't remember his name now although I do remember that he was thin, freckled, dark haired and had a face like a horse. Eschewing the paths we were making our way through the undergrowth, pushing through bushes and wading through piles of dead leaves, stifling giggles when we came across a man lying on top of a woman. My friend said they were having sex, which confused me because they were wearing clothes and I had assumed nudity was a prerequisite.

The ground began to slope down further and we ended up in a shallow trench. Looking back we could see that it passed beneath the odd bridge over which we'd entered the wood. Under the leaves and dirt the ground crunched in a familiar manner. Pumice rubble. This was another abandoned railway. Could it be something to do with the twin tunnels of Highgate? We certainly weren't far from there. Excited I struck out in the direction leading away from the bridge, the direction I hoped would lead us to Highgate station.

The path we were following reached a chicken wire fence topped with barbed wired which it continued running alongside. Beyond lay...

Acres of tracks. On these tracks sat tube trains, bold as brass out in the open where, I imagined, they had no right to be. I felt as if I had opened a cupboard door in my bedroom and discovered a whole new wing of the house.

Where in God's name was I? My knowledge of the underground network whirred and chattered in my brain but there was no logical explanation for this. The Northern Line was the only line anywhere near here and that went underground just past East Finchley station up by Cherry Tree Wood.

There were two men in hardhats near by.

"Excuse me!" I shouted. My shyness had been totally eradicated by my need to solve this mystery, the Mystery of the Tube Line, "What line is this?"

The men looked confused. I suppose it must have been very odd to be going about your business in a London Transport tube siding only for a child to appear behind the fence beyond which only moments ago all had been visible was undergrowth.

Nevertheless one of them got it together enough to answer.

"It's the Northern Line."

This made sense, but my head was still spinning. A secret branch of the Northern Line? A disused station was one thing, the route of a vanished railway another, but those were live trains sitting over there in rows and were as confusing to me in their multitude as coming across a person with five eyes in their face would have been.

Eventually I figured it out. This must be where the tracks at the mysterious two extra platforms at East Finchley led instead of plunging into the ground by Cherry Tree Wood like their peers. And if the tracks led off to the disused Highgate station in that direction, then it meant that once upon a time there had been two routes from East Finchley to its neighbouring stop.

Where had the line run after Highgate? I hadn't a clue. In a world without the internet no Google Maps or hobby sites being run by enthusiastic amateurs meant that I was unlikely to find out. It wasn't the sort of thing they'd have books about in the library.

However, the Ordnance Survey map of London that was one of my prized possessions offered a clue - a dotted line labeled Dism Rly. Dismantled railway? On the map it seemed to disappear off towards the uncharted territories of Crouch End in one direction and Muswell Hill in the other.

Did this mean that Muswell Hill had once actually been served by a tube station outside the Outer Circle Line of my imagination?

Highgate Tunnels photo by Diamond Geezer

Down the Tube 2: Hidden Above

2011-01-24T10:00:00.008Z

East Finchley Station was quite an impressive building. I could forgive it for being above ground because it had an aura of mystery. For a start there were more platforms than the station actually needed. This was a conundrum. And then there was the statue of the archer looming over the platforms, caught in the act of loosing an arrow towards Central London.

To feed my growing obsession I told the staff at East Finchley ticket office that I was doing a project at school and was given a red plastic folder which contained a collections of maps and timetables. This was wonderful. The map was far better than the ones I'd had to make do with up until now, tiny ones in the back of diaries and black and white versions in the A-Z. This one was in full colour and made of card, folded twice in to what years later I would discover was known as a “triptych”. I covered it in the sticky see-though plastic sheeting you got for covering school books.

I made a nuisance of myself going back to the ticket office several times and asking for more maps for my friends at school whom I was trying to get interested in the underground. Eventually the woman who worked in the ticket office got cross with me and told me not to come back. After that I used to make sure she wasn't on duty before asking for more stuff. The Indian man who worked there was the friendliest, I decided.

Also in the folder was a bus map and most intriguingly of all, a big fold out map called "London's Railways". This not only had a map of all the tube lines but all the British Rail lines as well.

