Dawkins vs Jacob

I’ve not blogged on Brother Dawkins for a while so here’s the next instalment. Sorry, it’s a long one.

The God Delusion continues to be a fun read, if only because his tone is much lighter than in the other works I’ve read (The Selfish Gene; The Blind Watchmaker; Climbing Mount Improbable). He even cracks the odd joke.

I think I’m coming to see his weakness, though. Well, two weaknesses. One is that occasionally, as previously said, he’s just not as well informed as he thinks he is. His take on the accuracy of the Bible, given the antiquity of the manuscripts, alleged unreliability of copying etc. is old, old, old. They’re reasonable questions to ask, and they have reasonable answers which no one ever told him. Thus what he’s sure is firm ground in fact stands up to informed critique like grass in a gale and I won’t go further into it here. Nowadays we teach this stuff in Sunday School. They probably didn’t in his day, and should have.

The other is his reliance on Darwinian evolution for everything. Fine as far as it goes – if you’re talking scientifically about how life has developed on planet Earth, at present Darwinian evolution is the only meaningful model. Just like for 250 years, Newtonian physics were the only meaningful way of talking about how the solar system worked ... until Einstein came along and showed that Newton was in fact completely wrong, he just accidentally used words that accurately described the situation in most observable cases.

(If you just heard a loud OW, that’s because my colleague Tim who sits five feet away from me has a degree in space science, has just read this and has thrown something at me for making uninformed generalisations. I sit with my back to him so I’ll have to hope I catch his reflection in the monitor.)

So, Darwinian evolution is now but may not always be the sacred mantra of life scientists ... which Dawkins should realise. And he goes even further than the origins of life – he goes on to seek Darwinian reasons for why religion should exist at all. And morality. And a passel of other stuff too. That is when you want to say, come on Richard, give it a break already.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s testimony time.

Dawkins graciously accepts the existence of otherwise sane individuals, reputable scientists even, who are still inexplicably religious. He has skilfully dissected the roots of religion and shown it all to be a load of hooey, so he is patently baffled why such a thing should happen.

It doesn’t occur to him that his premises are incorrect. He took a wrong turn early on. Dawkins assumes believers believe because they are told to. In the Dawkinsian model of religious belief, children are indoctrinated and either continue to believe, growing up into credulous adults, or be clever like him and drop it. It’s a simple little model which totally fails to explain, say, the Alister McGraths of this world who start atheist and go the other way ... via the medium of science.

Nor does it occur to him that people can , yes, be taught religion as children ... and then discard it, and then rebuild it piece by piece, bit by bit, hanging on to those bits that make sense, discarding those that don’t. Religion to Dawkins is a homogenous mass of credulity. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Yes, I was brought up as a Christian believer but in such a way that if I hadn’t gone through the reconstruction process myself I would have given it all up long ago. I will also admit that I might have done likewise if raised a Muslim or a Hindu. It’s unknowable, what I would have done. I can only say what I did.

Now, that testimony thing.

In December 1991 I moved into my flat. I was in a brand new town, I knew no one, the job wasn’t half as good as I had hoped, I was flat broke ... life was not good. In the midst of all that I prayed. A lot. Sometimes it’s all you can do.

I awoke the next morning to find that my incompetent boss had died, an anonymous philanthropist had deposited £100,000 in my bank account and ...

Actually, absolutely nothing noticeable happened, except that a word popped into my forebrain. Jacob.

But it was more than just the word – it came with a parcel of meaning attached. I’m not sure what you could call it. A meme? An engram? Whatever. The meaning attached it to was the Old Testament patriarch of that name, who – as I knew from my David Kossof Bible Stories many years earlier – laboured hard for seven years, married the wrong girl, laboured for seven more, married the right one.

I’m not the kind of person who regularly gets visions, or messages, or images, or apposite Bible verses to quote. I write science fiction, for goodness sake, and weird stuff pops into my head all the time. Yet, for some reason, this seemed different. How? No idea. You might as well ask, how is the woman I married any different to any other woman that I didn’t? Biologically they’re the same. But she is different and I can see it. So there. Same thing here.

Mind you, I wasn’t particularly interested in anything happening in seven years time, let alone fourteen. I wanted it now. And if it was some kind of prophecy, I doubted it was a literal one, if only because the two women Jacob married were sisters and he ended up married to both of them at once. So, encoded in the word that I received was [in seven years time you’ll think you’ve got it made but won’t and in another seven years you really will have].

And there was of course the implication that I would still be there in seven, or fourteen, years time, so therefore I would get through my current difficulties. Which I did. Wasn’t easy, but got easier. Job improved, incompetent boss left + got a much better one, made friends. Occasionally I thought a little about Jacob over the following years, but not often. Certainly not often enough to have the effect that I’m sure someone will suggest to me, that this was all subconscious positive thinking. I certainly didn’t tell it to my publisher, yet seven years later, December 1998, my first book was published. And I thought I had it made.

Except that I didn’t. Yes, I was a published author. No, I wasn’t rich enough to retire. His Majesty’s Starship got reasonable reviews, did reasonably well, but it certainly didn’t take the world by storm. In short, it was a bog standard first time novelist experience. So, back to the grind stone.

Jobs and solvency came and went; another seven years passed quite quickly. I met Best Beloved and knew before too long that I wanted to marry her. Couldn’t see how, given various circumstances that I won’t go into. Jacob began to loom in my mind as the fourteenth anniversary approached, and it did occur to me that maybe this was what God had in mind – but I couldn’t see how. And I never told her about Jacob, yet she was the one who finally came out with the breakthrough suggestion that let us go ahead. We got engaged in December 2005. Do the maths.

This kind of thing shouldn’t happen, according to Dawkins. Yet it does. How strange.

I’m now moving on to the chapters where he talks about morality. Expect more soon.

But still no pyramids

Caves on Mars! That's what it's all about. Come on, what skifianado's heart doesn't beat a little faster at the thought?

In a nutshell, Nasa spacecraft in orbit around Mars have spotted the likely entrances of seven caves. And if that doesn't excite you, you'll never understand.

But honestly, the names ... researchers have dubbed the caves Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Abbey, Nicki and Jeanne. Who are they? The mission controller's teenage son's girlfriends? For pity's sake! The first ever known example of a particular geological feature on another planet -- which already boasts the mighty Mons Olympus, the Valles Marineris, the Hellas basis, the Tharsis plateau -- and we call it ... Nicki.

I hope these people aren't the first to discover a whole new planet.

In which Ben is happy

This morning I was mugged for my spare change by a trio of women whose figures were really not flattered by the superhero cozzies they were wearing ... but even that can't dent my good mood.

A few years ago, when Big Engine was still up and running, I had an email exchange with a complete and utter twit whose novel was sublimely awful and who had an interesting perspective on the ideal author/publisher relationship. I chronicled the exchange but omitted his identity, as I'm a nice guy, it was the professional thing to do, and it was so much more than he deserved that I could feel immeasurably smug. The fact that I wasn't publishing him caused me several sleepless nights, because it's so hard to get comfortable when you're giggling uncontrollably.

And I still don't intend to name him, because the fool has gone public with Miss Snark and I'm off the hook. Miss Snark is a New York literary agent - or possibly a collection of the same who blog as a corporate identity - and her blog is invaluable for insights into the harsh reality of commercial fiction. And the snarklings who use the comments column are much less nice than me. Vindication!

I'm not giving the URL of his site because I don't want his logfiles to show that people came to his site from mine. It's there in the Miss Snark post, however. Go there and you will find such gems as:

• A rejection from the the Austin Wahl Agency / Thomas Wahl. This has a "Charges fee. Not recommended" against it from Preditors & Editors: or in other words, even the scammers don't want to touch him.
• My favourite ever fanmail: "Received autographed copies of your book and already sold all of them here in the Ear Nose Throat Clinic."
• And possibly my favourite ever opening line, in the excerpt that he publishes: "Oceana's triplicate synthetic recreation from the Space Ark's registry of binary data was the first Being to be regenerated from the Terrestrial Ark's deep well of androgynous doubles and carnal genetic ancestors."

And now I feel myself becoming nasty, so will stop.

Surreal moments in my career # 927

Doing a photoshoot for a jack-in-the-box.

It was destined for an advertising postcard to be handed out at conferences etc with the message "avoid unwanted pop-ups". Do you see what we did there? But as neither of our regular image repositories (Getty and Shutterstock) have a decent jack-in-the-box image - the ones we found were cartoons - we had to arrange it ourselves.

