Catmachine

Do you remember the pointless lies you told yourself as a child? I do. I remember them quite clearly. They were harmless but very powerful and sometimes I almost managed to convince myself that they were true. As far as I can see they served one major purpose: to make life more interesting and more like a story. They were micro-stories. One that clearly stuck in my mind was almost convincing myself that I'd heard a cuckoo. Of course it was really a wood pigeon, but a cuckoo was more exciting. Cuckoos belonged in fairy tales and clocks, and how much more exciting would it have been to live in a fairy tale? Or indeed in a clock. The important thing was not to question it. Of course there was that tiny nagging rational voice at the back of my mind whispering "Pigeon... pigeon... pigeon..." but who was interested in pigeons? Pigeons were commonplace, part of the mundane, the everyday, the here and now. Hearing a pigeon was not anything to get excited about. Hearing ...

Any regular readers of this blog (and excuse the hubris of even imagining for a moment that such things exist) may recall that I have blogged on more than one occasion about  Lush, one of my favourite ever bands , who I used to go and see as often as possible in the nineties and who recently announced that they would be reforming after twenty years. Of course I was going. They announced a couple of dates at the Roundhouse, for both of which I booked tickets, plus one in Manchester for which, after a moment's hesitation, I also booked a ticket. I could work out travel and accommodation later. I drew the line at the American dates - that would be ridiculous. And then with less than two months to go, they announced a warm-up gig in London a ticket for which I booked at the drop of a hat, sitting nervously in front of the computer refreshing the browser as the time approached 9am, waiting for them to go on sale. A long way from twenty years ago when I sent off a cheque or (rarely...

Previously I detailed how a lot of my younger life revolved around trips up and down the North Circular Road or A406. Now read on...  The move to Muswell Hill another six years later took us back upstream along the North Circular.  Now it lay separating us from Colney Hatch and the sprawling Victorian asylum where I would do voluntary work in the Library in between school and university. It still felt like a canyon separating the familiarity of Muswell Hill with its record shops and paper round routes from the strange environment of Friern Barnet (I often wondered how this differed from Normal Barnet and whether this implied that their might be other similar districts of London like Friern Walthamstow or Friern Putney). It was after coming back from university that I renewed my acquaintance with the A406. I moved to Leytonstone which was the furthest east along the North Circular I had yet lived - and also a little far away from it. A couple of years later the move to Wa...

We are told that time and space are merely aspects of the same thing, just narrow ways of looking at space-time, a four-dimensional continuum. And this makes sense and is all very well. The only problem is that you can't move to another moment in time in the same way that you can to another position in space. It's not as if you can hop on a bus to last week. However sometimes  movement in space can simulate aspects of time travel. As long as you have somewhere to go that you haven't visited in years. Last month I went to Muswell Hill for the first time in around twenty years. This north London suburb was where I spent a large segment of my youth so in many ways stepping off the bus onto the Broadway was like stepping from the TARDIS. Of course it helped that it was a dark evening and that I couldn't see quite how much things had changed.  There was just as much of the familiar shape of the landscape present to fool me into thinking I was back in the nineties or ea...

Of course I believe in coincidences. They happen all the time. What I am doubtful about is that they mean anything. For a start if they meant something then they wouldn't be coincidences by definition. Furthermore as discussed in a recent blog the human mind is trained to see patterns in things above everything else so any such interpretation should be taken with a pinch of salt. But sometimes you wonder. At the beginning of 2014 I finished the first draft of my latest novel. Like the previous one it was partly set in and around the music industry, this time in the early nineties. The central character  - who'd been a supporting character in the previous one - was the singer in an indie band, a band described in the book as shoegaze but with more aggressive vocals than was usual. I must admit that when I was first writing I didn't know exactly what the band (Beam - a very nineties name, I could almost see the logo on the t-shirts) sounded like although I knew that I ...

What with all the furore surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who back in November 2013 you might have thought that the programme had celebrated enough anniversaries for now. After all - fifty one and a bit years on from the first episode? Nothing that special. But today, 25 January 2015, sees the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of what is probably my favourite run of sixteen episodes (four stories in the old money) from the show. There are of course stories and episodes that I like more than that, but this particular period - from 25 January to 10 May 1975 - was the most consistently enjoyable time for me watching. There is a danger that in writing this I will go over old ground but checking back on the Dimensionally Transcendental Confession blogs covering the relevant period it appears that I restrained myself from going into too much detail. It was almost as if I knew I was going to write this blog five years hence. My enjoyment of these particular four mon...