Somewhat irrationally, I hated the British Rail lines. They weren't proper. They should build more tubes instead I thought and began drawing maps of my own, devising the orange Outer Circle Line part of the route of which which I decided would go through East Finchley with a brand new station at Muswell Hill Broadway going on to Bounds Green and points east.

I even started travelling by tube unsupervised. At first it was in secret - my friend Robert Knight and I went to play in the park by East Finchley station and took a quick trip to Trafalgar Square straight there and back with no changes. After that came an "official" test run during which my parents dropped me off at East Finchley and picked me up from the next station, Highgate. From there on in I was unstoppable and began to explore further afield. I started going to Clare Ash's Children's Theatre Workshop on Saturday mornings on my own, getting the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road and then changing onto the Central to get to Bond Street.

There was something otherworldly about these subterranean places. The upright consoles of the ticket machines with their illuminated sloping tops displaying giant red prices 20P; the smell of the dust and warm tunnel air being pistoned through London's arteries by the silver and red metal worms. And the sense that this was just the tip of the iceberg, that the underground I knew was just the surface and that further down into the earth and deeper in time there were hidden stations and lines that would transform my humdrum existence if I only could find them.

There were clues everywhere. For instance, at nearby Highgate the sign at the top of the escalators read "Northern Line: Platforms 3 and 4" despite the fact that there were only two platforms. What had happened to Platforms 1 and 2? Were they hidden somewhere nearby I wondered? Might I discover a secret passageway leading to them?

It turned out that they were hidden, but in an unexpected place. Above my head.

Highgate Station was reached in a variety of ways - there were some steps that led out into a small car park, an entrance at the end of a cul-de-sac (which could also be reached from the main road by descending a vertiginous concrete path) and a long thin escalator that emerged from a small brick shed on Archway Road. These surrounded a void area thick with trees; on the map it appeared to contain nothing although some older A-Zs seemed to indicate a railway line there.

One day descending the vertiginous path with a friend I spotted something. Beyond the cottage which lay almost next to the station entrance and through the trees I could see what looked like a station canopy. We sneaked through the cottage’s garden and through the chicken wire fence.

It was a derelict station lying at the bed of a deep artificial gorge, overgrown with plants. The tracks themselves were missing, but the brick walls of the station buildings on the island platform bore the unmistakable imprints in discoloured brick of now-removed London Transport roundels. I'd done it. I'd discovered Platforms 1 and 2.

We wandered up and down the platforms, discovering them to be stripped of any accoutrements, the station buildings bare brick cuboids with metal window frames supporting a large overhanging roof. No long abandoned chocolate machines. No ancient posters. There was however a set of stairs leading downwards.

I walked down these steps to a padlocked wooden door through which leaked familiar sounds and smells. Burnt dust, the creaking thud of the escalators. These were sensations I imagined similar to those experienced by Wells' Time Traveller when he investigated the shafts that led down into the Morlocks' domain. I’d discovered something just as momentous; the link between the hidden and reality, the wormhole...

Arriving over the top as I had done felt a bit like cheating.

Down the Tube 1: The Victorian Zodiac

2011-01-21T09:45:00.007Z

Alleyways weren't the only obsession during my first few years of life. The London Underground also captured my imagination. There was something about H C Beck's brightly coloured wiring diagram that plugged straight into my childhood brain and lit up all the bulbs.

I first came across the Tube when we moved to London at the tail end of the sixties. Most of the time when we went into town we travelled by car but on a few occasions my Mum had to take us into town by public transport. We would catch the bus from the end of the road (opposite the police box, just outside Tesco) which would take us all the way to Seven Sisters where we'd get on the tube.

Thus my introduction to the service was the Victoria Line. The new Victoria Line as it was known at the time. I seem to recall talk of the trains being driverless at first but that people got too freaked out by seeing no-one in the cab as the trains entered the platform so they installed a person there to reassure the travelling public. However, I can't find any record of the "driverless Victoria Line" now but clearly remember adults talking about it. Perhaps it was a suburban myth.