Where it got surreal was the details. As supplied (literally, I suppose, in his out of the box configuration), Jack just stands straight upright. First we thought we might have him leaning back, staring up at the camera, which meant using combinations of unseen safety pins and bulldog clips to pull him back.

But it looked too like him wanting to give us a hug, so he had to be made to lean forward - again with posture altering devices like a rubber (UK meaning) and a highlighter shoved down his back, with who knows what implications for chiropractors later in his career. None of this was run past his agent - a two-year-old named Harry - in advance, so I won't tell if you don't.

When we found ourselves saying things like "Come on, darling, exude, exude, make love to the camera, that's it" then we knew it was getting silly. When Jack threw a tantrum and went to sulk in his dressing room (he assures us the white powder is just talc) we definitely knew it was time to call it a day. But we got our picture.

Professionalism, sweetie, professionalism.

Thank you Paul Gambaccini

- for introducing me to Explosions in the Sky. Nothing to do with how Japan lost WW2, this is a four-part instrumental group from Texas and Mr G played their "The Birth and Death of the Day" on Radio 2 on Sunday afternoon.

It is very, very rare that I hear a bit of music and think "wow". But in this case it seemed appropriate. It spoke to the unreconstructed stadium rocker buried deep within me - not that I have ever rocked a stadium, or in one, or am likely to. It's prog rock without all the embarrassing silly hair and costumes and inability to sing. It's Mike Oldfield joins Sky and goes heavy. It's just bloody good guitar music.

Sadly Youtube doesn't have "The Birth and Death of the Day", so here's "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean" (I gather all their titles have a similar verbosity). How nice to be reminded, in this day and age, that something good can come out of Texas.

Whisper a little prayer for me my baby

At the invitation of m’colleague Tim (who lent it to me) I’ve started reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I suspect I will have a lot to say ...

I won’t do one big review as it would take too long and life is too short. I’ll just drop in comments here when and as I feel, as I go. Like now.

First impressions. Like all his books, it’s a joy to read. It’s witty, lucid, very well written, and invaluably informative in those areas where Dawkins is well informed. (He’s not always as well informed as he thinks he is but I’ll probably come back to that in another post.) His one page analysis of the excesses of Catholicism shows exactly why the Reformation was such a good, and long overdue, idea. His dissection of Creationism and Intelligent Design (amusingly described as ‘Creationism in a cheap tuxedo’) are all I need to point at if anyone ever asks me why I’m not a Creationist. And as for the prayer experiment ...

This, too, rightly gets the Dawkins treatment. This was an experiment set up to test via scientific means whether praying specific things for a specific group of people had the slightest effect. It was all done with the proper system of double blinds – the prayees (all hospital patients) didn’t know they were being prayed for, the prayerers didn’t know exactly who they were praying for (they knew first name and initial of surname, but had never met the people in question) and so on. Rather unsurprisingly, the experiment revealed that prayer had exactly no effect at all.

I take this with a pinch of caveats because I’ve heard a similar story in which prayer did work. I have no direct way of knowing which account is correct, but I strongly suspect it’s Dawkins. I won’t lean over backwards to give Deep Faith reasons for why it didn’t work, like some theologians he gleefully goes on to quote – I’ll just say that if you want to prove the existence of a thinking, reasoning intelligence then you don’t reduce it to the status of a lab rat; and if that intelligence is in the habit of handing out favours when and as he feels like, you don't treat them as a mechanical process that is there on demand. That’s the logical flaw of the experiment, never mind the moral and ethical ones.

Here is Ben’s take on prayer.

I was running low on petrol so I decided to divert from my ordinary route home from work, and go via Tesco to fill up. This means coming off the A34, driving up to the Tesco roundabout and turning right. With no traffic around, you can do this in 30 seconds. When Abingdon is having a Bad Traffic Day, like this day in question, it can take 40 minutes.

Forty minutes later, having finally crawled up to the Tesco roundabout, my schedule for the evening was already way off. So I just did a full 180 (UPDATE: I meant 360, gaah!) round the roundabout, back to the A34 in 30 seconds, and took an alternative route home that took a further 10 minutes. Then I had my dinner, went out to a meeting scheduled for later that evening, and filled up en route to that instead. At the garage, I met a lady from out of town who was badly lost and wanted directions to a particular road. Which I was able to give her.

Now.

I don’t know if she was religious; I don’t know if she had prayed for help in finding her way about town. It’s still entirely possible that as she drove away she sent up a quick thanks for meeting someone who could help her. I certainly sent up a quick thanks that I was able to help. Neither of us would imagine for a second that God had inflicted a Bad Traffic Day on Abingdon, inconveniencing hundreds of drivers with a knock on to thousands if you include family members, just so I could help the lady find Appleford Drive. (It's hard to imagine a loving God inflicting one of Abingdon’s Bad Traffic Days on anyone. Sodom and Gomorrah got off more lightly.)

My mental image is of a grid stretching out ahead of me. A grid of events, or non events, that affect everyone. My life, and the lives of everyone else, rattle through the grid randomly like pinballs. We bump into the events, we bump into each other. It's a chaotic, non-predictable process. Prayer is a way of bringing a bit more order into it. It puts you in a state of mind and being that gravitates more towards, or away from, certain events and lives than others. It makes you able to find some good wherever you find yourself. It puts yourself second and others first. It helps good spread out to encompass other people, not just yourself. And quite possibly – a bit like Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable – it will bring you via a series of smaller events to a big event that, had you jumped straight there, would have seemed to be in violation of the laws of the universe.

Drat. I feel the need to give a particular key testimony in my life coming on. But not here. Maybe tomorrow.

[I thought of heading this post with another anagram, but "Richard Dawkins The God Delusion" is an anagram of "Swindled and rigorous thickhead". Which would be unkind, so I went with the Mamas & the Papas instead.]

Grim, stirring foolery (anagram)

Someone came to this blog today following a search for a review of Farah Mendlesohn's edited collection Glorifying Terrorism. The sharp eyed among you will have seen from the reading/read list (over on the left somewhere, page down quite a bit) that this is what I have been mostly reading this month. Well, I guess I'd better review it then.

The purpose of this collection was, quite simply, to show up the utter absurdity of the knee-jerk Terrorism Act 2006, specifically, the bit that forbids "the glorification of terrorism". Quite why this is so silly is best shown by a glimpse at the book's recommended reading/viewing list at the end. The Act could be used to outlaw Star Wars. The Act could be used to outlaw - and this really brings it home - C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian. Say what you like about the latter, it's about a campaign of armed resistance against the brutal yet legitimate rulers of - um - Narnia.

Of course, we all cry, no one's ever going to be arrested for reading Prince Caspian. But what's to stop it? There isn't a copper on the face of the planet who, if he's made his mind up to exercise the rights of enforcement granted to him by law, will stay his hand because "that's not what the legislation was meant for." No, but that's how it can be taken. Any blunt instrument, sledgehammer law is a bad law. Like this one.

So, after all that, is the collection any good? Well, yeah, here and there. Some are good stories in their own right and needed publishing anyway (let's call them category A). Some probably never would have been without this collection but still justify their own existence (category B). And some frankly left me cold (category C) or actively didn't do the book any favours (category D). I enjoyed Charles Stross's "Minutes of the Labour Party Conference, 2016" in which the chickens come home to roost for Labour; H.H. Loyche's "The Rural Kitchen", in which an innocent recipe book falls foul of over restrictive legislation; Lucy Kemnitzer's "John Brown's Body", exploring an alternative fate of the nineteenth century emancipator. These were category A above. In category B, I didn't enjoy but was glad to have read (for example) Rachel Swirsky's "The Debt of the Innocent" and Una McCormack's "Torch Song". I'll be kind and not identify the category Cs and Ds.

Let's just say the level of copy editing shows that Farah is a busy lady. Which she is. The multiple use of "annoint", far too often and with far too many 'n's in the first story sets the tone ...

I'm glad the book was published; I'm glad I've read it; and I'll probably put it on Amazon.

School's in

When I blogged about last year's parent-teacher evening it drew a lot of Google searches for something completely different, due to my use of the word "threesome" and a word that almost rhymes with "thespian" in the same sentence.

No sign of them this year, though - or at least, the third person who made me wonder didn't seem to be around. It was obviously a year for shedding partners because for various reasons our own household's turnout was just me and, wonder of wonders, the actual Boy in question, the point of the whole thing, deigning to turn up so the teachers could deliver their opinions directly to him. Which may have slightly more effect than having their opinions filtered through the medium of me. I did get to see one lone father trailing round, all on his own and minus child, and it's a very forlorn sight.

