Snail's pace

Two minutes away from work this morning, I discovered I had a passenger.

This little guy probably spent all night tackling the big metal cliff in the back yard. Why? his friends asked. Because it's there! he answered. Just think of the challenges he had to face. It's not a straight ride up. The wheel arches would have presented colossal overhangs. And this is his reward. He finally makes it to the top, or at least base camp 1 on the bonnet from which he can contemplate the ascent to the summit on the roof ... and the cliff top starts moving. Bugger. Twenty minutes later he's seven miles away from home and all that he loves.

Assuming an average speed of an inch a minute, that will be 443520 minutes for him to get home under his own steam, or 7392 hours, or 308 days, not counting time taken to eat and sleep. I don't know what the average lifespan of a snail is, but I'm guessing odds are against him making it. I think the best bet is for his family to have him declared legally dead so that both they and he can start over in their new lives.

He didn't have a very comfortable ride because he insisted on staying side-on to the wind. He retreated into his shell but the shell itself was bending to windward (i.e. sideways from his perspective). If he had turned into the wind it would probably have offered less resistance, but evolution hasn't really equipped snails with an innate knowledge of streamlining. Who knew?

Q: what did the slug say to the snail?
A: Big Issue, sir?

A challenge for the organist

From the ever-reliable BBC: a church in Cardiff is to host a Dr Who-themed service for young people (young people?! It will be wasted on them!). Organiser Fr Dean Atkins says that as a saver of the world, Doctor Who was "almost a Messiah figure".

So now we know. He didn't Rise, he Regenerated. The tomb was in fact a TARDIS with a functioning chameleon circuit.

Suggestions for hymns?

• "I the Lord of Sea and Sky (and Time and Space)"
• "He is the (Time) Lord"
• "Time Lord of the Dance"

... Hmm, too obvious just sticking "Time" in front of "Lord". Maybe I should be more lateral.

• "Gallifrey is very wonderful"
• Anything that mentions "Citadel"
• "Come on regenerate"

And doubtless others for hours of decreasing entertainment.

Crikey, it's 9/11

Where did that come from?

For the record, not that anyone asked, six years ago I was waiting at the Frilford traffic lights on the A415 en route to Witney when the 2 o'clock radio news announced breaking news that an aeroplane had collided with the World Trade Centre. And like the rest of the world, I assumed it was some idiot trainee in a Cessna. Funny how you never actually see the world change around you. Once the facts caught up, tragic though it was, it did occur to me that maybe it was a bit like the sinking of the Titanic, which ushered in a new world of stringent lifeboat regulations and safety precautions and ultimately saved more lives than it lost. On 9/10 you could have smuggled an elephant through US customs; on 9/12 you couldn't get a gnat in. The attacks might have led to the present mess in Iraq by means that still aren't entirely clear, but they could also have prevented the Great Al Qaeda Nuclear Strike on Manhattan.

Drove home that evening in sombre mood, and for the first time in my life almost had to pull over with streaming eyes as Classic FM played "Lacrimosa" from Preisner's "Requiem for my friend". Or maybe that was the next day on the way back in.

That afternoon I had set my video to record Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in That Hamilton Woman. I watched it that evening, and during one of the commercial breaks John Sissons popped up from Channel 4 News to announce the same breaking news. Then it was back to the film, then another news flash and this time the film never re-started. I had to wait for a repeat many months later to find out how it ended, though I had my suspicions.

A year later - five years ago - I was in the US for my first ever visit. And great fun it was too. The world SF convention in San Jose, fly to St Louis, stay with friends in the strangely named Highland, Illinois (it's flat), sleeper train to NYC via Chicago, train to DC, fly home. Memorable experiences/ticked boxes in the great checklist of life:

• first night in America, eating in a diner straight out of every movie you ever saw
• San Francisco, including obligatory drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, but sadly my host vetoed a reconstruction of the car chase from Bullitt
  
• the Winchester house, San Jose
• the Cahokia Mounds and the St Louis stargate gateway arch
• said train trip: a space age sleeping cabin all to myself and astonishingly beautiful scenery outside
  
• New York and the Empire State Building: an ambition ever since I learned of its existence aged about five, in the Thunderbirds where it falls down
  
• trying to cash a traveller's cheque in said Highland. Banking lady could not believe someone would come all the way from England just to cash a cheque in her bank. Once the concept had been explained - no, I didn't have an account, that was the whole point - and run past her manager, we had the following memorable conversation as the computer did its stuff.
• Lady: so, you're from England?
• Me: that's right.
• Lady: my stepfather is from Croatia.

I had deliberately timed my departure from the US for 9/12, thinking that if I flew back on the first anniversary the security would be so tight as to be unbearable. As it was, JFK was so packed I missed my connecting flight from Dulles by minutes, and everyone was saying I should have been there yesterday when the place was deserted. The first anniversary itself wasn't too bad. All the hoopla was over by the time I woke up, as all the commemorations were timed for the time of the attacks, early in the morning by US time. Later in the morning I wandered around Arlington (which seemed appropriate), then in the afternoon went with my friends to tour George Washington's home at Mount Vernon. As my friends' kids were home schooled, this counted as edumacation.

Earlier on in New York I had the slightly surreal experience of sharing a lift an elevator in my hotel with a group of police officers from the Met. They were there, of course, for the forthcoming commemorations. A WPC had an itty-bitty truncheon about two centimetres long and an American who was with us observed, "ma'am, that ain't gonna stop nuthin.'" But I think he was impressed that anyone would even try.

Jonathan Aitken and the Big Yellow Stupid

Being thoughts on a couple of books read over the weekend.

1. Pride & Perjury, Jonathan Aitken
I remember once seeing Aitken interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, the latter displaying the intellectual cut and thrust that makes him so feared by interviewees.

JP: so, you lied in court about the payment of the hotel bill and you roped your wife and sister into the perjury?
JA: that’s right.
JP: but that’s despicable. Why did you do it?
JA: because I was proud and stupid.
JP: but it’s a disgraceful thing to do. Why did you do it?
JA: because I was proud and stupid.
JP: but it’s disgusting. Why did you do it?
JA: because I was ...

You get the point.

A couple of years ago, Aitken gave a talk in Abingdon about his life after the perjury trial and his time in jail. Pride & Perjury is about his life before and I’m finding it even more interesting.

He’s a hard man to find stuff in common with. Friends with Middle Eastern nobility (plus Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon); son at Eton; daughter at a Swiss finishing school; described in his own words as not particularly rich, average income £100,000, personal value of £2-3 million ... but by the standards of Tory oligarchs, I suppose he wasn’t that rich, and let’s face it, arms dealers and pimps for Saudi royalty do not scrape by on 100 grand a year even by 1990s prices.

And yet, that is what a series of attacks from the Guardian and Granada accused him of being, with (as it becomes clear) not the slightest justification or evidence. Unsurprisingly he took them to court for libel, and even though the run-up to the trial took years and cost hundreds of thousand of pounds just on the preliminaries, the defendants never had a chance. Because they had lied, and that’s it.

And unfortunately, so had Aitken, on the matter of who paid his bill for a two-day stay at the Paris Ritz (prop. M. Fayed, well known friend of the British establishment, which really didn’t help) in 1993. He was there to catch up with an old friend, not for business, but the old friend was a Saudi prince and his people paid the bill. It was a breach of ministerial etiquette that shouldn’t have happened, but compared to the alleged infractions of creaming off arms deals commissions and procuring prostitutes for rich clients, it was small beer. So Aitken reasoned it was the least of his problems, and lied about it for simplicity's sake, and it spiralled out of control so he got his wife to lie about it, and got his daughter to sign a statement saying it was true. (She was 16; she was 12 at the time it happened and wouldn’t have remembered it anyway, so she just trusted that what he wrote was correct.)

That one little lie ruined his career and brought him to bankruptcy. And quite right too. His wife subsequently left him, but as she had already agreed to give false testimony herself she couldn't really claim the moral high ground.