However, they certainly were the first trains on the London Underground (as far as I am aware) to run without guards. The idea of a train guard on the tube seems weird now, but they were quite common back then. They lived just inside the front door of the rear carriage, roped off by a strap of elastic and with an array of intriguing bakelite buttons set into the end wall of the carriage in front of them. Large and colourful, they were the kind of controls you would imagine finding upon a close inspection of the TARDIS console. Train guards stood up a lot of the time but they did have a fold down seat they could use (and which canny members of the public could use when such guard carriages were in the middle of the train provided you knew how to release the catch).

Most exciting of all was they way they used to leave the doors open after the train had departed, standing nonchalantly in the doorway with their head poking out, only ducking back inside to avoid having their heads knocked off by the tunnel entrance.

I digress. The Victoria Line in the late sixties and early seventies was an exciting and futuristic experience with its blue-grey tiles and shiny metal escalators, such a contrast from the cream, purple and wood feel of the older sections of the network. Another feature of the line was the one I became obsessed with very early on - station specific murals that decorated the walls behind the benches on each platform. We never went south of Victoria or north of Seven Sisters so the concept of the murals on the stations outside this zone was mysterious. As it was I had to be content with familiarising myself with and decoding the murals available to me.

Seven Sisters. Seven trees, a fairly straightforward concept. The trees were the sisters.

Finsbury Park. A square green of a park containing a tree, but by far the most dominating feature of this picture were the crossed pistols. I had no idea what this signified, but decided that a pair of handguns must be known as a "finsbury". Whatever that was.

Highbury and Islington. A castle. I assumed this was something to do with the castle I could see from the car when we drove into town (which was in actual fact Holloway Prison) and surmised that was where the station was (the mural actually depicted the now demolished Highbury House). Or maybe a castle was also known as a "highbury". Either made sense to me.

Kings Cross. Another straightforward one - a cross made up of five crowns. Easy for the four year old mind to grasp.

Euston. An arch known as Euston Arch, apparently the victim of a great injustice. A tragedy. According to my parents, horrible bastards had knocked down Euston Arch when building Euston Station even though they didn't have to. I felt obscurely guilty about this. I couldn't see how it was my fault but it felt like it. There are now plans afoot to reconstruct it - and even today that would come as a relief to me; I'd feel as if I'd been let off the hook.

Warren Street. A bright orange maze or warren. No rabbits. When we were waiting on the platform there I used to try and trace my way out from the centre of the maze before the train came. I don't think I ever succeeded.

Oxford Circus. A circle, with lines converging on it. Some kind of representation of Oxford Circus itself I decided. I felt grown up because I knew that it wasn't the kind of circus with clowns, but just the boring crossroads where John Lewis was. Near the BBC where my sister and I had spent the night once.

Green Park. Some dots. I didn't get this one and asked my Mum. She said they were supposed to be blobs of paint on a palette because artists sold their paintings in Green Park. This was a more interesting explanation that the genuine one which turns out to be more bloody trees. Seen from overhead presumably.

Victoria. Like King's Cross, an easy one for me to get my head round. It was Queen Victoria's head, the same head that appeared on some of the pennies I had in my wooden money box shaped like a rocking chair.

These motifs became my childhood constellations, reassuringly familiar symbols I could use to track my progress across the capital. The ones I hadn't seen became almost mythical in my mind. I knew they must exist. Of course some of the stations weren't open yet; little notices on the maps in the carriages said so - anything south of Victoria wouldn't be open until 1971 and Pimlico wouldn't even be open until the futuristic sounding 1972!

One day when we caught a bus my Mum asked the conductor whether it went to Seven Sisters. Apparently not but it did stop at Tottenham Hale. I still remember his words to this day.

"Same line, different station."

I was excited. I was going to see a new motif.

I wasn't disappointed when we reached the platform. There was something enthralling about seeing a new instance of a familiar set of things and the Tottenham Hale motif didn't disappoint. I had the same background colours as some of the other stations, but in the foreground an oval frame surrounded a medieval looking picture of a man and a woman in a boat. For some reason I thought the man was Jesus because he had a beard.

I wasn't to see the Tottenham Hale Jesus in a Boat motif again as a child, but it was enough to have seen it once. There were plenty more motifs - would I ever get to see them? One day whilst waiting for the bus again I saw a London Transport poster on the bus shelter. It was about the New Victoria Line and even better had pictures of all the station motifs. I moved forward for a closer look...