This time the teachers were all sitting where they were meant to be and we actually mostly stuck to the timetable - it only began to slip about three teachers before the end.

Mrs A (maths, but doesn't teach him) is still multiply pierced, though her dress sense has toned down a little. Mr K (business studies), I finally decided about two hours later, reminds me of Jim's dad from American Pie but without the witty, dynamic sense of humour. Mr E (maths) thinks the Boy is the entire bee's anatomy and can't believe his colleagues in other subjects don't do likewise. Quite touching, really. Mrs K (English) couldn't believe she was sitting at the same table as a published novelist. Miss W (RE) looks about five minutes older than the Year 10s she teaches.

So, a good evening; maybe scope for future improvement but isn't there always; useful pointers for how this can be achieved. We celebrated with dinner from Domino's Pizza, which for some reason is considered a treat, probably because a pair of pizzas and a garlic mushroom starter costs half our average weekly shopping bill. Maybe he could consider that in his next Business Studies project.

Dense bodies and objects in space

I was always extremely unlikely to watch the new series of Castaway. Looking at the BBC page I now see that contestants can't even bring reading or writing material with them, and at this point my already zero-point interest spins into a black hole and becomes even less accessible. There is no way I could ever be interested in someone who is prepared to go without reading or writing for 13 months.

Except possibly on a dissecting slab so that future anatomists can learn from the mistakes of the past.

What is interesting, and completely unrelated but it saves me having to do two blog posts where one will do, is the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, which does what it says on the tin: every day you get a brand new and usually quite astonishing astronomical picture. I just add it to my regular first-thing-in-the-morning blog and cartoon round-up and there you are.

Makes that small island in the Pacific seem even less important than it already is.

Bad luck Mr Gorsky

There's no excuse for it.

Neil Armstrong allegedly uttered two famous lines on the moon, and the second was "Good luck Mr Gorsky" as he climbed back into the lander. Apparently, as a child he had overheard his neighbours the Gorskys arguing, with the wife promising the husband sex "when the kid next door walks on the moon."

This was presented to us with the assurance "this is a true story" at a meeting at church last night, and padded out with lots of supplementary detail: NASA assumed he was talking about a Soviet cosmonaut and checked their files but couldn't trace the man; Armstrong refused to expand on his comment until 1995 when Mr Gorsky died.

What a shame that it's just a joke made up by comedian Buddy Hackett – in, curiously, 1995. As a very quick and easy Internet search discovers.

In some versions it's apparently the oral variety that Mrs Gorsky is trying not to promise, but I don't think last night's speaker was ready to go there. It was still a good talk, good points ... just a little undermined.

I like to think I can detect an urban legend quite easily. There's something about them – the tone, the very faint stretch marks it leaves in your disbelief – that makes my antennae twitch. Some are just funny to tell as jokes. Did an Asian family in Weston-Super-Mare really think the miles of low-tide mudflat meant there was a tsunami coming? I don't know and frankly can't be bothered to check. But then, I don't intend to use this as an illustration in a talk.

With the internet, there's absolutely no excuse for not checking any anecdote you intend to repeat to reinforce whatever you're saying. And yet, up they come, time and time again, and the ones I hear most often are shoehorned into sermons or church talks. Christians do have a distressing tendency to believe anything told to them by another Christian without questioning. The first time, it might amuse, even if already the antennae are twitching. The second time, especially if one or more of the key features varies slightly ... well, that's when I tend to shut down.

What does it say? It says your talk is so flawed it has to be backed up with lies. It says you're so clueless you can't do a simple Google search, yet apparently people should believe you. Or maybe you're just a very nice guy without the slightest idea of how the world works ... so still not really worth listening to, sorry.

Another one that pops up frequently tends to be on talks about sin or guilt, in the format of:

[Arthur Conan Doyle / Mark Twain / A.N. Other] sent a letter to every man in town saying "Leave town at once – all is found out." [A quarter / half / three quarters / all] of the people who received it immediately left.

Unlike the Gorsky one, I can't find this at all on the web ... which itself makes me suspicious as to whether it happened to Conan Doyle or Twain or anyone at all.

For pity's sake, people, get it right or shut up.

Lazing on a square-eyed afternoon

A nasty wet afternoon yesterday, so no walk and far too much TV.

The Shawshank Redemption. One of the greats and something I’ve been determined Best Beloved should see for a long time. One of those movies that is excellent the first time you see it and improves with repeated viewing, because every time we are drip-fed one of the threads that come so gloriously together at the end there is a nice warm fuzzy glow as you realise what is happening. Tiny flashes of humanity show up through the sea of dehumanising misery like poppies on Flanders field – tiny, but all you really need to keep going one more day.

Then the ‘Making of’ feature on the DVD. Not something I usually watch, but interesting to see. Not least for the group of Christian film critics who like to shoehorn as much meaning as they can into – well, just about anything, really. You can take it too far. The Shawshank Redemption is undoubtedly a film about redemption – there’s a clue in the title – but drawing parallels between Andy and Christ starts to get silly. Andy’s redemption comes through his own hard work – which many would say is the only kind of redemption available, but I wouldn’t and they shouldn’t either.

Also amused to see actor Clancy Brown, who plays the utterly bastardly Captain Hadley, explain that he politely declined the offer to mix with some real prison guards, since if they saw the movie then they would really really really really rather he didn’t say he based his performance on any of them.

The West Wing. The Prime Minister of the UK is a glorified MP who gets to meet the Queen a bit more than usual. It's a position worthy of respect, but this fact should always be at the back of his or her mind. On t'other hand, the Office of President of the United States of America should be worth so much more honour and dignity. It should belong to someone like Bartlet; not a sabre rattling pea brain, not a Southern slimeball, not a ... fill in your own unworthy candidate here. Always priceless.

And finally Lewis. I like this show. Lewis has moved on since Morse. He’s older, more cynical and also slightly better at his job than his old boss. I really get the feeling Oxford is his manor. Of course, it’s still a dream Oxford linked by a mysterious network of wormholes enabling characters to move seamlessly between locations miles apart while still having the same conversation. It’s more fine tuned than in the old days, when Morse couldn’t drive between any two locations in Oxfordshire without heading the wrong way down the High. Lewis doesn’t drive so much – his car isn’t so photogenic – so the wormhole network now mostly covers tourist attractions and college quads.

I’m still not quite sure where Lewis works. Morse, in the books and on TV, was undoubtedly based in Kidlington, HQ of Thames Valley Police. Lewis's office is obviously somewhere more central but we’re never quite sure where. I suppose it could be St Aldates. I’ve never been beyond the front desk there but even so, it looks a bit too modern. Anyway.

And please can we not wait another twenty years for Hathaway to get his own series.

So, far too much TV, and a headache and a couple of hours insomnia as a result. But every now and then, just once in a while, that’s what Sundays are for.

Not Angels but Anglicans

The BBC news site changes its headlines on a fairly frequent basis. Earlier today, under Entertainment, was Church confirms she is pregnant. Scope for all kinds of theological extrapolation along the lines of the church being the bride of Christ ... except that it is of course Charlotte Church who is expecting.

A couple of hours later, also under Entertainment, the headline has changed to Church condemns 'humiliation TV'. Knowing that Charlotte is shortly to host her own chat show I wonder if this is a promise for quality, comfy sofa entertainment - more Michael Parkinson than Graham Norton.

No, this time it really is The Church (of England) warning that TV shows like Big Brother and Little Britain can "exploit the humiliation of human beings for public entertainment". Ah well. CofE's finger still firmly on the pulse, then.

The latter makes for quite entertaining reading. Bath's Reverend Stephen Lynas is evidently a cup-half-full kind of man: "For every Jade Goody there is a Sister Wendy" and "Big Brother is pretty awful but nobody has died yet."

Little Britain is singled out for criticism because the Vicky Pollard character makes fun of the way some teenage girls speak. Well yeah but no but yeah but no but that's because they do, you fool. And prize for Clergyman Most Likely to Live on Another Planet has to go to Reverend Richard Moy: "My only complaint with Channel 4 is that they did not think to have our Archbishop of York on Celebrity Big Brother."

Though Big Brother rules would be one way of managing the Synod. And I would pay to see Jade Goody's art appreciation series.

The real me

Get Your Monster Name

"Ben" was just "Bloodythirsty Evil Nightmare". This seemed more fun, especially the jogger-abducting.