It just seems a shame that the Guardian/Granada partnership didn’t also get a couple of torpedoes up the fundament in the same way. God knows they deserved it. The Guardian isn’t a rag and there must be decent people working there (even if that’s the kind of statistical assertion that means I can also say ‘there must be decent people working at the Daily Mail’). Why did they do it?

My guess is, for exactly the same reasons as Aitken told his lie. Pride and a distorted hobby horse fixation. Reading the archived Guardian articles on the web is a bit like reading proofs that the Apollo landings never happened, JFK was done in by the CIA, the Queen is a lizard, Princess Diana was Elvis’s lovechild. You can’t prove straight off that they’re rubbish ... but there’s the same overreaching grand tone, broad statements, inferences that almost but not quite follow from the facts, that makes you suspicious. It smells odd, it smacks of obsession. This is why, contrary to all instinct, I’m actually more inclined to believe Aitken’s account of events: it’s simple, it’s straightforward, it tastes normal and it cites his references.

It would be interesting to read the account of the trial from the Guardian’s point of view – more specifically, from the point of view of saner heads within the organisation who came to realise how indefensible were their lies and how totally screwed they were ... until the miracle happened and Aitken got busted first.

There’s definitely a sermon in there somewhere.

2. I, Jack, Patricia Finney
I love books that play metaphysical games with the very nature of being a book to give an extra dimension to the reading. At the end of New World Order, an alternate history novel about two parallel worlds coming together, I included an author’s note saying what really happened in our world ... and in the parallel one.

But that’s nothing to I, Jack. Jack is a labrador – boundy, thick, and devoted to his pack (i.e. the human family that owns him) to the point of imbecility. His entire life revolves around pack and food, with a little sex when the neighbours’ dog goes on heat. What makes it work is that the story is told as a labrador would tell it. It’s not like, say, 101 Dalmatians, where the dogs are basically four-legged humans. Sometimes Jack is HAPPY DOG. Sometimes he is sad dog, but never for long because his entire train of thought can be completely derailed by OH HI PACKLEADER RESPECT LOVE CAN WE GO WALKIES NOW? Sometimes the text waves up and down on the page or goes round in little circles to reflect Jack’s exuberantly boundy mood. Sometimes other typographical features creep in as well, like love hearts when he's feeling especially devotional or when he - ahem - spoils the neighbour's dog's impeccable pedigree.

In short, you can believe this is a book written by a labrador – and just to add an extra layer, there are dry, acerbic footnotes from the family cats giving their own views of the Big Yellow Stupid, as they call him. These are of course written from a cat’s point of view, with their withering contempt for all other lifeforms, their list of things they intend to kill when they have enough data on their weaknesses (vehicles, lawnmowers ...) and their grading of everything according to its edibility. The one thing on which the cats and Jack are united is a desire to find out where the Pack Lady goes hunting because she keeps coming home with all this wonderful food. And they think it’s iniquitous that he gets fed first in the morning.

You can’t do this too often. I gather there’s a couple of Jack sequels but I probably won’t read them. Once is enough, but it’s great fun while it lasts.

Value may go down as well as up

My friend Peter - one of my friends Peter, I have a couple - points out that Wingèd Chariot (incorrectly titled and without the accent, but I'm used to that) is available on Amazon at an interesting range of prices. Used, from £0.01. New, from £999.99.

Snap up your collector's edition now! Or wait until the new edition is published in April ...

Research question for boys and girls

Something that has bothered me, on and off, for years.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck at one point disguises himself as a girl for totally plot-consistent reasons which I forget. We can assume that in the style of mid-nineteenth century frontier America he wore a long dress and a bonnet, and he was young enough that five o'clock shadow and a deep voice wouldn't have given him away.

What does give him away is that something drops into his lap - probably off a table, I forget - and to catch it he brings his knees sharply together to increase the catching area. A sharp-eyed woman sees this and deduces he is a boy in disguise, as a girl would have moved her knees apart to spread out her dress and increase the catching area even more.

I've never been entirely convinced by this and have visions of Mark Twain muttering to himself, dammit, I've put him in disguise and now someone needs to spot it, how can I do that in a family-appropriate manner? And he came up with this. Possibly not having asked a real girl first.

A couple of colleagues who have been known to wear dresses from time to time say they would still subscribe to the allegedly boy-typical, knees-together motion. Anyone going to contradict?

Handy hint for travellers

Do NOT fly Nepal Airlines.

From the BBC:

"Nepal's state-run airline has confirmed that it sacrificed two goats to appease a Hindu god, following technical problems with one of its aircraft.

Nepal Airlines said the animals were slaughtered in front of the plane - a Boeing 757 - at Kathmandu airport.

The offering was made to Akash Bhairab, the Hindu god of sky protection, whose symbol is seen on the company's planes.

The airline said that after Sunday's ceremony the plane successfully completed a flight to Hong Kong."

When I'm at 30,000 feet I would much rather know I'm kept up there by the skills of trained technicians rather than Hindu deity. Not very multicultural, I know, but what can you do?

Suddenly Ryanair looks so attractive.

Sure of at least a small surprise

Once I was talking to a colleague whose teenage son had been to a drama camp over the summer. At the end of the week all the students put on a performance for their parents, which my colleague didn't get at all. I commented that like all good art, it makes you ask questions. "Yes," he agreed, "like, why did I spend £200 on that week?"

The Chiltern Sculpture Trail makes you ask similar questions, but it's a nice walk in the woods and you don't actually have to spend anything, so why not? Drive up Watlington Hill to Christmas Common, turn left, drive a couple of miles and stop before you cross the motorway. There's a forestry reserve up there on the right, which is worth a walk in itself. Corridors of trees curve their way across the Chiltern they're growing out of like vast wooden cathedrals-


-and when you come out the other side you get a breathtaking view over a sheep-dotted Chiltern valley, which my phone's camera couldn't really do justice do. And scattered here and there en route are random bits of sculpture.

In some cases, this uses the word loosely.

In others it's more appropriate.


Some just make you think what? And that's when you finally get it. That's why they're here. They might not necessarily mean anything. But take something like "Posts Modern", which I couldn't really photograph because it's ... posts. Seven foot white poles, scattered about the woods. You see two or three, and a fourth behind a bush. You step past the bush to see the fourth, and see a couple more, but now the first couple are obscured ... and so on.

Or this.


What was going through the artist's mind? What is the background? Is this just a wind-up? Questions like that bubble away in a deep molecular level at the back of your mind. You will come to no dazzling insights ... probably. But your mind is set to "receive" and the walk in the woods suddenly acquires a new value.

Gawd, I'm sounding like one myself.

This was probably my favourite.


It's basically a "What the butler saw" machine. You look through the little porthole, turn the wheel to make dozens of still photographs flap past your vision to create animation, and what you see is ... a red kite in flight. Beautiful, awesome birds, iconic of the Chilterns. Yet, as the artist explains in a nearby notice, their presence today is purely due to manmade intervention, reintroducing them after their local extinction a hundred years ago. You think you're seeing something natural in this woodland setting? These woods themselves are a plantation. The machine celebrates the existence of these creatures while its tombstone-like shape laments the loss of nature.

You can pick a dozen holes in this argument in approximately half a second, but that's not playing the game. You have to look at the sculptures and expect to ask questions - like, why have I consistently typed scultpure instead of sculpture throughout this blog (which you wouldn't have known because I have also consistently gone back and corrected it each time, but it bugs me).

Sometimes sculptures are removed, apparently. One such is called "The Beautiful Dress" by Jacqueline Pearce. I'd love to know if this is the Jacqueline Pearce who played Servalan in Blake's 7. As only a certifiable nut could call "The Beautiful Dress" a beautiful dress, it's quite possible.

But still more accessible than Tracey Emin's bed, right?

Take out the comic and you've got me

The comedy of errors

Like Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and the Veneration of the Reserved Host, Holiday Club is an annual rite. At least, it is where I come from.

It's really quite a feat. For four days in August, a couple of hundred primary school age children flock to our church for a programme of fun and silly games, all managed by CRB-registered volunteers and teenagers of the parish in a truly professional manner. And yes, we try to get a Christian message across, but it's in a church, you know, so join the dots.