...and my Mum grabbed my hand and we got on the bus which had just pulled up.

Eventually we moved house away from the Victorian Zodiac. It was the end of the first era of my Tube obsession, but the beginning of the second which would turn out to be far more epic. For a start there was a tube station within walking distance of our new home, East Finchley...

Embarrassmemes

2011-01-18T09:35:00.002Z

I watched a fascinating documentary on BBC4 last week, part of the series The Brain: A Secret History. It was all about emotions, where they come from, how they work and what they're for. All interesting stuff, but I was surprised that at no point was the evolutionary root of emotions discussed - it was all behavioural. And yet I've found that simply looking at things from an evolutionary perspective can provide astonishing insight into what makes us human and just why it is that we do all of the things that we do.

Evolution says that anything that makes it far more likely for organisms to pass on their genes to future generations will be exaggerated over time, and for sentient beings lusts, urges and instincts are what make us do things we have to (if we didn't "enjoy" food we'd forget to eat and starve to death).

The stronger the lust and protective instincts felt towards a chosen partner will result in more sex and therefore more children; the stronger the instinct to protect and go out of ones way to nurture one's offspring means that more of the children survive. Simple mathematics states that as time goes on the number of individuals who through random mutation experience stronger combinations of these varieties of instinctive emotional response will increase until ultimately it becomes the norm and is a fully fledged emotional behaviour in the psychobiology of the species. Then we can call it love. But if it had happened that, say, embarrassment and guilt had inexplicably made it far more likely we'd pass on our genes then for one thing Mills & Boon range would be a very different proposition.

Embarrassment and guilt are two important emotions which are two sides of the same discomfort coin, one which has been legal tender in my mind for as long as I can remember. Sometimes as a young child I would feel so embarrassed that I could barely cope with what was going on around me and allegedly flew into a rage (which I don't remember, but I am reliably informed happened) or became so mortified that I shut down the emotional side of things.

I would embarrassed at the most peculiar things, often to do with pairs of things or varieties of things. Sometimes my source of discomposure would be what I imagined people might be thinking that I was thinking even though I knew I wasn't thinking it, if you see my meaning.

One early example of an embarrassmeme was the lyric "Dracula and his son" in the song Monster Mash. I was embarrassed to hear it. Another embarrassmeme occurred the first time I saw the video for David Bowie's Laughing Gnome - it was the part when the next morning the Gnome turns up with his brother. For one horrible microsecond I though he was going to be the Crying Gnome and was consumed with embarrassment. This swiftly passed when it turned out he was only "his brother Fred".

A further occasion was when watching Play School or some other children's show. The presenter announced she was going to tell us the story of:

"Busy Bee and Lazy B-"

Before she could even finish the sentence I was swamped with embarrassment again. I was afraid that there were going to be two bees, one of whom was going to be Busy and the other Lazy. However this moment of shame only lasted as long as it took for the presenter to finish her word and in fact the sentence turned out to be:

"Busy Bee and Lazy Bear"

Phew. The embarrassment evaporated. This whole drama had taken a microsecond but had managed to be all consuming in that time.

Other concepts would overwhelm me in the same way. As a child I tended to see everything in a binary state which meant that in the universe things were either Good or Bad. I was always worried that I was on the Bad side of the line. This really wasn't helped by the famous nursery rhyme:

What are little boys made of? What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails
That's what little boys are made of
What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and all things nice
That's what little girls are made of

I took this really personally. It made me angry. However, part of me suspected that my objection and anger at this generalisation was because I really was Bad. Well of course I was Bad. I was a boy, and so I was made of frogs and snails. The word Bad began with a B and so did the word Boy. The word Good began with a G and so did the word Girl. Further evidence of the binary nature of reality upon the wrong side of which I had been born through no fault of my own.

At that age I didn't even know what spice was. Something wonderful no doubt.

I also picked up a strange eco-message at a very young age. I'm not sure where that came from unless it was a hangover of the hippy movement. Anyway, what it said was that trees and flowers and the countryside were Good things. This also upset me. I liked science and numbers and cities and space. I felt that this was yet further proof that I was Bad, because I liked the Bad things. I felt bad about liking the Bad things, but couldn't help liking them nonetheless.

