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.

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’.

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.

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.

1. The North York Moors
2. Life on Mars, starring the equally excellent John Simm and Philip Glenister (who, in a moment of brilliance, seems to have partly based his rough & ready copper on Brian Clough)
3. Battrick, the cricket management game
4. Kate Bush
5. Babies who sleep through the night

ALL STEMS FROM COVENT GARDEN

At the very opposite end of the scale, a local barber has decided that he really grab a piece of this upmarket “hairdressing” malarkey. Sadly, his sign doesn’t really do his bold offer any justice:

ANY HAIR
CUT ANY
STYLE £8

Further cheers as the first story we find there is a thigh-slapper about déjà vu:

One man had it so badly that he stopped watching TV because everything seemed to be a repeat, even the news, recalls psychologist Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds, U.K.

Yet when Moulin offered to help him, he adds, it was futile at first. The man “said there was no point visiting the clinic because he’d already been there.”

I supposed that it must be more to do with the need for the head to feel as though it’s vertical, but this is completely wrong: the head ends up at a more severe angle than otherwise. I think it must be two things.

First, it’s about keeping your weight above your feet, reducing the likelihood of trying to maintain an impossible angle and slipping off entirely.

Second, once you lean your whole trunk over, you can’t correct: you’re committed, and you might just as likely overcompensate and fall over the other way. With hips out one side and head the other, you can perform that recognisable finessing wobble until you’ve recovered fully.

Me, I cheated. The dog, on a retractable lead, had already crossed, and was ahead and to my right. Fixing the lead and giving a sharp tug pulled me back upright and on over the bridge. Good dog, as I effused afterwards, to her bewilderment.

I had thought that this would mean that updates will be non-existent. Now I think that, perhaps, updates were virtually non-existent anyway from London, so you might get something resembling normal service for a few days.

The various evils of the smoke (greyness, too much coffee, too much dirt, lack of horizons, illness) seem to be slowly dropping away. More than anything else, here there seems to be more time: time to unwind, think, eat, sleep.

London, I fear, eats time: not just hours, but whole months and years.