Oh, and don't forget the songs. Some really quite fun, some truly, truly, horribly, awful. You grit your teeth, stick your hands in your pockets (in case you feel drawn into doing the actions) and remind yourself that this is the faith that gave the world Verdi's Requiem and the Missa Solemnis, so clearly God has a sense of humour. Anyway. Kids get out of the home, the parents get some hours to themselves, everyone's happy.

And the highlight - for me, because it's my sole involvement and doesn't even involve having to turn up, though I like to if I can - is the drama. A scene each day, humourous and light hearted yet embodying that day's themes. These are great fun to write and to watch and as far as I can see to perform, usually by talented teenage actors who get a little taller and deeper voiced each year.

For the first couple of years I wrote these from scratch. Lately the organisers have got off-the-peg ones from Scripture Union or somesuch that require some adapting. Sometimes the adaptation is very light - say, there's five scenes that have to be condensed into four, as Holiday Club only runs for four days. Sometimes the work is heavier because the drama was written by someone who once had "funny" described to him by a bloke he met in the pub, but as neither of them had much sense of humour to start with it hasn't really worked.

This year's tended towards that end of the spectrum. The basic plot was the rivalry between two airlines at Kingdom (of Heaven) Airport. In the original version one of the airlines was called FAG, which really had to go, whether you subscribe to the US or UK interpretation of the word, so it became RASH - the Reliable Airline Syndicate of High Flyers, which wasn't called RASH-fuh because that would sound silly, and which opened the door to all kinds of jokes about "my RASH is still growing" and the like.

And the last scene, get this, revolved around a briefcase exploding. The organisers felt that the subtext of airport terrorism, and the King of Heaven blowing up his loyal subjects, was a little outré for a drama aimed at children, so my revised and somewhat more lighthearted version involved an actor being convinced the briefcase would explode, and trying to stop another actor from opening it, and the latter actor opening it anyway and finding a bit of paper marked BANG.

It would all have been so much more effective if the poor boy had been able to open the briefcase at all ... Memo to stagehands: don't supply as props briefcases with combination locks for which no one on stage has the combination.

Still, the young actors improvised their way through it with great aplomb - the net effect was still that it didn't actually explode, which was all that was really needed - and the comedy was heightened.

My favourite of all the Holiday Club dramas still has to be one I wrote from scratch some years ago, about the adventures of Paul Saint, the demon traffic cop who has a change of heart and becomes a rally driver. Can you spot the symbolism? Can you, I ask? Anyway, I've decided to make it available here.

Woo-hoo! I is scientific geniuz

Possibly.

A slash-wrist-inducing somewhat depressing report in the Times says that examiners have been told to make science exams easier.

A sample GCSE physics paper from November 2006 is given, along with the answers.

Yours truly has just cruised 75% in ten minutes, referring to nothing but my memories of O-level physics from 26 years ago (which I had to take twice to scrape a C). Could someone of a young persuasion tell me what grade that might get?

They didn't do P1V1 over T1 = P2V2 over T2, which is the only equation I remember.

Another reason to love Oxford

When the public information notices contain typos, there's someone to correct them.

In proper proof-reading notation.

Two plus two at an APR of 15.9%

We've received a carefully tailored, personalised piece of junk mail from Capital One. (Strapline: "what's in your wallet?" Response: not Capital One and unlikely to change.) Through the little window on the front I read:

"Dear Occupier. Specially delivered by hand to ensure you receive the enclosed."

There's four flats in the building. They delivered one such envelope. Specially delivered by hand to ensure you, whoever you are, someone, anyone, we're not fussed as long as you've got money, receive the enclosed.

"Please read carefully."

So that's what I'm supposed to do with bits of paper in envelopes that come through the front door? Thanks so much, it's been bothering me for years.

I could read more but that would require opening the envelope. As one of my basic rules of life is never to open an envelope with an APR or interest rate printed on the front, it goes in the bin.

Ooh, breaking news. As I was picking the envelope to throw it in the bin's direction, I see a little message on the back beneath the flap. "Subject to handling fee. See inside for details." However will I contain my curiosity?

I'll manage.

In 1984, Winston Smith writes that "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." Nowadays I'd change that. Freedom is the freedom to ignore advertising, marketing, hype. To turn your back on it, to dismiss it from your life with no further thought. To continue your path through life as if the intrusion had never existed. However crappy my day, knowing I (still) (just) have that freedom always puts a little spring into my step.

That sort of afternoon

[The cast: self, C the actress, R the manager, all braindead from a day of wrestling with the new content management system.]

C: this link won't work.

[Clicks. Works perfectly. Self and R retire back to our desks disappointed at the absence of a valid distraction.]

R: ever heard of Peter and the Wolf?

[Pause]

Self: do you mean the Boy who Cried Wolf?

R: do I?

[Subsequent research indicates he does indeed mean the fable created by Aesop c. 500BC, not the children's story written and composed by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936.]

R: so what's the story of Peter and the Wolf, then?

[C. and I stare blankly at each other. We vaguely remember that apart from the obvious, there's a cat, and a bird of some description.]

C: And the wolf gets caught by the Village People ...

[Mental images of a nightmare beyond Prokofiev's wildest hallucinations cause collapse of all parties.]

C: ... villagers ...

[I finally look it up on Wikipedia and recite the story.]

Self: 'Everyone leads the wolf to the zoo in a triumphant procession-'

C: that will be the Village People, then.

[Brief outbreak of the Y-M-C-A actions.]

Self: 'At the end one can hear the duck quacking in the wolf's stomach, "because the wolf had swallowed her alive."'

C: so it did swallow the duck? I'm sure I saw this animation where it didn't.

Self: it did in the version I saw a few years ago with Rod Hull as Prokofiev ...

[Aghast look from C.]

Self: ... I mean, Roy Hudd ...

[Okay, so you had to be there.]

A-levels

Today the internet will be abuzz with proud 17 and 18 year olds sharing their A-level results. I thought I'd share mine.

• English: C
• History: C
• Economics: E

Down from a predicted A in English, which was a little disappointing, but the Economics was better than expected. The English prediction had been largely thanks to a pretty nifty essay in my mocks where I argued that Paradise Lost wasn't a tragedy but a comedy (in the classical sense of such terms, of course). Economics was saved from total failure by doing a course on Economic & Social History, i.e. waffly and essay-based rather than having to remember what economic aggregators are, how you calculate them, why, and who cares.

Okay, this was 24 years ago but I still remember it. We were having a relaxing post A-level family holiday in the Lake District, which would have been considerably more relaxing if we had chosen a different week to the one in which the results came out. Not only did I get my results a day later than everyone else but, given the serious down on predictions, it required some intensive phoning ... from a rented cottage with no phone. In the days before mobiles. Not such a problem as I could use the landlord's phone in the house next door, but that meant a clever thing called Advised Duration of Call. You phone the operator to say you're about to make such a call. You make it. You then wait for the operator to call you back and tell you what the call cost - for which service there is an additional charge anyway. You then pay the owner of the phone the total cost of the call.

Oy.

But that was the only real down in a week of ups that included seeing a beautiful part of the country when it wasn't raining, and tasting milk fresh out of the cow and Kendall Mint Cake for the first time, though not together. And of all my original university choices, the only one I really wanted to go to was also the only one that would consider me without resits. So it all worked out.

Card's right

Ever since I started reading the Seventh Son series back in the eighties, I’ve suspected I would get on well with Orson Scott Card.

He’s American, I’m a Brit. He’s a Mormon, I’m CofE. He doesn't believe in global warming and he probably says ‘tomayto’. But still I suspected, and now I’ve read his recent essay on sport, I know.

“I keep hearing all kinds of wonderful things that playing sports are supposed to do for kids.

Teaching them teamwork, for instance. But doesn't playing an instrument in a band or orchestra teach the same thing? What about singing in a chorus? You can get a lot more than five or nine or eleven kids going at once, and nobody can hog the ball.”

Preach it, my Utah-bred brother, and never mind the extra volume of scripture.

