Pet seminary

The Boy's fish has moved house and location. His name is Jimmy, though to preserve this blog's tradition of anonymity I should maybe refer to him as the Fish.

The Fish (or Jimmy) used to live in a rectangular tank in the Boy's room; now he has moved into a bowl in the living room, giving him (I calculate, having googled how to work out the volume of a sphere) an extra 800 cubic cm.

I have a sneaking suspicion that bringing him more into the family area is a cunning means of making him our responsibility. Which may not be wise. The pets of Ben to date have been:

• Some goldfish when I was about five. Forget what happened to them, or how many there were.
• Owly. Guinea pig, inherited from neighbours when they moved. Foully murdered one day by neighbour-across-the-road's champion ratter, who couldn't understand what the fuss was about. Owly was buried with full honours and a verse of the National Anthem.
  
• Huffles, Susie, Blackie and Ginger. Guinea pigs. Huffles and Susie were purchased with blood money donated by champion ratter's owner. Huffles (mine) was a light brown abyssinian with fur in tufts; Susie (my sister's) was smooth haired with patches of brown and black and white. Huffles turned out to be not rodento intacto when she came from the shop (or we'd have required a discount) and before long turned out the other two whose names were bestowed on them for not entirely impenetrable reasons. The four of them were eventually sold on before we moved to Bangladesh in 1977. Because I never saw them go I still have the occasional fantasy that they may be alive ...
• Peter, née Genevieve. Guinea pig, very elderly but not so elderly he couldn't have his way with Ginger before pegging it. The ambiguity over his name is because he was acquired from an elderly friend of my grandmother who gave him his birth name. Honestly! Even I, aged 10, could tell at one look that Genevieve was not really applicable so a hasty renaming was in order. Was told he had died in his sleep. In fact my father had gone in to feed the animals one morning and found maggots crawling in Peter's flesh, so zotted him on the head. My father forgot he had never actually told me this, hence the slightly traumatising conversation many years later that began "Do you remember that guinea pig of yours that I killed?"
• UPDATE: Apparently it wasn't an elderly friend of my grandmother, it was her doctor (military), making the failure to recognise the fundamental Peter/Genevieve dichotomy even more baffling.
  
• Piglet. Guinea pig. Lovechild of Peter and Ginger. Always sickly, didn't last long.
• Tass. Dog. Domesticated Bangladeshi pye dog, to be precise; brown/ginger, short haired, with pointy ears and curly tail typical of the breed (though the ears flopped down at the top; he probably had a bit of European ancestry). Acquired from fellow ex-pats moving back to Blighty. Got his name because as a puppy he escaped from the Soviet Embassy (YES REALLY) which might explain his constant breaks for freedom whenever the gate was opened, to fight everything on four feet within a half mile radius. He never really twigged that he now had the diplomatic and military protection of the free West. On second thoughts, if he wasn't fighting with it then he was mating with it, so maybe he did. You could follow his progress around the suburbs by the sound of furious barking. Sadly, his loose ways proved his downfall and he died of a dose of canine clap one summer while we were in England.
• Bruno. Cat. Acquired with our house in 1984 (strangely from the same original owners of Owly's murderer, 11 years earlier; the army throws up coincidences like that), died of respectable old age in 1998 after a further two house moves. Or rather: euthenased with dignity in the vet's surgery, though I gather a close relative had to be talked out of taking cat and rifle on the long walk to the end of the garden.
  

So there you have it. A sad tale of premature death or being sold; only Bruno had everything mostly his own way but what would you expect of the species? Jimmy should watch out.

Oxford Lights

I have to tread carefully here because you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get a day pass to get on set. (Which fact I think I am allowed to disclose.) Anyway ...

• There is a film currently being filmed in Oxford, based on the first volume of a children's fantasy trilogy set in multiple alternate worlds. Atheism and the death of God play a small part in the plot.
• Ly- The young heroine is indeed played by a young girl. Panta- Her good metamorphic friend is occasionally played for shooting purposes by a stuffed cat. (For purposes of the part the girl has to look like she shares the DNA of Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, which she could do. Well, she comes closer than Keira Knightley in last year's Pride and Prejudice, whom we had to believe shares the DNA of Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn. Nah.)
• Her attic bedroom looks atticy and bedroomy.
• Unless it ends up on the cutting room floor, at one point a cat runs down a stone passage. As that's all I saw being filmed, I'll be very cross if it does end up on the cutting room floor.

And there you have it. The inside goss on next year's blockbuster, no less.

Never a frown

I enjoy listening to Wogan on the morning drive in but I wish someone would tell him there's one joke that's been done to death. Yes, Tel, thanks, we all know that the names of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the Stranglers's greatest hits are very similar. We don't need the joke every time you play it.

Anyway, one is a blatant advertisement for recreational drug use and the other is a wistful, slightly offbeat ditty led by a harpsichord.

Chinese puzzle

You can have endless, if borderline xenophobic, fun speculating about our downstairs neighbours.

The downstairs flat is slightly smaller than ours, which has two bedrooms and a living room. They lack the living room. Generally one of the larger rooms has been their living room and the other the bedroom. The flat is rented out and tenants tend to be couples who stay for a couple of years before moving on. Once a baby was born there and once there was a couple with a primary school age girl, who were just waiting for a house sale to come through. Otherwise, two neighbours is the norm down below.

We currently have five. And a half.

Last year a couple of Chinese people moved in - maybe students, maybe not, dunno. One of them works at Tesco. Every now and then a white, middle aged man rolls up, parks his car smack in the middle of a space that would be wide enough for two cars parked side by side, and spends a night or nights before disappearing again.

Then a third Chinese girl joined the mix. All three now live in one of the large rooms - in fact, the smaller of the two, beneath the Boy's room - and sublet the other to another couple (white, mid-to-eastern European extraction). Mr McCantparkstraight still stays over from time to time, possibly packed into an overhead locker.

I'd be very surprised if the letting agency, or indeed the owner, knew of this arrangement. But we don't let on because they're clean and quiet, and if they were Al-Qaeda they would have blown us up long ago. My former neighbours have included the Chippy Scot, the Laughing Hyena (whose sense of humour tended to be tickled at about 2am) and Satan's very own double glazing salesman. So I don't complain.

Today they got a letter addressed to "The Legal Occupier". It's still sitting in the hallway because they've forgotten whose turn it is to be the legal one today.

Cisterns are doing it for themselves

Came home last night to find Best Beloved, an open DIY manual and the toilet all locked in a dynamic tableau of Woman Against the Cistern (that Won’t Stop Flushing). We could diagnose but not fix a blocked valve-or-summat in that plasticy thingy that the water disappears into. Therefore, the cistern wouldn't fill, therefore the ballcock wouldn't rise, therefore water kept pouring into it. So, the ballcock was jammed in the up position and a phone call first thing this morning ascertained that (of course) our plumbing insurance only covers emergency emergencies, not yer general sort of emergency. But at least we got pointed to an approved-hence-expensive plumber (first cheque drawn on the new joint account!) and two hours later we had a new summat. So we can’t complain.

“At least we get a new cistern out of it,” said the Boy before heading off to school, before the plumber’s arrival, with a naïve innocence that almost brings a tear to the eye. He still hasn’t twigged that he lives with a soldier’s son and a farmer’s daughter and we don’t do new – not when old, patched up and perfectly serviceable still works just fine.

Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem

We have normality, or what will become it. Until the start of this week, of course, normality has consisted of me going off to work every day leaving wife and child behind to enjoy their summer break. So maybe it’s more accurate to say we now have full unusuality, which after six and a half weeks (which is how long we’ve been married) will become the new normality.

Best Beloved started back at work on Monday and the Boy returns to school today. Three of us looking reasonably smart before 8 a.m. – a whole new experience. Once again I have to look carefully from left to right as the car crawls out of the drive, to dodge the swarms of children on bikes, and the roads are clogged. This is what life is all about.

What I don’t get is why the roads are clogged on the way to work. I can understand the roads leading to schools being fuller than usual but not the roads leading to far-flung high energy research establishments. We don’t have children here ... um ... do we? I suppose they have to send someone down to clean the pipes.