More news just in gets a post of its own

Under Torch Wood is credited to Verity Stob and the script is available here. End of public service announcement.

Redemption achieved

Okay, that was fun. Only one klingon, for a start - the legendary warrior strangely missing from the Trek canon, Khq'as. Yes, there were many other costumes too, some but not all of a Trek orientation, but when they're as cute as the two little cyberboys you really can't complain. Here they are with, presumably, their cyberdad.


Sadly my camera didn't have the battery oomph to power the flash too, which limited the number of pix that could have been taken. This was an especial shame for the masquerade and caberet. However, still photography could not do justice to the astonishing dance acts (to Gogol Bordello's Start Wearing Purple, one that I think was to original music, and let's not forget seven year old Karen's dolphin dance), and the best act of all didn't need costumes. A Hugo and Oscar should go to whoever penned Dylan Thomas's Under Torchwood.

There was sufficient serious sf discussion to be had, and it can safely be said Battlestar Galactica (the new one) has achieved beatification - so much so that I almost felt a heel in my final panel session, "Creating an alien culture", by raising one tiny implausibility about it. (Okay - I'm feeling brave. The 12 colonies have been at peace for the last sixty years and as far as we know they got on okay before that too ... so why the massive, budget consuming fleet of battlestars?) Anyway, I'm happy.

Two most favourite panels:

1. Room 101. Scott's subjects: instruction manuals, Rupert Murdoch, modern pronunciation and computer technology. Mine: digital rights management, smart-alec shortarses, and birthday banners that get tied to roundabouts and are still there a month later. Sadly we ran out of time before he could get on to cricket on Radio 4 and I could get on to A.N. Wilson. Most of our choices were successfuly argued for inclusion in Room 101, but he had to keep modern pronunciation and I had to keep smart-alec shortarses, as represented here.


2. What would Blake's 7 be like not set in space?
<unintelligible><fan><geekspeak>
We came up with a series in which a resistance fighter to the British Raj is transported to Australia and escapes halfway in a before-its-time zeppelin. Three quarters of the way through his adventures, the zeppelin is destroyed and he acquires the Nautilus. Zen is a Babbage difference engine. Orac is a bald dwarf with an astonishing aptitude for telephone technology. Our heroes winch him down from the zeppelin so that he can tap telegraph wires. My suggestion that he be Scottish and called McApple was cruelly rejected. Star One is on Rockall (or possibly Ascension Island) and is a listening post into the transatlantic cables. Queen Victoria is Servalan.
</geekspeak></fan></unintelligible>

And yes, I might even do it again in '09. I assume that by then I'll have seen Galactica's third season.

• News just in: I've just received an email telling me that the results of the Blake's 7 slash writing workshop are available at http://www.eclectic21.co.uk/. Before going there, make sure you fully understand what slash is ...

Seeking Redemption at the weekend

I've been going to science fiction conventions on and off for many years - my first being in Cardiff in 1991. There are conventions going on all the time catering for all aspects of the field and so I've always stuck to the more literary-oriented ones. Partly because that's where I am myself, with my unswerving conviction that progress in science fiction is made at the literary end of the spectrum, and the better known / more publicised media end will catch it up ten years later. And partly because ... well, I just don't want to be surrounded by people who have lovingly crafted their very own Klingon battledress complete with an exact replica of the medal bestowed upon Worf by Picard during the third series of ... and so on. It makes me ... uneasy.

All very stereotyped, I know, and I finally feel secure enough in my own identity to be venturing into the heartland of media SF conventions. Specifically, Redemption, to be held in Hinckley (a small triangle of grass between the M1, M69 and M6, on which someone has built a hotel) this weekend.

Redemption is a once-every-two-years series of conventions based loosely around Babylon 5 and Blake's 7, but now broadened out even to other shows that don't follow the B + numeral pattern. The title is of course - how sad that I know this - taken from the first episode of the second series of B7, in which our heroes, having spent the first series swanning around the galaxy in their stolen alien starship Liberator, are finally called to account by the Liberator's builders who want their ship back. In other words, as Blake helpfully says, redemption. Which, yes, is a technically correct definition of the word, but not how it is generally perceived. I suspect Terry Nation, who wrote the episode, just wanted to use the word in the title.

I have absolutely no idea what to expect, save that I've looked at the membership list and it features some gratifyingly sane people known personally to me.

Partly as a means of getting involved, and partly as a way of making sure I generally have at least a table between me and the Klingons, I've volunteered for various panels. And golly, according to the programme I'm down for seven. Seven! Three of them being back to back on Saturday morning, and me with my incipient sore throat, though it's still best not to be absolutely sure what's happening in a programme until you turn up. They are:

• What would Blake's 7 be like not set in space?
• Room 101 (with the guest of honour!)
• Narnia: film vs the books
• Elections and politics in SF
• What would you cut first? Making a programme to budget (no idea how I got onto this one)
• Legal systems in Babylon 5 and Blake's 7
• Creating an alien culture

Guest of honour is an actor named Scott Fredericks, who had small parts in Dr Who and B7 way back when and has diversified since, not least into writing and directing. His photo on the web site shows he has aged gracefully, though it would be hard not to improve on his appearance in the 1972 Dr Who episode "Day of the Daleks". The series had a bad case of the seventies back then, and when Mr Fredericks's character - a time travelling freedom fighting guerilla - first appears with the rest of the group, you take one look at the sideburns and moustaches and have to force yourself not to start humming:

"Young man, there's no need to feel down, I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground ..."

"Day of the Daleks" also has a famous scene of precisely three Daleks being wheeled out of a tunnel, over and over again in different orders and shot from different camera angles, to give the impression that a whole army of pepperpots is invading. Gave me the willies at the time. There was no CGI in those days, children, and we were better off for it.

Anyway, it should all be great fun and I'm looking forward to it. Reports will be made next week, depending on how reportable it all is.

Hours of endless fun

There's a very silly but addictive game to be played with book titles and author names. I remembered it in my publisher's office yesterday, looking at the cover of a book by new writer Peadar O'Guilin. The cover text was laid out:

Peadar O'Guilin

THE INFERIOR

and I thought how wise it was to do it that way round. Putting his name second would have been unfortunate.

See how the game is played?

Other contenders include Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone J.K. Rowling and the legendary The Sheep Look Up John Brunner. And there's many more here, of which my personal favourites include:

• Fear L. Ron Hubbard
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase Joan Aiken
• Flush Virginia Woolf
• A Time to Kill John Grisham

But you may have your own, or even better, track down some new ones.

Turl churl

That was nice. As of yesterday morning I had two works in progress - the novel I delivered to my publisher last year and was awaiting feedback on, and the next novel which is now 30,000 words in.

As of a meeting with my publisher, the lovely David Fickling, yesterday evening, I now have two more. One of them is part of a much bigger secret that I hope I can tell here eventually, the other I'll let you know all about once the contract is signed. Still, not much sleep last night as a result of this meeting - ideas for works in progress buzzing around in my head, Jerusalem artichokes from my starter at the QI Club buzzing around in the rest of me.

Ah yes, the QI Club ... very pleasant, nice food, clean and well kept, can't believe it will last another five minutes without going bankrupt. At seven in the evening the place was empty apart from us and three others, and they all worked there. Not what you'd expect of a trendy club and restaurant in the middle of Oxford.

And for no other reason than that the club is in Turl Street, here are a couple of Turl Street jokes.

Q: why is Turl Street like the Church of England?
A: it goes from the Broad to the High and passes Jesus on the way. [Link provided for those who don't get it.]

An American tourist is standing in the middle of Turl Street, looking from one almost identical college on one side of the road to another. She laments: "I just can't tell Lincoln from Jesus." A porter pops his head out of the lodge: "Yes, madam, a lot of Americans have that problem."

Plus, tubular bells!

That is actually a complete misnomer because not only are there no tubular bells, there is no option to add any either. But it is Mike Oldfield we're talking about and I've always wanted to say that.

Bought Mr Oldfield's latest, Light & Shade, with my birthday money. Four of the tracks are available in, apparently, U-MYX format. This is nothing to do with rabbit diseases but is in fact (very limited) remixing software. The different tracks are broken down into segments and you can fade them in, out or completely shut them down as you wish. What you can't do is reorder them, or introduce new stuff - hence, no tubular bells. All in all a bit of a waste of time, but what the heck, it's a nice novelty.

If you really want to waste your time with a bit of remixing, try these guys. I once set our company's development programme back by a good 30 minutes by circulating this to the Strategic Technologies division.