From ages 8-18 I was the victim of compulsory sport for which I had absolutely no motivation. The rugby, I am convinced, gave me chiropractic problems that last to this day. If God intended the second row to exist, he would have made the human skull pointy and ten times stronger, and sweaty rugby shorts would smell a lot nicer. The football (8-13) and hockey (14-18) weren’t so bad as you could run around a lot in the mud, keep warm in the freezing drizzle and (forced) enthusiasm got you just as far as skill. And cricket ... oh dear Lord, don’t start me on cricket. If golf is a way of ruining a good walk, cricket is how to ruin a nice snooze in a field of a summer afternoon. If you ever want to avoid someone throwing a cricket ball at you for three hours, just ask me to stand next to you. I can guarantee no ball will ever come near.

A brief sidetrack: if you have never read Bill Bryson’s book Down Under, do so – now – just for its wonderful, wonderful description of cricket. For instance, with thanks to Wikiquote:

“After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.”

“It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.”

Back to sport, and here’s the strange thing. No one ever sat me down and talked to me about it. Academically, I generally had good teachers. If they detected a latent skill in me that they thought could be developed, they would encourage it. If they saw I was having difficulty, they would talk me through it. Nothing like that ever happened for sport. I don’t think they would ever have snagged me for one of the team-based field sports, but it wouldn’t have been too hard to nudge me in the direction of rambling or orienteering or swimming or even just circuit training in the gym – all sociable activities that help you fitten up and enjoy yourself and hang out with your mates. But no. None of these were invited, they were simply decreed. Skill, enthusiasm and motivation were assumed, and I was the one at fault if none of them were apparent.

I did swim, both above and below the surface; I was in the CCF (solo gliding wings, marksman on .22s and SLR); I was in the junior and senior debating societies. I may not have excelled but I was never rubbish. But they were all extracurricular and therefore below the radar. Did any kind of kudos come with any of them?

Guess.

Back to Card:

“I'm glad that people who love sports have had a good time with them. But don't ever, ever say, "This is a life lesson that you just can't learn any other way." There are no life lessons that you can't learn any other way.

And a kid who's lousy at sports but good at music or theatre or writing or videogames should get as much encouragement and honor as any athlete.

But he won't.”

Indeed. Pah.

Shoulder to shoulder with Richard Dawkins

It’s no secret that I don’t see eye to eye with Richard Dawkins on a number of issues. Well, we may be on opposite sides of the fence but we are at least at the same end of it.

Enough with the metaphors, on with ‘Enemies of Reason’. Part 1 on Channel 4 last night, part 2 next Monday. Sadly, according to the TV guides (so much more reliable than the spirit ones), we won’t be seeing a scene that was withdrawn on legal advice. A medium tells RD that his late father is sorry they parted on bad terms; he replies that his father is alive and well and the last time they saw each other they parted very nicely; and she declares ‘stop the cameras, the interview’s over’. We do however see a group of dowsers getting no more than a statistically expected score in a double blind test. We see Derren Brown explaining basic cold reading techniques, followed by a practical demonstration spiritualist church meeting. (Why do the alleged messages always come from ‘someone ... I think ... a name beginning with F? Something about ... a ... key? A dog? A car?’ Why can’t the spirits just say ‘Hi, it’s Fred, the key to the car is inside the dog?’) We see the Observer’s astrologer claim that the clockwork-predictable positions of the planets are signifiers as to what is happening on the spiritual plane in people’s lives.

Next week – faith healing and, apparently, the lady who believes she can restore the missing ten (ten!) strands of our DNA that separate us from the ancient Atlanteans.

You may reasonably point out that I, a man who believes an unemployed itinerant carpenter rose from the dead, am in no position to mock. Well, leaving aside the items that are just plain wrong (like ten missing strands of DNA), or hugely susceptible to a little logic (planet and star motions are predictable for millions of years ahead, so why not just write down a million-year horoscope now?) or down to active conspiracy to defraud, there isn’t a single positive ‘proof’ of astrology, spiritualism etc. that can’t be explained by statistical clutter, just as likely to happen to believers as non-believers. And to this I will candidly add much of outward organised Christianity.

But it’s not about the miracles. It’s not about following rules. Yes, with a little puff of science and logic, 90% of everything Dawkins hates will just blow away. It’s the residue that’s important.

For me the Trinity isn’t just a point of theological dogma, though that’s certainly how it started out, back in the days when I believed it was all about following the rules or else. It’s the base state of the universe, and the more you fixate on the clothes you wear or the shape of the building you worship in or what Biblical precepts you can shoehorn into your own out-of-context cultural milieu, the more you miss out on that basic fact. Use science to sift away the nonsense and you end up with a view of a universe - and a relationship with its creator - that is full of wonder and awe, so much bigger and better than any tidy pocket cosmology.

‘Science,’ Dawkins declares, ‘is the poetry of the universe.’ To which the Boy, who was watching with me, responded: ‘science is the HTML code, poetry is the web page that it creates.’ Amen.

From the nation of Drake and Nelson

Seamanship at its hardiest.

From 1977-1979 we lived in Bangladesh. The people of Bengal navigate their waterways in dhows whose design hasn't changed much in the last couple of thousand years. The time was plainly nigh, thought an entrepreneur from a large federal republic across the Atlantic, for them all to swap their dhows for 15-foot aluminium canoes that he would sell them.

Strangely the expected market never materialised and a lot of unwanted 15-foot aluminium canoes were suddenly going cheap on the market. One of them was bought by a countryman of the entrepreneur who, in the custom of his people, decided he should put the biggest, baddest, melonfarming outboard he could find on the stern. As the canoe proved difficult to operate when it was pointing nearly straight up at the sky, he too sold it on. Finally it reached my father, who put a small little 2-stroke outboard on and, guess what, it worked perfectly well. Or, of course, you can just paddle.

Thus we have had a 15-foot aluminium canoe since 1979, ideal for outings on the Kennet & Avon canal -- and indeed anywhere else with sufficient depth (about 2 inches), but it's the Kennet & Avon that gets most of our custom. My father and I once paddled/walked the canoe up from Pewsey to Reading, spending two nights beneath its upturned hull - this was in the pre-restoration days when the canal was part waterway, part muddy trench. This week's outing was less adventurous but no less memorable - the first time it's just been the three of us, and the first time I've been in charge and haven't dropped the engine in the canal. (In other words, the second time I've been in charge in total.) Voices were only occasionally raised and rattiness was kept to a bare minimum. In nautical terms, that means a good day out.

Tick talk

Tick-related things I have not done before.

1. Acquired one (in England; in Sweden it's practically an initiation rite).
2. Removed it all on my own.
3. Photographed it and displayed it to a breathless world.

Still not quite sure how (1) came about; it was probably in the long grass at the end of my parents' garden. Not noticed until the next morning when towelling. Procedure for (2) is to smother with vaseline for a few minutes and then remove it with tweezers; in the absence of vaseline, shaving gel was found to be an acceptable substitute.

So, humans 1, evil vampire arachnoids 0. A thoroughly acceptable result.

Looking at yew

My parents' yew hedge was the bane of my hayfevery teenage summers. It was scratchy and pollony and evil, and guess who got the job of cutting it.

So naturally when my father announces that he intends to cut it this weekend, my inner bastard makes me suggest the Boy helps him. Which he did, to apparently everyone's satisfaction. Dad gets some help, Boy gets out of going on a walk, we get to enjoy some splendid views over Wiltshire without anyone to whinge when the rain starts. And no hayfever, apparently.

In my day the clippings were just thrown away. Nowadays apparently they are bought up by a French company that uses them to make anticancer drugs. Well, did you ever? And apparently it has to be English yew as only that has the right anticancerous properties.

French company. English yew. There is an irony that is not lost on me. If it's lost on you, click here.

Is there a test?

"Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders."

I spent a long time thinking how to paraphrase that line from Times Online, but eventually decided, why tamper with art?

This is part of a 14-part regulation issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, aimed at limiting the influence of Tibet’s exiled god-king. Okay, that's the first part. What are the other 13?

1. No reincarnating without permission.
2. I mean it.
3. Think I'm joking?
4. Look, mush, no freakin' reincarnating, right?

And so on.

I wonder if you have to submit a recent photo with the application form.

