Quod petis, hic est, Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus
It really is the dog days of summer. Everything’s slow, difficult, all minds are elsewhere.
In one carriage of the train this morning, I saw people reading travel guides to Prague, Brazil, New York, Guatemala, Greece, Australia.
Large pans of East Anglia are reclaimed land. Reclaimed from the sea, that is, during one of the technological expansions of the last couple of thousand years. This has several important consequences, most of which involving it being flat, dull, wet and salty.
Furthermore, like the Netherlands, there’s a permanent disquieting air of impending disaster, waiting for the next big spring tide that might, just might, be the one that breaches the sea defences. Talk long enough with an older local where I grew up, and two topics are bound to come up: the last big flood (”see that mark on the wall? That’s where it came up to”), and the state of the sea walls, which are always bad. Even when they’ve just been rebuilt, someone’s projection will be already showing that they won’t be high enough to protect against the really big one.
That’s why it’s so brilliantly counterintuitive that, almost exactly opposite where I grew up, they’ve smashed down the sea wall and reflooded the land. I’ve written before about this particularly odd island, and there is, for me, a satisfying rightness about the idea of returning it, at least partly, under the sea. Perhaps it appeals to my submarine soul.
No time to rant about the lingering death of the beautiful game during this World-Weary Cup (note to self: I need a holiday). However, I’m darkly gratified to see that an intemperate old grouch of mine on the football is by far the most popular post on this site this month.
As ever, I am glad to be of public service, even if it is just providing an echo chamber for howls of frustrated boredom.
Here in the city, it’s nice to get updates on life outside the ant colony. Now supplementing my doses of life in the deep north I’m hearing regularly from old friend Paul who’s finally followed his manifest destiny and set up a smallholding in South Wales.
Today’s lesson (a link pushed my way by Paul): bees.
Shelter — In nature, the honey bee uses a number of natural cavities to build their brood nest. The term “Bee Tree” was once common. It referred to a tree that had a colony/swarm of bees living in it. The reason we can keep bees is because honey bees will adapt to man made hives for shelter.
Comment spam is getting interesting again. I’ve been receiving some lovely comments from, among others, Bob Dylan, Stewart Granger, Harry Houdini and Erich Weiss (hm…), Charles Dodgson and Eric Clapton, all of whom seem to have developed a late interest in MP3 files. My favourite must be this from a novelist who knew all about publishing under assumed names, George Eliot:
I used to use a program called Cool Edit to do this kind of work as well as other audio editing things. I’m not even sure if it’s around anymore. This was a long time ago.
If Our George was using it, it surely must have been a venerable piece of software.
Woken by a loud bang at about five this morning. Not much noise followed, making it the more mysterious.
Some members of the household, watching the morning news, excitably suggested that the cause was “a shooting in South London”. Spot me the morning where there hasn’t been a shooting in South London.
All, or most, was revealed when, on the way in to work, I walked past a Routemaster bus being hauled up onto a recovery vehicle. The road was covered in what looked like fine mulch: in fact it was sawdust that had been soaking up petrol for the last couple of hours. Some the inside of the bus was burnt out, seats blackened, parts of the frame poking through like broken bones. Uncomfortable memories of last summer, buses and sirens. Funny how the sunshine brings out memories that had been carefully furled away, like sunflowers.
The medical students out on their rag week were collecting for the RNLI. Everyone, I suppose, has a cause for which they will turn around in a crowd and fight their way back in order to put money in the bucket. For me, it’s the lifeboats.
I grew up in a town with a lifeboat station (it housed an Atlantic, a rigid self-righting inflatable capable of 35 knots). For anyone who has lived close to a lifeboat, or who has known people who work at sea, supporting the lifeboats feels as normal as paying for your milk.
Part of the unrefusable call of the lifeboats comes from an awareness of the never-ending cruelty of the sea, its protean capacity for putting you in trouble. Part comes from the absolute impossibility of reading about the activities of the lifeboats with a dry eye (if you are feeling sturdy, remind yourself of the Wells and Penlee disasters. Part comes from the fact that the lifeboat service is a charity more or less because you could not pay people to risk their lives in this way: it is the sort of sacrifice that must, it seems, be made freely.
For me, I suppose, the RNLI consists of moments that cast a shadow, a horror over the heart. Local men racing down the High Street in answer to “the shout”. The coastguard helicopter clattering low above the river in assistance. The line “For those in peril on the sea”. Simply reading the phrase “lost with all hands” in a history is enough to unman me.