Losing myself in obsessions was one way I could forget my inherent badness. I don't remember any of the techniques now, but there was a time when I was seriously obsessed with origami. I'd get books out of the library about it and practice until I managed to construct some quite complex objects out of folded paper. It was very comforting.

If I attempted to revisit it in adulthood I wouldn't know where to start. I suspect that the origami meme fitted quite well into the particular shape my mind was at the time and perhaps that as my mind has matured and lost its flexibility I lost the ability to learn such things.

It might be worth a try though. Next time I get angry or frustrated by the behavior of my fellow passengers on a crowded bus perhaps I should try and fashion my ticket into a Kawasaki Crane...

The Alpha Draft

2011-01-16T10:36:00.004Z

Some people might have noticed that I have suddenly started blogging a lot more frequently than in recent months. Amongst other things this is because I finished the first draft of the work in progress novel that has been hanging around my brain since the Christmas 2007. Those worrying about whether this is going to be a boring self-indulgent blog take heart - I promise not to mention the novel again after today until a much later stage.

As I have mentioned in a couple of recent blog entries this completion was in no small part thanks to the machinations of 750words.com which seems to have successfully tapped into the addictive qualities of social media (which I am given to understand is to do with something called Random Intermittent Reinforcement) so that rather than obsessively checking Twitter every two minutes to see what everyone has said since the last time I looked or checking into Palmeira Square on FourSquare twice a day to ensure I retain the mayorship, I actually got something useful and self rewarding done.

It was partly the little badges but mostly the implicit guilt I would have felt had I not completed my daily word count. I am sure that the creator didn't actually build any actual guilt into the system - if anything it's encouraging - but my brain in its limited wisdom was able to convert the motivation into guilt which for my mind anyway is a far more high-octane fuel.

I call it a First Draft, but I'm not sure that it actually qualifies for that status yet. Whilst the story is certainly finished and all the pieces are in place, I do think that I need to go through the whole thing at least once again to cross the Ts and dot the Is before I am ready to pass it onto any "beta readers". Currently the draft is in an alpha state; draft 0.8 if you like.

For one thing I need to put chapter breaks in; towards the end of the final stretch I completely forgot to do this. I also strongly suspect that in the latter passages Wendi might have repeated one particular nugget of exposition so I need to clean that up.

So what have I learnt from finishing this, my second novel (for the background to the first, please see my earlier blog entry "You all everybody")?

Firstly that things aren't always what they seem. Even though I had a vague shape in mind when I finished (although to be honest all "Quest" stories have a similar form) I was genuinely surprised by the twists and turns of the plot and in particular by the denouement scene the details of which I hadn't realized until shortly before I actually started writing it. This is somewhat insane - as if Agatha Christie could have got 80% through writing one of her books before realizing Who Dunnit.

But that is just how things seem to work for me, as mentioned in a previous blog entry I'm an archaeologist, not an architect. I'm not sure of the mechanism behind this - is it my subconscious that formulates the plot in advance and allows me to uncover it as I go along, or is the story somehow part of the shape of my mind, built up over years of reading fiction and working out what I like? All I do know is that if I'd sketched everything out in advance with index cards and post-it notes I'd be too bored to actually write the book as in my head the story would already be complete.

At least I'm not alone; I have read about several other authors, some of whom I really enjoy, who work to the same method.

What next? Received wisdom is that I should lock the manuscript in a drawer for three months. I don't think I have the time. That's all very well if you're a successful author with several irons in the fire, but given my limited time I'm going straight to beating this alpha version into actual First Draft shape and then distribute a handful of copies to a small number of beta readers. Perhaps then would be a good time to take a break and write something else.

There's certainly a lot to be getting on with; the Toyah memoir has a deadline now - I would love for it to be available in time for her 30th Anniversary "From Sheep Farming to Anthem" tour because it would be supremely fitting.

And then of course I have to write the next novel.

The Most Effectual Top Cat

2011-01-14T09:30:00.015Z

Thinking back to my earliest memories, I recall myself as having been surprisingly (mentally) articulate even as a very young child. Perhaps what I was thinking wasn't necessarily in adult English or even in words but it was still recognisably me doing the thinking, exactly the same person, the same mind that is doing the typing now. Particularly recognisable is the way things use to puzzle and bother me, in exactly the same way then as now.

