Victory!

I just wanted to preserve my own copy of this.

It's HMS Victory. And it's floating.

From a very senior relative's photo album, dated 18 July 1914.

So that's why I don't deflect compasses

To give blood you have to have 13.5 somethings per something in your iron count. I have 13.3. Put another way, when they take the drop of blood they drop it into a tube full of blue liquid and it has to sink within 15 seconds. Mine floats.

I'm assured I'm not anaemic but still ... Must be just one of those things. My diet hasn't changed and I haven't been ill. Maybe I've always been just at the upper end of the 15 seconds. So, plenty of lean red meat, pulses and brown bread required. And less tea, which blocks iron take-up, apparently.

Nah, stuff that.

UPDATE: Best Beloved comments that this is obviously what lay behind all those floating witch trials. They weren't rejecting the water of their baptism, they were just severely anaemic.

To the Tower!

Here's a useful tip. If you're going to a Sunday morning service in the Chapel of St Peter Ad Vincula within the Tower of London, and provided you're pre-booked in (or just plain convincing, smartly dressed and clearly not a terrorist) you can get in for free. See, there is a plus side to an established state religion. Of course, it's probably best that you actually go to the service after that if only to establish some cred.

Or, in today's case, to attend (arriving five minutes late due to a crash [not ours] on the M4 and having to awaken a slumbering teenager at 7.30am on a Sunday) the christening of Junior Nephew in the same building that has previously seen the christening of his sister and brother and the marriage of his parents. This is a chapel royal and they do it ... differently to Christ Church on Long Furlong.

The medals worn by the vicar on his robes are the first clue (six of them, one with bar and a mention-in-despatches). The robes themselves are another. As the service progressed I had cause to discover (and feel quite pleased that) I can still mumble my way through the Venite, the Te Deum and the Jubilate, all in 1662 English. And I can safely say that the highly spiritual meditative aid that starts "Oh it's great great brill brill wicked wicked skill skill to have a friend in Jesus" has never rattled these particular rafters.

The rafters are however rattled by a marvellous choir who can hit their notes so perfectly that the sound just seems to come out of the air around you. We finished, as you would only expect, with the National Anthem and the final verse of "Eternal father strong to save"-

Oh Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour.
From rock and tempest, fire and foe
Protect them wheresoe'r they go.
Thus ever more shall rise to thee
Glad hymns of praise from land sea.

In case this all seems a little overpowering, it's also worth mentioning that the choir master has a pony tail, he looks (from behind) like the lead singer of the Commitments, and at my niece's christening four years ago he played "The wheels on the bus" on the chapel organ for the benefit and delight of Senior Nephew.

Sometimes it's good to take a break, eh?

On previous occasions we've taken the opportunity to see the Crown Jewels, but not this time as the queue was winding around the block and there's some things even chapelgoers can't jump. As I recall they have a conveyor belt down either side to carry the tourists past, thus preventing build-ups of gawkers which is a very good idea. With only a small effort you can make the perceptual shift that you are standing still and it's the Crown Jewels that are gliding past, like a very expensive edition of the Generation Game. "A priceless diamond. An orb. A sceptre. A cuddly toy ..."

Then we repaired to Zizzis in St Katherine's Dock for lunch, where I had the seafood risotto "with a hint of chili". I would say more than a hint - it gave me several harsh nudges, a couple of curt requests and at one point it was outright barking orders at me. Very nice. I'm loath to admit to any good coming out of the Thatcher era at all, but sheer honesty often forces me to admit that quite a lot did and one of these things is the renovation of the Docklands. If a building has to be one thing or the other, would you rather an Italian restaurant with a slightly experimental menu or a mouldering warehouse that's no good to anyone except rats? Not a hard choice to make.

Occasional recipes: Marilyn Monroe's Chicken Cacciatore

I have no idea if this really is Marilyn Monroe's recipe (or variation hereon), but why would iON Oxford Tube, the Oxford Tube's inflight magazine, lie to me? Anyway, this comes from page 21 of issue 3, apparently winter 2009, though I'd have said in March 2009 that's impossible and winter 2008 was probably what they meant.

Anyhoo. They say/ [I say]:

• 4 chicken quarters [or 2 drumsticks each]
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• crashed black pepper and salt
• 1 yellow pepper, sliced
• 1 small chopped onion
• 2 cloves chopped garlic [um, 5, I think it was]
• 1 glass dry white wine. [A glass? Just what the heck is a glass in official terms of measurement? I dunno, so I gave it exactly one wine glass full and it seemed to work.]
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1 cup chicken stock. [Cup? See remark about glasses of white wine. Best Beloved suggested about half a pint and again it seemed to work.]
• 1/2 tsp crumbled oregano [omitted in favour of lemon thyme, that being what we had to hand]
• 2 bay leaves [simply omitted]
• 1 cup finely chopped mushrooms [here we go again ... I just went with my judgement of what looked like a good quantity]
• 1 can peeled tomatoes, juice reserved [whatever that means. I put the whole lot in and, you guessed it, it seemed to work]
• 2 tbsp fresh, torn basil leaves [see bay leaves above]
• 1 tbsp slivered black olives [I don't think I've ever had a slivered olive in my life. Black olives! Whole! Lots of them!]
  
• 3 anchovy fillets [a tin from Tesco has more than 3 and did fine]
• freshly grated parmesan [so much nicer than the pre-ground type you get in sprinkler cans which smells of sick]

Season the chicken with blackpepper and salt. Heat olive oil unilt a haze forms over it, then saute the chicken until skin goes golden brown. Transfer onto a plate.

[I know from experience that this will just fill the kitchen with chickeny olive oily smoke. Instead I roast the chicken pieces for 30 mins at gas mark 5. Meanwhile ...]

Saute the yellow pepper, add onion and garlic and cook for 8-10 minutes [more like 5]. Add the vinegar to deglaze the pan, then add the white wine and boil until the jucie is reduced to about 1/4 glass. Add black pepper, pour in chicken stock, turn down to low, add tomatoes and half their juice [or, as I say, the whole lot], oregano, bay leaf, half the basil [if you're having any of this] and the mushrooms.

Return the chicken to the pan, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 30 mins. Transfer the chicken onto a plate.

To the sauce add the black olives, remaining basil and anchovies. Stir and cook for two minutes. Spoon over the chicken and sprinkle with parmesan. Serve with buttered spaghetti.

[Now, at this point I want to know why I have never heard of buttered spaghetti before. Where has it been all my life? Just think of it. Roll the words around on your tongue. Buttered ... spaghetti. It's spaghetti, and it's buttered. Got that? Buttered spaghetti. I have just done you a greater favour than you can possibly imagine.]

And, wow. If Norma Jean was in the habit of cooking that little lot up then she wasn't half as dumb as she appeared. It's rich, make no mistake, but with a range of flavours jostling for attention and each one pointing out to you what an utterly fabulous meal this is. Go to it, people.

And remember, buttered spaghetti.

To your scattered quizzes go

I am: Philip José Farmer This prolific author brings surprising depths to he-man adventure tales, and broke science fiction's prudery barrier.