The very worst thing, though, is the maroons. You have to understand that though the water is pretty quiet, you do get used to sporadic unexpected noises. The river I grew up on knows foghorns and klaxons (the timber ships use them to call back the crew before setting sail, which I used to fear as the four-minute warning). On top of this, the yacht clubs along the town front still use cannon to start and finish races. And, across the way, as I’ve mentioned previously, the ministry of defence would occasionally blow something up.
The only noise that stops you in your tracks, though, is two muted pops, the maroons going up. Locals cast their eyes off to the east, over the lifeboat station, squinting for two woolly purple bursts of smoke hanging low in the sky, calling the crew in.
When the RNLI were able to equip the crew with pagers, for a short while they stopped sending up maroons, reckoning it an unnecessary cost. They were very soon reinstated at the insistence of the locals. Of course it is a tremendous instance of keeping the work of the lifeboats visible, and fundraising suffered without it. I, however, like to think of it as a shout to the whole community, a call for their collective willpower to send the lifeboat through the swell and, more importantly, bring it back again.
Locals don’t tend to think about the sailors in distress, funny as that seems. Every ounce of concern is directed towards the lifeboatmen. No seaside community wants its own entry in the famous history, its own collection of RNLI medals, its own stories of sons following dead fathers out on the boats, its own reputation for courage. It wants the lifeboat back in its shed, where it belongs, and the men, still in their oilskins, in the pub, raising their glasses to another easy shout.
Did I mention Boris Johnson’s recent inspired run of lunacy? I think I did.
More inspired Borisery:
Piece written for an Italian paper about the elections…
Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial paper
Boris says:
“Why not bung it on the blog to show I am alive?
Yesterday we all climbed Vesuvius!”
[Ed: With our apologies as we have now been asked to remove this piece from the site]
And now this charity football match escapade:
But the crowd’s favourite sounded a note of caution when he said his preparation for the match had been entirely mental. “I haven’t played since I was 18.”
After the final whistle, Boris, lager in hand, said: “There was no malice in my actions. I was going for the ball with my head, which I understand is a legitimate move.
Utterly magnicficent, and yet more evidence that Boris has simply wandered, confused, out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.
An awe-inspiring find comes down the email pipe: The Baim Collection.
The Baim Collection Limited owns and controls all of the copyright works of the late Harold Baim.
Harold Baim was a prolific producer of short films from 1946 to 1983.
There are over one hundred 35mm short films in the collection originally made for release in the British cinema and a couple of feature films. Nearly all of the surviving films are in colour and more than fifty of the titles are available on BETA SP tape.
And what films! Everything from travelogue (such as The English Riviera featuring this beautiful still of Sheila van Damm opening the boot of her Sunbeam) through animal films (the most appealing being ) via short documentaries about printers, wallpaper manufacturing, strippers (no, not wallpaper strippers) and quite honestly who knows what else.
Everywhere you go the eye is drawn to a new gem. Do try Telly Savalas Looks at Aberdeen, and in particular this lovely shot of the car park at Aberdeen airport. Or what, I ask you, is wrong with Pete Murray Takes You to Coventry.
Find of finds, for me, is Baim’s sole feature, 1963’s Cool Mikado, a swinging version of the comic operetta directed by Michael Winner and featuring Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Lionel Blair and his dancers, Mike and Bernie Winters, Pete Murray (yes!) and Stubby Kaye. I have found my new project in tracking down a viewable copy. Wish me luck.
Update: The nice man at the Baim Collection points out that there is some VHS stock of The Cool Mikado is still available from Amazon. When this is exhausted, he will investigate a DVD version, as he is for other Baim titles. Do write to him with encouragement if there’s anything in the collection you would buy.
Very much to my pleasure yesterday I was served in a shop by a Septimus. It set me wondering what the rules for numerical names really are, specifically:
Father and son time in the park yesterday was enlivened by the overwhelming amount of play going on everywhere. Every twenty yards a little kickabout was going on, underneath a sky bright with frisbees and tennis balls. A raucous scratch game of rounders (Peckham rules, which is to say very few that I could make out) descended into fits of laughter every couple of minutes as someone slipped, dropped or ran in circles.
