The Importance of Retaining One’s Paperwork

New Year's Eve in the National Garden, Athens

I’ve just got home after a holiday over the festive period in Athens. The main reason to go was to give my Dark Lady a chance to go visit her mother and to give the aforementioned mother-in-law a chance to see how our Spawn is getting on. All things considered it was a great trip and Terminal 4 at Heahrow is a big improvement on the old Terminal 2. It would, of course, have been even better had Aegean Airlines not decided to move their flights from Stansted to Heathrow, but such is life. In the end, because of that we chose to fly with Olympic Air (the successor to Olympic Airways) and we had remarkably trouble free journeys in both directions.

Much as I like Greece and Greek culture (especially the food as served by my Dark Lady’s fearsome mother), there are one or two little niggles, one or two little details that seem insignificant at first and then irritate. These are neither large enough nor serious enough to damage my philhellenistic tendencies but they do act like a bucket of cold water in the face each time I am here to remind me- if the temperature, palm trees and different alphabet fail to do the job- that I am in a foreign country.

So what are these things that put such a dampener on my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent country. One is the Greek bureaucracy which is not the oxymoron it might seem to English prejudices. It is instead something utterly ferocious and as punctilious and authoritarian as to be a Whitehall mandarin’s wet dream, perhaps as a response to the pleasant laid-back attitude of most Greeks. Fortunately for me, my brushes with this dread beast have been few and on this visit none, save a protracted period or two standing outside the bank while my Dark Lady proceeded to wheel and deal with the family finances within. The reason I waited without was thanks to the bureaucracy of the banks and their insistence on a system of double doors that make it impossible to enter their premises while manhandling a child in a pushchair. This is supposedly a security feature, though I have yet to learn of any spate of toddler-related bank robberies. I think that they simply prefer to work without the noise of babies and their gurglings, whimperings and occasional screamings. As I was not going to leave our Spawn in his buggy outside alone, I waited there with him for a length of time determined by the large amount of paperwork required for my Dark Lady to do even the smallest thing in the bank.

However, the real annoyance on this visit is not Greek bureaucracy but rather Greek plumbing. It really is a mystery to me and is quite perplexing in a number of ways. The first is the inability of the pipes that lead from lavatories to deal with paper. They are perfectly capable of dealing with the solidity of anything that the human body might produce (and after airline food those productions can be quite solid) yet it is well known that even the tiniest wisp of something so insubstantial as toilet paper can cause a blockage. This is of course quite ridiculous, because toilet paper is designed to virtually dissolve when saturated with water and yet it is also quite true. Hence each lavatory has a tiny bin in which one can deposit one’s paper waste. This need to retain the paperwork from one’s lavatorial transactions might well be the hand of the Greek bureaucracy at work. I can certainly think of no other reason for the plumbing to be organised in this way.

Of course, were that the only idiosyncrasy of Greek plumbing, I might not be quite so grumpy every time I come out here. However, it is not. The phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness” is inscribed deeply on the Greek soul and they love to shower. This is not just my impression, but it is confirmed by that indispensible guide to all things Greek, The Xenophile’s Guide to the Greeks. It is surprising therefore that, considering the Greek love of showering, they have yet to invent (or even borrow from their European neighbours) the idea of a fixed shower head, one which does not have to be held in the hand for the duration of the shower.

How can they not know the sheer joy of just standing there and feeling the rivulets of water falling onto them like warm rain. Moreover, how can the sheer practicality of things have eluded them; trying to hold the shampoo bottle, squirt some of the viscous detergent into one’s other hand and hold the shower head at the same time is a recipe for disaster. Or at least a very wet floor. Quite simply, it’s maddening.

What is more maddening still, however, is the fact that the shower is on the same water line as all the taps. So as soon as anyone uses, say, the kitchen tap, the pressure and, consequently, the temperature of the water in the shower change in response. I am sure that my mother-in-law must have a hidden camera in the shower so that she can coordinate her manipulations of the taps in the kitchen to cause the maximum disruption. How else can it be that parts of my body which should never be subjected to excessive temperatures have been scalded each time I attempted to clean or rinse them? Suffice it to say that I know have a very different mental image when reading the end of the Lord of the Rings where Tolkien describes the boiling fluid flowing about the Crack of Doom.