Plant crossing

Last month I mentioned the introduction of vegetable matter into my lunchtime rolls. Now I can no longer even mention my lunchtime rolls because it has become a lunchtime roll, singular. It still contains plants, though, and its missing twin has been replaced by a much bigger plant. In fact, a very juicy, tasty, roundish plant with red and yellow skin and a stalk and pips. But a plant none the less.

The new lunchtime ethos is "healthier, and less of it." Still, that's why we have vending machines. I will just have to work hard and tighten the belt until this evening.

Current music: Genesis, 'Return of the Giant Hogweed'

It looks like you're writing a letter ...

New (to me) PC installed over the weekend. Fun!

Its predecessor was acquired in January 2001 and ran Windows ME. It's no concidence that Windows ME was named after a painful and debilitating disease. After a couple of years it was upgraded to Windows 2000 by a passing teenage whizkid. It ran a little slower, but much, much better. Earlier this year I installed Nortons 2006 on it and it went from a little slower to massively slower.

So, a faster PC was always on the cards. The present one is only on loan, part and parcel of some freelance work that I've taken on, so will have to be given back eventually. But for the time being it has speed. It has Sophos. It has XP ... hmm. XP. Does exactly the same as 2000, but lets Microsoft take their insistence on micromanaging your computing experience to unprecedented levels, with a brutal blocky colour scheme reminiscent of Windows 3.1 (and why anyone would want to reminisce about that is beyond me).

Microsoft do so love to be helpful. They give you that bloody paperclip. They categorise the control panel so you can't find anything. But when it comes to being usefully helpful ...

I was working on some text in Word on the new PC. I instinctively pressed CTRL+W to get a word count, and the document closed itself. I was forgetting. You see, there are two keyboard shortcuts I always set up when I get a new copy of Word. One is the word count. This exists under the Tools menu, but I don't want to go to a menu everytime I want a word count (which is often). CTRL+W is the most cripplingly obvious keyboard shortcut imaginable to get a word count. So why doesn't Word have it? Why instead does it have two separate ways of closing a document? (Small prize for anyone who can tell me the other.)

The other is one that doesn't exist at all in Word, so I have to set it up as a macro. In fact it hasn't existed in any word processor I have ever used except Protext, which was an imperfection-free ASCII text editor on my old Amstrad PCW. Just about the most common typing error in the whole wide world is transposing two letters. eBn instead of Ben, natidisestablishmentarianism instead of antidisestablishmentarianism, etc. With Protext you could press two keys and swap the wrong letters the right way round. With any copy of Word that has passed through my hands, you can press ALT+A to do the same thing.

The micromanagers of Microsoft have set things up so that when I put my memory stick in the USB port, I am now told that there are a variety of file formats on this, what would I like to do? Strangely, I already knew what was on my own memory stick so I would like you to JUST OPEN THE F*&^ING THING like Windows 2000 did. See? They've found yet another way to be fascistically helpful. But, in all the years Word has been around, they still haven't got round to adding those two simple keystrokes.

Gah.

Statcounter tales

For some time I've been using Statcounter to get the details of who comes calling to this blog. Hence for instance I know that yesterday someone working at kuwait.army.mil (Headquarters Usaaisc) in New Jersey came here via a search for "naked girls". And, now I've written that, will probably come here again.

Lately Statcounter has done a deal with Google Analytics so that I can display a map of where everyone has come from. Except that the map stops at about 150 degrees W and 150 degrees E - in other words it leaves out a full 60 degrees of the planet, which includes the east coast of Australia, most of the Pacific and all of New Zealand. (And the west bit of Alaska, but who cares?)

So apologies to you eastern Aussies, Kiwis and Polynesians. Google doesn't care but I still think you're lovely.

Slicker Wicker

In what may not be the wisest casting decision ever, Nicolas Cage is starring in a high-budget American remake of low-budget seventies British classic The Wicker Man. Production costs for the original were helped by Christopher Lee giving his services for free. Cage’s paycheck is most likely higher.

I won’t spoil the original for anyone whose years are too tender to have seen it yet. Let’s just say it comes down to a clash between two inimical traditions, yer basic Christianity and a much older pagan religion as practiced on a remote Scottish island. The clash is embodied in the interaction of the two lead characters: slightly dour Scottish Presbyterian Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) and the local laird, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee in the role of his life; anyone who just associates him with Saruman has some unlearning to do). A key but underplayed-till-it’s-important plot point is the fact that Howie is a virgin.

This was where my heart really started to sink, because I read in the latest SFX that this point has been removed from the remake as there’s no way the director thought Middle America would buy the idea of Nicolas Cage knowing not the love of women. Logic would suggest that if your lead actor can’t convince your paying audience of a key aspect of his character’s persona, then you’ve cast the wrong actor. But what do I know.

You may be thinking – wow, a film that shows a clash between Christians and pagans, jeewhillickers, I haven’t seen one of those before. What makes it distinct is the sympathy shown to Howie’s character. No, he’s not the life and soul of the party (and is ribbed by his police colleagues for it) but he is a humbly steadfast, righteous man. He resists the seduction of Britt Ekland when his every molecule wants to go for it, and he quietly reconsecrates a deserted church with the help of a broken packing crate, giving his God what honour he can. Faced with insuperable odds, he simply sticks to doing right as he is best able, and trusts God to fill in the gaps. If he’s a tad puritanical then it’s through personal choice and conviction, not smug hypocrisy or any personal inadequacy.

The people of Summerisle are the dark side of the New Age, seemingly all fun-loving and in touch with nature, but don’t look too deep. Lord Summerisle is confident and assured throughout the movie (and he gets all the best lines*), right until the end when Howie asks him what will happen if his intended plan to revive the island’s fortunes (and it’s an extreme plan) doesn’t work. The mask slips; for just a moment there is no smile, no smugness, indeed it’s almost a snarl as Summerisle declares dogmatically that it will work. Then the smile and the poise are back, and the plot is led to its downbeat fulfilment.

But it stays with you. Howie is physically, instinctively afraid but his convictions never slip. Not once. Summerisle’s distinctly slipped.

A few years ago, Chocolat showed a clash between rules-based Christianity and allegedly free-spirited paganism in a small community. There, the pagan was in the minority. Thankfully, both sides were shown to be flawed, with the lead character just as enslaved by her own personal demons as the villagers were by the pointless rules of the church, and both parties are freed by the end of the feature. But critic Roger Ebert wondered if anyone would ever make "a film in which the glowing, life-affirming local Christians prevailed over glowering, prejudiced, puritan and bitter Druid worshippers".

The original Wicker Man is not that film, and as you watch the final denouement and the credits start to roll, you may think it never even came near. But once the credits are done and the ad break has come up, and you start to think back to the examples set by the characters, you realise that for all its emphatically unhappy ending it was pretty close.

How close the remake comes remains to be seen. Anyway, closeness is a relative term. Sometimes Mars is quite close to Earth.

---

[* An aghast Howie has just seen naked teenage girls jumping over a bonfire.

- Summerisle: They do love their divinity lessons.
- Howie: But they’re naked!
- Summerisle: Of course. It’s very dangerous to jump over a bonfire with your clothes on.]

Not the first to mention this, but ...

Today's BBC News website has two stories, one above the other:

• Cameron calls for emissions law
• Semen 'may fuel cervical cancer'

Snigger.

The missing jellicle

Yesterday I proposed that TS Eliot should have written a poem about the Varnhem Abbey cat. Now I gather his output has declined with very little new stuff published lately, so maybe he wouldn't feel up to it. Never one to back down from a self-imposed challenge, here's my own take.

Jagerbirl the Abbey Cat
Will always sit upon the mat
Or anything that’s smooth and flat
No matter what the sign may say

Then wanders round the stony tombs
Patrolling all the Abbey’s rooms
(Permission granted, one assumes)
To send the mice up Heaven’s way.

He’ll greet the guests as they come in
(A friendly purr is not a sin)
You’ll find him there day out, day in
Until the Lord may lead his flock home.