Which science fiction writer are you?

There are worse things than to be the creator of Riverworld, though I'm not aware myself of having broken any prudery barriers. Having got this result I redid the quiz trying to make myself as obnoxiously right wing and then as utterly loveable as possible. The former, surprise surprise, got Robert Heinlein, the latter James Tiptree Jr. So, should anyone else be tempted to try this, those are the ends of the spectrum you'll find yourself somewhere on.

Bonanza with bubbles

- is my manager's unkind assessment of the titles to Barrier Reef.

Reader, I cannot speak highly enough of this show. It captured my imagination in the early 70s and still has it to this day. It was an Australian series about a marine science unit based on an old sailing ship that had been significantly upgraded into a high-tech floating laboratory. It must have been pretty high-budget for a kids' show. The extensive underwater scenes really were shot underwater, and the two jet boats that come thundering towards the viewer in the opening bars of the title sequence really are thundering towards the viewer. Most of it was shot on location - the scenes on board ship, even below decks, were shot on board ship. The title music is just as stirring as the Thunderbirds march and I've been able to hum it ever since.

I enjoy, or at least am interested in, old ships, computers, scuba diving, science and the sea. I can probably trace all those back to this show.

Barrier Reef was produced by the same company that made Skippy. It seems grossly unfair that that stupid wallaby gets the lasting fame and Barrier Reef has faded beyond even the reach of DVD re-releases. How hard would it be? I'll do without the usual cast interviews, value added features and easter eggs. Just stick the eps on disk and I'll watch them end to end. And pay for it. Who could ask more?

Two things I learn as an adult watching the closing titles that evaded me as a child. Three things. Among the things I learn are: (1) without the music it would be pretty dull. (2) I bet that boat's under power. (3) There's a key change I'd forgotten. For the opening titles, Bonusbarn comments that that's the most useless submarine he's ever seen.

Smugness lost and regained

Lost: Just as I was looking forward to another session of doing immeasurable good for very little personal loss, the National Blood Service tell me I can't give blood platelets and be a blood donor. It's one register or the other. I'm sure that's the first time they've mentioned it, and since they signed me up for the platelets at a donor session you'd think they could have worked it out. But no. When I phoned today to postpone tomorrow's session, and mentioned I'm giving blood next week, the lady reacted as if I'd said I wanted to come round and have her on the spot. One of them had to go, and as giving platelets requires a trip into the JR and blood requires popping round the corner from the office, it wasn't a hard choice to make.

Regained: Firefox crashed on me (irritating) immediately followed by the automatic Apple Crash Reporter (quite amusing). Even more amusing, the latter caused a window to pop up asking if I wanted to relaunch Crash Reporter. I did, and it told me you can't run Crash Reporter directly, you have to wait for something to crash first. "Quis reportiet ipsos reporter?" I thought to myself with bilingual classically inclined cleverness, and resolved to spend the rest of the day pointing out the badly designed native Mac software to anyone who'll listen, and a few who won't.

How do you turn a bird into a soul singer?

You microwave it until its bill withers, arf. I thought of labelling this post "Not your average white band" but the Bill Withers joke beat it by a margin.

The magic of photography manages to make this look like a smoke filled jazz lair rather than the eminently respectable and entirely smoke-free Charles Maude Room of Abingdon School. Though the rows of politely attentive audience might also be a clue. This represents, though I say it myself, a really quite good recovery job via Photoshop on a picture taken in a dim room by my phone on Saturday night.


Young Michael S, second band member from the left and playing bass, is a pupil at said school and has a close relative suffering from Addison's Disease. And so, completely off his own bat, he arranged an evening of jazz and funk at the school to raise money for the relevant charity. He was ably assisted by a friend from church on keyboard, a friend of the friend from church on drums, and teachers on trumpet, sax and guitar. The sax teacher has apparently played with Manfred Mann, though whether that is the original group, the Earth Band or the individual I do not know.

And flipping good it was too: two hours of tunes by people I know or know of (Hoagy Carmichael, Gershwin, the Average White Band, Mr Withers) and people I don't. A great time had by all and, I hope, lots of money raised. If Mike can keep going like that non-stop for a two hour gig, despite being the youngest in the band by a good 10 years, then great things lie in store for him. He was at primary school with Bonusbarn. I'm posting this now to register the fact, when he's famous, that we knew him first ...

A tale of fire and water

Recently finished, and hugely enjoyed, Pompeii by Robert Harris.

In a book set in Roman times, about Pompeii, you think you have a shrewd idea what's going to happen. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find most of the novel is in fact about water. Marcus Attilius is engineer in charge of the aqueduct that feeds water to most of the Bay of Naples region. The water supply unaccountably fails one hot day in August 79AD and he has to find out why.

The reader already has a pretty shrewd idea why, and it's no great surprise that, yes, the aqueduct has been blocked by earthquake activity near the base of Vesuvius. It's easily dealt with. But in the process of his enquiries Attilius stumbles across intrigue, fraud and skullduggery that would make quite a decent novel on its own.

Yes, the reader is thinking, all very good but sooner or later that volcano's gonna blow and press the reset button. Which it does, but in a way that still manages to continue the story so far quite logically. Each chapter starts with a paragraph or two from a modern text on volcanology, so we the readers understand what's happening even if the Romans don't, and it's all quite seamless. One of Attilius's niggles is what happened to his predecessor, who looms over the novel without ever actually appearing alive. Turns out the guy was a native of Siciliy, from near Etna, and was about the only person in the whole of Campania with an idea of what was about to happen.

And when the volcano does blow, it's terrifying. You see how the Romans must have felt. First, they had no idea Vesuvius was a volcano at all (the Greek historian Strabo, who had obviously been up there, described the top as a flat plain - no crater like today. You could stand up there with no idea the mountain was hollow). When it blew, around midday, the clouds of ash blotted out the sun and brought a premature night to the land. When the final pyroclastic flows came, burying Herculaneum and Pompeii completely, that really was at night so it would have been twice as dark as before, with visibility through the ash just a few feet. All they would have seen were the faint glows of light tumbling down the sides of the mountain. The first couple of these, from the point of view of the Pompeiians, go from right to left, east to west, and take out Herculaneum. The next just seem to get bigger and bigger, coming right at the town ...

You're on the edge of your seat, I tell you. And what makes this vision of volcanic hell doubly powerful is that Harris has been so good at describing the contrasts. The pre-eruption paradise of hot sun, vineyards, crystal clear water from the aqueduct, and the well-ordered civilisation of the empire that collapses into local chaos.

Another point that struck me - and amused me - was that Attilius reports direct to a guy in Rome who reports direct to the Emperor. A couple of times he is able to play on this fact and bypass all local politics, vested interests etc. The aqueduct itself, the mighty Aqua Augusta, was built by direct order of Augustus. That well known bunch of commies the ancient Romans had absolutely no problem with the idea that a vital resource like water operates under centralised state control. Privatise it? Don't be ridiculous! They would have laughed.

Okay, we don't have slaves or gladiators and we know a thing or two about volcanoes now. But it's just possible we may have lost something too ...