Yet all things considered, these are small tribulations to bear when one is in such a wonderful place. The people, bureaucrats aside, are wonderfully friendly and accepting and overall, I can’t think of many nicer places in the world. If only they’d sort out their plumbing, get decent tea and learn to serve bacon and eggs for breakfast…

Those left behind

The observation of Remembrance Day today at school was different this year. In previous years, the system has been to hold a minute’s silence at eleven a.m. Today, things were much more formal, which is something I approve of. There was an added poignancy to it this year for several reasons.

The first was that we were hosting a delegation of teachers and students from our German twin town. Their presence did create a frisson, for management were very anxious not to offend them. Of course, given that the very date and time of the silence was chosen to match that when the guns fell silent at the end of what was called, at the time, the war to end all wars. Yet that war was not the end, for twenty-one years after, the world was plunged into conflict once more. And at the centre of each of these two great conflicts were Britain and Germany, and so any reference to them is ripe with the potential for embarrassment. Yet the Germans keep this day too, for their losses in those conflicts were as great as ours, if not greater. So while management were careful not to say anything that was overtly nationalistic- there where no corners of foreign fields that are forever England today- the fact that the Germans were here was a powerful symbol, a sign that two nations once enemies can come together in peace and remembrance.

Another reason for poignancy today is that, for the first time there are no British veterans of the First World War alive to remember: we must remember for them. We must remember the sacrifice and the valour and the horror and stupidity that made that conflict fought in the trenches such a great part of our national psyche. The other reason is, of course, the current conflict in Afghanistan, a conflict which has marked more British casualties than any conflict in my lifetime. That has, in a real way, made the act of remembrance more immediate to the public than it has been in years.

So, perhaps, this Remembrance Day, while we remember those who served and died all those years ago, those who died more recently in the current conflict and those who still serve out in Afghanistan, we should remember those who are left behind: the families of heroes. They have sacrificed loved ones and in their grief, they bear the cost of service to our nation and they are, in their own way, as heroic.

Factoids

By profession, I’m an educator, in that I attempt to teach science to children.  This is both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure.  Rewarding in that you can see students make real progress and frustrating because of the barriers that, all too often, impede that very progress.

The most significant of these obstacles to progress is not a lack of understanding or knowledge but rather the preconceptions that the learner already has.  If someone thinks they already understand  something, it follows that their efforts are significantly reduced.  And when that understanding is flawed- or just plainly wrong- the barrier to learning is very great indeed.  Quite simply, the mind cherishes the misconceptions and treats all attempts to correct them as personal attacks.  Unless you are very careful, correcting knowledge becomes a criticism of the person and not their understanding- and that really does get in the way of learning.

In many cases, the most significant misconceptions are the things that everybody knows.  Things everybody knows but in fact knows wrong.  Life is full of these little factoids, things that have been repeated so often that we just accept them uncritically.  And these factoids can become significant problems to understanding.

A good example of this is the statement that carrots help you see in the dark.  Like a lot of- but not all- factoids, there is a kernel of truth at its centre.  Carrots contain the orange pigment, carotene, which the human body can convert into retinol, a substance that is better known as vitamin A.  The fact that retinol is then used in the eye to manufacture the light sensitive pigment rhodopsin, which is necessary for the rods in the retina to detect light only helps to give credence to the factoid, especially when you understand that the rods are the light receptors most active in low levels of light.  Indeed, a deficiency in vitamin A can cause night blindness.  However, no amount of said vitamin will allow you to see in pitch dark.

So where did this statement come from?  It was thanks to a programme of misinformation engineered by the RAF during the Second World War.  It had become apparent to the Luftwaffe that night bombing raids of Britain were significantly less dangerous than day time ones, as the brave pilots of the spitfires and hurricanes that defended Britain from aerial assault were unable to see the approaching bombers and their fighter escorts.  Indeed, in the early days of the war, the early warning system of such attacks was down to the Royal Corps of Observers, who watched the skies over the English Channel through binoculars for signs of imminent attack.