He gives his tail a friendly wave
And keeps a close eye on the nave
To see no one disturbs the grave
Of Birgir Jarl (who founded Stockholm).

Anyone got Lloyd Webber's phone number?

More reasons to love Sweden

How can you not love a country where the approved method of greeting someone even at a formal gathering is to say ‘hey’? Okay, it’s spelt ‘hej’ but ‘hey’ is how it’s pronounced. Meet more than two or three people at a time and you can start to feel like an extra from Friends.

If you want to be friendly and informal then it’s ‘hej hej’. However, if someone greets you with a ‘hej hej’ then it’s considered rude to respond with ‘vi har den Monkees’.

Best Beloved hails from Västergötland, an area between the two big lakes Vänern and Vättern. It’s highly fertile plainland, scattered excitingly by random collections of boulders deposited by the glaciers which you have to learn to ignore, or work around, or incorporate into your plans, and high-res grass crawls out of the ground at a thousand blades per inch, pushing your feet out of the way if you stand still for too long. In many ways it reminds me of the American Midwest, with fewer Americans (though a lot of classic American cars, tailfins and all). It’s wide and empty, with so much space that if you want to live somewhere then you build a house out of wood and plonk it down away from everyone else. The house is usually painted red or yellow and is immaculately kept, so that it could have been built last year or 100 years ago. It’s big sky country, and on a clear day when you learn to look past the midges the horizon looks a thousand miles away in any direction.

That’s on a clear day. Here’s our itinerary.

Wednesday
Rained. Toured the local area with Best Beloved, the Boy and my parents, getting accustomed to driving on the right. Looked at a nearby covered bridge and the stone circle at Askeberga. Also looked at a couple of churches. Proved by empirical testing and observation that a medium-sized pre-growth spurt 14-year-old male fits comfortably into the boot of a Skoda Octavia.


Then home to a sauna ... mmm. Sauna. My parents were staying in what was technically a B&B, though probably not a typical one, even by Swedish standards ...


... and there was an en suite sauna in their apartment. Ah-h-h-h-h-h. To draw in a deep breath, to feel 65-degree air trickling into your lungs and turning your insides into a molten mass, to feel your entire body liquefy and trickle down between the slats into a quivering puddle on the floor ... bliss.

Thursday
Rained harder. To Skara, with its mother cathedral (think Sweden’s Canterbury) ...

... and also its tower with dragons, knights and goblins crawling out of the windows ...



... which is of course a bank, hence the cashpoint at the bottom. Then on to the abbey at Varnhem. Asked the lady at the desk if there was somewhere sheltered we could eat our picnic; after a moment’s thought, she suggested the abbey vestry. Gosh. Ate our rolls surrounded by dead stone Swedes, a few yards away from the tomb of Birger Jarl. No picnic has ever been eaten more reverently.

Discovered that some cats will sit on the mat, regardless of what the sign says. If TS Eliot didn’t write about this cat, he should have. Jagerbirl the Abbey Cat ...


Friday
Rained less. Looked at some more churches, to the flagging delight of the youngest member of the party. I personally find it interesting to see somewhere like Forshem, which was an approved substitute for Jerusalem if you couldn’t manage a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or Husaby, which still has the spring where the first Christian king of Sweden was baptised. But I concede that others’ mileage may vary.

A fun feature of Husaby is the square hole in the wall that used to separate the altar area from the rest of the church. In the good old days, when the altar was completely screened off from the plebs in case they saw what the minister was doing, and the clergy were practically a separate species, the minister would preach his sermon standing in front of this hole so that the congregation could see his head and shoulders. A bit like very early TV. Or Punch and Judy.

Someone must have asked this guy why the church doesn't just give all its money to the poor, hence what he's doing with the two fingers of his right hand.

Then on to Läckö Slott, a castle on the shores of Vänern.

Something that’s very rare in this country – an intact castle that’s still pretty well a castle and not yet turned into a stately home. Though you can see why stately homes were invented. It must be horribly cold and draughty in the winter, and when it was inhabited the line between the pampered ruling classes and the servants must have been mighty thin, based more on perception than any material count. When the cold north wind blows, everyone shivers equally. On a reasonably warm summer's day, though, fascinating to wander around.

From the datestamp on the file, this must also have been the day we established that the Boy can still get his toe in his mouth. No recollection of how this came about.


Saturday
Rained a little. Boys’ day out. I want it on record (and both Best Beloved and my mother agree) that I was quite prepared to stay at home and help prepare for Sunday. But no, it was decreed that everyone with a Y-chromosome would head out and explore and leave the gels to their business, bless them. So the three of us matching that description wended our way up the Göta Canal, the shipping canal that makes it possibly for big boats to get from Gothenburg to Stockholm without going through the Baltic.

Threw the Boy a bone by playing minigolf and going for a swim in Vänern. Yes, I had a sauna and swam in a lake. I have done the Swedish experience. Also discovered what the TARDIS would look like if Doctor Who was Swedish. So there, David. (Sorry, in-joke – apologies to those who are Out.)


Sunday
Rained hard. Our second blessing – or, as far the local pastor seemed concerned, our first wedding. Well, we got a certificate out of it anyway. Married by a Bond villain, or someone who should be when your name is Eva Post. Interesting mix of high and low church – Eva crosses herself, sings her prayers, and wears a robe that could have been a present from my three year old nephew. A handdrawn cartoon of Noah’s Ark (I’m guessing) was surrounded by coloured handprints made by the church’s Sunday school. Sweet.

Funny, but a small little service with about 20 guests can still feel like a much larger one with about 150, especially if most of the 20 don’t speak English. At v1 in England we were firmly told to sit back, enjoy the day and let everyone else do the running around. At v2 in Sweden I was despatched to the shop after the service to buy more beer, and it got to the point where I wanted to staple my wife's dress to her chair just so that she could sit down and eat and not have to wait on elderly family members.

Still great fun. We read Efesiersbrevet ... I mean, Ephesians 3:14-21 together in Swedish, and I had carefully practiced my bit from v 20 onwards, marking the stresses and writing words like ‘önskningar’ out phonetically. Äran tillhör Gud, som kan göra mycket mer än vi någonsin skulle våga be eller ens drömma om ... The result was apparently quite lifelike – well, it drew some compliments anyway.

The organist had laid on a treat that we only partly expected. A friend of hers, a student called Victor, was training to be a countertenor and would we like him to sing for us ...? Sure, we said with a shrug. And there on the day was ... this person, long flowing hair, gorgeous chiffon scarf and high, powerful voice that filled the building with liquid melody. If Freddie Mercury and Dame Kiri te Kanawa had a child, it would be Victor.

Afterwards, my mother remarked that our weddings just keep getting better with each one she goes to.

Monday
Rained. Planned a visit to Karlsborg, the fortress on the shores of Vättern designed to be Sweden’s reserve capital if Stockholm ever fell. Got there to discover that the tourist season had ended the day before and Sweden was now closed for the winter. Looked round a fairly interesting military museum (for a given value of ‘interesting’) but that was it. Somehow – still not quite sure how – persuaded by the Boy to go for another lake swim. Realised as I was changing – and I’m really still not quite sure how this came about – that I was taking my clothes off next to a main road. Got revenge by looking at another church on the way home.

Tuesday
Not a drop of rain. Flew home.

Celebrated our first few wedding anniversaries standing in the passport queue at Heathrow. Not a trolley in sight once we were through. NTL server down when we got back to the flat. Välkommen till Storbrittanien!

Foreigners are funny because they're different

First there was the checkout girl at the supermarket, wearing a badge saying "Kopp av mig". Because of Sweden’s liberal attitude to the letter 'K' – which is modified depending on which vowel follows it, and the side of the bed you got out of that morning – it is pronounced 'shop av mig' and just means 'buy from me'. But I think my inner child was awoken by the sight of a girl wearing a badge apparently inviting you to cop, and after that it just kept regressing.

Like the road sign apparently showing a pair of buttocks and the word 'farthinder' – i.e. traffic calming. Sadly, I didn't take a photo but there's one here.

Or the popular chain of stores that will need some rebranding before it launches in the UK.