Why was Fred Flintstone ordering a deckchair to be delivered to his car, and what was the deal with Top Cat?

Firstly it bugged me that he was called Boss Cat in the Radio Times and on the TV continuity announcements but that in the theme tune and throughout the show he was Top Cat or TC. My mother did explain that this was because the BBC didn't allow advertising and that there was already a brand of cat food called "Top Cat", but this explanation didn't stand up to scrutiny for me. If this was the case, why didn't they change it everywhere? A caption card saying Boss Cat appearing at the end of a theme tune throughout which people were cheerfully singing about Top Cat and mentioning his name a lot seemed to me like a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, even if I might not have been able to articulate it in that way.

The lyrics of the song itself bothered me a little as well. "Close friends get to call him TC" as if that's a really coveted privilege. Why is it so great to be permitted this familiarity? He's only a cat. What happens to someone who calls him TC whom he doesn't consider a close friend? Or if a close friend does so with insufficient dignity? And again towards the end "He's the boss, he's a pip, he's the championship". How can an individual be a championship?

And what was all that business with the coin on the string being flipped into the hand of the doorman of the high class restaurant? Looking at it as an adult you realise that it can't be that fancy a restaurant if the employees are that easily bribed to let you in. It's just one coin and seeing that that the series takes place in New York City, it's a fairly safe bet that it's a quarter. A quarter? Is that all it takes to buy you into one of the Big Apple's top eateries?

I don't understand why Top Cat went there anyway if all he was going to do was sit on the pavement outside the terrace and then nick a sewer worker's lunchbox.

But despite these gaping plot holes, there was something about Top Cat that really appealed to me at the time. It was partly the sense of camaraderie between the members of the cat gang that made me wish I could somehow find my way there and join them. But most of all it was the alleyways.

As a six or seven year old child (which is when I was a big Top Cat fan) I was obsessed with the alleyways or "alleys" as I called them that riddled the area in which we lived at the time. In this terraced suburbia there was something magical about these shortcuts behind and between the houses; as an avid Narniaphile I couldn't help but dream that I might walk into one in Edmonton and walk out the other end somehow supernaturally transported to a bizarre magical foreign land where amongst other things cats stood on their hind legs and talked. I knew it was only imagination but part of me really wanted it to be true. What if, I would ask myself, what if I actually do come out of this alley somewhere else? What if Top Cat could really be my friend?

I named all the alleys. I don't recall any of the nomenclature now aside from The Lost Alley which certainly lived up to its name. It lay beyond the end of one easily accessible alley where there was a fence overgrown with brambles and weeds. if you pushed your way through these and then through a gap in the planking you could gain access to a fenced off section of alley (similarly boarded up at the other end) that it was obvious no-one had been in for years - the grass came up to my chin. It was discoveries like these that kept the hope alive that something magical might indeed happen one day.

I sometimes wonder whether the Lost Alley has been subsumed into someones garden by now or whether it is still lost? Revisiting those alleys via Google Maps reveals the sad fact that they all have metal gates now. I suppose it must have been a very different time back then; for one thing our parents didn't see anything odd about letting us run riot in these rat runs all Sunday afternoon. And Sunday afternoons were about ten times as long in those days, you could lose yourself in them, eventually coming home far older and wiser with great chunks of fresh life experience to be digested by your brain that night.

One such summer afternoon I recall that Shamus, Raymond, Steven and I held an archaeological dig in one of the alleys, unearthing a peculiar stone bone. It was probably a lump of sandstone or something similar, but there was something very bonelike about it. I was convinced it had belonged to a dinosaur.

When we finally pulled it free the other three boys suddenly turned against me and, wresting it from my grasp, ran off. Interestingly every one of them then came to me afterwards in secret over the next day or two and promised to get the bone back for me as long as I didn't tell the other two.

When I was eight we moved away to somewhere without nearly as many alleys. Some of the magic died right there as my brain matured and imagination began to coagulate. But sometimes I would give anything to be back there running through the dust and weeds with the sun on my head, the sounds of grasshoppers in my ears and the possibility of meeting Top Cat just around the next corner.