Naturally, a better system of detection was needed, and so, a Radio Direction Finder (RDF) was invented, a device that broadcast radio waves and then detected any that were reflected back by incoming aircraft.  By 1941 this device had the ability to give the range of the aircraft and the acronym became RADAR, short for RAdio Detection And Ranging.  In those early days, radar stations were large and were often disguised as ice cream parlours so that they did not themselves become targets for the German bombers.  The first aircraft borne version of this system, called AI (for Airborne Interception) was installed into the Bristol Beaufighter and later the Mosquito fighter bomber of Group Captain John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham.  With this equipment, he was able to chalk up twenty kills defending the country from the Luftwaffe, nineteen of them at night.  To keep the existence of such technology secret and to preserve the tactical advantage it engendered, the story was put about that Cunningham ate a special diet mainly of carrots to give him such excellent night vision.  From there, the notion that carrots help you see in the dark became so firmly entrenched in the public consciousness that it is all but impossible to shift it.

Many factoids are like this, they start with a truth, or a half truth, sometimes created in order to prevent a different truth coming to light, sometimes created because they make the story more interesting and enjoyable for its audience and sometimes simply because of political expedience.  The factoid about carrots is the first of these and another factoid to do with radar illustrates the second. 

The story goes that the early radar stations operated using microwaves rather than radio waves and, in the morning after use, a significant number of dead seabirds were found outside them, some of which were partially cooked.  As a result, the heating effect of microwaves was discovered and thus the microwave oven born.  In fact, this is completely untrue and is an example of a factoid that is believed because it is too an amusing story to be doubted. Like the carrots factoid, it has been repeated so often that it is believed without question.

While neither of these two types of factoid are particularly damaging, except to my blood pressure as I try to teach the correct versions to children who hold onto their misconceptions with an almost religious fervour, the last type, the factoid born of politics is.  Such factoids shape opinions and the true damage such factoids can wreak can easily be seen when we see them used to shape public opinion.  When opinion is based on the flimsy basis of a series of factoids rather than on solid evidence, disaster can follow in its wake.

A good example of this, at the moment, are the attacks on the BBC that are being made, because they are allowing the British National Party’s lead, Nick Griffin, to participate in the Question Time programme on BBC1.  Now, I have no great love for the BNP and its odious political views, but I have even less love for those who are threatening the BBC with prosecution if they allow Griffin to speak.  That the BNP espouses opinions that many- including myself- call fascist is not something I argue against.  What I do argue against are the factoids that some opinions are so dangerous that they should never be allowed utterance, that the public are so unsophisticated and easily led that allowing the BNP a platform will lead to the public beginning to support them.

This is not only insulting to the public at large but dangerous, far more dangerous, in fact, than allowing the BNP a platform.  Censoring an opposing political opinion is a despicable action, whatever the opinion censored.  And that is what those who are criticising the BNP are doing.  To my mind, seeking to deny the BNP a platform is counterproductive at best.  In doing so, they give credence to the BNP’s assertions that we do not live in a free society and therefore help them spread their vile message of intolerance.  In short, they are helping the BNP create their own little factoids that will, eventually, be accepted by a significant minority if they are unchallenged.

The correct course of action, in my opinion, is to allow the BNP a platform and then to challenge every untruth, every logical fallacy and every false assumption they make, and thus show up this hateful organisation for what it is: not something that glorifies Britain but, instead, a vile smear on my country’s reputation.  Why is this action not taken? Because the two factoids I stated earlier are accepted uncritically: that some ideas should never be allowed utterance and that the public are so stupid, they will believe anything they hear.  Whatever you try to do, the BNP will spread its vile message and, by denying them a platform on a debating programme, they are allowed to spread their message unchallenged.   Moreover, the public are bright enough to recognise bigotry when they see it exposed under the harsh light of public scrutiny.

In the end, it’s a shame that factoids are accepted in this regard rather than the simple fact, expressed long ago, that the only condition required for evil to triumph is that it is allowed to go unchallenged.

Public Nudity

I am almost certain that the subject heading here for this entry will have caught some attention. However, I’m not really posting anything here for the prurient. So, apologies to any who have got this far hoping for something juicy.  We’ve had a bit of a mini heatwave here, so people have been going about in far less than they usually wear.   So I was reminded of something I wrote for a yahoo group a few years ago.  The question had been asked about public nudity; specifically, what we thought of it and whether the laws should be altered. Well, being me, the inevitable answer was as follows.

Baring one’s bigotry

OK, I’ll admit to being really shallow here, and I feel really really guilty about it. I mean, I know that I should be much more tolerant than I am, especially of other people’s appearances, but I’m not. I can be a really intolerant so-and-so, but being the polite person I am, I keep it under my hat and go and fume about things afterwards at home, much to my Dark Lady’s amusement.