The brand of sponge fingers that you probably won’t see on the shelves soon ...


... and my personal favourite, the chocolate bar designed to appeal to small or regressed boys everywhere.


I'm back. Fuller report to follow soon.

Do you hear the drums, Osama?

I feel a bit like Noah resting safely in his ark while he sends the dove and the raven out to scout for dry land. I have been sitting comfortably here in the UK while various friends venture into foreign parts. They’ve all got back safely so it’s time to bite the bullet. Tomorrow we fly out to Sweden for wedding+honeymoon v2. Changed names will be registered in the land of Best Beloved’s birth, inlaws finally get to meet each other and for the first time since 1989 I will be driving a left-hand drive car on the wrong, i.e. the right side of the road. Should be fun. Oh, and another (slightly lower key) wedding blessing next Sunday, in Swedish. So by the end of August we will be about as married as you can get.

The airline says all flights are behaving as normal – possibly because al-Quaida have got them confused with the other SAS, possibly because Sweden hasn’t really done anything to upset the fundamentalists. Or indeed anyone, much, though it’s possible Napoleon was none too impressed when they poached one of his marshals and persuaded him to turn against his former Emperor, with the minor bribe of ‘why not be our king while you’re about it?’ A royal family descended from a French turncoat! (Is there another kind?) They’ll be descended from illegitimate Vikings living in the north of France next.

True, they gave us some of the ugliest cars on the road. They also gave us Abba, Ikea and a stealth warship, which is my particular favourite and way cooler than a Volvo. Anyway, Abba on its own makes up for just about everything. Would al-Quaida be half as unpleasant if they listened to 'Dancing Queen' or 'Super Trouper' every day? Let alone 'People Need Love' or 'He Is Your Brother'. Somehow I doubt it. Driven to the point of psychosis, yes. Unpleasant, no.

See you in a week.

It's like they'd never been away

I hadn't realised how great a part of my life they played. At one time I would get two or three every day. Either they stopped, or my ISP's spam filters got turned up, or something.

Whatever. Today I got my first Nigerian spam in ages.

This one is from one Amos, Esq, Advocate, AmosLaw Chambers, 12 plot Victoria ireland Lagos Nigeria (West Africa). (All sic. I particularly like the West Africa in brackets, just in case I think he's from one of the many other Nigerias scattered around our planet.) The non-existent sum he would like me to launder help him process is $10.5m, allegedly deposited with his firm by someone who then went and died in the Paris Concorde crash.

If anyone wants to send him their bank account details, drop me a line and I'll give you his email.

Or for more harmless fun, just read here.

Money flows towards the author

This is the basic definition of Yog’s Law (see here for origins of the term) and it should be carved on the heart of every author. You can rewrite it slightly to read ‘Money (such as it is) ...’ but otherwise it’s pretty sound. Publishers pay authors. Authors do not pay publishers. But there is a certain breed ...

They’re called vanity publishers, though many prefer ‘subsidy publishers’ as vanity is such a nasty word. You see their adverts everywhere if you look closely. Writers’ magazines, small ads. “Authors! Send us your manuscript! All categories considered for publication!” What will they do? They will take your manuscript and turn it into typeset pages (which any fool with InDesign or Quark can do at the drop of a mouse), bung a cover on it (ditto), pick a print run out of thin air and charge you for the privilege. You are left with a pile of unedited, uncritiqued, uneditorialised books that you are expected to shift all on your own and for which you have paid a great deal of money.

But they couch it in such reasonable terms: a joint venture, shared risk ... No. Wrong. Absolutely not. Don’t touch them. If they want your money, don’t go there.

Marketing? No, your problem. Distribution? No, your problem. But you said my book would be available in Amazon and 100,000 bookshops around the world! Well, of course it is ... if they order it. Just don’t expect us to tell them of its existence. So how will they know to order it? Sorry, your problem.

And even if the bookshops do hear of it, chances of picking it up are slim. For every book that comes to them from a real publisher, they know that the publisher has put themselves on the line for it. The bookshop’s opinion may differ, but at least they know the publisher thinks the book is good and ought to sell. The publisher’s editor will have discussed it with the author and worked on making it as good as the publisher thinks it can be. It will have been copy edited, and proof read, and marketed, and distributed all at the publisher’s own expense. The publisher has reasonable grounds to think they will get all that expense back through sales. That’s quite a vote of confidence in the product.

What does getting a book from a vanity publisher say? It says the author thinks his manuscript is pretty good (duh!) and has more money than sense. Not a glowing recommendation.

Not that a bookshop won’t order a vanity publication, if you go in and ask them to. Hey, a sale’s a sale. But they won’t stock it.

It’s less of a problem (I think) over here than over there, i.e. the US, but there is a thriving industry of publishers that charge authors for the privilege of publishing their books, taking the money and running. There is also a related industry of agents who charge for the privilege of representing their clients or even just reading their manuscripts, stringing the poor saps along forever and never once actually making a sale. Except sometimes they ‘sell’ the book to a vanity press in which they have a share, and guess what, the author is stung yet again into putting some cash up front. And, unless they actively break the terms of their cleverly yet loosely worded contract, it’s all legal.

Sometimes authors can fight back ... and the happy tale of Atlanta Nights is well worth reading.

BOCTAOE, as Scott Adams would say. If your book is a pictorial history of Bury Street, Abingdon, from 1950 to 1960 then no commercial publisher will ever pick it up, and no bookstore outside Abingdon will sell it. And, you may say, what about someone like G.P. Taylor, who self-published Shadowmancer and is now a millionaire? Sometimes you need to pay for the publication of your own book.

Well – quite apart from the fact that on the basis of Shadowmancer, G.P. Taylor is a man who badly needs the services of a good editor, however well the book sold – the key is that term ‘self-published’. Nothing wrong with self-publishing. Nothing at all.

You walk into self-publishing with your eyes open, fully aware that you will come out the other end with a book product which is then your responsibility. Maybe you’ve written for a very specialised niche market, and know it; maybe you just can’t get a traditional publisher for your manuscript (and don’t get me started on the possible reasons for Shadowmancer not making it this way). A vanity publisher will lure you in with promises that never materialise, claiming to do all the jobs that a publisher should do, for a fee – and you’re lucky if the finished product is worth anything. A self-publishing outfit will print your books for you, and that’s it. They won’t even pretend to perform any other services, and they are completely up-front about the fact. With modern print-on-demand, you won’t even need to have a pile of books left over at the end (though unit costs may well be cheaper if you do). Firms like UPSO and lulu.com (not lulu.co.uk which is completely different) exist to facilitate the process.

If you can’t write, if you haven’t had it copy edited or proof read, then the text between the covers will probably still be rubbish; and unless you’re a good self-publicist, like Mr Taylor (and kudos to him), then the only buyers will be close friends and family who love you. But that’s your problem, and you will know it, and so will everyone else. No one has been lied to or ripped off.

All this has been on my mind quite recently with the thought that I might reissue my out-of-print work. Print on demand only – I won’t even try to get it into bookstores. And e-books. It’s just that every now and then I get a plaintive e-mail from someone who has read one of my in-print titles and wants to read more. So it shouldn’t be hard.

Maybe when some genius comes up with a clever way of getting more than 24 hours into a day. But watch this space.

Thin end of the veg

For the better part of twenty years I've made my own sandwiches or rolls for lunch. But lately, by the time I've reached the kitchen of a morning, I've found someone else has made them for me. Which is nice.

Now, I don't want to complain but today's offering distinctly had PLANTS in it. One roll had sliced red plants and the other had sliced green ones, both in addition to the regular filling. I think I'm still high on the vitamin C rush.

Some aspects of marriage will take more getting used to than others.

How it works, boys

It's been brought to my attention that the video clip (which I had no part in formulating) in the last post features a lot of the character Seven-of Nine. Well, that's Voyager in a nutshell.

The conversation at Paramount would have gone something like this.

- Studio President: "Well, we're midway through the projected run of the series, and ratings aren't what they could be. What fruit can we pluck from the hundred year old tree of science fictional excellence to stir into the heady brew that is Voyager?"