Lost soles

They look like something on the seabed picked out by the lights of a submersible, but these shoes have a story. I suppose any shoes you've owned for at least six years would accumulate experience but I like to think these ones are special.

I forget if I acquired them specifically for my first ever trip to the USA in 2002 but I know I was wearing them at the time. So, these shoes have traversed the North American continent. They have felt the waves of the Pacific slap the boards beneath them as they stood on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They have trod the baking hot dirt of the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois. They have been up the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument, they have walked the length of the National Mall and they have stood in reverent silence before the giant statue of Abraham Lincoln in his Memorial.

They only survived this long by taking a cunning sideways step a few years ago into being my indoor shoes. They have a strange fleecy lining that stops them getting too warm in hot weather but keeps them nicely warm when it's cold. Even so they really were getting past it and made the fundamental mistake of becoming uncomfortable to wear, due to the split soles on either side. Overconfidence, perhaps? So they have, with all due respect and ceremony, been consigned to the kitchen bin. I will probably never see them again. If I do, I'll know something has gone badly wrong, probably in the kitchen.

I don't know if it's meaningful to tell a new pair of shoes that they must fill a big pair of, um, shoes, but that's what I'd tell their replacements if I could and it was.

Who, me?

"I am pleased to inform you that today, March 4, 2008 Emerald Who's Who for Executives and Professionals has selected you as potential candidate into our organization to represent Didcot, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. Your professional experience with Great Big Network Ltd as Technical Editor has been recognized and has qualified you to possibly be included. Emerald Who's Who is the authority for professional networking and recognition in virtually every industry across the globe."

My colleague N asks why I get emails like this when he just gets spammed by Vistaprint. I tell him a man is known by the company he keeps. I'm awed that my experience has been recognised by such an august body, even if they plainly assume my five years of service have also stripped me of all critical discernment. Thankfully, I still retain the ability to recognise at least three grammatical errors in the above - and also to spot that they spell the name of Great Big Network Ltd wrong.

Let's not go anywhere near the idea that I might want to represent Didcot. At anything.

But let's not be sourpusses either. There is no charge for inclusion and they kindly send me the link by which I can enter my own details. So, to be selected into Emerald Who's Who to represent wherever you live, just go to http://www.ewwep.com/signup.asp?ID=SXEUR.80.120.030409

A necessary correction

I've met a few reasonably well known and/or important people in my time. Most of them are of an authorial persuasion. I have been recognised by Philip Pullman and I've sat opposite Terry Pratchett at dinner. Of a non-authorial nature, the great and the good of Northern Ireland used to pass through our dinner parties with monotonous regularity. One I particularly remember included the Northern Ireland Minister and the Chief Constable of the RUC, whose jokes were judged so off colour by Mrs Minister that she threw a wobbly and demanded to be taken home (whereupon Chief Constable apologised profusely to my mother, who said that's okay and could he possibly finish the joke?).

But all this was as a clanging bell on Saturday when I got to meet Michael Green. Michael Green! One of the greatest Christian apologists of all time! (And no, that doesn't mean he keeps saying sorry for it.) I was reading his books when I was a kid. I can't remember anything about them, mind you, but I know they're there. They're like the hidden foundations of a mighty building. You don't need to know what they look like.

And I was bursting with pride, not because of meeting him, but because he came into the church, and he greeted my lovely wife by name, and she introduced him to me.

And then ...

He was leading a seminar on the general topic of "how to share your faith without sounding stupid or putting people off". Well, that might as well have been the title. Someone asks why you're a believer? He suggested a number of non-jargony, non-judgemental responses. One of which was to cite the fact (his word, not mine) the fact of intelligent design in creation.

Oh, Michael, what went wrong?

You could cite the fact of a widespread perception of intelligent design. That would present no problem. Others may disagree but you've got your talking point. And I must hasten to add he's of an entirely different intellectual order to the Sarah Palin brigade; I don't see him raising any controversy about whether or not to teach it alongside evolution in science classes.

But, fact? No. It was like he was ticking Richard Dawkins's boxes. "Something as complex as an eye ..." St Dawkins has shown, quite convincingly, in his epistles unto The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable, that actually something as complex as an eye can evolve. And to show that the Blessed Richard isn't just mouthing theory, St David of Attenborough the other day on TV actually showed examples of animals with light-sensing organs that are, we could say, eyes at different stages of evolution.

My position? Well, we're working our way through the final series of The West Wing on DVD. To quote Congressman Santos, "I believe in God and I believe he's intelligent". Later in the same episode he defines his position with a few well chosen words that wouldn't be news to any Christian at my church but which apparently takes the American media by storm:

"Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. It's a religious belief and our constitution does not allow for the teaching of religion in our public schools.... Evolution is not perfect, It doesn't answer every question but it is based on scientific facts. Facts that can be predicted, tested and proven. Intelligent Design asks theological questions. I'm sure that many of us would agree that at the beginning of all that begetting something begun. What was that something?"

(quote half-inched from The West Wing wiki)

No, my faith isn't left in tattered shreds. The Blessed Richard is impeccable on biology but in areas outside his self-taught expertise, including the whole vast arena of theological discourse, he is so gloriously, wonderfully wrong that Mr Green still wins by several thousand points.

I just dock a few.

Banking gestures

Gordon Brown is considering legal measures to get back some of the £693,000 pension paid to former RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin.

Strange to say, I hope he doesn't, or is not able to. This is because my considerable dislike of smugly complacent overpaid not very good bank chiefs is still second to my dislike of politicians who move the goalposts because the headlines tell them to.

Freddie's considered response to the idea that he should forego some of the pension as a "gesture" is available for public view. He's agin it, though you'd think that on the salary he's been paid recently he really should have put a penny or two aside for a rainy day. As he says:

"to voluntarily accept a reduction in a pension entitlement which has been built up over many years and in other employments in addition to RBS, is not warranted."

Quite. I'm a one-law sort of guy. If someone has benefited because the law was in the wrong place, change the law, don't come after the benefittee. Even if he is stinkingly rich. One law. If the government finds a legal way of taking some of his £693k off him, they will find a way of denting the monthly fiver I confidently expect to be claiming off them soon after my 85th birthday, or when old age forces me to retire, whichever is sooner. That would be a Bad Thing.

And anyway, who among us (apart from RBS account holders, but I'm not one) doesn't actually find it screamingly funny? I can't remember when I first heard the argument that "you've got to pay the right sort of salary to find the right sort of people", but it was a long time ago, way before the present crisis and probably way before the last. I didn't believe it then and I don't now. Finally, finally it's being exposed as the lie it is in such a way that even the politicians are having to accept it. The "right people" got us into this, you dolt. Freddie is the peak of a very large pyramid going all the way back to Thatcher and probably beyond. If this fiasco finally gets it into people's heads that you pay people what they're worth, and if they screw up then they're screwed, then it will be worth every penny.

And will either Gordon Brown, who ravaged our pension accounts, or his illustrious predecessor who got us into an unjust, illegal and unwinnable war, and who between them spent every last penny of our spare cash such that there is none left anywhere, be foregoing the considerable benefits that accrue to an ex-prime minister?