Nothing in adult life ever comes close.

Every Decreasing Socialism 2: Same Old Tory

2011-01-12T10:30:00.001Z

The problem with writing anything about politics is that people see it as carte blanche to Have A Go. Even though I'd hope that the bulk of people reading this very probably share my views, it is all in the public domain. If I'm not very careful I'm going to end up with abusive comments.

You see, I experienced something like this once before when I wrote a miniblog entry on Tumblr about the whole Bigotgate scandal. You must remember. It was when Gordon Brown was caught off the record saying he dislikes bigotry and got pilloried for it. The gist of what I wrote was that whatever you thought of his policies I considered that his treatment by the press had been unfair. The link to this miniblog was retweeted a couple of times and before I knew it was was drowning in angry responses from people who loathed Brown and completely missing the point I was trying to make were telling me so in no uncertain terms.

Of course many of them were dyed in the wool Tories, which is fair enough, but some of them I suspect were something more sinister.

Another entry last year was about the phenomena of Every Decreasing Socialism - the observation that many people seem to get more right wing as they get older. I argued that rather than being a calcification of the human mind which caused it to slip ever rightwards as it aged, these people were probably always right wing but when young and in the public eye adopted a faux leftie stance simply to appear cool. Belief as fashion accessory. When they got older they cared less for the cool and allowed their real selves out to play.

I stated my own political beliefs in this entry - a kind of instinctive socialism based upon what makes my blood boil. This blog entry is about the behaviour of some people around politics, and NOT about the political views themselves although if I start getting hot under the collar my own might slip in by accident. That was a disclaimer for anyone planning to Have A Go.

The last few years have been interesting ones in British politics from the point of view of the responses of these false socialists to political events. Things not being quite as expected led to some interesting behaviour.

Firstly, wasn't it peculiar how the faux-left pundits and bigmouths alike stuck the boot into "Bliar" and his party with far more enthusiasm than they'd ever attacked the Tories? Were these people really more incensed by the war in Iraq than by anything Thatcher and Major had ever perpetrated in the previous decades or was it that as Crypto-Tories they were suddenly delighted to be able to legitimately stick it Labour? Quite unexpectedly the cool point of view coincided with their genuine feelings even if they were missing the point (caring not about an illegal war in Iraq but merely for the opportunity to Have A Go). In the press, the Mail and Independent alike were attacking the same targets even if their agendas were very different. The same was happening with the Crypto-Tories and the genuine left.

With a marvellous irony (in hindsight) some of them made a big noise about how Labour had failed them, publicly crossed the floor and set up camp with the Liberal Democrats whom they now claimed were the only voice truly representing the left.

The result of the 2010 election must have been a delightful surprise to them. Their true masters had gained power in no small part thanks to their pretend support for the Lib-Dems. They'd voted Tory without any of the shame or loss of coolface caused by having done so.

Now that the coalition government has bedded in and is slitting the throat of the nation's future whilst enthusiastically raping its corpse these commentators are conspicuous by their absence. Their protesting screams of "Bliar!" whilst on anti-war marches have fallen silent even though there's still much to complain about, a lot of it far closer to home as the private security force once known as the police cracks heads and abuses children.

This is because their burning desire to look cool doesn't extend to actually slagging off those with whom their loyalties really lie. Some of them are still banging on about Blair - hey everyone, lets move his autobiography to the crime section, eh? That'll be good for a laugh, but even those who realise that they've got to move on seem to be reserving all their bile for Clegg who has unwittingly been forced into the role of the figure its OK to hate. That way they get to keep up their fashionable appearance without actually betraying their Tory masters.

Cameron seems to be getting away scott free.

A letter of complaint

2011-01-04T16:21:00.001Z

Friday November 12th, 2021

To the Managing Director of Mattoy Educational

Dear Sir

I am writing to complain about the Mattoy “My First DNA Sequencer Kit” I purchased for my daughter Blaze’s fifteenth birthday in October.

From the widespread publicity and advertisements, I had been given to understand that the kit would “turn my kid on to the intricacies of genetics with simple experiments such as extracting DNA from root vegetables and revealing DNA fingerprints on doorknobs, thus giving her a head start in one of today’s most exciting and challenging growth industries”. However, upon opening the kit we discovered that not only did the electrophoresis chamber lack a power cord, but that the manual was missing.