- Flunky 1: "How about a republic of scholars dedicated to preserving the scientific knowledge of mankind after the collapse of the galactic empire, saving the galaxy from 30,000 years of chaos and sowing the seeds of a new, even greater empire?"

- Flunky 2: "How about a tragically doomed experiment to augment the intelligence of a simpleton, raising him to the level of genius and beyond, only to save his life he has to revert to being a simpleton again?"

- Flunky 3: "How about a gorgeous babe in a tight one-piece?"

- President: "Darn, this one will cause me sleepless nights."

Then, once the decision had been made, there was a further crisis meeting over the exact level of gorgeousness for the new character - should it be unattainable perfection-type gorgeous, or just the drop-dead variety? Eventually they went for drop-dead based on the novelty factor, as Trekkies are just too used to unattainability in women to bat an eyelid.

Ooh, see me.

Definitely not the way to Amarillo

But fun anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTyjGuBuSe0

Have a good weekend!

Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la ...

Things I bet you never knew #8475

Beer mat collecting is called tegestology.

See http://www.britishbeermats.org.uk/

Some people might be rude at this point, but I'm a Dr Who fan and I live in a glass house.

UPDATE: Wikipedia reports that "There are many subcategories of tegestologists, including those who are solely interested in porcelain or other specific kinds of beermats." These are presumably ceramotegestologists.

This is what family life does for you

You scored as Maximus. After his family was murdered by the evil emperor Commodus, the great Roman general Maximus went into hiding to avoid Commodus's assassins. He became a gladiator, hoping to dominate the colosseum in order to one day get the chance of killing Commodus. Maximus is valiant, courageous, and dedicated. He wants nothing more than the chance to avenge his family, but his temper often gets the better of him.

Maximus		63%
James Bond, Agent 007		54%
Indiana Jones		50%
William Wallace		42%
The Amazing Spider-Man		38%
Neo, the "One"		38%
Batman, the Dark Knight		38%
Captain Jack Sparrow		33%
Lara Croft		33%
El Zorro		29%
The Terminator		25%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com
And the relevance to family life? Well, as you can see, I tied with 007 and they had to ask a tie breaker: "family is everything" or "the opposite sex find you irresistable". Tough call, but I went for the first one. I hope I don't have to prove this quite as often as Maximus did.

If you think this is obsessive, at least I don't study my own earwax with NMR.

Oh, all right

The deal with Hello! magazine seems to have fallen through - seems they mistook us for Ant & Dec, who apparently got married on the same day, or something. So anyway, courtesy of m'colleague Sue, here in all our finery is ... us.

As I was going to St Ives

So there we were, parked in a layby on the high ground beyond Penzance. It could have been the Mediterranean - a warm, sunny day with just enough breeze to keep things bearable. The sea was, I'm pretty sure, sparkling azure - not a phrase I ever thought I would use, but it seems to fit. Below us we could see almost the entire expanse of the bay from the Lizard round to Penzance and beyond, punctuated by the dark mound of St Michael's Mount. We ate our sandwiches as we sat in the car, a mechanical marvel that obeys my every reasonable command and burns fossil fuel to transport us from A to B in air conditioned comfort.

We were just down the road from Chysauster, an Iron Age village that we had failed to locate due to the Iron Age road signs. But so what. We hadn't a care in the world.

What, I wondered, would the original Chysausterians have made of us? Could they have comprehended anything at all in our lives that we take for granted?

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a Golden Age, and Golden Ages end. I just wonder how close we are to the finish of this one.

Truro Cathedral is bent

See? See? It's bent, I tell you.

It was built in the 1880s but deliberately recalled the gothic perpendicular style of its medieval ancestors. So you get these magnificent soaring columns, rows of vertical lines that draw your eye upwards to heaven, converging in perspective on ...

Hang on, you think at this point, the altar's shifted. Except that it hasn't. The place was built with a deliberate kink in it. The east end is about six feet out of kilter.

The cathedral was apparently built on a relatively shoestring budget, on an irregularly shaped piece of land. Which the architect knew. But rather than revise the plan, or make it just small enough to, you know, fit the land available, he went ahead with a full sized cathedral and then squeezed it in. Like trying to stuff an oversized bag into an overhead locker, only bigger and with less danger that it will fall on your head.

But what the hey. A nice feature of the place is that it replaced the original (smaller) parish church, and rather than knock down the original church, they incorporated it - the original aisle of the church is now the north west side aisle of the cathedral. Nice touch. It's tranquil and like all good cathedrals it has lots of nooks and crannies and curtain walls and different levels so that it never really feels the same from any two angles. And you know God is at home, no doubt chuckling quietly to himself as yet another visitor lets their eyes travel inevitably down the aisle towards the altar ... and then a puzzled frown crosses their face.

The march of literacy

Where to start? Where to start ...

Wedding report

... but not much of one, actually, because I don't remember that much. I was told this would happen. To gather impressions you need to be an observer on the periphery, not the (slightly offset) centre of attention. I surprised myself by almost getting teary towards the end; isn't that meant to be the mother's job? But in my speech I thanked (and named) the people who had been especially kind to us and most especially to Best Beloved, and suddenly there was a lump where previously there had been none. And before that my uncle had made a little speech of his own, remembering when he had come to Northern Ireland and met me for the first time, and given me a bottle, and then gone downstairs to watch Dr Who. My uncle is pushing 60 and has a mental age of five, and he had spent most of the day before composing that offering. That got to me.

What else do I remember ...

• my bride alighting from her car and looking absolutely beautiful. And then getting back in again so the photographer could capture the moment.
• sweltering heat; temperatures inside my hired suit approaching the temperature inside Chernobyl shortly before it became world famous.
• wrath-of-God-type thunderstorm as we were having our drinks afterwards.
• a swirl of smiling faces, everyone apart from one whiny six year old (and who cares?) seeming to be happy and enjoying it; everyone there special to at least one of us and wishing us well.
• year 9 girl sitting on year 11 boy's bike and refusing to move until he offered to marry her. (Me: "It would make a lovely match." Her dad: "Well, for her, maybe ...")

And I think that's it. More may follow. I'd post some pictures, but the deal with Hello! magazine was pretty exclusive.

Things I learnt on honeymoon

1. Wedding rings tap against the gear stick when you change gear.
2. Without your glasses, "Eliot The Mill on the Floss" looks like "Enjoy The Mice on the Floor"
3. You don't miss writing. At all.
4. Cornish moths aren't like their Oxford brethren, choosing to stay on the wall when you turn the light off. They come and join you in bed.
5. Truro Cathedral is bent.
6. Leaving your wedding is like going backstage after a show. Weddings usually end when the couple go away. When you are the couple, you're in new untrodden territory.
7. One good turn gets most of the duvet.

Some, all or none of these may be elaborated on in future posts.

Conjugally matrimonified ...

... but not, as Gilbert & Sullivan would have had it, parsonified by a doctor of divinity who is located in this vicinity. No, it shall be a representative of the Crown that declares us able to indulge in the felicity of unbounded domesticity, in a little over 24 hours, at the Guildhall, followed by God’s stamp of approval at church. A certificate from the Queen followed by a thumbs-up from the creator deity: an interesting order of precedence but there you are.

It would be nice to think it’s all over bar the marriage bit. Yesterday I carelessly started on a list of final things to do today, writing on an A5 sheet. It is now a very cramped A5 sheet that needs transcribing to an A4. But apart from all that ...

This will probably be the last blog entry for a day or two so I thought I would share some thoughts on the topic of marriage.

It’s said to be on the rocks; marriage failure figures are frightening, though it’s never the same figure twice when I look. (Our photographer innocently referred to this as the wedding of Ben versus ... rather than Ben and ... Fortunately we don’t believe in omens.) Even if you factor out the marriages that were doomed from the start and should never have been entered into in the first place – shotgun marriages, knocked up teenagers, students, or just people who are so hopelessly romantic they don’t have a clue – I suspect the figures are still pretty high.