Anyway, I have a solution. Stop me if I'm wrong - it's possible - but is the basic idea of banking not:

• you give the bank all your money for safe storage.
• occasionally you draw some of this money out.
• but not all of it.
• so they get to play with the rest - invest, spend, whatever - just as long as any sum you wish to claim is always there on demand.

I'm going to hazard a guess that a large part of the £693k, or the monthly £57.5k, won't actually be spent. So, if Freddie keeps it in a bog standard checking account at RBS, RBS will still have that money and he'll still be quids in. Everyone's a winner.

You're welcome.

In which English becomes marginally richer

Proofreading the workbook for a Shibboleth training course has unearthed two typos that really ought to be proper words.

• Confliguration: configuration that you basically make up as you go along because you don't know much about it either.
• Recommendatino: a small suggestion. A bijou recommendationette, if you like.

The book also, with a completely straight face, manages to make the subject sound a lot more interesting than it is.

"After this number has been reached, the child process will die and be respawned."

Yikes.

Our one source of energy, the ultimate discovery

The folk at arcattack.com know what electricity is really for. As their site explains it, Tesla coils:

"... produce an electrical arc similar to a continuous lightning bolt which put out a crisply distorted square wave sound reminiscent of the early days of synthesizers."

Which means you can play tunes on them. Like this guy, getting lightly grilled (about 45 seconds in) to the strains of the Imperial March.



Thanks to Major Clanger for the info.

Be ceiling you

Shortly before Christmas, a hole appeared in the ceiling of our porch, which was goodness knows how old and possibly original to the bulding. The hole looked a bit like this, only smaller.


Then it grew to look exactly like that; then it grew to look like that but even bigger. Each fall stabilised it a little, until the edges of the new hole succumbed to gravity and fell. You can see an incipient dangly bit next to the light fitting.

But no more. The entire old ceiling now looks like this:


... and its replacement like this.


Drying out nicely, which sadly means we've missed the chance to do some interesting Sistine Chapel-type frescoes in the plaster. Probably just as well.

Snow angels of Abingdon

The snow is all but gone but in Albert Park the remains of the snowmen linger on, scattered around the grass. It's like something Anthony Gormley might have installed when he was very young.

Hello, world

I just thought I'd announce that at some point today the planet will have orbited the sun exactly 44 times since I first opened my mouth, took a deep breath of fresh Northern Ireland air and howled my protest at being evicted from my nice warm home of the last nine months. We're shortly off to see Slumdog Millionaire, which is probably something we'd have done anyway but for the sake of argument is officially the Birthday Treat.

In other news, Far Frozen North CID have been in touch again; there are a further 12 eBay accounts linked with the gentlemen under investigation and it's thought he may have profited by about £50k over the last three years. That's a lot of Galactica boxsets.

Oh. My. God.

I am married to Richard Dawkins ...

Your result for The Doctor Who Companion Test...

Romana II

You are Romana II. While you still retain all your knowledge from the Academy, your time spent traveling with The Doctor has mellowed you a bit, and you and The Doctor now get along quite well. The Doctor also greatly enjoys your company - you're smart enough to keep up with him, but are no longer the brash young know-it-all of your previous incarnation.

Unfortunately, all that mellowing has also caused you to become a bit more dependent upon The Doctor than you might like - you seem to be getting captured by monsters more and more these days. Still, you know how to enjoy yourself, and will probably stick around for the time being.

Take The Doctor Who Companion Test at HelloQuizzy

Eat justice, perp

Well, this is exciting.

About a year ago I got stung on eBay, foolishly sending off a cheque for £35 for the boxset of Battlestar Galactica series 3, which never arrived. The vendor's feedback seemed good but clearly the system doesn't always work.

(Note to close relatives and family members: if anyone tries to give me a hard time about this confession, I will bring up the subject of who recently ordered a £55 bottle of wine in a restaurant without checking the price. Are we understood?)

eBay themselves spotted something dodgy about the vendor because they emailed me to say they were closing the account - conveniently and thoughtfully, it was soon after I had mailed the cheque. It was too late to cancel, the cheque had already cleared, and frankly it wasn't worth going round to the guy's place because he lived in the Far Frozen North. I put it down to experience and nowadays only buy DVDs'n'stuff on Amazon, if I do it online at all. And I pay by Paypal or card.

But today I get an email from a detective constable in Far Frozen North CID, saying the guy is under investigation, and my name is one of the 255 eBay have provided him with as having bought something off him in December 2007 or January 2008. Would I mind letting him know what happened? All the sums involved were quite similar to mine, most stingees did like me and put it down to experience ... so over a two month period the perp was quietly amassing 255 x £35 or thereabouts, which = quite a lot.

I've sent off my report and copies of the emails that were exchanged. Funny that now I can fantasise far more exciting punishments than I could a year ago when I was quietly resigning myself to my loss. Gene Hunt is never around when you want him. Or Judge Dredd. Or Lord Vetinari.

Child's play

Time's Chariot gets its first decent review - by my standards of decent, anyway, i.e. by a science fiction publication with reviewers who are likely to Get It - in the latest Vector. It emerges favourably at the end, even if the reviewer does play the game reviewers like to play (and I doubtless do it myself) of "pick up on something that hasn't even occurred to the author and make a deal of it".

Sometimes this is good; it reveals strengths and weaknesses and stylistic quirks that the author can take into account the next time round. Sometimes it's just baffling ...

"The fact that it is so clearly 'written down' for children might prevent their full enjoyment."

Ahem. 'Written down'? That's my actual style, thank you very much.

You don't believe me, ask a genuine child, like 14 year old Tommy who reviewed it in the Cork Evening Echo, second only to Vector and perhaps Locus as a nexus of the sfnal hive mind. Generously he gives it a 7/10, apparently deducting 3 points because "this book would really only be suitable for anyone over the age of 12 because the author uses difficult words to describe things and there is some bad language".

Sadly he doesn't cite the bad language (I'd love to know where he found it) but he does at least explain that bit about the difficult words: "I didn't like the way the author used futuristic, made-up words which he didn't explain, for example agrav."

A future in SF critique does not (yet) lie ahead of young Tommy, but give him time.

A flaw in the BCP

If the Chief Technology Officer is going to send an email to everyone saying "stay at home", he really should do it earlier than 8.32, a time at which on a normal day almost everyone is at their desks.

My own manager did try to phone me, but the call came as I was pulling out onto the main road and I don't answer the phone while I'm driving. By the time I had slithered into work and seen the almost deserted carpark, I could guess what the voicemail she had left would say.


The roads were much less crowded than yesterday but also much more slippery, cancelling out the advantage. To be honest I only pressed on to work because I had seen the queue of traffic heading in the other direction. Still, having got there I was able to give a colleague a lift back to Abingdon, to catch any bus that might be heading for Oxford, so I felt warm and fulfilled.

Tonight's recipe: gnocchi bolognese, hot and with lots of garlic. Perfect for the season, I think.