Now there’s one of my problems. Hat wearing is already slightly frowned on today, with the assumption that if you wear a hat, you’re eccentric at the very least.  OK, I might just put my hand up to the slightly mad thing, but really it’s no more than a mild eccentricity, not anything certifiable, honest!   Anyway,  I guess I’d best get back to the point.

So if public nudity is accepted and widespread, then hat wearing will be even more unacceptable and, without a hat, where then will I hide my bigoted opinions? I suppose I could try to hide some of the prejudices, that my political adherence to the extreme centre produces, in the crevice between my buttocks, perhaps also in the fold of skin between my second and third chin and maybe under the great flaps of flab at my sides that glisten with perspiration as I make my way through the world. But there is so little room there and I have so many daft opinions. Do I really want to harm the aesthetic perfection of my form by stuffing stuff into every nook and cranny that my plumpness affords?

I think it will give us poor men a hard time

And then that idea of hiding my opinions touches on a uniquely male perspective here. If I were nude always, how would I then be able to hide my (positive) opinions on some of the female forms around me? I mean, in some cases what I thought would stand out like a sore thumb! And worse, what about after a heavy session on the booze, when brewers’ droop had set in? How could I explain to someone, who felt slighted by a lack of visible attention, that it I really thought she looked great today but that the other thing was just the booze talking? And talking of going to the pub, how will I carry my beer money? Remember, all of my crevices are already choc-a-block with my daft opinions.

Does your bum look big in what exactly?

Worse, given the obvious physical lie detector that will perk up (or not) at odd moments, how on earth will I be able to answer my Dark Lady when she asks, “Does my bum look big in this?” The nudity thing adds a whole new terror to the male mine-field of trying to navigate a safe answer to that question. And further more, the “this” to which she would be referring would be nothing at all, and the implications of getting a “wrong” answer here would make the Pentagon’s preparations, when they discovered Kruschev shipping missiles to Cuba, seem small beer indeed.

Say no to public nudity now!

For the sake of humanity, keep this under wraps- literally- and stop the terror before it begins. Let’s stop this madness and keep our eyes safe. After all it’s bad enough seeing octogenarians wandering around Tesco’s in thongs and bikinis as it is! It’s no wonder I shop at Sainsbury’s.

Close Encounters of the Missed Kind

As is common in these lazy days of summer, I’m turning to a blog entry from a year or so ago to add some more to this blog.  I don’t intend to port all of my old logs over, especially as a lot of them are well past their sell-by dates, but some I’d like to keep here in what is pretty much becoming my permanent web home.

A friend commented about making a model with mashed potatoes and talk turned to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The memories of that film that surfaced then naturally led to this post.

CE3K was the first film I was allowed to go to see in the evening without parental supervision. Indeed, it was the start of my whole dating career. I say start, but what I really mean is… well, you’ll see what I mean in time.

It was the Easter of 1978 and I’d just turned 13. We’d gone to spend the whole two glorious weeks of the Easter holiday in our caravan at Hastings. My father had bought the caravan some years ago, reasoning that it would be an economical way of getting us out of London and into the country at weekends. And so it proved, for the cost of the train fare we were able to spend weekends and school holidays in an idyllic little caravan site with the big picture window of the ‘van overlooking the English channel. We’d travel down on the Friday night and I’d wake up on the Saturday morning and go over to Funnel’s Farm down the road to buy milk and eggs for breakfast. We could go down and buy fish fresh off the fishing boats for supper and I could roam around the countryside. It gave me chances to learn and grow that I’d never have had, had we remained in London for the weekends.

Anyway that Easter, the spot next to us had a new caravan on it and the couple who owned the caravan had a daughter who was roughly my age. Inevitably, the potential for the possibility of dating eventually crossed my mind. Of course, I use “eventually” in a sense that is only strictly correct if “eventually” is described in nanoseconds. Teenage hormones being what they are, the possibility stood out like a sore thumb. Yes Tom, Cam and any others with minds on my level, I said the possibility stood out; anything else standing out goes without question.