Some people don’t marry because they don’t believe in it, or can’t see the point of a piece of paper legalising the perfectly good relationship they have already. That’s their privilege and I won’t argue ... if they’re an adult with some life experience to back it up. (If on the other hand they’re a cynical teenager, especially one whose parents themselves are happily married – grow up, kid. I know you just want the fun of an adult relationship without the responsibility. Ain’t gonna happen.)

Some have been badly scorched by the whole experience, either to themselves or to someone close by. I thank the good Lord I haven't been, and I don’t have the right to lecture those who have.

And some people believe in it too strongly. This the weird bit. Marriage isn’t running down, as popular perception would have it. On the contrary, it has become elevated to ridiculous heights. This can have two outcomes. You can have a Victorian society where being married is so much the be-all and end-all that it excuses all kinds of hypocrisies and wrong doings behind the scenes. Or, you can have the present situation: “I just want it to be perfect.” Marriage is meant to mark the final perfection of a relationship, so people wait until they have that perfection ...

... and wait ...

... and wait ...

... probably don't find it with present partner, so ditch him/her for someone else ...

... and wait ...

So, you might fairly ask what we want ourselves. Well, Best Beloved is my closest friend, first and foremost – we wouldn’t be anywhere without that. She is something and someone to celebrate. She is worth the best I can give, and to me that means marriage – a defining moment at which we can say we began our lives together. And if I can be tediously religious for a moment, there’s no doubt in my mind that our relationship is a gift to us both from God – pure grace and generosity on his part, not deserved in the slightest on ours. Gifts from God are handled properly.

A couple I knew distantly had been cohabiting for years and then had a two year engagement. They couldn’t marry the year they got engaged because they’d already had their holiday, they couldn’t marry the next year because a big family holiday was already booked ... so they married the year after, and in the meantime just carried on as normal. Why couldn’t they just pop down to the registry office and do it there?

Because of course they wanted the show. Great Aunt Bertha had to be air lifted in from New Zealand. The bride had to glide down the aisle like a meringue Dalek while a small child had to be vat-bred to sprinkle rose petals in front of her. The couple had to be waved off by tearful relatives in a fairy tale coach pulled by white shire horses, and five generations of family and friends had to be treated to a sumptuous wedding feast of roast swan and truffles and a chocolate fountain while the Rolling Stones provided the music for the dance afterwards. Memories to last a lifetime, along with the loan repayments.

Well, yes, we too want to celebrate. Two lives are entwining; the wedding is the point at which they come together. Otherwise, our only anniversary would be furniture-moving-in day a couple of weeks ago, the hottest of the year at that point, which I’m more than ready to forget. Yes, thank you, I know the figures I mentioned earlier. You actually have a better chance of a happy marriage than of getting your first book published, and I managed that okay.

We decided in December that we wanted to marry and so we are. We’ve had a seven month engagement: most of that has been about getting the flat into decent order to have somewhere to live, and even our determinedly discount offer redecorating has probably cost more than the wedding. I will admit it does help being members of a church community, with many hero friends quietly helping out here and doing favours there. But we have the wedding we want – just the simple bringing together of two lives, surrounded by valued friends to witness the event, with not a shire horse or Dalek in sight, and the only meringue is in the pavlova. Honestly, what fool would want more?

The palace has a name!

Ridgeway House, apparently. Almost makes you want to move in, doesn't it? Sadly I will be otherwise occupied on Thursday 27th.

The line about "located in the superb grounds of ..." was presumably cut short for reasons of space. It should have finished: "... and only five feet away from a bolshie computer network company that doesn't appreciate the privilege of being witness to the cutting edge of modern structural design, but sod 'em because they're moving out next year anyway."

Was this what Flanders & Swann had in mind with their quip: "Architecture, said Hegel, is frozen music ... Donald Swann's music is often compared with defrosted architecture."

So close, so very close

The Internet Movie Database reports that Macaulay Culkin and his girlfriend were holidaying in Haifa when Lebanese rockets hit the town. Shame on you for thinking what I bet you just thought.

The couple have since returned to the US. "We went to the beach, and there were tons of jellyfish," said Culkin - a native of the continent that gave us the black widow, the rattlesnake and poison ivy - "so we figured that even the sea was dangerous."

Yes, Mac, the Middle East is basically out to get you. Maybe now you've gone, things will settle down.

Resistance is futile

Longer term readers might remember the Portacabin Palace being built in our backyard at work. Follow the link for a reminder.

And here it is in all its modern hideousity. They put a third row of blocks on, bricked up the ground floor, clamped sheeting to the first and second, and put on that eye catching corrugated metal half barrel roof, having presumably run out of tiles. They left the green plastic wrappings on, beneath the bricks and the sheeting. Someone with a surgically removed sense of taste might think it looks quite swish - but we've seen what's under the skin and we know better, don't we, children?

It does serve a purpose: the westering sun used to shine right into the kitchen and raise the temperature to furnace level after mid-afternoon. This now casts a shadow so we can admire it in the merely quite warm.

The frightening thing is, it's been built to expand. New modular extensions will be added on in forthcoming years. There's presumably a vertical limit, but in principle this could just keep growing horizontally like some architectural cancer until eventually the entire Harwell site has been assimilated. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is the future. Get used to bowing down now.

London No

The Boy was meant to go up the London Eye with a school party today. The best laid plans ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5190736.stm

Honestly. Git.

Norfolk and good

For some reason I’ve been thinking of weddings recently and I suddenly remembered one such that we went to a couple of years ago, in Norwich. It was at a relatively early stage in our relationship, and while I was phoning around B&Bs in darkest Norfolk I asked – hypothetically – if all the single rooms were sold out, did we feel brave and mature enough to risk sharing a twin room? Feeling was that yes, we did. As it turned out this wasn't an issue because two singles were found quite easily.

It was a lovely ceremony, reception was fun too, and the happy couple were waved off into the pouring October rain. We repaired to our B&B, kissed goodnight and chastely withdrew to our separate chambers. And as I unpacked, I had a sudden insight into how God likes to combine protection and a sense of humour.

I’d forgotten to pack my pyjamas.

A feminist eventually, and then a change of subject

Under the heading "This is why I'm still a feminist", Liz Williams cites a sickening story from Saturday's Guardian about a so-called honour killing in a Muslim family. A young woman was butchered for daring to fall in love with the wrong guy - right religion, wrong background. The Guardian tells us 'The Old Bailey heard the method was "barbaric"', raising the question of whether there's actually a nice way to do it.

But being a perversely minded male, and while being able to see where Liz is coming from, I immediately asked myself: why is that a feminist issue? Because surely pinning down anyone and multiply stabbing them in front of their infant nieces is horrendous, regardless of gender. But then I thought a bit wider. Women of all cultures have been downtrodden much more than men; therefore these legacy bigotries are clung onto much more tenaciously by many cultures and, yes, religions (or at least religious interpretations) than any distorted image of manhood. Battered wives outnumber battered husbands. Male babies are generally valued. Male circumcision is (probably) less painful and certainly less damaging than the female kind. Male rape victims are a distinct minority.

So, fun as it would be to proclaim self-righteously that "actually I'm an everyone-ist, I treat everyone equally", the sheer weight of precedence means this has to be a feminist issue. The law can proclaim equality, but cultures and mindsets only follow suit when hearts and minds are changed; when people are taught that because women are just as important as men, therefore and ipso facto these medieval hangovers cannot be right.

On a separate bugbear, this is why church and state should be two absolutely distinct entities, and the state should be on top. The state should not care whose sensibilities it offends or whose toes it treads on. The state should be able to say, I don't care what your culture is - if you live in me then you respect my citizens, you do not murder them.

Now, yes, a state can go mad and bad - we've all seen that in the past hundred years - and it can be up to religion, or religious people, to put up an opposition. The difference is, it's far easier to change a bad state than a bad religion. A state is in one place, a religion is global. The basis of a state is that it makes a few simple laws to enable the general prosperity and safety of its citizens. The basis of a religion is that it's no more than a halfway house between here and a better hereafter. So, putting the state first seems the safer bet. The state should tolerate any and all religions, and indeed give them equal protection and rights, up to the point where they transgress certain basic principles, whereupon the state comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

The question is really what those certain basic principles should be ... I also realise that yes, this would give my beloved Church of England exactly the same status as the Scientologists or the Cult of the Invisible Pink Unicorns. But hey, I'm ranting, not debating, and my God can wipe the floor with yours. Bring it on.