Us and Gregory Peck

I was briefly convinced we might have a connection to Gregory Peck. The only one of his movies I have seen where he was really miscast is Hornblower (too old, too handsome, too American) where his wife was played by Virginia McKenna, who also played Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name with Pride and who has met the proprietor of the Violette Szabo museum who we met last month. So, a link all the way to Peck.

Except that Hornblower's wife was actually played by Virginia Mayo, not McKenna. So, in breaking news, I can confirm there is no connection between us and Gregory Peck.

Occasion for this non-speculation – watching To Kill a Mockingbird last night. We both read this recently and the Boy has to read it for school, so we thought watching it would also be useful. (He says it wasn’t but what does he know.) I never read it at school for which I’m very grateful – I would have just got bored and I wouldn’t have understood half the nuances. Harper Lee writes in a way that could make a description of a shopping trip interesting. Her voice is so graceful, her tone so matter of fact that you can easily miss how slyly and how deep she is driving the skewer into the heart of that thoroughly untenable society, the Deep South of the 1930s.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem so bad. There’s no slavery. The blacks and whites live in separate communities and, yes, the whites obviously rule the roost but the blacks have their dignity and both sides seem happy with the arrangement. But look closer and you see how far the civil rights movement still had to go. In the courthouse scenes, the blacks sit in the gallery and the whites get the downstairs seats. Atticus spends the night in front of the jailhouse because he knows a lynch mob is bound to turn up – consisting of decent, respectable citizens that he knows personally. All reasonable forensic evidence shows that black Tom Robinson is innocent, but he is still found guilty by a white jury because the alternative is to admit a white woman was lusting after a black man. And he is condemned for his perfectly reasonable answer to a reasonable question – “I felt sorry for her” – because even though he is a decent, hard working family man and she is just ignorant slutty trailer trash, what right does a black man have to feel sorry for a white woman?

Maybe I should have said earlier: spoilers ahead.

Atticus Finch is the heart, soul and conscience of both book and film. There has never been a stronger, more decent man in literature and Gregory Peck was obviously born with the role in his DNA. Which makes his occasional portrayal of loopiness – Ahab in Moby Dick – or sheer evil – Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil – all the more impressive.

Apparently Harper Lee herself came to see the filming and at one point she wiped away a small tear at Peck’s performance. When he commented on this after, she said it was because he had a small pot belly just like her father’s. He commented gravely, “that’s just acting.”

256k memory lane

A nostalgia-inducing article on the BBC today. Ah, the Amstrad PCW. My friend.

I bought mine with money received for my twenty first birthday. I had already discerned the need for a word processor in my life - easier to write and edit, kinder to my neighbours than the manual typewriter I was then using for writing. Amstrad got their marketing exactly right. Most people probably weren’t going to buy a home computer because they couldn’t think what to do with one – and a computer really was just that, the CPU. Keyboards, monitors and disc drives were optional extras to buy separately. (Mouse? What’s that?) Word processing was the most likely application for home use but word processors at the time tended to be dedicated machines – a computer to all intents and purposes except that they processed words and that was it. A user-friendly word processor on a cheap and cheerful, all-peripherals-bundled computer (including its own one-sheet-at-a-time dot matrix printer) was the perfect solution.

No C: drives, of course. Everything ran off universally incompatible three-inch 180k floppy discs – or 720k if you got the 8512 model or added a high density floppy drive yourself. The word processor, Locoscript, was its own operating system and took up so much space on the boot discs that so you had to switch discs to edit anything if your file was of any decent size. (A fact that you eventually had to work out for yourself.) Alternatively you could load the other operating system, CP/M, and run programs off that. The software came from a different age when everything was about 99% bug free before it left the factory – and people’s expectations were so low that they would forgive the remaining 1% quite happily. (Microsoft have their faults, which you can learn to live with, but the one thing I can’t forgive is the way they have standardised shoddy workmanship to the point where it’s expected and accepted.)

For anything fancy like a spelling checker the world had to wait with bated breath for Locoscript 2. Another problem 2 solved was 1’s habit of scrolling, very slowly, through a document whenever you saved it. Apparently it was to check the formatting. It would head down to the bottom of the file, think about it, then scroll slowly back up again to wherever the cursor was at that point. Fine if you’re just typing a letter; if you’re working on a 5000 word story, not helpful. If you were still working off the Locoscript boot disc, or hadn’t got the hang of working off the memory drive, chances were good it would run out of space and complain at you. I learnt to work in small files – in fact, until very recently I still wrote novels with one chapter per Word file. Old habits die hard.

On the plus side, you weren’t distracted by Minesweeper or Freecell because they didn’t exist ... The nearest games were a whole reboot away and probably written in BASIC so you could customise them to your heart’s content.

At work we often got books sent in on PCW discs which meant I could edit them at home. We had to send them off to a bureau that would put them onto – gasp! – 5.25" floppies (the last generation of floppies that really could flop) for our office PCs. I once got an author’s disc where he had even broken his chapters into different subsections, each one in its own file named by subtopic. So, the contents of his book appeared on screen in alphabetical order. Oh, what fun that was to sort out. One of my first professional paid pieces of writing wasn’t science fiction, it was an essay in one of the PCW consumer magazines on how best to prepare your manuscript for a publisher. I may still have it somewhere.

So the PCW was far from perfect but it introduced a generation to the basic computing habits that we take for granted in any modern software – and indeed hardware. How impressed would you be today if you bought a new PC from Tesco and got blank looks if you asked where the keyboard was? Or had to buy the OS separately? (And I mean had to, Linux geeks, as opposed to optionally buying a better one ...) It changed expectations and set new ones.

My first couple of published stories – and many, many unpublished ones – were written on my old green-screened friend, as were the first few chapters of His Majesty’s Starship. I only really got rid of it and upgraded to a PC to be compatible with work. Windows had just arrived, e-mail and the web were looming on the horizon – the poor old thing would never have coped.

The new PC was a laptop with a 30Mb hard disk. The veritable bee’s knees. Any further advances have been purely cosmetic ...

At last the truth can be revealed

- five months after the first veiled hint. Having signed the contract I feel sufficiently jinx-proofed to say that my second novel, Wingèd Chariot, will be republished next year by my present publisher, the mighty David Fickling Books. Springish, the last thing I heard, but will confirm more precisely as soon as I can. Text slightly tightened to reflect nearly a decade’s further writing experience.

I’ve removed it from lulu.com. The three people who bought copies since I put it up last November now have rare collector’s editions on their hands. I have confidence in the marketing department of Random House to do a better sales job than I could manage.

It’s getting the works – everything Scholastic didn’t give it first time round, like a decent cover (I’m told) and a hardback edition and US publication and ... and a fighting chance, for crying out loud! And I’m happy.

Sadly the subtly literate impact of the title is lost as it will now be called Time’s Chariot. Apparently people aren’t sure how to pronounce "wingèd" and not enough of them read Andrew Marvell to understand it. A small price to pay, I say.

As long as you don't mind the occasional strained pause ...

I've heard jokes about it but have never encountered the phenomenon until just now. The sound of a co-worker, in the toilet cubicle, talking on his mobile.

And he hadn't just gone in there for a private conversation because I heard the sound of paper being pulled and-

I'll stop now.

No, I won't. I'll assume for the sake of charity that he received the call rather than initiated it. Still curious about the etiquette. Do you reveal your location to the caller?

Yet another reason why videophones will never catch on.

Now I'll stop.

I’ll always be proud to be British

How can I not be when we have our very own Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain?

Major Clanger reports that at a recent folk festival he heard them performing Anarchy in the UK, Smells like Teen Spirit, Shaft and Life on Mars. Tracks you can download (a snip at £1 each) on their website include:

• Wonderful Land (well, of course)
• Should I Stay Or Should I Go
• Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
• The Dambusters march
• Wuthering Heights
  
• Teenage Kicks

Alternatively you can listen to extracts of the above. Wuthering Heights is done in a bass, Johnny Cash-type growl which is really quite surreal.

I love this land.

Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news

Actually I’m not but I’ve always liked that opening line.