That physical manifestation of my interest in Jackie (for that was the teenage siren’s name) was just one of the reasons I was, for almost a week too embarrassed or shy to actually go up and talk to her. There is nothing so inhibiting to the teenage boy’s ability to talk to girls as a throbbing erection; when your mother insist on you wearing short trousers, the problem is doubly obvious. Add to it the possibility that she might say “Go away” or something even more dismissive and you will readily understand why I decided not to approach her directly.

Worse still was the fact of my education. I had been lucky enough to win a scholarship into the finest school in South East London, a school that admirally prepared me for most of what I heve encountered in life. I could already utilise the equations of motion to solve problems, decline nouns and conjugate verbs in Latin and discourse at length the folly of Aethelraed the Unready’s policy of appeasing the Vikings with danegeld. However, as it was a boys school, it was not for another couple of years when I joined the Senior Choir (a joint venture with the girls’ school down the road) that it gave me any chance to learn about the workings of the female mind. Appeasing Miss Meredith, the English teacher didn’t count as she was, after all, a teacher and therefore inhuman. Girls were, to my mind then, something like an alien species: exotic, fascinating and utterly inexplicable.

So it can be seen then that I was as out of my depth as a midget taking a dip over the Marianas Trench. Thus, I hope that the errors in my campaign to woo the fragrant Jackie can be seen as, if not excusable, understandable. Initiating conversation was out of the question. Aside from the fact that the front of my shorts would reach her about a second before the rest of me and perhaps give her enough time to scarper, I had no idea what to talk to her about. So I decided to impress her with my intelligence, this being the main thing that teenage girls look for in potential boyfriends, of course.  I can just about look back on my naivety back then without whimpering, but only if I grit my teeth. Of course, intelligence is only really evident in conversation, hence I found myself faced with the problem of how to use my intellect to induce her to throw caution to the winds and say hello to me without my actually talking to her.

I decided that reading could be the thing. Indeed, the more I thought of it, the better a solution it seemed as I could, therefore, avoid the whole minefield of eye contact. So, armed with a copy of Bronowski’s ‘The Ascent of Man’ I began my campaign. It was a simple enough plan. All I had to do was walk past her caravan reading a few times and it would be, to paraphrase Caesar, “Lectito, videor, vinco.”

There were plenty of opportunities to wander past Jackie’s caravan reading, for this was 1978 and the call of nature necessitated a visit to the “utility block” a breeze-block-built shrine to cleanliness some quarter of a mile away on the other side of the site. Something in the British character at the time meant that we actually looked down on those who had chemical toilets or had even, heaven forfend, arranged for their caravans to be plumbed in. They had, we thought, a deficiency in moral fibre. I had, on the other hand, lots of fibre forced upon me, and not just the moral sort. This meant that I had many early morning sprints across the caravan site to the unheated relief that awaited me in the utility block.

My strategy to woo Jackie meant that I began to use the block more frequently, sauntering past her caravan reading the Bronowski and trying to exude intellectualness. Two things complicated this. The first was acne and the second was my mother. I developed a prominent pimple on the left side of my nose which would would have to be hidden from Jackie at all costs. On the way to the utility block the pimple was facing away from her caravan, however on the way back I really did make sure I had my nose in a book to hide the damn thing from her. My mother grew suspicious of all of these trips to the utility block bgan checking my food extra carefully in case I was getting food poisoning. Thus I had to prioritise my trips to times when Jackie was actually likely to see me. The poor girl hardly had to poke her nose through the caravan door before her path was intersected by that of an incontinent intellectual who was totally absorbed in his book.

I was puzzled by this stratagem’s lack of success, as I’d reasoned that the mixture of intellect and a serious absorption in study that left her unnoticed would be just the thing to melt her heart. Fortunately, while the course of teenage homones seldom runs smoothly, adult intervention aided my cause. My father and Jackie’s father had found my misadventure’s vastly amusing. They chortled together at the frequent trips to the utility block, at the reading, at the hiding my nose in the books pages and at the intervention of an inconveniently placed tree.

So it was that that Friday, I found myself sitting with Jackie on a wooden bench outside the London Trader sipping coca-cola through a straw from curvy glass bottles that were passed to us from the pub’s inerior at thirty minute intervals. Even I couldn’t totally mess up the conversation that such enforced comradeship engendered. Thus we talked and laughed at the seagulls and agreed to meet up and watch a film the following night. I talked her into us going to see “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” at the Bexhill Odeon. This necessitated a bus trip and a lot of fast and eloquent talking to get my father to agree.