Fine apathetic absorber

That's an anagram of "Pirates of the Caribbean", by the way, as is "absorbent artifice heap". You can get "captains" out of it too, but the left over letters don't really make much sense.

Anyway, let's leave out the fact that the Flying Dutchman is a myth of the Cape of Good Hope, nowhere near the Caribbean. Pirates of The Caribbean has been watched and mostly enjoyed. It is however at least half an hour too long with inessential bits that could easily have been cut - the most obvious contender being the first quarter of the film. It badly lacks the narrative drive of the first movie, i.e. each scene leading on logically from one that has gone earlier and contributing to the story. All we needed was to get our heroes back on the Black Pearl; everything that happened beforehand was dispensable.

This first quarter also featured a gag which was repeated as a variant later on in the movie. This meant the repetition was a bit old, which is a shame because it was much funnier.

The bad (human) guy was suitably slimy and reptilian. Davy Jones was excellent, though never with the same calculated overacting that Barbossa had in the first one. A relatively minor character from the first one reappears halfway through to assume a much more important role, and though it carries on his story I didn't like what they did with him. In the first one he showed honour and courage; now they've just cheapened him.

By the end, I was quite frankly ready to give part three a miss ... except for the trick they pulled in the last thirty seconds, which suddenly means I'm really looking forward to it.

So, pretty good as sequels made for the sake of it go. Wiped the floor with the Matrix Redundant. Only 5/10 as good movies go generally, though.

Open letter to Abingdon Town Council

Dear Morons,

I suppose I should be grateful to you. Three reasons come reluctantly to mind.

1. Saturday is a day traditionally associated with lie-ins. Who knows how many man hours are frittered away by people snatching an extra couple of hours in bed at the end of a long week? Your inspired decision to commence road works with a pneumatic drill outside my house at 6.20 this morning will have led to a wave of increased productivity all along this road.
2. I have occasionally harboured the fantasy that I might be in some way psychically gifted. You know - able to send messages telepathically, move objects with my mind, that sort of thing. If this were true then the grieving widows of your work crew would now be having to identify their loved ones from the piles of ashes and occasional item of personal jewellery in the mortuary. You would also be having to explain to your insurers how the expensive equipment used has suddenly been reduced into piles of molten slag. So, clearly I am not a psychic - or at least not at a sufficiently advanced meta-operant level - and I thank you for clearing up any confusion.
3. The sensation of heart failure when I couldn't access my email, and thought you might have severed the cable, was equivalent to several hours of hard cardiovascular workout in the gym. Thankfully it seems to be the server's fault, not yours, since as you can see my web access is fine.

So all in all, hats off to you boys, and keep up the good work.

Insincerely,
Ben

No one's business but my own, really ...

The Boy managed to be born 14 years and 24 hours before our wedding day. As we'll probably have other things in mind on the exact anniversary, we had a birthday meal out at the Fox this evening.

The Fox thoughtfully sticks up current newspapers in the Gents, at eye level on the wall in front, for patrons to read while they stand and deliver. Sometimes it's the Telegraph; today it was the Mirror. Now, the Fox can't be held responsible for the adverts that the Mirror puts on its back page, but there's a time and a place to be asked in bold lettering: DO YOU HAVE AN ENDOWMENT SHORTFALL?

That's me, that is

Not everyone who reads this has met me. So to sum me up:



David, if you're interested then they have cricket leg pads amongst the accessories ...

Thunderbugs are go

I have a strange fondness for thunder bugs. I don't know why but of all the vast and mighty insect kingdom, they are probably the cutest. They're not poisonous, they don't bite and they don't buzz annoyingly. Okay, in humid weather they can swarm and get everywhere, and they itch as they make their ponderous way across your body. But they mean no harm. It's like someone shook a page of type and all the semicolons fell off. They just want to get back home.

I tried to do this as a table, but Firefox puts a massive space in front of it and Explorer puts a massive space in front of the whole post. (Added later: because, I now realise, I did the table in Dreamweaver which set it to 100% width. But I can't be bothered to re-do it now.) So here in straight text is my attitude towards our six legged friends.

Thunder bug

• Inside: will almost certainly live and let live, if it stays off me. Odds are shortened if it crawls across my monitor.
• Outside: ditto

Bee

• Inside: will probably help escape, but have been known to lose patience if bee is especially dense and resists rescue.
• Outside: be free, little brother, and make lots of honey.

Wasp

• Inside: will almost certainly swat. Not half as hard as they think they are: one good zonk and they're down. Hah!
• Outside: will watch warily. Fine if they eat dead caterpillars etc; less so if they go for my food.

Fly

• Inside: will almost certainly spray, 'cos it's easiest.
• Outside: ignore. There's too many of them.

Mosquito

• Inside: die you bastard, die die die. And there's another! Think you're hard enough? Do you? Bring it on!
• Outside: probably won't notice, unless I feel it settle on me.

Butterfly

• Inside: will almost certainly help it out.
• Outside: pretty!

Moth

• Inside: have become more tolerant in my old age; still uneasy with the big flappy kind, especially if I'm about to turn the light out.
• Outside: will probably be dark, so won't notice.

Daddy Longlegs

• Inside: urge to swat is generally overcome by pity at something so pathetic.
• Outside: plenty of room for us both.

Biologist J.B.S. Haldane is credited with remarking that if God exists, then to judge by his creation we can deduce he has "an inordinate fondness for beetles" because there's so many of them. He must love the thunder bugs, then.

It was a dark and stormy night ...

No, it wasn't Snoopy who first wrote this famous opening line, it was Edward Bulwer-Lytton in a novel written in 1830. Snoopy simply immortalised it and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has now been running annually since 1982. To enter, contestants are simply invited to write the opening lines of a thankfully imaginary novel, couched in good traditional Bulwer-Lyttonic prose.

Results for 2006 are now in.

Diamond no longer shines

Radio 2 is at this very moment playing Pink Floyd's "Shine on you crazy diamond", a song penned in tribute of Syd Barrett, who died (physically) today and (mentally) many, many years ago.

Except that, of course, Syd didn't write "Shine on you crazy diamond". Something he actually penned might have been a better idea. Couldn't go much wrong with "See Emily play" ...

And through it all ...

One of the more irritating aspects of the civil wedding process is the dire warning about including religious content of any, and I mean any kind.

Fr'instance, in your choice of readings they would look seriously askance at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee", for its line "if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death." Comes across suspiciously like a prayer, dunnit? However, Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" has the line "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines," but that's acceptable because it's a poetic way of talking about the sun. It took a phone call to the Senior Registrar to establish that we could have Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet," which isn't at all religious but is about, you know, a prophet. (Not the synthesiser, either.) I would love to see the looks if we wanted Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell," or anything by Genesis or Black Sabbath. Robbie Williams' "Angels" is acceptable because it's about his mum – so that’s our entrance music sorted, then. (Not really.)

I had always assumed this was some legal thing because religion was like grit in the wheels of the civil process and got in the way, possibly casting doubt and ambiguity on the proceedings. Not at all, it turns out: the reason is because it upsets the religious authorities, who don’t like the civil authorities muscling in on their privileges of marrying people.

This comes over as a little rich, as many people (e.g., to pluck a random sample out of thin air, us) only have a civil wedding in the first place because the religious authorities won't let us do it in church. For the religious authorities to then start whining ... Gaah.

Of course, it doesn't really upset them - not most of them. No one from our particular church would raise an eyebrow, and surely if you think that one of your guests will be offended by something then you simply don't invite them - but that doesn't work here because in principle any clergyman (or imam / rabbi / shaman / lama) could wander in off the street without invitation. In other words, the people most likely to be upset are the people who will deliberately go out of their way to gatecrash and be upset. Why exactly do we care what these people think?