A Snake dominated by Wood

Which sounds a little rude, but I didn't invent the Chinese zodiac. Anyway, happy Chinese new year. Read all about it at http://www.chinese-astrology.co.uk/.

I was apparently born in the Year of the Snake:

"Snakes have always been the seducers of human beings ... Snake people are born charming and popular. Snakes are spotlight magnets, and they will not be ignored. Peer group attention and public recognition are the least of what he expects."

Darn tootin' (seducers of human beings? Aren't there laws against any of the alternatives?), and it gets better. I am also dominated by the Wood element:

"Those born in the years dominated by the Wood element are people of high morals and great confidence. They know the intrinsic value of things and are apt to appreciate all that they have."

Well, that's us Aquarians to a T.

Platitudes in stained glass altitudes

When I got the proofs back for His Majesty's Starship, I found that a copy editor deep in the bowels of Scholastic had obligingly changed every mention of the ship's attitude jets to altitude jets. I obligingly changed them back and included a restrained note on how attitude control is quite a useful accessory in any good spacecraft, while altitude control is just another way of saying "wings" and is pretty meaningless in the context.

All brought back to me by reading Charles Stross's Iron Sunrise, in which on page 242 the spaceship Romanov departs a space station and Charlie uses one of each - attitude at the top of the page, altitude at the bottom. I strongly suspect he knows the difference so will just put it down to over zealous copy editing or under zealous proof reading. Either way I will feel politely smug.

Except that, do you know, it's just occurred to me I never checked the US edition ... hang on ...

[A moment later] DAMN!

How to make your wife disappear

Best Beloved use to work in Saudi Arabia, and she picked up one of these nifty little numbers for getting about in public.

It's astonishing. The woman you love is standing a few feet away from you and her identity has vanished, subsumed into a surprisingly light and airy black cloak. (Well, it felt light and airy to me, but she said she was sweltering even under the lights in our room.) She has been erased.

If I can use the language of one religion to describe another, it's been an epiphany. And not a nice one.

Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy

Sometimes your birthday falls on a weekend. I would guess this happens about 2/7ths of the time, which is basically a third, give or take. And if your birthday falls in the middle of February, it generally manages to hit half term, or come very close.

But today was the first time I have ever actively instigated a holiday on my birthday, i.e. taken a day of annual leave allowance. Blame my lovely wife for the idea, but it was a very good one and shall be repeated.

So, a lie in, breakfast in bed and a home made card from the Boy, with a message that made me quite nervous until I had read it all the way through:

"I just want you to know that the ONLY people I send birthday cards to are attractive, intelligent and sexy individuals. Merry Christmas."

Then a walk to the Fox for lunch and back (for those with local knowledge: okay, we parked at Long Furlong and walked the rest of the way), and an evening that will probably consist of last night's Life on Mars and who knows maybe some Cadfael too. Having married someone who has opened my eyes to The Bill, Judge John Deed, Waking the Dead, Foyle's War ... well, you get the message, anyway, LoM should be the ideal crossover point for our mutual tastes.

Badly handled birthdays suck. Done properly, they rock.

It's the principle, innit

You can't sneak anything past the bright bods of Homeserve GB Ltd.

"During a recent review of our customer records, we identified that you may live in a flat or apartment."

The letter was correctly addressed to my full postal address, which includes the word "Flat" as the very first word of the first line. So, spot on, eh? You can see where all our graduates are going.

Anyway, they urged me to call to check that my cover was still appropriate for my newly flattened address. Some is, some isn't - and some of what isn't never was. So, you'll be refunding my premium, then?

Well, apparently not, as the policy documentation that I have received (having bought the policy) allegedly drew my attention to my ineligibility. Except that (a) it doesn't (I've just checked it for the third time) and (b) the person to whom I gave my address over the phone really should have picked up on the f-word when I said it. A brief moment of being put on hold while the minion consults with the manager ... and yes, I get a refund, to be with me within 28 days.

It's £15. But like I say, it's the principle.

I've also discovered an acid test for those of us who like to be reasonable, British, non-complaining, don't make waves etc. Aside from the sense of natural justice, just ask: "Do you expect sympathy if you go home and tell your wife this?" If the answer is no, then it's not reasonable and you go for the jugular.

Could the Daleks be any more evil?

Yes, apparently they could.



And as if that wasn't enough ...



Yes, there are Monty Python / Dr Who fans with far too much time on their hands, and we salute them all.

Well, I tried

Up at the normal time, peek out of the window: snow! As promised. We must have listened to the rundown of closed schools in Oxfordshire four or five times - there's a lot of them - and eventually established that every school in Abingdon except the Boy's seemed to be shut. So off he went, hah. Hoping and praying for a day off, but he's not back yet, an hour later.

Best Beloved could walk to work, her Swedish blood itching to get out into those snowfields. And me ...

Getting out of the drive was the hairy bit. After that, I reasoned that with the rush hour already well established, the roads would have been swept clean by at least three or four cars gliding in pirouettes to their hideous deaths, and so I could get to work safely. Right?

Got to the first roundabout; decided that if even a main well used road was still this slushy, no way was I going further. I would love to be knocking those three reports on virtual private networks into one glossy brochure, I really would; more to the point and more seriously, I would love to be in an all-day centrally heated building where someone else pays for the heating. But my family would miss its main breadwinner if I skidded to my own death. So, a day at home and not even the compensation of being ill in bed to help pass the time. Comfort eating, second series of Battlestar Galactica on DVD, and the wonders of NTL film on demand, here I come.

UPDATE: oh, okay. M'colleague Claire, or Comrade Stakhanov as we like to call her, having successfully fought the drifts into work, has been able to email me those VPN documents. So, goody, I can work at home, where I pay for the heating and the free coffee isn't on tap. Not that I'm complaining or anything.

If the bus principle holds, there'll be a third along any moment now

Good grief. There's another me out there. See here.

I expect we can easily be told apart. He's aged 16 or under, and good at sport.

Glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults

... is just one of the memorable turns of phrase in this reasoned little exposition on why Macs aren't as good as PCs. Enjoy.

My, that is rounded

A shocked world learns that Daniel Radcliffe is to appear nude on stage in Peter Shaffer's Equus, opening in London in February. (He's 17, for crying out loud - is this legal?) A spokeperson says that he wants "to show he is a rounded actor".

Must - control - urge - to - make - innuendo. (Well, apart from the subject line.)

Anyway, good for him. He knows he won't be Harry Potter forever - and who would want to be - so wants to make his mark in other ways. Though I can't help wondering if a condition for taking the role was that his mum should be barred from coming anywhere within a billion trillion squillion miles of the theatre.

There is precedent. Peter Firth played the same role opposite Richard Burton (whose part will be taken on stage this time by Uncle Vernon, strangely) and he was in the Double Deckers. (He's the one in the orange shirt ...)

A year ago ...

Riots over the cartoons in Denmark. A visit to the marriage registrar. And I installed Statcounter, since when I have had 9557 visitors, 1221 of whom were last month. Obviously a rising curve, then. So, just a quick note to you all to say thanks, and if you enjoyed this blog, why not buy one of my books?

Why rude health?

Health isn't rude. Illness is rude. It barges into your life, unwanted and uninvited and unannounced, and proceeds to embugger your existence without a by your leave.

A slight cold yesterday, achy sinuses, bit of a runny nose. Slept okay during the night, but fitfully; felt bored, got up at about 5 a.m. for the bathroom.

Woh! Dizziness, cramps, headache, very light headed, imperative need to return to a horizontal position ASAP. Which is how most of today has been spent, with a 39 degree temperature. Or if not completely horizontal then sitting up in bed, part horizontal and part vertical, which I suppose averages out at 45 degrees.

I honestly cannot remember missing a day at work in all the time I've been in Abingdon. Yes, I've been ill. I was laid low by some kind of gastric flu one New Year's Day - but the holiday extended over a long weekend so work was not affected. Since 2000 there was the time my back went twang at the London International Book fair and I spent a couple of days lying down; also another bout of flu. But I was working from home so could still read manuscripts. This is a novel experience. But I'll tell you one thing - it's much more fun to be ill with someone to look after you than sweating it out on your own ...

Anyway, pink elephants are floating around on the monitor and I'm pretty sure it's not some novel screen saver, so back to bed I go.

We'll make a publisher of him yet

To Abingdon's Unicorn Theatre on Saturday, for to see Mr Briggs's Feet of Clay, adapted from an original work by Mr Pratchett. (I still have ticket # 00001 for 1992's Mort, which I choose to believe may be valuable on eBay one day, even though there was no eBay in 1992.)