Honour satisfied, now go home

Management at work are currently considering whether to declare a BCP scenario. Lovely as it would be to think this means they will whip out a 1662 Book of Common Prayer and see what it says about the weather, it means the Business Continuity Plan will come into effect. After an hour's journey in and a cup of coffee, and with full managerial approval, I pre-empted it by coming home anyway.

Earlier on, Bonusbarn escorted me to my car, frolicking in the virgin snow like a little lamb and helping me on my way with snowballs, bless him. I left him stewing with the possibility that school might still be open. It's a hardy place. The last time we had snow, every other school in town closed except his; they let everyone get in, then sent them home again at 11. This time they saved him a journey by announcing that sixth form lessons were cancelled; no excuse for everyone else. So he's happy.

The roads were slushy but passable, and very slow due to careful drivers. There's a certain solidarity amongst snow drivers; an esprit de corps, a knowledge that we're all brothers and sisters. Unless you're the driver of a 4x4 Chelsea tractor that broke down in the left-hand lane halfway up Steventon Hill, flashers on and blocking off traffic to Didcot. Stuff the esprit de corps, you're allowed to find that hilariously funny, unless of course you're one of the drivers behind it. But as it happens, I go up the right-hand lane of Steventon Hill, so that's okay.

Coming home, I came down the A34 which had no problems at all, and I saw The Snowplough. It appears to be the only one in existence in the UK, and I saw it. Ploughing snow. I feel fulfilled.

Now to get down to the work I brought home on a stick, relishing the chance to do it on a PC.

Strapped to a gurney

So, you've given blood once or twice before and thought that platelet donation would be much the same? You fool.

The first difference is when the nurse breezily announces that the process takes on average 90 minutes. You gulp, and think of all the great books you could have bought to fill in the time. She assures you that they have plenty of newspapers and magazines. The Daily Mirror, Men's Health ... tears begin to come to your eyes.

Oh, and DVDs. You begin to perk up.

The second difference is when you are introduced to the Machine, a cross between a school chemistry experiment and a bad Dr Who special effect from the time when everyone knew you could tell a really advanced computer by the number of moving parts. And this is the really clever bit. It sucks your blood out, and you get to see it go down the tubes and squirt itself around a small plastic labyrinth (that's the school chemistry bit). It then pumps into something like an unfeasibly long transparent condom which gets spun around in the machine's innards. The platelets separate out and manifest in a clear plastic bag as a cloudy yellow liquid a bit like cheap consommé, or that stuff that floats to the top when you leave gravy in the fridge too long. And then the machine pumps the rest of it, which is still red, back into you. Therefore you don't actually lose much, and can just get up and walk away when they unplug you 90 minutes later.

You feel tingling in your lips, making you feel strangely like you're holding back tears even though you aren't, which is an effect of the anti-coagulant they pump into you along with your returning blood. Otherwise the only real discomfort is sitting in the seat, something a bit like a dentist's chair, for so long.

The guy who was scheduled alongside me had to pop out to phone a flatmate and alert him to a delivery from Tesco, so I was plugged in first and I got the unit's sole DVD player. I got to watch Sliding Doors, an enjoyable bit of fluff with Mrs Martin which I hadn't seen before. It's a 95 minute movie for what turned out to be an 85 minute session, but they kindly let me finish it.

So, I get to do some good, lose a little consommé and suffer driving to the JR in rush hour, which frankly is the worst bit. Oh, and I get dinner three hours later than normal, but the sting of that is offset by an understanding wife who sticks an extra banana and kitkat in with my lunch. In return unknown strangers that I will never meet in this life with leukaemia or other disorderly nasties will benefit and, who knows, maybe lives will be saved. The good outweights the bad.

Will probably do it again, and next time I'll take a book.

Observation affects outcome

Put it this way - if you weren't a tiny percent nerd, you wouldn't do things like this, would you?

Why the slippers were red

The participants in this conversation were a middle-aged prime of life man whose degree course included a year on Comparative Communist Systems, and a child born three years after the Berlin Wall came down and who is now studying the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin.

See if you can guess which speaker is which.

- "Yugoslavia had maybe the most successful communist system, though it was only held together by Tito-"

- "Dorothy's dog?"

- [after baffled pause] "what?"

- "Dorothy, in that film ..."

- "The Wizard of Oz?"

- "... had a dog called-"

- "TOTO!"

- "Oh. Well. It's only one vowel."

Occasional recipes: honey mustard pork chops with peppercorn

This one comes from the BBC Food site (apparently Mike Robinson from Saturday Kitchen), with adaptation.

Ingredients
1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
1 tsp runny honey
2 pork chops
50g/2oz butter
1 red onion, halved and sliced
2 Golden Delicious apples, peeled, cored and cut into 8 slices
200g/7oz new potatoes, lightly cooked and halved
1 tsp wholegrain mustard
6 shredded fresh sage leaves

For the sauce
3 finely chopped shallots
1 tbsp green peppercorns
small glass cider
100ml/3½fl oz double cream

I've done this a few times before with the drawbacks that (a) Bonusbarn doesn't like it and (b) the original recipe suggests griddling the chops for 6 minutes each side with the honey mustard sauce already slathered on them. This means you do the rest through a haze of pork flavoured smoke.

Oven roasting the chops takes longer but makes them much nicer. Cover and roast for 1 hour in an oven at gas mark 4, over a tray full of water to keep them moist. Mix the honey and mustrad together and, at the 55 minute mark, paste it over the chops, then return them to the oven for another five minutes.

Before that, stick to what the original recipe said:

• Melt some butter, add the onions and apples and cook for 2-3 minutes.
• Add the potatoes and another teaspoon of mustard.
• For the peppercorn sauce, melt some butter in another pan, add shallots and peppercorns and cook for a minute. Add a splash of cider and bring to the boil, then add the double cream and cook until it thickens
• Serve it all together. Pork chops lovely and moist, sauce deliciously creamy, potatoes and apples adding body and interesting flavours to the mix. Yum.
  

TVM but WTF?

A supplier tells us they have a procurement process "from EOI to BAU".

EOI = Expression of Interest.

BAU = ...?

Binned and Unread?
Broken and Unmaintained?
Bugger All Use?
Bold and Underline?
Bloody Awful Users?
Bored and Underwhelmed?
Baryonic Asymmetry of the Universe?
Beirut Arab University?

Why people can't speak in clear English Baffles All Understanding.

The half-abbey habit

Who needs a whole abbey anyway? That at least was the pragmatic approach taken by the people of Malmesbury when the tower and spire of their abbey, taller than Salisbury cathedral, collapsed 500 years ago and took the entire east end of the building with it. They consolidated, built internal walls to block up the suddenly inconveniently open bits, and carried on as before. Now the building is a fully functional church with ruined bits at each end ...


The big arch on the left is where the tower used to be, and there was about the same amount of abbey to the left of that, once.

The long stay carpark is at the foot of the hill with the abbey at the top, next to a tributary of the Avon. Then you get this sheer hill with steps leading up it. It's the kind of place that you can tell has been manipulated by the hand of man since centuries past, to the extent that the artificial enhancements of yore are essentially the geology of today. A fantasy writer's dream. Once you're up the hill you get a lovely little town, probably infuriating to drive in but full of character and secondhand shops that we proceeded to plunder. Living there would be nice as long as you had a proper native Malmesbury home and not one of the McResidences springing up around the edge. A home like this one, say ...

