Catmachine

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 tog...

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 ...

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...

"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 "t...

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 b...

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...

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 turne...

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 ...

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 Wo...

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 t...

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 th...

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 stronge...

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...