The programme turned out to contain coded messages - every few words you come across a letter in bold type, which added together make a clue as to how Lord Vetinari is (or rather, isn't) being poisoned.

And it was the Boy who spotted the bold letters, with a disparaging comment about the programme's print quality. [Ben's voice begins to wobble] I'm so proud ...

Sigh

The case study was written by a techie type at one of our customer organisations. For some unknown techie type reason he had chosen the medium of bold italic GREEN Times New Roman.

I gave it a title. I took out words like "seperacy" and I made my best guess as to what was actually meant by sentences like "The implementation can be broken down into a number of areas of interest which are often asked question but people considering exploring VoIP." My editorial skills were a fine-toothed comb run through the tangled knot of verbiage. Beneath my nimble fingers on the keyboard, a pig's ear was transformed into a silk purse.

Then came the editorial board ...

Any document that goes before the gaze of the public has to pass through the editorial board first. This consists of at least one technical person from the division concerned, to check that the document is, yanno, right. And the division head to check it fits into the overall grand plan for world domination of the internet. And the division communications manager who needs to know what the division is communicating. And my two colleagues, and our line manager, who check the commas, and our director who checks the company isn't saying anything silly that will upset our funding bodies. Any of the above has the power of veto.

Our (usually very literate) director's sole comment on the ed board form? "Good written piece of work."

Bad joke

I went into B&Q. A bloke dressed in orange came up and asked if I wanted decking.

Fortunately I got the first punch in.

Petition, petition, we all fall down

So the clock radio switched itself on at the normal time and announced the headlines from the Today programme: the Catholic church is still pushing the government to give it an exemption from the gay adoption laws, and BA is going on strike. In my wake-up wooziness I thought how interesting it would be the other way round: BA calls on the government, church goes on strike.

But speaking of asking the government things, the wonderful Lady Bracknell has led me to this site. No. 10 has a site where anyone (apparently) can post a petition on any topic they care to name, and people can sign it. Of course, the chances of the Divine Helmsman actually reading any are slightly lower than Germany passing a law that makes holocaust denial compulsory for under-11s, but hey, this is yer real actual people-enabling joined-up e-government, so don't knock it.

Most, but not all the fun can be had by browsing petitions in reverse order of number of sign-ups. I was quite amused that as of today, re-introducing corporal punishment and stopping bull fighting are listed together - scope for a little synergy there, maybe.

There is quite a bit of duplication - at least two people want to grant Steve Winwood honours for his contributions to music (!?) - and mutual annihilation (scrap the Hunting Act / tighten it up even further; give Cornwall independence / make it even more part of the UK; no faith schools / every school a faith school; and so on). But here are some choice nibbles.

• make statutary the teaching of astrology and other pseudo-science in Government-funded schools (on the grounds that they already allow intelligent design)
• ban petitions
• give Christopher Lee a knighthood
  
• stop John Humphrys interrupting people
  
• make the teaching of Anglo Saxon compulsory from age 7
• treat the abuse of ginger haired people the same as any other hate crime
  

But my favourites are some of those aimed directly at the PM himself. You can if you so choose petition Tony to:

• hand over his passport to the Passport Office
  
• become the first British Prime Minister in history to attempt to swim the Atlantic non-stop
• tour Iraq to receive the public adulation and thanks from a grateful population
  
• stand on his head and juggle ice-cream
  

The last of which has 2767 signatures at the time of writing and expires on 16 August this year, if anyone's interested.

This is a first

My first ever Nigerian spam ... en Francais. And it purports to come from a woman of Austrian descent in South Africa. How multi-cultural.

"J'ai recu votre adresse de contact d’une connai ssance digne de confiance dont je prefere garder le nom secret pour le moment. Je vais aller droit au but, j’ai une offer d’affaire rentable a vous soumetre, il s’agit d’un transfert d;une valeure de 22.5millions de dollar americain, comme vous le comprendrez surement, je voudrai vous demander une total discetion concsernant mon nom qui est DR. Susana wolfgang. Je suis la veuve de monsieur Michael wolfgang. Je suis nee en afrique du sud , mes grand parents sont autrichiens d'origine. Mon defunt mari a heriter l”entreprise de ses parents, qui sont plusieurs hotels en afrique du sud, des magasins et quelques entreprises agricoles."

The format is pretty recognisable in any language, isn't it?

Foreigners still funny, so let's laugh at them

The original poster of this little gem says it best: "The Japanese decided to make a brand new title sequence featuring images of destruction and death, then got little kiddies to sing over it."

Behold the magnificence that is the opening titles of Captain Scarlet, in Japanese.



And it gets better: they did the same to Thunderbirds. This sneakily starts off as per normal, but get to the end of the countdown sequence and see if you can spot the difference.



Our church's teen youth group, aided and abetted by a leader who really should have known better, once did a worship chorus to the tune of the Thunderbirds theme. If we'd known about this, we would probably have realised we were outclassed and shuffled off in shame.

Tie me ectoplasm down, boy

Now here's an idea for a story. As chat over lunch turned (somehow) to ouija boards we got this gem from an esteemed colleague: "Isn't that what Rolf Harris used?"

Can you guess who it is yet?

Shouldn't boast, but ...

... on the other hand, why not?

You know the Bible 100%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Though I will confess to at least one guess. Still, I was pretty certain that the guy who got swallowed by a big fish was not called Hootie, and whatever got created on the fourth day did not include MySpace.

Something to agree on

In my more charitable moods, I merely pity the headmaster I had between ages 8-13. I can't comment on his strengths or weaknesses as a husband (doubtless faithful and loving), a father (doubtless an inspiration to his children) or a soldier (doubtless fought bravely for his King in WW2). I can't even really comment on him as a teacher - I'm pretty sure he taught me history in my last year but it's just a blank, apart from one thing which I'll come to. But he taught me other things in other ways ...

His ability to walk into a room where absolutely no one was misbehaving, identify at least two offenders and punish them was staggering. (It was never just one offender, because - mantra #1 - "It takes two to make a fight.") Nor could anyone else who had witnessed the event, or lack of it, bear testimony for their friends. Mantra #1a - "Do you really expect me to believe that?", with the very strong implication that you should stand down now, or join them in whatever punishment he had devised.

So he taught me that where theory (or ideology, or dogma) and fact disagree, fact wins every time.

He taught me that standing by your beliefs if your beliefs are wrong and lack any factual basis is not actually worthy of respect. I have never subscribed to the "you have to admire the courage of his convictions" theory. Not if he's a pillock, you don't. And the more you use sheer authority to steamroller your view of reality through in the face of all fact and reason, the more contemptible and pathetic you look.

He would move goalposts, or abolish goalposts altogether. Conditions would be set for X to happen; the conditions would be met and often exceeded; but X would not happen because he simply changed his mind. So he taught me to let your yay be yay and your nay be nay, and he taught me to look ahead. If it looks like you're going to make it a nay anyway, just say so.

He taught me that you can base your authority on fear, or respect, but respect really is better.

And sadly he taught me two things on which we can both actually agree. (By which I mean, on purpose and by direct example.)

The one thing I remember from his history lessons is a throwaway remark I made about "primitive times", by which I think I meant around the 17th or 18th century. His margin note was: "careful, in many ways they were more civilised than us." An unexpected shaft of open-mindedness, which is maybe why it stuck.

And the other was mantra #2, "any fool can be uncomfortable". School expeditions were always well equipped, with everyone dressed appropriately for the weather of the day. Which is why, having just come back from a pleasant post-prandial stroll around the park with Best Beloved, warmly muffled against a biting wind in coat and scarf and hat and gloves, I feel moved to write this.

Toilet humour

Someone in this house - and I have my suspicions who - leaves empty toilet rolls in the toilet roll holder.

They don't have a couple of scraps left on, and the next roll in line has not been plundered of its first few squares. The roll is exactly finished.

I can think of three possible explanations.

1. Yer modern Tesco toilet roll is precisely calculated by computer to match the toiletary needs of a family of three (with a complex algorithm that caters for the needs of the occasional visitor too).
2. This person likes to round up to the nearest square.
3. This person prefers to suffer mild discomfort rather than go to the bother of opening up a new roll to finish off what the old roll began.

I may ask him this person, just out of interest.

Hans the Grumpy German

Everyone should have an alter ego. For the last 10 years Hans has accompanied me every time I have ventured beyond the borders of Her Majesty's realms. Now, however, he has been retired, to be replaced by someone who quite disconcertingly actually looks a bit like me.