I am however mentioned on Ship of Fools, invaluable online resource “for people who prefer disorganized religion to the organized kind”. I have arisen in a discussion thread on the subject of Harry Potter. Someone has approvingly linked to my thoughts on the matter as reflected in Harry Potter & the Flawed Arguments.

Apparently I’m not a ConEvo, I’m an MoR Anglican. So I’m not only mentioned, I’m mentioned with jargon. I feel I have arrived. Somewhere.

If you go touring Ship of Fools generally, check out their caption contest as it’s very funny and one of the submissions has an esoteric Dr Who reference.

Life and the lack of it the seventeenth century

The register of burials in the village of Lamplugh, Cumbria from 1656-1663 is available online. Don’t ask how I know, I just do. In this period 57 people died of old age and 76 died of more, um, creative causes. One broke his neck robbing a nest. Seven were hanged for “clipping and coyning”, which I’m guessing is forgery (the register was written before the discovery of spelling). Four choked on their food.

Then it starts getting, frankly, quite funny. Other causes of death include: duels (weapons in one case being a 3-footed stool and a brown jug); freezing to death in church (11! Not known if all at once or separately); drinking the squire’s wife’s cordial water; being set upon by the squire’s dog; and attacked by the parson’s bull. And my personal favourites: “Frighted to Death by faries: 4” and “Died of a fright in an Excersise of ye traind bands: 1”.

And not at all funny, of course: “Old women drowned upon trial for witchcraft: 3”.

Harry Potter and the Unexpected Apathy

I’m half way through Deathly Hallows – the Godric’s Hollow scene, for anyone who knows what that means – and I’m astonished to find ... I'm not that interested.

This is unprecedented. I’ll be the first to admit Harry Potter has never been great literature, but one thing it has always been good at is keeping the interest. After the first chapter of the first book – and I read this long before the hype with absolutely no idea what was to come – I couldn’t put it down. I broke a lifelong rule with Goblet of Fire and bought the hardback edition, as this was the first one where we all knew in advance someone was going to die and I guessed that if I waited for the paperback then I would have learnt who. (Once I did learn I felt distinctly let down.)

But for this one, I’ve suddenly got to the point of not really caring.

Could it be that the series has just banged on for too long? It could certainly have been over more quickly. Rowling chose to write a novel for every year of Harry’s secondary education – which just happens to match Muggle secondary education in the UK, i.e. there has to be seven books - but she could have done it in less. The fun thing about creating your own world is you make up your own rules.

Even if the series couldn’t have been got through more quickly, the books certainly could, and this might also be the reason. The first two books were short, concise and gripping. Thereafter a distinct lack of editing started to show. Rowling of course was under huge pressure just to get them written and her publishers were under ever more pressure to publish, and it shows. I’m sure she put as much professional time and effort into the last book as she put into the first, but the fact is, the process has been rushed. I’ll bet good money her later manuscripts didn’t come back with red ink all over them saying “this is long winded. Tighten it up.”

A very handy rule for writing is that you enter each scene as late as possible and leave as soon as you can. Don’t have someone open the door, walk into the room and start talking (unless of course you need it for tension or other purposes) - just have them start talking. Leave as much as possible to the reader’s imagination. A master of this is Dan Brown, which is why The Da Vinci Code was so unputdownable despite being Differently Good in many other respects.

Deathly Hallows, on the other hand, is constructed along the lines of “they did this. Then they did this. Then they did this.” Harry, Hermione and Ron spend a long time wandering aimlessly around the country with no fixed plan. And this is a good thing, in story terms, showing that they’re vulnerable and not superhuman and letting some interesting cracks develop in their relationship. But just because their experiences are long and wandering and aimless, doesn't mean the writing describing it has to be.

Still, there’s hope. The Godric’s Hollow bit had a pleasant twist and maybe things will start happening. I know we’re gearing up for a big battle with a last-scene-of-Hamlet-type casualty list. My prediction is that everyone dies except Dobby.

If I try very hard I can probably remember what I was doing for Christmas 1997 ...

Silver linings

The emergency services have quite enough on their plate at the moment, but even so, it's fun listening to some of the time-wasting calls they've been getting.

Marvel at:

• the woman who is a bit psychic and thinks a friend will have an accident
• the man who can't get his pound coin back from the supermarket trolley
• the woman complaining about not being able to hear the TV due to her neighbour's noisy engine
• the man worried that a hedgehog with its head stuck in a pot noodle pot is going to be run over

And more.

If only they would network. The psychic lady could have told the bloke with the trolley not to waste his money. TV lady could go out and rescue the hedgehog instead. And so on.

Happy anniversary! (We've been flooded)

I am so glad this didn't happen a year ago. In fact I'm also quite glad it didn't happen while we were in Hereford as I would have been quite miffed to miss it.

For every event like this there's a law that there should be an old codger who can remember the last time. Our local old codger (I believe the law requires them be stationed at distances of not more than one mile) says it was 1947. So, there you are.

Picture taken at 7.30 this morning, when the water was lovely and clear. Really quite beautiful, though now brown and muddy due to all the cars driving through it. There was already a high water mark at the end of the driveway, two feet from the waterline, showing how far it had got in the night. (The basement flat got flooded via the back route because the water treacherously came up the drain.) Friends and neighbours in the more immediate danger zone say the police were coming round at 3 or 4a.m. to clear them out, and someone on BBC Oxford living not too far from here reports water up to the level of his garden table. But we're secure in our second floor flat, and even if the electricity and gas fail then we will power the household devices through our own smugness.

We've been very lucky with water so far. We had two sunny days in Herefordshire, and to judge by the news we got out just ahead of the tsunami that went on to engulf the area between the Welsh Marches and the Cotswolds. Meanwhile a colleague from work reports that she spent two hours on Friday getting home due to floods in Steventon; an engineering friend stuck in the same traffic queue says there was "a lovely hydraulic jump right down the road." Just shows that to those with eyes to see there is always something to appreciate.

(Oh, and should anyone murmur that maybe I should have been kinder about the Thames in yesterday's post - well, so far it's the Ock that's flooded. The Thames may follow when Oxford's floodwaters reach us ... but that will just prove my point, as there's no better judge of character than how well someone can take a joke.)

Wye oh wye

Face it, the Thames is an old has-been. Oh, it looks very grand and sedate in places, but if it didn't flow through our nation's capital, would it be famous? It's been tamed. It has the Thames Barrier and it's lined with locks and the so-called Thames Valley is a broad flood plain with mole hills on either side. After London it's boring beyond belief.

The Wye, now, that's another matter. It tolerates us but no more than that. Its waters are dark and slow. Its banks are steep and overgrown, even where it deigns to flow through a town. It's a national boundary for a large part of its route. It defines the very nature of its region because anywhere that is anywhere is on it. And it has a gorge. Yeah, baby, a gorge.

Put it this way - if I was a pagan, I know which river god I'd be sacrificing my firstborn to.

So that's where we started - drive down to Chepstow, turn right and up the Wye valley, wooded slopes and limestone cliffs towering above us. First stop, the ever delightful Tintern Abbey where the sun shone on the ancient stones and swifts buzzed about within the skeleton of the old church like miniature Me.109s. Lunch, and onwards past Monmouth to the Violette Szabo museum, which turns out to be part museum and part shrine - a one-lady enterprise run from a small building at the end of the garden of the house where Violette's aunt and uncle once lived. The one lady in question is the kind that you suspect Violette might have become if she hadn't been executed at a young age in Ravensbruck. 'Indomitable' is one word that comes to mind. 'Bats' is another. But it's a labour of love into which she has poured huge amounts of effort, a worthy tribute to a very brave woman, and it's not an experience to miss.

Then, finally, Hereford, skirting the outskirts to head out to Credenhill where we used to live and where, 300 years earlier, poet Thomas Traherne was rector. A small detail that completely passed me by back then. What also passed me by at ages 9 to 12 was how beautiful the whole area is, shining gold in the sun while the Tolkeinesque Black Mountains line the southern horizon.