I spent the Saturday afternoon in Bexhill and arrived at the cinema at 5:45 to buy the tickets for the film and waited outside. 6 p.m. came and went and no sign; perhaps she had missed the bus. 6:15 and still no sign and the programme was beginning to start. At 6:45, once the first feature (a cartoon about a flying boat apparently) had ended I went in. At least the other seat gave me somewhere to put the popcorn bucket. What had happened was that Jackie had decided that a “geek film” was less appealing than watching those hopeful of representing the UK at Eurovision compete in “A song for Europe.” There were other dates with other girls but, even now, the feeling of anxiety that filled that waiting hour before I gave up hope haunts me every now and then. Indeed, I still can’t hear those five notes of the alien fanfare without my eyes misting up.

The Suspension of Disbelief

It is, of course, obvious that I do not post as many entries here as I might.  Part of the reason has been work , part of it a simple lack of inspiration and part of it one of the sites listed over on my blog roll.  You see, I spend a great deal of time at Elliquiy, the place that is, in my opinion, the best role play forum on the net.  The people there are nice and pleasant, by and large, the standards of writing are good and it is a place that is open and accepting of others’ points of view, kinks and other miscellaneous quirks.  Indeed, I know of few forums that would create a third option for gender, so that people in indeterminate sex could have a place to call their own.  Such an option is perhaps one of the reasons why, by and large, Elliquiy’s members are so honest.

So you can imagine my feelings of outrage and betrayal when I found out that the lady vampire with whom I was role playing such steamy scenes of hot haemovore action was not what she claimed to be.  Her anatomy, in real life, was different from as advertised and, let me tell you, it cast a distinct pall over the virtual necking we were doing.  You see, she was not, in fact, a vampire.

You might argue that it should not matter to me as, after all, the story’s the thing, isn’t it, not the writer.  But I simply can’t get past it.  How can I ever let her character bite mine in the jugular again, when I know that she lacks the dentition to do so in real life.  I can suspend my disbelief so far, but this would be hanging it by the neck.

I tell you, this situation is a right pain in the neck and I will be petitioning the powers that be at Elliquiy to put a stop to it.  How can they allow people in who can write so convincingly that I would believe that they are of a completely different dietary type.  There is only one solution that will satisfy me: they must demand that every one there furnish proof of their dietary status and blood group immediately.  If they don’t who knows where this will end.  I mean, I’m already starting to look suspiciously at that werewolf  I’m thinking of starting a game with.

Read All About it

I read on my Dark Lady’s blog the following, and was prompted to reply.  In the end, the reply became large enough to become a blog post of its own.  Here’s the quote that got me thinking:

When asked about the new Amazon Kindle product, Steve Jobs CEO of Apple computer had this to say:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

What really strikes me as interesting is the inconsistency of Jobs’ idea of what a good business model is.  He says: “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”  So therefore 60% of people read more than one book a year.  Now when he and Steve Wozniak started up Apple in the mid-seventies, less than 10% of people were interested in even looking at a computer, much less owning one.  Even after the big growth in personal computer sales, Apple’s market share represented considerably less than 40% of the population.

Perhaps sales of the iPod have skewed Jobs’ perceptions of what a success can be and that to him, now, anything less than global domination is a failure.  Whatever the reason, his remark is typical of two things.  Firstly, it shows Jobs’  tendency to make bold and provocative statements in order to draw attention.  Secondly, it highlights his reputed dismissiveness of ideas that are not his own.  In many ways, this is a natural characteristic of a successful entrepreneur: a single minded self belief that can border on egomania.  Without such self belief, it is unlikely that Jobs would be the successful businessman he is today; most normal people would have simply given up the ghost when faced with the reversals of fortune that have made his and Apple’s story such interesting reading.