To see what his replacement looks like, and to find out what name I will give him, come back in 2017. Or when I need a new passport because the Americans decide that travellers will need finger prints, brain waves, retina scans and bodily fluid samples encoded in their biometric chips. Whichever is sooner.

Meanwhile, wiedersehen, mein alter Freund.

Coffee anon

A student friend at university introduced me to coffee bags. Compare the etymology of ‘coffee bag’ to the very similar ‘tea bag’ and you get a pretty good idea – in fact, exactly the right idea – of what a coffee bag does. They need to steep a bit longer than the tea version, but otherwise you’re there. They’re almost as convenient as instant and, being made of real coffee, they taste a lot nicer.

A second-year flatmate with the mild perversion of sticking her nose into the jar of tea bags and inhaling the aroma nearly blew her head off when she accidentally tried it with the wrong jar, but otherwise I held and still hold them to be a good idea.

I took the concept with me when I started work and it lasted until 1998, when I finally started working for a firm with decent filter stuff on tap. And with that, for some reason they faded from memory and habit, even though the filter coffee-providing job only lasted two years.

The present place uses tea and coffee making facilities provided by a firm called Flavia. The nicest thing you can say about the flavour of Flavia is that the two words share four letters, perhaps in the hope that no one will notice they don’t share anything else. And yet I have put up with this – indeed, I have literally stomached it – for nearly three years. Until, across the gulf of years my ears picked up the faintest call ... ‘coffee bags ...!’

And so I am back to coffee bags. I’m now on my third of the day. They’ve changed in the last nine years. They now come in a big square box, and each one is individually foil wrapped and stamped with instructions for how to make a cup of coffee. From this I deduce the average intelligence of coffee bag users has deteriorated since 1998, so clearly I have a duty to raise it slightly. One more indication that I’ve made the right choice. It’s nice to be right.

A Potter that the evangelicals will enjoy

The morality is impeccable. The stick-in-the-mud mum and dad are respected and honoured. Ah ... there are animals that wear clothes, and as I vaguely recall hearing that CS Lewis has been denounced in some quarters as satanic because he has talking animals, that may not do.

Anyway, Miss Potter. Beatrix Potter was the kind of author that should not be allowed. She swanned into authoring without the slightest idea of how it’s done and made becoming an overnight success look easy. Renée Zellweger is the kind of actress who shouldn’t be allowed. She’s from Texas and talks like a Southern belle in her native accent, yet plays an English Victorian spinster to perfection. So the two are really meant for each other. And the love of her life is played by Ewan McGregor, another fake English accent thrown seamlessly into the mix.

Some may say proto-feminist. Some may say benign and harmless schizophrenic – or that could just be the way the movie shows her actually seeing her painted animals moving around her. But she was clearly a remarkable woman – proto-scientist and environmentalist; talented artist; single and happy with it at 36! (gasp) – and the film gets her very nicely.

It was fun watching colour printing in a day when you couldn’t just adjust Saturation and Hue in Photoshop. You had to re-ink the presses instead. And what also helped me with the movie was that Beatrix and the men in her life were all too old to be called up for WW1. I find it hard watching any late Victorian or Edwardian setting without feeling depressed at the knowledge that in ten years time they will all go to the Western Front and probably die ...

My work is done for another generation

I was delighted at Christmas to see my almost-four-year-old nephew playing with a toy Thunderbird 1. I was less delighted to hear him describe it as "a rocket". Suddenly his birthday present list for January more or less wrote itself.

I'm now told that his new Thunderbirds vol 1 DVD is all he ever wants to watch. Excellent ... [rubs hands together]

A few years ago I had the pleasure of andersonising No. 2 Godson in a similar way, under the auspices of the fictitious charity CULTURE - Campaign for Unveiling to Little Tots Useful and Relevant Experiences. I may make this a full time thing.

Spreading Oates

Lawrence Oates was an Antarctic explorer who originated the famous "I may be some time," a line reported by the shortly-to-be-equally-late Capt Scott.

Titus Oates was a failed 17th century priest who fabricated a Catholic plot on the life of Charles II.

Lawrence was nicknamed Titus by his friends in the Antarctic. But even so, you'd expect the BBC to get it right.

UPDATE: Hah! They have corrected it and the story now refers to him as Lawrence "Titus" Oates. Which they distinctly did not to yesterday morning when I first read the story. Once again the media of the world bend before me like wheat in a hurricane.

The Greeks have a word for it

So do the Brits, and that word is "omygodohmygodsugarrushsugarrushsugarrushbleearrruuurrrkk".


This little baby is apparently a Greek delicacy. The core consists of a quite pleasant spongy biscuity sort of thing, wrapped in a mantle of pure icing sugar on average about 5mm deep. When my Greek colleague returned from his break and produced the box this morning, everyone assumed (perhaps not very diplomatically) it was Turkish Delight - interestingly shaped lumps warping the surface of an untrodden sea of icing sugar. Now the box is empty, the leftover icing sugar is still about 2cm deep.

You need a napkin, you need strong coffee and you need to be not remotely diabetic. If you can manage all those - yum.

Murdoch is my washpot

Last week this blog featured an entry mentioning the charity Sense in Science and Celebrity Big Brother.

So did the Body & Soul section of Saturday's Times.

Last week this blog featured a rant that included, amongst other things, my difficulty in hearing conversation at parties.

The Body & Soul section of Saturday's Times featured a piece on how to hear what people are saying to you under such conditions.

One, I could dismiss as coincidence. But two? Plainly, Murdoch's hacks are picking up hints on great stories from this blog. I have his mighty media empire in the palm of my hand.

He's my bitch.

Ethics, or maybe just Middletheks

Is there a morality to this blog? Do I have Standards that I will not Compromise?

It had never really occurred to me to ask. I try not to embarrass people; I try not to be mean; I try not to spread misinformation. But these are really life statements about myself that my web site ought to reflect.

Then out of the blue I get not one but two emails from something called Tamar: The Search Conversion Agency. Will I accept between £30 and £50 per annum to put sponsored links on the site? They've sent me some sample URLs of existing customers who have taken up the offer and they all seem kosher. The links are all for travel insurance. I don't know if you get a good deal or not.

But ... I don't want content on my site that I can't guarantee. Now you ask. So no, thanks, I am turning down the kind offer of between £30 and £50 per annum.

Stick another 0 on the end and ... hopefully I would say exactly the same thing. But who knows?

People of Britain, I thank you

... for borrowing twice as many of my books from our excellent public libraries in 2006 as in 2005. This I have learnt today from my annual public lending right statement. And as per last year, guess what, the hack work is streets ahead of Original Ben.

The precise numbers are between me and the taxman, so let's just say that the following titles have paid for the following percentages of our bathroom redecoration:

• Vampire Plagues London: 30%
• Vampire Plagues Paris: 25%
• Vampire Plagues Mexico: 17%
• Midnight Library: End Game: 12%
• The New World Order: 6%
• The Xenocide Mission hb: 4%
• The Xenocide Mission pb: 3%
• His Majesty's Starship: 1%
• Winged Chariot: 1%

Which doesn't quite make 100% but that's because some figures are rounded up, down or sideways. But my gratitude is a full 100% yours.

Add your voice to the sound of the crowd

I've never been one of life's great socialisers. In any of those personality tests where you're asked to place yourself on a scale of "small company of select friends" to "large crowd of people who love you," I'm with the small select every time.

Various things have compounded this effect. Constantly coming home from school and finding we'd moved house was one of them; it wasn't a great incentive to establish new relationships. Another is being a Christian public school science fiction fan from a military background - four very key areas of my identity about which the world at large knows and understands nothing. Even those who are knowledgeable in one of the above will probably be completely ignorant in the others. So it was never easy to find people with something in common to talk to.

Didn't stop me trying, due to the unspoken pressure that this was in some way abnormal. Even if the threat of "if you don't accept invitations, you won't get invitations" sounded more to me like a promise, I cheerfully made my way with gritted teeth to teenage party after teenage party, and then student party after student party, always wondering if this would be the one where I learnt to get on with strangers. It never was, and probably would not have been even if there hadn't always been a steady background of loud pulsating music that made conversation impossible except by semaphore. I find it hard enough to hear in a crowd anyway, without music, when the general buzz of conversation is somewhere around my shoulder level. If I tell you that 6'5" me once spent the night on the back seat of a Ford Fiesta rather than stick one of those parties for another minute, let alone all night like it was meant to be ... that's how fond I was of them.