Then onwards to find our hotel - clean, quiet and cheap, which is all I really ask for in a hotel, and dedicated to redressing the disservice it feels the hotel trade has dealt to short people over the years. Maybe the owner is very short and a tall person was once rude to her. If I was standing up then the rule of thumb was to duck, because if the light fittings didn't get me then the door into the bathroom would, or the shower cubicle as a last resort. Our bed was, I suppose, technically a double, in that you could get two pillows on it side by side. Just. I like to feel close to my wife after nearly a year of marriage, but sheesh.

That evening and the next day - Hereford! Which has hardly changed at all in the last 30 years. Well, here and there, obviously. Some fool has moved the cathedral a couple of hundred yards to the end of Broad Street, when I know it used to be opposite the Green Dragon hotel. Possibly the same fool, flush with success at his undetected fiddling, moved the Market Hall from the south side of the High Street to the north. Said Market Hall is a bit like Oxford's Covered Market except, as Best Beloved wisely pointed out, it contains reasonably priced items that you might actually want to buy. Less tourist trap, more actual market. Then outside and down the street to the old town house museum, the sole remnant of an ancient Hereford street that has been kept like a 17th century black and white timber home. And of course, the cathedral. Still not quite my favourite cathedral - you'll have to try very hard to knock Salisbury off that perch - but with many points in its favour, not least of which is free entry. Salisbury technically has free entry if you can find it within yourself to walk straight past the ticket desk soliciting recommended voluntary donations, but at Hereford they don't even hint at you. You pay for the tower tour but it's worth it, climbing up inside the walls to reach fantastic views out over the surrounding countryside.

Thirty years ago, as far as I remember, you could also get to see the chained library for free, and the Mappa Mundi just hung vaguely on a wall. Nowadays they've been moved into a custom built library of their own, for which you have to pay. So, no Mappa Mundi.

And all the while the sun shone beautifully. Come six o'clock, everything closing but not quite ready for dinner, I proposed a drive out to Dinedor, venue for many Sunday afternoon outings when I was young. An old iron age fort, like Credenhill itself, but more accessible; overgrown and wild but in a safe sort of way with footpaths and nooks and crannies and the potential for spotting hobbits.

(A thirty-year flashback; I could show Best Beloved the place where my father once parked the car on a steep slope, facing down, on a cold and icy day. His cunning plan was that to reverse out, he would position a ground sheet beneath the rear wheels. I would stand on the ground sheet to weight it down and the sheet would give the wheels traction. Eventually he worked out that I didn't keep falling over out of perversity and I wasn't being wilfully non-massive; there was just an inherent flaw in the plan that had to be worked with. He got the car back up, somehow.)

As we walked, admiring the views through the trees, the first misty spray began to play on our faces. We gazed across the vale and saw the Black Mountains dissolving into rain. Slowly but surely the rain grew harder ...

... and, 23 hours later, it has yet to stop. Today we were going to drive home via Goodrich castle, another popular childhood attraction, but it really didn't seem worth it, so we just came straight back.

Ooh, do you know, I think I see blue sky in the distance. Oxfordshire was obviously worried that it had lost us and is welcoming us home. And if it weren't for, you know, things like career and a child at a local school approaching his GCSEs and this being where most of our friends are, that worry might have been within reason.

A boy and his Eagle

I have fond memories of Hereford, and not just because in the great lottery of a childhood spent moving house every 2-3 years, that happened to be where the first Stirrings of Adolescence(tm) began, manifesting in am enhanced appreciation of Sarah Jane Smith on Dr Who, an unbearable itch in the back of my mouth that I now know was my first hayfever symptom, and an inability to get to sleep if I read anything at bedtime that even mildly hinted at sex, like a James Bond novel.

But the happiest memory of all is me and the Space: 1999 Eagle Transporter. The series (of which less said the better) had just started on TV and Eagles were the cool toy. There was one in Hereford that I wanted. I wanted it so badly. But alas I had no money and my parents took a dim view of state subsidy. Oh, what was I to do?

Astonishingly it was my godfather who solved the problem. This hardened SAS veteran of conflicts around the globe came to stay, and presented me with - I think - the AA Book of British Birds. Or something very like it. He hadn't thought to check whether we already had one. We did, but were too polite to tell him.

Instead, after he was gone, my parents bought if off me at the full RRP. Five pounds! Five hundred new decimal pence! All mine! More than enough to buy the Eagle, and a couple of books, and (the best bit) buy myself a return ticket on the bus in from Credenhill so that I could do it all on my own.

Capitalism, independence, adventure and science fiction, combined. If you can think of a more fulfilling rite of passage then I don't think I want to know.

Anyway, Hereford. That's where we've been for the last couple of days. More will doubtless follow shortly.

Aagh! Mind melting

Are squares A and B the same colour or different?

They are the same. Impossible, I know, but trust me, they are. To test it I sampled both squares in Photoshop, and they're identical. They each have CMYK values of C=57, M=48, Y=44 and K=11.

This is obscurely known as the same colour illusion.

Excuse me, I see a wall I must go and bang my head against.

Wasn't keen, but ...

Okay, maybe I will watch the next series of Torchwood after all.

• Buffy star's joy at Torchwood job

Clannad going round in my head for some reason

Robin Hood famously fought in an archery tournament where his opponent scored a dead bullseye, whereupon Robin got his arrow so in the middle of the target that that it split the shaft of the arrow previously occupying said bullseye.

Bu I bet he never did this - got his arrow between the strap around the edge that holds the target together, and the target itself. And this after only six tries, the first five of which didn't even hit the target at all. Yup, I think I score over one of England's greatest folk heroes, personally.


Afterwards, for a bit of variety I thought I'd practice actually hitting the target and bunching my shots together. This is about as good as it got ...


Anyway, a social event last night courtesy of the Harwell archery club. Come the great plague that wipes out civilisation, plan A (assuming I'm a survivor) had previously been to head for the homes of various people known to me who have fully legal, licensed and declared firearms for hunting purposes. That might now be knocked back to plan B, while plan A becomes to raid the supplies store of the archery club. It's closer to home, the stores are easier to replenish, and you can reuse the ammunition almost indefinitely. I'm taking the long view on how long it will be for civilisation to recover.

But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, and meanwhile enjoy the nice bruise that has developed along my inner left arm between elbow and wrist. My forearms are just too manly and muscular and the bowstring kept hitting me there. It's a cross I must bear.

Da na naaa, da-na, na!

Once upon a time, children, there were only three TV channels. (Actually, progress back and you can logically say there were once only two, then only one ... but, with Channel 4 finally appearing when I was 17, for the bulk of my childhood there were only three.) And as the amount of TV actually worth watching over any 24 hour period has stayed pretty well constant, it follows there was a lot more worth watching on those three than you will find on any of the 1001 channels now available.

And few things were worth watching more than The Professionals. You have to understand the ritual to appreciate this fully. I was at a boarding school; TV was rationed to the weekends only. (Plus the weekday Nine O’Clock News if you were a sixth former, or Not the Nine O’Clock News for everyone by special permission.) The Professionals was on Saturday evenings, usually after some ghastly sporty drivel like Rugby Special. So you staked out your chair in the TV room at least 30 minutes early (=30 minutes of ghastly sporty drivel to tolerate, but it was worth it). If you were junior enough that you were only up because of the extended Saturday evening bedtime, you got into your pyjamas and dressing gown first.

And CI5’s finest burst onto our screens: Bodie (tall, taciturn, the cool one) and Doyle (slim, edgy, obviously embarrassed by the whole business but then never dreaming he would one day be a high court judge). Ah, me. Forty five minutes of Ford Capris screeching around the suburbs of London. Testosterone charged manly beating up of bad guys. Flirting with birds who actually seem to turned on when men with bubble perms call them “luv”. And let’s not forget the civil liberties routinely trampled into the dust in ways that would make DCI Gene Hunt green with envy.

Happy, happy days.

All brought back by watching an episode on ITV4 last night. (See, I didn’t say that the quality of modern day channels had declined per se – just that it’s spread much more thinly.) I must have seen this first time round because I remembered a couple of lines. Bodie and Doyle, having collected a valuable antique desk for their boss (what else would you do with a pair of highly trained killers on your payroll during a slack period?) inadvertently spook a couple of kidnappers, leading to an exciting car chase in a Ford Cortina taking turns on two wheels with an antique desk on the roofrack. The inevitable happens and jokes are made about “she’s lost her drawers”. A hostage situation ensues, leading to the discovery of industrial espionage at an armaments firm.

