Catmachine

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...

Previously... Top of the Pops was the centre of the musical week but as more and more bands begun to produce promotional videos the mimed performances were often a disappointment as you wanted to see the video. This early eighties over-experimentation with video didn't go unnoticed by the satirists - nowadays they can't show a retrospective of early eighties music without wheeling out the Not The Nine O'Clock News parody Nice Video, Shame About the Song . But even though I did like Not the Nine O'Clock News and thought that the parody was well observed in places I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the writers didn't quite "get" it and were probably in the process of turning into a parental generation banging on about the rubbish that young people listened to in the name of music today. Or rather the rubbish that they watched. By now everyone had to have a video and inspiration was beginning to wear a bit thin. Having scored an unexpected ...

Like Doctor Who , Top of the Pops was always a part of my childhood for as far back as my memory goes. It was just something that was always there, and my infant brain saw it in much the same way as Winter, Spring the Sun or the Moon. I remember dancing in front of the large black and white television in the family flat in Birmingham much to the amusement of my parents plus Tony and Jill, the couple upstairs who didn't have a TV but always came down on Thursday evening to watch. Personally I couldn't quite see what was so funny about my dancing - I had decided that it must consist of clenched fists bounced up and down in front of me - but I enjoyed the music and the experience plus I was getting attention so it was all good. There was always music around whether it was the records my parents would put on - the Beatles (interesting if sometimes scary) or Bob Dylan (inexplicably sad because I thought the combination of his voice and the harmonica sounded like crying) but ...

I am a rationalist and were it not for the fact that I prefer not to define myself by what I don't believe in you could probably call me an atheist because most of my world view coincides with most of the world view of an atheist. I say most of because I think there are exceptions. Whilst I do not agree with the lazy but oft repeated mantra that "atheism is just like another religion" there are certain aggressive aspects of behaviour I have observed in atheism that I also don't agree with. Of course one could argue that they're just down to human nature rather than any flaw in the atheist argument - after all we are all human whether or not we believe in a god or gods. One particularly distasteful atheist argument is the "religion is a mental illness". I don't think this is a valid analogy for many reasons. In general people choose religion - or have it forced upon them as children - and can change their minds about it later. Furthermore th...

Do you ever have dreams in which there are two versions of the same person? The strangest thing is that in the dream you don't really notice. It's really quite odd - there's Jack and of course there's Jack as well. Often one of them is a lesser instantiation - they have less talent or inspire less fear. You say I thought Jack was frightening but they're nothing compared to Jack! Sometimes it's something less negative - Jill will show you something and you think That's interesting - I bet Jill would like that, I'll have to remember to tell her about it! This last one sometimes occurs in real life - when Jill shows you something just for a second you think that Jill would be interested and resolve to tell her before remembering that the notion is ridiculous. It must be caused by an error in brain processing. A person is probably represented in the memory space by a complex object with myriad properties and associations. Perhaps sometimes two ver...

Things may have changed a lot when it comes to listening to music. Whilst the fact that I have no idea what is in the charts these days is most likely to be an indication of advancing age than anything else, it does nevertheless feel that people aren't as into music as much they used to be. Whilst the tribes seem as strong as ever ( Belieber or Directioner ?) it's more disposable and the energy seems to be missing. However I can't really judge without being young myself and the only experience I have of that was in the past. It was exciting back then - all these new things to discover. The absence of an internet meant that information was far more difficult to come by and therefore far more precious. You scoured the music press for the smallest clipping. And as for the music - well without YouTube , SoundCloud , Spotify , Last.fm , illegal and legal downloads you simply had to wait. Sometimes if you were lucky a DJ - John Peel or Kid Jensen, sometimes even Peter Powell ...

So the World Cup is upon us again? I can't entirely believe it. Surely all that business with the vuvuzelas was only last year? Or a couple of years ago, maximum. Four years ago is just... stupid. Not that it makes a huge difference to me anyway as I am not now and never have been interested in football. This is a fact that occasionally people seem to find hard to get their heads around. Every so often when meeting someone in a social situation they will ask What team do you support? When I tell them I don't follow football they look at me as if I've just told them I haven't got a head. I must admit that from the outside the whole football fandom thing does look insanely complex and it's a relief that I have never been into it as it's probably a lot of work. But on the other hand it does seem to give people a lot of pleasure and for that reason I can't justifiably complain about its existence. The world isn't created and run for my benefit and ...

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve written a blog whilst miles up in the air, but it has been a while. In fact it’s been a while since I flew anywhere at all – and even then it was the same place I’m heading for now. Why the gap? I don’t know I just don’t seem to have had the time or inclination to go anywhere abroad. Plus my passport ran out a couple of years ago. But the thing is that’s just an excuse, I like travelling about and part of my MO these days is to ensure that I keep doing different things in an attempt to fool my brain into thinking time is lasting longer. Or perhaps when I do different things time is lasting longer. It’s all subjective after all. Anyway I thought it was about time I wrote another blog entry as I don’t yet have one for May 2014 and that month is nearly over. It’s a far cry from the days when I used to blog on an almost daily basis. In those days my blog was something I used to look forward to and I enjoyed uncovering fresh topics to...

I clearly remember when I felt that TV as I knew it had truly died. It wasn't video that did it. Video may have killed the radio star but it was a close friend to TV, enabling people to enjoy their favourite soap opera even if they'd planned to go out for the evening. If anything it helped, giving TV a shot in the arm - no more did people say Oh well it's just a TV show when real life got in the way of their planned viewing. Instead they'd tape it, a word which we still use today even though there's no magnetic tape involved. Oh have we got a video? Weird that the technology that inspired that raw excitement and freed us from the shackles of TV scheduling is now obsolete and almost forgotten. Remember how magical it was at first? Re-record, not fade away. No the death of TV occurred far more recently. There were many enhancements along the way that served only to bolster the screen in the corner. VHS's companion technology the Laserdisc was stillborn...

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...

I recently wrote a blog entry which described the effect fantasy novels - and I used the term very loosely, intentionally including SF - had on me. In particular I talked about the way I considered it essential that the Other World visited in the story was real and that, even if the protagonists returned to their own world at the end, the Other World still existed and was emphatically not Just A Dream. Revisiting some stories and thinking about others I've also come to recognise another equally powerful ingredient contained in fantasies I enjoy. These tales of other worlds are far more powerful if they also contain scenes set in this one. Fantasies set in the real world have an extra frisson of excitement about them. If set in a real location then it is always possible for you to go and visit the location after reading, a fantastic experience which makes the book almost real . I have yet to visit Watership Down (and if I ever found myself in the vicinity I think I have t...