The Science Museum was another matter altogether. Sometimes I entered it from the passage that led from the Natural History Museum and on other occasions I approached from the main entrance in Exhibition Road - at the far end of the " Foot Tunnel to Museums " that led from the tube station; a tunnel so long that the end appeared to disappear with the perspective and you wondered whether it had originality been designed to carry trains. The entrance to the Science Museum was deceptive - it was nothing like the grandiose frontage of the Natural History Museum but more like you imagined a Victorian office building or part of the Ministry of the Defence. However the interior took you by surprise - a cavernous hall filled with light and lined with machines in glass cases, brass mechanisms the purpose of which was often obscure. Off to one side a wide curved staircase surrounded a stairwell in which an enormous pendulum swung to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. It was...

As a teenager I used to like going to the museums at South Kensington on my own. This might sound like an odd thing to want to do, but what with the cheap tube tickets (half-fare was for a time set at a flat rate of 10p even if you wanted to go to Ongar) and the fact that the museums had no entry fee it was a cheap way of entertaining myself. As a younger child these visits with adults had always been a special treat but had been slightly frustrating as you were subject to the whim of your guardian (whether parent or teacher) with regard to how long you could spend staring at things. This could get annoying if you wanted to try one of the demos - more often than not there would be a scrum of five year olds around the button jabbing it pointlessly and not waiting to see whether a tinny voice would start to emerge from a speaker or the intricate brass mechanism within the display case would start to operate with slow inevitability. By the time it became free you'd have been dra...

One of the most enjoyable extra-curricular activities I took part in as a child was called the Children's Theatre Workshop. Nothing to do with the Children's Television Workshop who produced Sesame Street (although at the time in my head they were somehow linked), this was a group that met every Saturday morning at an office space in the West End of London, tucked away in a side street somewhere behind Bond Street tube. I must have only taken part between the ages of seven and ten but in retrospect it seemed like a long and happy time. We would meet up and devise short plays, scenarios and sketches as well as taking part in more drama workshop type activities of the standing up, shaking your arms and legs and pretending to be a tree type. The workshop was supervised by a handful of adults and consisted of twenty to thirty children of between eight and thirteen. There were only a handful of the older children there and they all loomed large in the scenarios. They felt like t...

Our memories are a very useful manual on how not to live your life. Never mind the rose tinted spectacles, for a lot of us the events that really spring into sharp relief are those viewed through blush-tinged goggles. We torment ourselves over and over again over how much of a fool we made of ourselves in such-and-such situation, despite the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person that remembers these faux pas is ourselves. There is one exception to this rule. When we get drunk and make a fool of ourselves there is a tendency of some people to never let us forget it. However this behaviour is most often observed in people who often do the same thing themselves and their attempts to get everyone else to remember that time you went swimming in the fountain in the town square at the end of the evening are merely an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they pissed on a policeman's shoes the week before. But most of the time we're the only ones cri...

There is simultaneously something sad and laughable about the sight of redundant technology being thrown away. These old plastic and metal boxes, most of them that off-white grey that was so popular for a while, tumbled together in a skip or a dustbin. How clunky and huge they seem, how ridiculously inefficient and pathetically low in capacity. That shoebox-like cabinet that used to sit on someone's desk with a total storage of 100MB, an amount of data that would now fit into something the size of a toenail clipping ten times over. How far we have come in such a relatively short space of time. And yet in a way this old tech is also oddly exciting. When we look at it we remember how not that long ago such a thing was an object of desire. That it epitomised bold new developments in technology that seemed so groundbreaking and enviable. That hand-held scanner that I was so desperate for in the early nineties that looked like a bizarre hybrid of a torch and a miniature vacuum cl...

The most annoying thing about buying a new jacket is the way that the pockets are all sewn up. I mean, why? Pockets are there for a reason and it's a very good one. You need to carry stuff around with you. There's always the wallet and the keys and the phone and not to mention the two separate travel-card holders - one for Brighton and one for London (I have to keep them separate in case the Key and the Oyster card interfere with each other somehow). These are the bare minimum of pocket essentials. Sometimes I might want to carry a USB stick, a padlock, a pen or a Kindle around with me. Which is why it's nonsensical that they sew up the pockets. It just means I have to spend an annoying ten minutes undoing what they probably had to spend an annoying ten minutes doing. It's pointless. Every time something like that happens it's another victory for our old enemy entropy. Some would argue that pockets are sewn ...

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...

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,...