... an old water tower, reachable only by walking down a narrow lane, with a penthouse at the top.

Anyway, the abbey. Despite being old it's clearly a warm and friendly community, with comfortable chairs and plenty of outreach into the town. A proper community as these things should be. At the top of one of the pillars is what looks like a private box ...



... which apparently was where the sick monks were allowed to sit and watch the service.

There's also a stained glass window in tribute to local hero Eilmer the Flying Monk, who legend has it observed the flight of birds, made his own gliding apparatus and got permission to test it. He flew 200 metres, or at least fell that distance with style, and attributed his subsequent crash and lifelong crippling to not having included a tail. Sadly he didn't get further permission from the abbot to continue his researches. But, 10/10 not only for effort but also for scientific powers of observation and reasoning.



It's now possible we've officially Done every abbey within a day trip of Abingdon, or at least every one of the free entry ones. But there's still a couple of cathedrals we can think of.

Pratchett, games and lists

To the Unicorn Theatre last night for the latest of the Studio Theatre Club's Pratchett plays. The group has gone back to its roots with a revised version of the very first such play that it did, in 1991, a few months before I came to Abingdon and a year before Bonusbarn was born. Wyrd Sisters: The Director's Cut.

The usual high standards; nigh on perfect casting all round. It was a shame they left Death out but you can't have everything. Plays also can't include lines of narrative text: I remember from the novel the lovely line "they turned to see a dwarf trying to loom over them". Also difficult on stage would have been the bit where someone tries to sit in a chair occupied by the ghost of the dead king. "Is someone sitting here?" / "Yes ..."

On the way back home Bonusbarn gave an interesting insight into the politics of gamery, or the workings of his own mind, or both, speaking contemptuously of the people sitting in the row in front, who I would guess to have been students. "I’m never going to be that nerdy. They were talking about Magic: The Gathering. That’s a card game."

… which led on to a discussion of which is better, a technologically accomplished piece of work graphical like World of Warcraft, where everything is laid out for you on screen, or a proper role playing game (you may see where my prejudices lie) where you may have a few props and enabling items but the main action takes place in the imagination.

… which led on to a reminder (following from his suspicious identification of my ability to recognise authentic player-talk) that I was in the university SFSoc in my day, even though I hardly ever went to a meeting because they clashed with scuba diving on Thursday evenings and so I just turned up to the end of term video weekends.

[Sigh] "Were you the president?"

"No."

"Did the president have long hair and a trench coat?"

Um. Thinks. I do remember a long(ish) haired president. I also remember a trench coat. I forget if they were the same person. But …

Hm.

Which leads on to something almost completely different but saves me doing two blog posts where one will do. Apparently the Guardian is having one of those prescriptive moments that the national press do so love and is listing the 1000 books everyone must read. They’ve now got down to science fiction and fantasy titles. There’s 149 of them (for the sake of convenience Discworld, Narnia, His Dark Materials etc. count as one title each) and the full list is kindly summarised here so I pinched it.

Some I've never heard of; some (I'm looking at you, Rowling) I'm thinking "what??" With the possible exception of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I'm thinking that any book published in the last five years is too recent to say everyone should read it; I'd say published this century except that China Mieville's there (though not with the title I'd have chosen). But anyway, here's the list again, with the ones I’ve read (60/149 = 40%) in bold.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
JG Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
JG Ballard: Crash (1973)
JG Ballard: Millennium People (2003)
Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)
Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960) [seen the film; does that count?]
Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973) [didn’t understand it, but read it]
William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
M John Harrison: Light (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)
David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
China Miéville: The Scar (2002) [why this and not Perdido St Station?]
Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- )
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)
Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) [what happened to The Chrysalids?]
Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

No one would have believed, in the early years of the 21st century ...

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA is a 360 degree panorama from the Spirit rover on Mars. It's been up there five years, trundling around doing its stuff. Five years! Those rocks and sedimentary layers and grains of sand have been unobserved for millions of years, but now Wall-E's distant ancestor is rolling around up there and taking it all in. It fills me with almost as much wonder as the thought that America now has a black president.

Making the picture even more fun is spotting the number of features named after science fiction people or ideas. There's Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Jack Williamson and Frederic Brown, not to mention Monolith, Martian Chronicles and Malacandra. Someone at NASA is reading far too much of exactly the right stuff.

Sew and sew

During our pre-marital compression and elimination of surplus material goods, Best Beloved somehow managed to get rid of her sewing box, and has been pining for a new one ever since. But no longer, because after months of trawling eBay and second-hand shops we finally found this ...


... a solid oak sewing stool from Chissock Woodcraft. This is in the grounds of Yeldall Manor, a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addicts, which teaches them useful craft skills to help them get back into the community. So, we get a nice stool and we support an excellent cause as well.

The place is south of Henley, down one of those nice bits of the Thames valley where the sides are steep and wooded and the road winds roughly along the 10' contour. Sharp rise and screamingly expensive houses on one side, river on the other. On this, the first decently warm and sunny (if windy) Saturday of the year, it was a lovely drive, apart from those heartstopping moments where the southbound road disappears into a white glare in the low noon-time sun and there's a bus coming round a tight corner towards you.

We had lunch in Henley itself and wandered around, making the first time I've had a chance to look at the town properly rather than just drive through it as a congestion-busting shortcut to or from the M4. I was delighted to see that although it has the usual high street names it's also heaving with small, independent specialist shops. After Abingdon's monoculture of opticians and second-hand shops, it was a nice change. But then we remembered that this place too is screamingly expensive - I mean, Heseltine and then Johnson were the MP, remember? - and the denizens are probably used to paying an extra penny or two for good service.

So, anyway, the sewing box is installed, all the other furniture has moved along one space and the item at the end of the row has disappeared into a space-time anomaly which is the only way to make room. Now we just need to sew something. One step at a time, eh?

Bonus Bonusbarn

Work has had a desktop calendar printed for customers and clients, advertising a different service for each month of the year. January's is for educational videoconferencing content and features the face of a schoolchild reflected in an astronaut's visor as he peers in.

I don't know who the astronaut is but the schoolkid who posed for the picture is none other than my stepson, the one and only Bonusbarn. Except that he's no longer one and only, we had 1000 of the things printed. All my close-by colleagues have one on their desks. I walk around the office and I see him everywhere. Please, roll on February.

At least I'm not at the BETT show this week, where our stand includes a 10ft high image of the same glowering down at the public. [Shudders]

Please deselect this man now

"A Labour MP has claimed dyslexia is a myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching methods.

Backbencher Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley, describes the condition as a "cruel fiction" that should be consigned to the "dustbin of history". (The full Beeb report)"

Never mind that the condition was first identified over 100 years ago. Never mind all the verifiable scientific research that has been done since. Never mind that it pops up all over the globe. Why let facts spoil a good dose of prejudice?

And the amazing thing is - this guy isn't even a Conservative.