I seriously doubt that Jobs is right in predicting a decline in reading.  Perhaps he is right in predicting a downturn in reading printed books in the long term; increasingly younger generations are turning to electronic media.  CD sales have fallen with the rise of MP3 and similar means of storing audio information and it is tempting to assume that the same will happen with books too.  Certainly, printed newpapers are finding electronic competituon increasingly hard to cope with.  I’ve not bought a newspaper in years as I find that my news needs are more than adequately supplied bu the excellent Today programme on Radio 4 in the morning, the various evening news broadasts on the BBC and Sky and, of course, the internet.  And there, the newspapers have found a means of survival; increasingly, the electronic editions of newpapers are becoming important.  I keep RSS feeds to the Times, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph along side my feeds to broadcast news providers (like BBC News and Sky News) and purely internet providers like Slate magazine.  Even when I was buying newspapers, I’d not buy all three of those, only one (I vacillated between all three).  Now, I read parts of all of them and so each of them can sell advertising based on the page hits their websites get.  Advertisers ain’t stupid and will only pay for advertisements if they know they’ll get exposure.  The fact that the newspapers are able to get revenue like this shows that reading is alive and well in cyberspace.

And Steve Jobs knows that too; were that not the case, it is unlikely that he would have allowed the Kindle for iPhone “app” to be produced.  In a real sense, I think that Jobs’ criticisms of the Kindle itself are well founded.  Why buy a device that can only read e-books when you can spend the same amount of money and buy a netbook or an iPhone that will do all of that and give you the whole of the internet as well?

The concept of the Kindle is not wrong because people don’t read; they do.  It is a flawed concept because the people who would but a device to read e-books already have such devices, their computers.  With portable computing becoming ever easier with netbooks and smartphones like the iPhone, the demand for devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader is not there,  not unless such devices are a hell of a lot cheaper.  In the meantime, I’ll stick with reading based around dead tree technology.  After all, books are portable, require no batteries and don’t get the stewardess tutting at you when you use them on an aeroplane during takeoff.

Falling Towards Midsummer

In a week, it will be midsummer and it strikes me as being quite remarkable how soon this time of year has come around again.  The exact date of the Summer solstice changes slightly from year to year, despite the popular belief that it is fixed on June 21st; last year, for instance, the solstice was on 20th of June.  The reason for this is because the solstice is the exact time when the the Earth’s axial tilt towards the sun is greatest.  Given the irregularities in the Earth’s orbit and the fact that a year is a few seconds short of 365¼ days long, the time can vary.  Last year the solstice was at 11:59 p.m. on June 20th, this year it will be 5:45 a.m. on June 21st.

Midsummer evening has been special to me since my days as a student and now it has a special importance too.  Since my Dark Lady came to live with me, she has kept me in contact with all of the rhythms of the year.  This is not some new age fluff bunny thing but just how she is and, if you are going to share your home with a Dark Lady, then the way she is has a big impact on how your home operates.  So it was, when we chose to wed last year, midsummer seemed an appropriate day and that was the day we had, even if it qualified as midsummer by just one minute.

Similarly, her Greek background has introduced to me the concept of name days, the feast day of the Orthodox saint who matches your own name.  Of course, there’s no St Haldo- perish the thought- but there is a saint matching my name and his feast day, and hence my name day, is 21st June.

For whatever reason, I do love this time of year.  I love the warm balmy evenings, with the barest breeze blowing to relieve the oppressive heat as I sip/drink/quaff/guzzle a pint of cool (not cold) beer.  I love the way that things seem less restricted and I love the way that the mind begins to pick over memories of past summers.

I was talking to one of the admins at the ever excellent Elliquiy this morning over IM and the conversation brought up the excellent Summer Ball that we held annually while I was an undergraduate.  I can remember them very clearly, from the food, the drink, the music, the lack of sleep…  I remember them very well indeed.

Over the years, I’ve been to a few balls, but none have matched those.  Perhaps, I’m looking at them with the rose tinted glasses that middle age imposes when one looks at one’s youth, but they were special.  And that specialness has remained with these weeks around midsummer ever since and it was that specialness that has made all events, around these days special and, if it doesn’t sound pretentious, magical.

If you don’t believe me about the magical, the photo at the top of the page was taken so that I could finish off the roll of film in an Olympus AF10 twenty odd years ago around this time of year.  A relatively nice sunset became, when the film was developed, remarkable.  Trust me, this time of year is special.  Enjoy it to the full.

A Week is a Long Time

It was that raincoat wearing optimist, Harold Wilson, who first commented that, “a week is a long time in politics. “   For Gordon Brown, each of the last few weeks must have seemed like successive eternities of agony.  For Wilson, that “long time” was a positive thing, implying that a current difficulty would be forgotten in a week’s time as events overshadow it.  Brown’s experience of political time dilation is less positive and it is unlikely that any prime minister has faced such a sustained challenge to his leadership from within his own party since Brown himself is reputed to have instigated in order to undermine Tony Blair’s premiership in the run up to Blair’s resignation on 2007.