Temporarily transplanting the cord from her PlayStation Seven, Blaze was naturally eager to begin experimentation, even without a manual, and so downloaded what at the time I believed to be appropriate material in order to make a start whilst we waited for the replacement manual to be delivered.

My first indication that something had gone wrong came on Monday morning when I observed Blaze catching the school bus as usual only to spot her ten minutes later sneaking out the backyard gate. Naturally of course I put this down to tiredness, although the weirdness continued that evening when I overheard what sounded like Blaze having a furious row with herself about “whose turn” it was to go to school the following day. However, the next morning she caught the bus to school as normal and so I dismissed it.

Later that morning as I was cleaning the lounge, I spotted Blaze backing my car out of the driveway. I was furious - not only was she skipping school, but also she hadn’t asked permission to borrow my car. The exact copy of her in the passenger seat was something that at the time I was prepared to turn a blind eye to, as it didn’t make any sense.

A week later I was no longer able to ignore what was going on. The neighbors had started complaining about the noise Blaze was making as all ten of her quarreled nightly about who was going to wear what the next day and who’d have to go to school. Most of the time she just ended up cloning off another copy to do the latter for her, which only made things worse. In addition, Mrs Manzarek was now phoning me up almost every day, bellyaching about how her son Vaughn (who had been Blaze’s boyfriend) had run off to stay with his dad in Alaska.

The last straw came two days ago, when I switched on CNN only to be confronted with a report that a rampaging mob of my daughter had run riot in Griffith Park, been arrested and were now all cooling their heels at 3353 San Fernando Road courtesy of Captain Sanchez and his colleagues in the LAPD Northeast Division.

As I am unable to afford bail for all twenty-two of them, I am turning to you for financial compensation. You will be hearing from my lawyer directly.

Yours faithfully

Azura Mantra (Ms)

NB: I have resurrected this old piece of writing to keep the blog ticking over whilst I finish the first draft of my novel.

Old Year's Revolutions

2010-12-31T13:45:00.002Z

As the light threatens to start fading on the final day of a year, it's time to look back, take stock and then decide to do everything differently, starting tomorrow. Well, these reviews of the year make for cheap entertaining TV, hopefully they can serve the same purpose for one whose primary medium is blog.

As far as this blog and its associated writing is concerned, I didn't do too badly in 2010.

In January I was still writing every other day, a remnant of the daily writing with which I'd started back in August 2009. The whole idea was to clear the creative tubes to allow me to complete my novel. Instead, the blog entries seemed to take on a life of their own. Curiously enough they were at their most popular when I started writing series of memoirs, staring with my Dimensionally Transcendental Confession and then moving on to I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan, the latter of which proved so popular that I am now planning to rewrite it more fully in the early months of 2011 and then make available via Print On Demand at Lulu.com.

These successes were all very well, even if they weren't the blog entries that entertained me the most, but the problem was that in developing into an end in itself, the blog was no longer serving its original purpose, which was to get that damned novel finished by the end of the year. It took me until December to discover something that would do that, namely 750words.com which I mentioned in my previous blog entry.

Unfortunately December was too late to discover this magic bullet if I wanted to get the novel finished by the end of the year. I've done very well (even though I say it myself) and am now within spitting distance of 80,000 words. I imagine the story will end before I reach 90,000 and then that will be the first draft done. Not only will I have the satisfaction of having completed a (second) novel, but also I will finally be able to reward myself with the iPad that I already bought with that very purpose in mind (it's been sitting on top of the cupboard still in its box, having been bought early to avoid the VAT increase).

So with that in mind, it's time to make some promises to my writing self for 2011.

Continue my daily practice with 750word.com - I'm looking forward to getting my hands on that Phoenix badge for having written for 100 days on the trot
Complete the Toyah memoir and make it available before Toyah embarks upon her 30th Anniversary tour in the spring - it will need to be good timing
Finish the first draft of that damned novel before the end of January and get Genie safely back in the real world

Of course after the first draft is complete I will have the joys of rewriting ahead.

I understand that I am expected to murder my darlings.