But that's my usual irritation at irrationality, not because I feel hard done by. Friends who went through a similar civil+blessing process last year told us they wouldn't have done it any other way even if they could, and I see what they mean. Both services are extremely flexible and almost infinitely customisable to your precise wishes (homeopathic traces of religion aside), and having two just gives us all the more opportunity to include the songs, poems, passages etc that really mean something to us. Even if one particular relative by marriage has said he'll only do a reading if he gets a lectern like in Police Academy. Yes, it's shaping up to be a good day and no, we wouldn't do it any other way either.

What do you see?

Does this look like a little boy who is happy to be sitting on his daddy's knee?

Some random web browsing has taken me back to the eighties (which is not necessarily a bad thing) and Karel Fialka's "Hey Matthew" (which is ... hmm).

Karel Fialka had two hit songs that I can name, seven or eight years apart. For the second and more successful one he pressganged his little boy Matthew, who must have been about five at the time. The song involves the two of them sitting in front of the TV while Karel croons about television violence and Matthew looks more and more worried - "my psychotic daddy has made me wear this Spiderman outfit and is chanting at me about guns and bombs." He lightens up as the song progresses and even starts smiling, sometimes grooving to the music, having realised that the sooner he can humour daddy, the sooner he can get away from this hell. At one point they are joined by a woman who is either Mrs Fialka or an actress hired to represent her. I suspect the latter as she does nothing to stop this abuse beyond a vain attempt to grab the camera for herself. But it's Matthew's childhood that Karel has determined to blight and he makes sure the camera stays on the boy.

There is a lot of red in the Fialka household. Possibly for a reason.

Matt gets a word or two of his own in as the song progresses. In the first chorus he lists a random selection of 80s series he has apparently watched, even though shows like Dynasty and Dallas were on well after a five year old should have been in bed (and Airwolf was good). In the second he lists the professions he wants to be when he's older: turn down the sound and it looks like he's running through auditions for the various roles in the Junior Village People. One thing he conspicuously doesn't say is "I want to be like you, daddy." A tear wells in your eye at his last words, "It's all a game ... I hope ... I hope ..." Even now, his faith in his daddy is such that he thinks this was just recorded privately and will never be released publicly to a waiting nation. Oh Matthew, how wrong you were.

A web search on "Matthew Fialka" minus Karel gets four hits and they still refer to the song. A search for Matt Fialka gets nothing at all. He has either changed his name or is keeping a VERY low profile, possibly as a gaucho in deepest Patagonia.

"Hey Matthew" is to music as Stinking Bishop is to food: it's different, it's distinctive, you will certainly remember it, but it's still cheese. Watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THlJYix6r3g and enjoy. Or not.

I wish my friends wouldn't do this ...

... because then I have to do it too. Yes, it's more of those web tests that tell you so much yet so little about yourself.

For anyone who's ever wondered this about me ...

You Are a Boston Creme Donut

You have a tough exterior. No one wants to mess with you. But on the inside, you're a total pushover and completely soft. You're a traditionalist, and you don't change easily. You're likely to eat the same doughnut every morning, and pout if it's sold out.

What Donut Are You?

Sadly, quite perceptive. Next: Ben takes on the world ...




create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

This really is a little simplistic. I have, yes, been to North America. I have spent a week each in San Jose, Toronto and Boston, with day trips to San Francisco and Niagara Falls. I have stayed at least one night in St Louis, New York and Washington. I've changed planes at LAX and Philadelphia, and changed trains in Chicago en route from St Louis to NYC. But that hardly qualifies me as claiming the entire territory from the Mexican border to the North Pole, does it?

Likewise, the week I spent in Moscow and then-Leningrad hardly qualifies me as succeeding where Napoleon and Hitler failed (though I like to think I have succeeded against some of their other failings: reasonably non-inflated self-image, not started any wars ...).

But hey, it's fun.

And finally, web site of the day: http://www.huggableurns.com/. I really should be revising my will soon, what with impending matrimony (the Boy can't believe he isn't on it yet), so maybe ...

Still waiting for the jetpacks, though

A few years ago I was staying in a hotel and reading the little advice card they put out for guests. One of the items was: "in the event of a medical emergency, just call the doctor on this number - no STD."

So I bore that in mind for my planned activities that weekend.

This came to mind today as the department to which I am effectively seconded at work, the Advanced Technologies Group, has now become the Strategic Technologies Division. Snarf, sniggle, snort.

Speaking of advanced technologies, this flat's non-stop progression towards the Singularity continues unabated with my taking advantage of NTL's three-into-one bundling offer. I already had an NTL phone and broadband but now the unholy trinity has been completed with digital TV. The effects are already making themselves apparent. My usual televisual fare over dinner is a Simpsons I've seen a thousand times previously, or a Frasier I've seen once or twice - but this evening I watched a Malcolm in the Middle that I've only ever seen once before. Once! Can nothing halt this breakneck progress?

Ben: moderately gluttonous but not really lustful

The doctrine of Purgatory was invented by a micro-managing church that couldn't bear the thought of people's souls slipping out of its control just because they had died.

At least, that's what I will tell them when I get there, which apparently I am going to do.

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	Low
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Low
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very Low

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

I may also mention (when I get there) that Article XXII of the Church of England calls Purgatory "a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture; but rather repugnant to the word of God." On second thoughts, rather than risk making enemies I should probably check first: having reached Purgatory, can you slip back? Or is it like one of the guaranteed levels on Who Wants to be a Millionaire: you might not get any more but you won't get any less?

Let's hear it for grace.

Bambi on the shelf

"Shelves," Best Beloved has been saying ever since we learnt we would one day be living under the same roof. And, "Cupboards." And, "Shelves and cupboards."

"Can I get you a cup of cupboard? Would you like some shelf with that?"

Yesterday it changed to: "I get the impression you weren't expecting this many boxes."

You live and learn. My new family's furniture moved in over the weekend. An interesting experience. Why does dimensional transcendentalism only belong to the Time Lords? Couldn’t they at least license it out? I would even put up with the circles set into the walls. You could put things in them. Still, by the end of yesterday I could reach the sink and wash up breakfast, which was more than I could do that morning. Progress is being made. Also, there's plenty of walls where shelves and cupboards can go, the ceilings are practically unused apart from the lights, and we can always take up our freshly installed carpets and put some trapdoors in (though the flat downstairs may object).

So, worldly goods take up volume – that's one fact of life learnt from the last 48 hours. Another is that even if you take two technically identical go-carts, and their drivers both put pedal to the metal, and one driver is a 10-stone teenager and the other is Ben, then the go-cart with the 10-stone teenager will accelerate faster. I'm a pretty good driver; I also know about keeping close to the curves, steering into the skid and all that. So I can block – but let the little buggers past you and you eat their rubber for the rest of the session.

I don't know why go-carting is fun but it is. You go at a pace that would be maddeningly leisurely in a normal car, but it feels like the speed of sound. Your wrists ache like hell after a few minutes as you constantly hold the cart into its turn when it would really rather be Newtonian and keep going straight on. And let's not even think of the environmental implications. Maybe that's why a session costs £21. Carbon tax.

I had my stag do a few weeks ago but that was for grown-ups. I'm also a youth group leader and I consider it my duty to introduce young minds to as many concepts as I can that are legal, moral and age appropriate. So I thought I would have a youth stag do as well. Hence the go-carting at Oxford Stadium (a picture may follow) followed by dinner at Pizza Express. The party after us was a group of about 10 teen girls, just to show that it's not all testosterone and Y-chromosomes. Possibly a youth hen party?

Pizza Express introduced the lads to a real grown-up hen party, though, hosted by the Abingdon Mutton-Dressed-As-Lamb convention. 1920s flappers only really looked good in the 1920s and even then you had to have the figure for it, and I bet very few 1920s flappers had tattoos – at least, not like this lot. But the one whose dress was made of reflective yellow high-vis material certainly made a lasting impression, if only on the retinas.

We tried to think of an official term for youth stag. The only youthful stag we could think of was Bambi, but if I say I took a group of teenagers to a Bambi party, or refer to them as "my Bambis", I could well have strange looks cast at me and be stripped of my CRB-cleared status. So I think I'll end here.