Most notably, from where we were sitting, I could see half a dozen small groups playing cricket, an obvious carryover from last year’s Ashes. A group of under tens played the unpredictable bounce with steely concentration. A dad bowled endless long hops to his straight-driving son. If we had been looking to fill out all the stereotypes, there would have been an asian father slowly unveiling the mysteries of spin to his sons. They were, in fact, off to my right, under a chestnut tree.
The only thing I couldn’t spot was a Flintoff Flame. The bats and balls were all cheap and cheerful, and I’m very glad.
On Sunday, after a gruelling but very entertaining bout of football (our Italian-ornamented side won, accompanied by many on-field shouts of “Che bella!”), one of the English contingent piped up: “If I just ask this very quickly can you answer and pretend you didn’t hear it? Where can I get a ‘muscleman’ cooking apron?”
Well, quite. I feel the same about the below, so read quickly and pretend I didn’t say it:
The best blog in Britain, I fear, is Boris Bloody Johnson’s. The evidence:
Boris fell off his bicycle on his way to the House of Commons yesterday afternoon and was taken to hospital to have his injured arm checked out.
His bicycle is in a bad state of repair but Boris himself is much better now and surprised at all the attention this minor injury is receiving. “Lord help us all!” he said, upon news that his fall had made it to national radio news this morning.
Lord help us all!
I’ve never had a problem mixing fiction and reality. Fiction is made-up, reality is mostly true, and everything in between is what-you-will. What, I ask you, could be easier?
The only points of confusion I ever knowingly encounter are where I find myself looking at something I know to be real only to be overwhelmed by the sensation that it belongs to a fiction somewhere. This is the Ffordian phenomenon of pagerunners with which the Deep North has so much fun, only relating to things not characters.
Today I’ve been experiencing the confusion with the universally derided launch of the “British FBI” SOCA, a crimebusting initiative that looks and feels exactly like the launch of a new primetime drama.
Everything from the foolishly jaunty acronym to the ersatz governmental logo shouts that this is an exercise in trying to look like a cool version of a government agency, probably involving lots of mod coats, moodily lit corridors and cod jargon. Which, I suppose, it is. A real agency that is trying to look as exciting as fictional versions of real governmental agencies.
This is government policy based on watching too much Spooks.
I blame my increasing confusion on the BBC’s enthusiastic adoption of fake websites as teasers for upcoming series (such as Doctor Who). I did scroll to the bottom of the SOCA website looking for the tell-tale disclaimer, and when I couldn’t find it concluded that Auntie was just upping the ante.
My little son came to see his daddy playing park football for the first time last weekend. He loved it of course, with all of its sound & fury, running, jumping, falling over in the mud.
He watched, saucer-eyed and squealing, as I did my once-a-game charge up the left wing, cutting inside to smash the ball against the post. Trouble is, he enjoyed it just as much when I tracked back, and in trying to block a cross from the right, only sliced it into my own net.
Oh my son, how hard I work to prepare you for the troubles of the world! I hope one day you will thank me, or at least have the grace not to laugh out loud.
Goodbye to Stanislaw Lem, the Polish giant of science fiction, who died this week.
One of the things that made Lem a genuinely interesting writer was that, despite including a great deal of gently satirical ’space travel’ fare in his output (particularly the Ijon Tichy stories), he didn’t really see himself as doing science fiction.
Reading Lem in English was always a curious experience. Whole books are predicated on fecund streams of puns, portmanteau words and neologisms. He was fortunate in his translators, but the suspicion always lingered in the mind, a very Lem-like suspicion, that perhaps there was no Polish original, and that the translation was a free-flying construct boiling out from the mind of the biggest computer in the world.
But Lem was real, despite being denounced to the FBI by the increasingly paranoid Philip K. Dick as being a collective of communist writers aiming to subvert the USA.
Lem was also second only to Borges in his creation of imaginary books. I recall my surprise on finally reading Solaris and finding that much of it is a survey of various (invented) books. There ought to be a term for this tendency: bibliofantasism? What’s unarguable is that a list of books invented by Lem would be almost as interesting as his books themselves.
My friend Paul, who introduced me to Lem’s work, sent me through this typically mad and maddening tribute, culled from Lem’s own Cyberiad:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
A mention in dispatches, by the way, for anyone who can explain the title of this post.
It wasn’t quite the same as the “were-you-watching-THAT?” intensity of last summer’s Ashes, but this morning’s end of the Test series in India was sumptuously improbable for any follower of English cricket.