The events of the last month or so are more reminiscent, however, of the last years of John Major’s premiership.  So far, at least, Brown has not yet been reported as calling those undermining him “bastards” but I am sure that he is tempted to.  There are strong parallels between Brown’s premiership and Major’s.  Both became Prime Minister after their predecessors without a general election, being elected solely by their parties.  Major might have subsequently won an election, but the similarity remains.  Likewise, both have faced stiff economic problems, Major with the events of Black Wednesday and Brown with the current credit crunch.  Both have faced opposition and challenges from within their own parties and the behaviour of their own MPs has led to subsequent cynicism about the moral character of politicians, with the “sleaze” that Blair and Brown vowed to end and the current MPs’ expenses row.

I must admit, I’m not a fan of Gordon Brown and I find that I feel a sense of satisfaction in seeing his current difficulties.  There is a sense of a dramatic closing the circle to see Brown suffering the same sort of campaign that he, allegedly, orchestrated against Blair.  Of course, I don’t know if Brown did undermine Blair or not; how could I, not being privy to those secrets whispered in the corridors of power.  However, the sense of dramatic irony in current events, given the rumours that he did do so, are too compelling.  In the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it will be believed as a form of political urban myth.

And so, I return to where I began, with Harold Wilson.  His resignation as Prime Minister is surrounded by the same sort of urban myth, that he was effectively forced out of power by a plot originated in MI5.  This has been proved to be so enduring that there is even a section on the MI5 website denying it, over a quarter of a century after the resignation.  After Wilson resigned in 1976 and James Callaghan took over, the government faced severe economic problems that led to the industrial unrest became known as the “winter of discontent” and a subsequent vote of no confidence that caused a general election.  The aftermath of that was a period of 18 years during which his party was largely unelectable due to squabbling between its leaders.  Likewise, the aftermath of Major’s defeat by Blair in ‘97 was a protracted period in which his party was unelectable for similar reasons.

Gordon Brown knows all of this.  He is, arguably, the least popular prime minister in the last fifty years.  It comes to something, when a sitting prime minister is booed by veterans of the D Day landings in the official commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of those landings in Normandy, as shown in the clip at the top of this post.  That must have rattled Brown and is the probable cause of his subsequent slip in referring to “Obama beach“.  Or perhaps it was the realisation that the British public are tired of twelve years of Labour rule and that in front of him, as he was speaking, was the very politician who embodied a nation’s desire for change.

The Road Ahead

The last six months have been incredibly draining, not just from the pressure of work but from the long grind of lurching from misadventure to misadventure at home.  We’ve had the oven get damaged in a freak accident, various interesting plumbing “situations” and the breakdown of our fridge.  We’ve had Spawn develop nasty eczema and Monster get badly bullied at school.  It’s been a busy, busy half year and I’ve felt my energy levels and my creativity just drain away.

Bright moments of rest and calm were our visit to Athens to see my Dark Lady’s mother (where the above picture was taken) and our visit to my mother, in Saltburn.  In both of these visits we had time away from all of the stresses that beset our lives and time too- I must add- from the internet.   Taking the time away was good, without the distractions that such tings can bring.   Inevitably, the return to work has brought all of those distractions and stresses back but, having had the break, I’m able to see over it all.

So then, where do I go now?  To where does the road ahead lead?  In the picture, at the end of the road there are ruins.  One of the things I learned many years ago was that, where intentions are concerned, the truth rarely has a single side: what you get depends on your perspective.  Looked at in one way, the picture suggests a road to ruin; looked at another, it suggests a return to the past.  Those great pillars are the remains of the Olympeion, the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens.  Its construction was begun in the fifth century B.C. and was completed 650 years later by the Roman emperor, Hadrian.  Now, in the twenty-first century A.D., the columns are still standing despite the sack of the city in 267 A.D. by the Heruli, the outlawing of the worship of the Greek gods by Theodosius II and attempts of the Ottoman Turks during their occupation.

That the site has survived, that it was even completed after such a long building time is a testament to resilience and durability.  In the end, I’d be happy if the road ahead were that: to face plenty of challenges but, like those great Corinthian columns, to remain standing afterwards, ready for the future.