Prat.

It's a Mac trap, and we've been caught

There are occasional advantages to IT Support's geological speed of response. It's been a full four months since I was forced to submit a request for a Mac. Now it's arrived, it took me a full four minutes to decide we weren't going to get on. My gay trill of laughter when it looked like my email files (a) hadn't transferred to the new system and (b) wouldn't be compatible if they did made the windows rattle. (My recent discovery that, even though I can still use Firefox to compose this, the keystroke on my PC that made the cursor jump between words here just closes the tab has had a similar result.)

Fortunately that little giggle seems to have been resolved. After a morning's acquaintance I have decided we can have a relationship, as long as I can go home at the end of each day and tell my PC at home all about it.

The "genie" effect, whereby a minimised application seems to be sucked into the dock, made me queasy and I've replaced it with the good old shrink effect that Windows uses (which, I know, it got off Apple). The fact that there's only one toolbar regardless of the application is an annoyance but I'll get over it. What fool thought it would be neat to swap the " and @ keys around, and why, I will never guess.

Sadly, my biggest and loudest complaint about the Mac isn't actually Apple's fault. This one is all Microsoft's. In using Word 2008 for Mac I've regressed over a decade. Ever since I switched to PCs from my old Amstrad, ever since, I've recorded a macro to swap two misplaced letters around. The commonest spelling mistake, as you may recall me saying before. On early PCs I used the Windows macro recorder. Then Word grew up enough to record its own macros and so I used that instead. Every time I have moved to a new computer or got a new verison of Word, that is the first change I've made.

No more. Word 2008 for Mac doesn't let you record macros. I am flabbergasted. What do they think they're doing?

(Answer, courtesy of my manager: they know exactly what they're doing. They grudgingly admit that there are Microsoft users who use Apples, and they cater for the market, but they don't make it easy in the hope that said users will see the light and switch to PCs. Easy)

You can still assign keystrokes to existing menu commands. All is not lost. And in some ways, the return to the classic Word interface after months of struggling with Office 2007 [spit] is a relief. Maybe we'll call this a draw.

I'll try to be positive. The overall look of the Mac is nice. I will gladly bow to Apple's ability to make technology attractive; to slip into your life and be part of it, rather than a beast growling in the corner. The downside is of course that you do it Apple's way or not at all. To make my point I've changed the wallpaper to <geek>a screen shot of the TARDIS console room</geek> (<ubergeek>specifically the secondary console room as used in series 14</ubergeek>), that being the ultimate machine where the user's requirements are paramount.

Most satisfying of all is that once you've got your head back on you notice a certain strange sense of familiarity. The CMD+Tab combination to cycle through applications, which is almost like ALT+Tab ... oh, and the keyboard. The keyboards of early Macs were truly alien beasts. This has a forward-delete key; the funny Apple key is labelled ALT; there's a CTRL key too. The overall effect is ... Windows-like. Okay, so it's about as convincing as Del-Boy's attempts to appear classy by speaking French, but you recognise that it's trying.

Note this well. The two systems did not meet halfway. They came to us.

Hah.

But no Turkish Delight

Boar's Hill on a subzero January day does a passable imitation of Narnia towards the end of the Witch's reign.


Look close and you see that everything is picked out in lines of frost. It's like the setting on Adobe Illustrator where you can reduce a picture down to a line drawing.




At one point we crossed over a small stream trickling down between two of these exquisitely outlined frosty banks, leading me (sorry) to start gibbering "Aslan is coming! Aslan is coming!"

The event: friend DW, who I must have known for a good decade or more (as opposed to DW, who I've known since about 2001 or DW who I've known since about 2004) has a birthday at this time of year and always organises a birthday walk with friends drawn from all walks of his life. Ten years ago the group was exclusively adult but suddenly babies started happening, all mysteriously at the same time, leading to a group of kids all about the same age (and mostly male, for some reason).


DW isn't actually giving them communion, just chocolate coins which are of course renowned for their warming effect.

From the Fox, through some fields and frosty woods that are still primeval Oxfordshire and where wolves really ought to prowl, up to Jarn Mound to look at what would have been quite a view if the mist hadn't been there, then back to the Fox for a warming luncheon. Hardier souls continued with part 2 of the walk, less hardy or those with some serious blogging to do peeled off and headed home.

It just wouldn't have been the same without the frost, but now we've done that, we can have the warm weather now, thanks.

Indigestible

A distant memory stirs like some sluggish primeval beast. It's been so long that for a couple of seconds I was even taken in by the envelope: "72-hour notice of document delivery".

"Wow," I thought, "this must be important ..."

... plus (half a second later) "so why not just send the important document now ..."

... plus (finally) recognition. "It's them. They're back."

I am one of the 2% of households in Abingdon invited to take part in the Reader's Digest prize draw. I could shortly be the winner of £250,000! The envelope came complete with a certificate that a total of £300,000 has been deposited at the NatWest to cover all the prizes. First prize: £250,000. Number of prizes: 2058. Do the maths to get the average runner up prize.

If past form is anything to go by, they will send me six personal numbers which might just might be eligible for entry into the draw. I have a sneaking suspicion they will be eligible. It would be an awful lot of bother to go to just to send me a load of duff numbers.

There's a picture of the large orange envelope that will fall through the letterbox. It has all the usual seals and barcodes on it to make it seem Very Important. (What exactly are we to make of "This communication to be delivered to named addressee only"? Who else is it likely to be delivered to? Is a busy postman expected to ring the bell and wait, shivering on the doorstep to press it into my eager hands?) The envelope will positively shriek that if just one of those numbers wins then £250,000 could be mine. Much the same way as I could walk down the road where I live and heave a brick through each window. "Could" does not equal "probably will". In fact the brick-through-window scenario has a greater chance of happening and I like to think I'm a model neighbour.

Even in the unlikely chance of my not winning anything, I will probably be invited – just because it's me, you understand, and they like me so much – to purchase one of RD's publications at a knock-down rate. In the past I've purchased their road atlas and maybe a couple of other things, knowing this would just make me a mark for further top priority hands-only mailshots. I have always declined their offers of Reader's Digest Condensed Novels. They would have more luck offering Jamie Oliver a supersize cheeseburger with extra fries, cheap.

Back in my day the prize draw manager was the improbably named Tom Champagne. Nowadays it's the slightly more plausible, blokey Nick Shelley. There's even a brief paragraph assuring us he does exist. At least he has a likely-sounding name.

Oh, balls, it's all so bloody Daily Mail. It's Hyacinth Bucket. It's a relic of a time when the middle classes were busting out like never before and craved respectability. The intent was to fool them into thinking they had it. How better to seem respectable than to have rows of condensed classic works of literature lined up on your stone clad bookcase, gleaming in their leather binding with gold embossed text? Sniggering at us? Who's sniggering?

And they're still doing it.