The 4.30am GMT starts have meant that many of us having been living the last few days in split-screen fashion: at 6.30am, as I’m woken up, I get to see the lunchtime score. Then I get to follow the afternoon session on the radio as I breakfast and travel into work. Finally, Cricinfo and Guardian Unlimited’s infamous over-by-over coverage keep me company while I sift email and get on with the working day.
This morning was all about whether England’s rag, tag and bobtail bunch of debutants and one old county pro could force a series-drawing result against India’s justifiably proud batting line up (Dravid, Sehwag, Tendulkar and all).
The consensus yesterday had been that England could nick the win, but only as the result of hard slog deep into the final session of the series. Astonishingly, it all happened in the time between finishing my breakfast and finishing my train minute train into London Bridge.
I was reminded of the time I tried to explain cricket to a German housemate. It happened to be South Africa’s tour here in 1994, when Devon ‘You guys are history’ Malcolm blasted the tourists away in 50 overs. “Hm,” commented Jurg, “I thought this game was slow”. I bit my lip.
You can read the glorious details for yourself, but treasure this moment, 37 year-old county twirler Shaun Udal removing the revered Sachin Tendulkar to speed England on their way to a daftly thrilling win. Udal took 4-14.
You can retire now, Shaun. It can’t get any better.
Update: As has been pointed out, the story of Andrew Flintoff playing Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ to inspire his side during the lunch interval was exclusively reported this morning to seemingly every paper in the world. Given Monty Panesar’s troubles locating the ball, it’s a surprise he didn’t choose ‘The One on the Right is on the Left’.
An artefact of running a blog that is never apparent to most readers is the phenomenon of visitors commenting on old posts. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it is a common occurrence, and it always brings me up short.
To me, looking at my old posts are an indulgent excavation, too frequently a surprise for me to feel entirely comfortable about the state of my memory, but at least quite commonly a pleasant surprise. For the most part, any sentimental journeys I make into the archives are prompted by someone wandering past and dropping in a comment on some (to me) long-forgotten post. It’s always nice to be reminded that, once written, the words are not dead, even if they seem irretrievably distant from me-now. To whoever reads something you’ve written for the first time, the dialogue is taking place now, this very alive moment.
And so we get the curious encounter of some passing web traveller now with the ghost of me two years ago. Sometimes, as in this exchange on stone-sucking, it’s a Note & Query that can happily take place over the span of years. Sometimes, as in this shared journey back to beginnings, returning to the past feels very appropriate.
On other occasions, as with this ongoing and increasingly Byzantine thread on academic conferences spam, I feel as though it would be rude of me to step back in with my casual opinion when so many people feel so much more strongly about than me.
Best of the lot, the comment that asks or offers no explanation, but quickly sketches a picture of a place where, frankly, I’m very happy not to be.
No, not how to beat spam, Beat spam.
I’ve been noticing, after a large clearout of the old spam comments folder, a marked increase in the quality of the junk coming in. A large amount at the moment seems to be created by throwing together short phrases of random dictionary words, obviously in an attempt to circumvent analysis. What’s nice is that, while there’s an infinitessimal chance of creating real meaning this way, the word patterns produced often take on the cadences of real English, producing a pleasant illusion of literal meaning in the obvious gibberish.
To be honest, it makes me think of a lot of the incandescently incomprehensible poetry I encountered around university arts departments when I was in the USA. Like listening to beat poets ranting from behind a closed door: it sounds as though it probably makes sense, though you’d be hard pushed to say what it is.
I call this one ‘Increase your performance’:
Mint fiat bakery as oaks
Hopefully list interconnecting tremor potting
Scribbled saucepan crutch Catholicism
Weight opened, humiliated wariness.
[goes on for another 12 stanzas]
Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of the Tower of Babel, as posted on the just-found blog of the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. You may wish to follow up with Kircher’s sketch demonstrating exactly why the tower couldn’t have reached the moon (it would have been so large that it would have tipped the Earth out of balance.
The Kircherblog, in the spirit of the man, covers everything from Kircher’s own notorious cat piano to feral children (a topic of interest to Kircher because of the chance they might spontaneously speak the original Adamic language) to buildings made out of trees and shaped as elephants.
Sometimes I still love the internet as a child loves its favourite bear. This is why.
I’m horribly aware that I’m not posting much here again, as the parcels of time I have to hand tend to be small right now. So, the last resort of the harrassed blogger, I resort to lists. Here are five things that have been giving me great joy over the last few weeks: