Catmachine

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...

As a rule we tend to do a lot less crying as adults compared with when we were children. It's understandable of course - when you are a child your brain is fresh and everything is far more extreme and world shaking. Even a turn of events such as your parents deciding that you're all going to eat lunch in a café not to your liking is enough to open the floodgates - I still recall how full of despair such events made me. It genuinely felt like the end of the world. Partly due to the aforementioned freshness of the brain but also I suspect due to the feeling of complete powerlessness in the face of your parents' authority. As an adult however, crying sneaks up on you and squeezes out through half closed eyelids in the hope that no-one else will notice. It's an unwanted pressure behind the optic nerve and not something you want to do or indeed admit to doing. It is also inspired by very different things, often things which have been specifically designed to provoke ...

Recurring dreams don't have to be recurring nightmares. Most of the time they are though. You know the ones, where the creatures are coming to get you . They never quite succeed but as you wake in the dead of night the fear that they might do next time is very real. But I used to have a recurring dream that wasn't a nightmare. In fact it was quite the opposite. If you've been reading this blog for a while you may recall that one of my favourite bands of all time are Lush. An account of following their Split tour around in 1994 appeared on this very blog back in 2011 ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 ). Due to the tragic death of their drummer Chris there were no more Lush gigs after 1996. I don't think anyone expected there to be. Except, for some reason, my subconscious. From the first few years of the twenty-first century onwards I started having dreams that I was going to a Lush gig. It was always a gig by the reformed band (as opposed to a dream set in ...

There are plenty of things from the world of arts and entertainment that have contributed to the deep programming of my brain, forming an integral part of the mental DNA of what makes me me and without which I would probably be a different person. I've already written blogs about some of them - Toyah for instance, or Doctor Who . But there are many more. The works of Douglas Adams for instance. And - as I recently realised - a lot of the comedy of Robert Newman from the 1990s. It's all getting a bit tricky now... And then browsing through Netflix I realised there was another TV show that had subtly and quietly wormed its way into my subconscious. It was comedy naturally. But it was also science fiction. Of course I am talking about Red Dwarf . People who don't watch it probably have an idea of it as a bit laddish or puerile - toilet humour in space. There may be a grain of truth in that but it is mainly so much more... I clearly remember when it started. Seeing...

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 ...

Not that long ago by the timescale of the universe there was no-one on Earth to observe anything. The solar system had been in existence for billions of years and the various bodies within it had long settled into their orbits with clockwork precision. Close in to the parent star smaller rocky bodies circled in the light, ring fenced by a zone in which gravitational perturbation had prevented any single body coalescing from the thousands that still swarmed within. Beyond that larger bodies formed chiefly of gas orbited in stately majesty, themselves circled by vast extended families of smaller bodies. And out on the fringes of the system lay further belts of small rocky and icy worlds some of which circled the star in a wildly eccentric manner. Occasionally one of these most distant of the star's children would fall inwards, jets of gas and vapour blown from their surfaces by the solar wind in tails millions of miles long. None of the bodies in the solar system or beyond ha...

I can't believe that it's already five years since I wrote the first blog in the I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan  series, a series which turned into a book self-published on kindle and paperback . Five years now is very different from five years back then. As a Teenage Toyah Fan five years was the gap between my first Toyah LP The Blue Meaning  and the realise of Minx - five long years of adventure many of which are detailed in the book and which at the time seemed to last forever. Whereas this last five years seems to have lasted just a few months in comparison. That is not to say that the most recent half-decade was without incident - far from it. The self publishing was an adventure in itself which gave me far more confidence in my writing as a whole and contributed to the fact that I have now had several short stories published (with more on the way). Fingers crossed for the novels as well... Plus since writing those first blogs - quite by coincidence - there was a re...

There is no-one to blame. The whole feeling of being put upon by fate, the weather or other so-called acts of God comes not from reality but from the human brain's almost infinite capacity for Pattern Recognition. Pattern recognition is how life makes sense of the universe. In the case of human beings the process has become so baroque and complex that it's unsurprising when it starts to throw out anomalies. We may think we see what is in front of us but that is very far from the truth. Without the high intensity interpretation and pattern matching going on in the visual cortex of the brain, the field of view is a chaotic mess of shape and shade. Even something as simple as identifying colour is tied up with image identification and processing. As the recent furore about a certain dress and - more interestingly - the very different colour palette perceived by the Himba tribe of Namibia prove, it seems that the ability to distinguish between shades of colour is linked to...

Of course when I first got referred to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy I was delighted. For too long it had been that whenever I mentioned problems with anxiety, panic and terror to my GP I was prescribed drugs - not a bad thing in itself but generally lacking. The SSRIs for depression tended to make me put on weight and the beta-blockers for panic were more of a short-term solution. I wanted to get to the root of the problem and it seemed that the Holy Grail was some kind of therapy, getting to talk to someone. It was of course difficult to get my GP to refer me and even when she did she warned that there would likely be a long waiting list. By the time I eventually got to see someone my life had changed somewhat and I had made plans to leave my day job which was one of the major causes of the anxiety I suffered. I had no illusions that this would be a cure all, some kind of magical fix, but I did feel that I was taking control of my own life and that made a big difference. I fi...

Ah, I'll do it when I get home , I think excitedly. And I visualise it in my head, sitting at the computer and doing the thing which has just excited my mind whether it is writing, coding or photoshopping. Except in my head I am still sitting at my computer in my old flat even though I moved out of there a couple of months ago. The human brain maintains a model of the world around it and when things change in reality it takes far longer for these changes to percolate into the mindscape of the head. The older you are the longer it takes for these changes to kick in. In dreams of course it takes even longer. When asleep I still seem to be living in the house I lived in as a teenager (although oddly am the age I am now). These mind quirks dragging me back into the past have of late caused me to become increasingly worried about dropping dead although I suspect that turning fifty also has a lot to do with these concerns. When I was a kid the idea of being fifty was the same as ...

For some reason I have been unable to blog this year aside from that one in January which was, basically, just me going on about something in the same way as I would if it came up in conversation in the pub. It's not that I haven't been trying. I have in fact started writing several entries but they all petered out before reaching a publishable state and have ended up abandoned in the drafts folder gathering virtual dust as they slowly become less and less relevant. The one about how we were all Ferengi now which led to the one about how I enjoyed Deep Space Nine the most of all the Star Trek series. The one about the brain's remarkable talent for pattern recognition which could probably explain so much about the human experience if only I could finish it. The one about how arbitrary so called "round numbers" are when you come to think of it. The one about anthropomorphising things. All these entries will be lost in time like tears in rain... if I leave the...

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 ...