Until, the crunch ...

How well I remember it. New Year's Eve, 1996. A black tie occasion. Turn up at six, chat to strangers till 12, go home. The direst, most crashingly dull, boring and uninteresting party I have EVER been to. I can do this for a couple of hours ... but SIX? And not even a sit-down meal in the meantime, just nibbles. Also, to the four key areas mentioned, I'd by now added a fifth and sixth in my life - writing and publishing - which didn't help.

But there was more to my inability to communicate, and I finally realised it when at one point I was talking to a woman I vaguely knew and it went something like this:

- "So what are you doing, Ben?"
- "I'm ..."
- "Are you going to get any taller?"
- "I ..."
- "What did you do for Christmas?"
- [draw breath]
- "Would you like to nail me to the wall, gag me and answer my questions politely in the order that I asked them?"

Sadly she didn't actually ask me that last one because the answer was yes, and I would have. Politely. I was brought up to be polite, unlike her, or a friend of hers who then turned up and proceeded - by some magic - to have a conversation in the same clipped, coded manner. Somehow they were communicating information that maintained a relationship. I have no idea how, but on the plane on which they exist, that was how it was done. It was almost interesting to watch. But eventually I turned and walked away, fighting the urge to walk between them. Which would not have been polite.

And that was when it sunk in. I am not abnormal. I am not (that) unfriendly or grumpy. My brain simply isn't wired to the social expectations that these people live in. For some people, this is normality. For me it is not. I don't need them, they don't need me, we have zilch in common so why force it? Live and let live, and hopefully meet them in heaven one day.

So I actually made a new year's resolution, and have kept to it. No parties that I don't want to go to. Ever again.

I can and do go to conventions, publishing events etc, and even parties, which may still be full of strangers and only very passing acquaintances, but where I can reasonably expect that we will all have something in common. But I no longer have to subject myself to the sheer hell of socialising for the non-fun of it.

January 1997. Exactly ten years ago. Happy anniversary.

No longer completely New World Order

An encouraging review of New World Order by the lovely John Toon has appeared on Infinity Plus. If you look at the URL it's strangely filed under "nonfiction", but there you go.

Thanks, John. Much appreciated.

One step forward, two steps back

Stars must check science facts, says a story on the BBC site. A charity called Sense About Science exists, amongst other things, to get celebrities to find out a few facts before lending their media weight to stories that may not be 100% accurate, like linking the MMR jab to autism. And quite right too.

The next story down on the same page: Stars begin Big Brother journey, as the latest shovelload of has-beens heads for the euthanasia cubicle Big Brother house. I confidently predict that late-into-the-night conversations between Cleo Rocas and Dirk Benedict as to the scientific accuracy of Battlestar Galactica will not be taking place.

Separated at birth?

Saddam from Baghdad	Owen from Dibley

Just a thought.

The hooded man

I've not had a coat with a hood for years. The last one must have been about twenty years ago, and as it was a coat that could double up for sailing wear, the hood in question was a plastic flap that kept the rain off but wasn't really comfortable.

But ...

I now have a black Eisenegger coat from my usual Stert Street tailor that is fine apart from missing a toggle on one of the draw strings and a broken retaining strap for the mobile phone pocket. It has a hood lined with artificial fluff. I love it. Put up the hood and your head is warm. Rain is kept off. Wind dies down to a background noise. I instantly feel warm and drowsy and want to go to sleep. I love it.

Hoods have their drawbacks. They don't move with the head, giving you limited peripheral vision. You couldn't have a decent sword fight in one of them, which strangely is not that much of an issue with my present lifestyle. More to the point, you can wear a hat if you're driving and the car's heater hasn't kicked in yet, but you really shouldn't wear a hood. If you're heading into the wind, you have to draw them tight or keep your head down. If you put one up just because it's cold, rather than raining, you look silly.

So hats are probably more practical, unless you're a Jedi and can use the Force. But I love my hood.

The digit turns

Okay, the intention was to go to the church's New Year party, or at least stick our noses round the door, or maybe just hand a pudding in through the door before retiring. But we were tired, and it was dark and wet and windy ... so, a quiet night in, with:

• The West Wing - last episode of the first series, giving a nice sense of completion as I originally started watching it at the first episode of the second, which picks up straight after. (Well, duh.)
  
• first two episodes of my Christmas present, "The Invasion" DVD. For the uninitiated this is a grainy b&w Troughton-era Dr Who story and, as cyberman invasion stories go, is approximately five hundred and thirty seven and three quarter billion miles better than anything you may have seen in the last year. Episodes two and four have been lost except for the soundtracks, so the DVD now features animated versions with the original sounds. A neat idea which could be extended to the many other missing episodes.
• And that was meant to be a nice early bed time, but apparently the Boy badly needed to be helped watch Torchwood. Um. Do the producers honestly think that no one has ever seen Fight Club? (Itself a hugely over-rated movie.) However, I grant them a grudging point or two for having an estate agents called Lynch & Frost. Extra points to anyone who can see why that amuses me.
• by now getting quite late, so a couple of minutes of Greatest Ever Screen Chases. One of those endlessly annoying programmes where twits you have never heard or want to hear of natter endlessly about how good something is, interspersed with fragments - but only fragments, never the entirety - of the item in question. Here's a thought. Why not The Most Annoying Ever Talking Heads show, where a miscellany of twits natter on about, for example, how annoying the twit was who was nattering on about how good The Italian Job was?
• then, mostly by dint of snatching the remote control, over to the last half hour of the Father Ted Christmas Special. Yeah, yeah, I've seen it before. So what. Still funny.
• Five minutes of the Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Kill. Me. Now.
• Finally, midnight and a really quite spectacular firework display at the London Eye. Unfortunate flashback to the not one but two consecutive New Year's Eves spent as a student in Trafalgar Square, shivering my nads off in the drizzle and wondering if the fun had started yet. Peer pressure. I was a martyr to it.

Anyway, so long 2006. Here's a game you can play.

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?
Got married.

2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
No and no.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Some people known to me; no one particularly close.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Ditto.

5. What countries did you visit?
Sweden.

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
More money, restored windows, no mice.

7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
22 July. See (1) above.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, see (1) above again.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Doesn’t really count as a failure, but the first book of a proposed children’s series I’ve been struggling with for several years finally got hit on the head. To the benefit of all concerned.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing more than the occasional cold.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
New carpets.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Lots of people’s; most of all everyone who helped make 22 July so special.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Those Israeli children painting messages on the rockets about to be fired into Lebanon. I am past being appalled and depressed by Bush & Blair; nowadays I just have expectations confirmed.

14. Where did most of your money go?
The mortgage.

15. What events did you get really, really, really excited about?
See (1) above ...

16. What song will always remind you of 2006?
Nothing in particular. Will always be reminded of the wedding by any or all of our songs: "To God be the glory", "In Christ alone", "Lord for the years" and (most of all, due to Geoff’s heroic 8-minute solo rendition) "St Patrick’s Breastplate".

17. Compared to this time last year, you are
More married and slightly lighter.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Reading and writing.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Sitting in traffic queues.

20. How will you spend Christmas?
Spent it at home, then down to parents on Boxing Day.

21. Did you fall in love in 2006?
No, just got ever deeper into it.

22. What was your favourite TV programme?
I imagine that would be Dr Who ...

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone. As such.

24. What was the best book you read?
I forget if I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in early 2006 or late 2005. Even if it was the latter, it’s good enough to last into the next year. And I definitely read Thud last year, which says all you could ever want to know about the evils of fundamentalism.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery or rediscovery?
Geoff has a great pair of lungs!

26. What did you want and get?
See (1) above.

27. What did you want and not get?
A book contract.

28. What were your favourite films of this year?
Didn’t see that many. The Prestige is probably the best, i.e. the one that would most stand up to re-watching.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
41. Got interviewed for a new position at work, which I didn’t get.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
As it already was immeasurably satisfying it’s hard to be immeasurably more satisfying.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
Much the same as last year except that I now have a wedding ring and a coat with a hood. I may write about this separately.

32. What kept you sane?
Best Beloved.

33. What political issue stirred you the most?
Iraq. Of course.

34. Whom did you miss?
A shame various people couldn’t make point (1) above, but no one was terminally missed.

35. Who was the best new person you met?
The only new people I met were new arrivals at work, so therefore they must be the best by default. Fortunately I like them anyway so this faint praise isn’t too damning.

36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.
Nothing I didn’t already know, really ... one or two philosophical beliefs confirmed by personal experience, though.