“But we have the highest possible security!” barks the firm’s CEO. “All our top secret documents are stored in this safe!” Points at safe. “And I have the only key!” Produces key. Bodie takes key, sniffs it, smells plasticine. The key has been copied! Oh noes!

A few years ago one of the satellite channels tried to do a Next Generation job with The New Professionals, which I never saw but I gather it never took off beyond a single season. Well, no, some things are sui generis and can never be repeated. If we want ethically dubious intelligence work today, we have Spooks. If we want blokes running around a lot and beating people up we have Life on Mars, but to get past the modern audience it has to have a key character who thinks that the beating people up bit might not be strictly necessary. That’s what makes The Professionals so special. It’s a time capsule, a product of a time when you could have both ethically dubious intelligence work and blokes running around etc. and you could get away with it.

Yes, The Professionals belongs to the time that begat it, as does Martin Shaw’s perm, which is believed to have eloped with Tom Baker’s hair into a parallel universe with enough dimensions to contain them both. But last night made me remember why those 30 minutes of Rugby Special were so worth it.

Curtains. We has them.

For the last week we've been sleeping without curtains, which less than a month past midsummer is an interesting experience. I had never twigged the full implications of being on the second floor and facing west, until we looked straight out at the roseate fingers of sunset finally loosing their grasp on a darkening sky, with Venus (I think, or maybe Jupiter) staring straight back like an unwinking eye. Over the silhouetted antennae of the police station. Oh, poetry, thy name is Ben.

It's meant either getting changed by streetlight, or coyly squeezing into a corner out of glimpsing range of the main road. It has also meant wearing airline masks to block out the light, which mean you sleep so deeply you wake up feeling much more groggy than usual, and with a sweaty face.

But now the decorator has done his work and we have fully functioning windows, painted, where the glass stays in, and curtains hanging in front of them once again. We have normality.

So, is the endless saga of the windows, which goes back I think to March 2006, finally over?

Well, we still have to clean them ...

Movies good and bad

Both boys alone this weekend, as Best Beloved was away. Not the first time we've been apart since we got married, but the first time I've been the one who has stayed behind. Interesting experience. Almost but not quite exactly unlike being a bachelor again. The whole flat is different and there's this teenager hanging around like he knows me.

So those of us who stayed behind decided that on Friday and Saturday we would watch movies, one each of our choosing. For Friday he chose ... oh dear, oh dear, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

Wow. I honestly cannot remember the last time I watched a film with such a total absence of comprehension. Or, as it went on, interest. Maybe it would have helped if I had played the game it's based on, so could recognise when characters from it start gratutiously popping up. Or maybe if I had watched Final Fantasies I through VI. In fact, I think I did see one of them. V: The Spirits Within, which I'm told was rubbish. Well, maybe, but I do recall quite liking it and it had esoteric concepts like character and dialogue and humour and ... what's that word ... ah yes, PLOT.

It's not the first time I've watched a movie and not understood it. Let's see. 2001. Blade Runner. North by North West. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But for each of those, I was either too young or there were layers to peel back; either way, each one has grown and grown and grown with repeated viewing.

I don't claim the gift of prophecy, at least not much, but I will prophesie that Final Fantasy VII will very rarely be mentioned in the same breath as 2001, now or ever. Unless the breath is to utter a sentence like "Final Fantasy VII is less good than 2001."

So what was my movie, I hear you cry? The Last King of Scotland, a fictionalised look at the reign of Idi Amin through the eyes of the young doctor whom he makes his personal physician. Doctor made up, dictator decidedly real.

There's nothing that gives me the willies more than African soldiers with guns. It's very unfair because there are African countries where there's nothing to be scared of at all about a soldier with a gun. There are also far too many where fear is a very wise emotion, and Amin was a big contributor to this. It's fair to say we Europeans well and truly screwed the African continent over in several different ways, but the worst crime of all that we committed was to impose European-type power structures that enable people like Amin (or Mugabe or Bokassa or ...) to seize power and hold it, rather than just be overthrown and quietly bumped off as would have happened in the normal scheme of things.

Anyway, the movie. Immediately written off by the Boy as boring, of course, but it grew on him - not just because of the sex and violence (which might have helped) but it really was fascinatingly disturbing to watch Amin grow more and more bonkers. Or rather, to watch his pre-existing bonkersness become more and more apparent. The young doctor is sucked into Amin's world because he's bored of the mundane life treating diseased children at a mission. He's flattered by the attention, he enjoys the prestige. He is not a likeable character at any stage of the movie but as his mistakes pile up, culminating in one ghastly blunder, he gets a kind of redemption. And the whole movie is a fascinating look at the subject of power - uses, abuses and temptations of.

Anyway, Best Beloved returns this afternoon and normal service will resume. The West Wing and Rome ... quality stuff!

You were warned

I did say an image might follow.

It's the sword that does it. Without it this would just be a bloke in a miniskirt. But with a sword at your side, one hand possessively on the hilt, then you can swagger. Oh, yeah.

Goddess wanted

I'm sorry, I'm about to poke very gentle fun at a faith that is not my own. If this offends you, turn away now.

From the BBC:

"A 10-year-old girl who is worshipped as a living goddess in Nepal has been stripped of her title for defying tradition and visiting the US."

Apparently 10-year-old Sajani Shakya was one of the three most-revered Kumaris, who are honoured by Hindus and Buddhists alike. Duties included blessing devotees, attending festivals until she reached puberty, and only leaving her palace three or four times a year.

"Elders said the visit had tainted her purity, adding that they would now begin the search for a successor. "

It must be very handy to be able to fire one of your gods if you consider them not up to scratch. I would have said it kinda detracts from the "god" bit of being a god, but then, what do I know, child of the Judeo-Christian monotheist tradition that I am.

Plus, it seems a bit harsh on the US. I have my issues with the current administration but by and large it's a lovely continent with lovely people. My god mixed with all types of people, including foreigners, and died on a rubbish heap. Never did him any harm and I believe he still holds the position.

This presumably creates a vacancy to fill, which is easier said than done.

"Tradition holds that she must hold 32 attributes, including thighs like those of a deer and a neck like a conch shell."

Lack of a passport also an advantage.

More seriously, there's a montage of pictures of little Sajani's home life available on the same BBC page, and smiles - quite common, unusually, among 10-year-old girls - are conspicuously absent. Nepal's Supreme Court has ordered an inquiry into whether the Kumari tradition has led to the exploitation of girls. Retired goddesses find it hard to find a husband as they are associated with bad luck. It stops being funny.

But, sheesh, they say we'll believe anything ...

Up ... since ... five ...

And until 9.30 pm last night we thought we were doing so well.

Some of the reputtying on our reinstalled windows is not great. Or indeed existent. So we went to B&Q, we got some glaziers’ putty, we went home, we very carefully dismantled our living room window – the smallest of all the ones needing work – we laid the two halves out on the kitchen table, carefully squeezed putty into the gaps where it was needed, smoothed it down, gave the windows a wipe ... I tell you, we were pretty proud after all that. Took the better part of an evening all told, but hey, we were working together. Husband and wife. A team.

The reinstallation didn’t include repainting, either. A few days ago we booked a decorator, tentatively for later this month with the proviso that he would come earlier if another job fell through. And at 9.30 pm – just as we’re completing the reassembly, quietly self-satisfied and ready to think about maybe a cup of tea and then turning in – he phones up to say that he can come today at 8.30.

Oh. Bloody. Hell.

There’s nothing like a bit of warning for removing curtains, packing stuff up and general clearing away. Sure enough, this was nothing like a bit of warning, so cue a frantic hour of removing curtains, packing stuff up and general clearing away. Then to bed, then up at (yup) five this morning for yet more removing curtains, packing stuff up and general clearing away. Five o'clock! I didn't know there were two of those in a day. This must be what it’s like having small children.

So ... very ... tired ...