The last time I got one of these, I think, I had never heard of (or indeed received) a Nigerian spam. Now it finally dawns on me that these wastes of treeware are Nigerian spam's only slightly better good twin. Okay, they're not invitations to criminal activity but they are equally insulting in their own way. Not by a blithe assumption that a large enough sum will induce me to participate in serious fraud; just by thinking that all the bells, whistles, seals, certificates of authenticity, strident letters assuring me I'm through two out of three stages but could fall at the third so don't delay, act now and the general good simulation of personal attention will actually make me take them one atom more seriously.

Spam makes it money by costing only pennies to hook in one sucker every few million. It's all they need. I don't doubt that Reader's Digest is actually legal and genuine; someone somewhere will be winning that £250,000. But to fund that, and to pay the considerably higher overheads, they must have to sell a lot of condensed novels, and that's the most depressing thought of all.

American presidents

The last movie watched in 2008 was The American President, which I first saw about 10 years ago and wanted to see again because it was a kind of dry run for The West Wing and now that I'm familiar with the latter I wanted to see how it held up. Same warm heart, same creator, a lot of the same cast, same attitude, a lot of the same lines and unashamedly Democrat.

And it does hold up, because like TWW its two greatest strengths are: (1) it actually uses real-world issues to drive its drama, and the result isn't always a happy one, and good people are forced to do bad things because not doing them would be even worse; and (2) it loves the presidency. Not for what it's become but for what it should be. It should attract people of the highest calibre. It should be such a power for good. To be addressed as "Mr President" should be the greatest honour a country can bestow, and it should only be bestowed on people who are utterly worthy of it. Presidents Shepherd in The American President and Bartlet in The West Wing - and indeed the future President Santos in the same - are such people. You can't help respecting and liking them. Why can't we get them in real life?

Also over the holiday period we reached the end of series 6 of The West Wing - one more to go, even if I do know roughly how it ends. Series 6 ended with the battle lines being drawn up - the end of the presidency in sight, the two new presidential candidates confirmed. And true to form and its own internal guidelines, it doesn't make the Republican guy a cipher who will easily be beaten. He's just as good and honest a man as Bartlet, who is well aware his own party can only produce slimeballs and second-raters and is actively worried that they can't find someone to stand against him. Until the underdog Congressman Santos enters the fray, of course, but some conventions of drama have to stand.

It got me wondering: when was the last time a Democrat president handed over to another Democrat? (Not counting Clinton who should have handed over to Gore, but that's history ...) A quick check isn't encouraging for the future. The last two Democrat successions both came about by the incumbent dying - Kennedy and Johnson, and before that Roosevelt and Truman. In both cases the former VP then won a single term in his own right but was followed by a Republican. The last time a living, breathing and compos mentis Democrat president was followed by another Democrat was Franklin Pierce in 1857, who was pro-slavery and had been disowned by his own party after a single term. The last two-term Democrat to hand over to another Democrat (though Clinton had two terms ...) was Andrew Jackson in 1837.

So, fingers crossed for Mr Obama in 2016, eh? He's already broken a couple of records; another one or two shouldn't be a problem.

Nation and other books

One of the best books I read in 2008, I just managed to squeeze into the year. I finished it about five minutes before the bongs, on the same day its author's knighthood was announced.

Nation by (Sir) Terry Pratchett could have been a Discworld novel but it wouldn't pack half the punch it does. It's more or less set in our world's nineteenth century, with just enough variance for Pratchett to have fun. But the underlying premise simply isn't funny and he doesn't try to pretend it is: the Nation is a Pacific island (one of the Mothering Sunday islands, which are an extension of the Bank Holiday Monday group) whose population is wiped out by a tsunami following a volcanic eruption. Mau is the sole survivor. On the island he meets Daphne (née Ermintrude, but in Pratchett style she chooses a name that better reflects her personality), scion of the aristocracy and related more closely than she realises to royalty, who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck caused by the same tsunami. They both have a great deal of pain to get through. Being Pratchett heroes, of course, they manage; and then you remember the author's own recent personal tsunami, his diagnosis with Alzheimer's, and you realise this is Pratchett's Book of Job.

I hadn't realised before how well Job works for non-believers as well as believers. I remember Pratchett saying in an interview that he's a humanist, and therefore an atheist, and either way that unfortunately means he can't get angry with God because he doesn't believe in him. Job, and Nation, show that you can still scream WHY? at whoever you do or don't believe in, and either way you get the same answer: "Because. Who's asking?"

After all that, don't get the idea it's heavy going, because it isn't. Pratchettism abounds. When you hear a sentence like "it only needs 138 people to die and your father will be King!" then it's just asking for trouble - the humour equivalent of the gun on the mantelpiece. The platonic love story - Mau and Daphne are still children - is funny and moving, and there are sideways views of science and religion and civilisation and wonderful turns of phrase left, right and centre. One of my favourites was a description of Daphne's great-great-aunt: "apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she's gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapours, and stayed there, still gently vaporizing ..."

It's great fun, and it's also one of the few books I actually feel honoured to have read.

And here's everything else I read in 2008. In summary, with last year's figures in brackets:

total: 53 (60)
science fiction/fantasy: 30 (30)
translated from Swedish: 4 (4)
gave up reading: 2

In full:

• Nation, Terry Pratchett
  
• Black & Blue, Ian Rankin
  
• The Turing Test, Chris Beckett
  
• Enigma, Robert Harris
  
• The Big Over Easy, Jasper Fforde
  
• Fool Moon, Jim Butcher
  
• Storm Front, Jim Butcher
  
• Halting State, Charles Stross
  
• Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
  
• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
  
• The Locked Room, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
  
• Marooned in Real Time, Vernor Vinge
  
• The Peace War, Vernor Vinge
  
• Jingo, Terry Pratchett
  
• Invasive Procedures, Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
  
• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  
• Smoke & Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
  
• His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik
  
• Coyote Frontier, Allen Steele
  
• Coyote Rising, Allen Steele
  
• Empire, Orson Scott Card
  
• Notes from a Big Country, Bill Bryson
  
• The First Rumpole Omnibus, John Mortimer
  
• Pied Piper, Nevil Shute
  
• Imperium, Robert Harris
  
• Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
  
• Saturn's Children, Charles Stross
  
• Keeper of Dreams, Orson Scott Card
  
• A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
  
• Wife to Charles II, Hilda Lewis
  
• Round Ireland with a Fridge, Tony Hawks
  
• I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
  
• Ireland: Awakening, by Edward Rutherfurd
  
• The Great Siege: Malta 1565, Ernle Bradford
  
• Snakehead, Anthony Horowitz
  
• The Digital Plague, Jeff Somers
  
• Simon and the Oaks, Marianne Fredriksson
  
• Then and Now, W. Somerset Maugham
  
• Leviathan Rising, Jonathan Green
  
• Stardust, Neil Gaiman
  
• Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist
  
• Mister Monday, Garth Nix
  
• Looking for Jake & Other Stories, China Miéville
  
• Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
  
• Causing Chaos with Jeremy James, David Henry Wilson
  
• The Queen's Tiara, CJL Almqvist
  
• The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
  
• The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman
  
• Frankenstein Unbound, Brian Aldiss
  
• The Dilbert Future, Scott Adams
  
• Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel
  
• My Booky Wook, Russell Brand
  
• The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss