It's been quite a nice day today. I spoke to my brother Matt over the occasional wonder that is MSN. He's all the way in Australia, on the Queensland coast, and yet here I am on webcam waving at him and talking. He has a microphone and I can hear him, but I can't see him yet because he doesn't have a camera, but he'll have one next weekend and we'll talk again then. I spoke to his son (my nephew) Jack yesterday. Jack lives in New South Wales. I could see Jack, because Jack has a webcam, but I couldn't talk to Jack because he doesn't have a microphone. I could ask him questions and he could nod for yes and shake for no. Which is OK, but it can get a bit one-sided, eh Jack?
The other good thing that happened today was that I managed to go for a run and make it the whole way - a glorious four or five miles. J cycled alongside me and I ran down past the golfcourse, along the side of Verulamium Park, up the hill to Waitrose, along to the horrid roundabout, down past the Abbet Theatre, up through the center of town, took a right by Devda's (the indian restaurant), along the side of Bernard's Heath, then left into our road. And all that with largely functioning tendons and scarcely a twinge in my calves. It's the magic new shoes - well overdue - that made it OK.
I (14yo) has been out at the rugby club, her new-found passion, just back and she's drenched to the bone. It's that lovely limey soft rain today, warm enough to entice you out into it, although I'm concerned that the lawn is going to need yet another mow before the season draws in. The trees are still largely green and I'm half expecting the apple tree to bloom again at any minute.
I'm on meal duty on Sundays. Last week's two gallons of chicken soup wasn't popular and to stem the wails at the excess quantities, I promised to eat it all myself over the course of the week. I got through it by Thursday night. J, especially, is not partial to "all in the pot"-style meals. He prefers to have each part as a clear entity. When we go for an Indian meal, J will want Tandoori chicken on its own. So, J's spirits soared when I told him it was "Pork and separates" tonight, the separates being each veg, with no messing about. I think this is probably indicative of some sort of organisational competency. J's room is tidy and he organises his time. I (14yo), however, has an "all in the pot"-style room. The door, on the few occasions that it left ajar, releases the smell of a sort of slow cooking, or perhaps more accurately, composting, from within. P found a half-empty jar of pesto under an old pile of clothes in I's room recently. When I do the rubbish on a Thursday morning, it is largely an academic exercise as to whether or not I pay I's room a visit. I likes "all in the pot"- style food - and so, as I look around me, so do I.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
What I believe but cannot prove
There's a very interesting book, a compendium of views by a whole bunch of scientists and writers, in which they set out some ideas that they hold to be true but can't provide the evidence to support. You'll find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Believe-but-Cannot-Prove/dp/0060841818
I think we all have loads of these.
My main one is that I don't think that there is such thing as a straight line. Most ideas of the universe are based around the idea that if you travelled in one direction, you could go on forever. You might go on forever (which is a different thing, it's about time), but you would always come back to where you started from, having travelled in one big circle. I think the idea of straight lines limits and frustrates our understanding of space. Assuming that you could line up a lot of people in order of size and that the smallest person could be amazingly, atomically small and the tallest amazingly, galactically tall, if you asked them to form a circle, the tallest would be smaller than the smallest. I think everything is made of circles. Everything that has gravity wants to be circular. I think that our thoughts go round in circles. They come back to us as deja vu. I think our sense of existence, being and comprehension is based on the circles of thought. When you think about it, what are straight lines for? Light bends as it yields to gravity. Even the straightest thing isn't really straight. Perhaps that's why pi is so magical - it because it's the secret of the circle which is part of absolutely everything.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Believe-but-Cannot-Prove/dp/0060841818
I think we all have loads of these.
My main one is that I don't think that there is such thing as a straight line. Most ideas of the universe are based around the idea that if you travelled in one direction, you could go on forever. You might go on forever (which is a different thing, it's about time), but you would always come back to where you started from, having travelled in one big circle. I think the idea of straight lines limits and frustrates our understanding of space. Assuming that you could line up a lot of people in order of size and that the smallest person could be amazingly, atomically small and the tallest amazingly, galactically tall, if you asked them to form a circle, the tallest would be smaller than the smallest. I think everything is made of circles. Everything that has gravity wants to be circular. I think that our thoughts go round in circles. They come back to us as deja vu. I think our sense of existence, being and comprehension is based on the circles of thought. When you think about it, what are straight lines for? Light bends as it yields to gravity. Even the straightest thing isn't really straight. Perhaps that's why pi is so magical - it because it's the secret of the circle which is part of absolutely everything.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Summer
Long time, no write, so here’s a catch-up on the summer which bore fruits in the most literal sense like never before. The cherry tree, the apple trees and some sort of red berry tree that we don’t understand, and don’t dare try, have been hunched in agony beneath the weight of the multitude of fruits. Pigeon poo within a mile of our house is purple; every morning throughout July and August, plump birds sat on the relatively undersized cherry tree like some sort of exorbitant, unseasonal and lavishly mechanised Christmas decoration. Our courgettes, in their abundance, were the size of fat arms, the beans like hundreds of arthritic fingers, and the tomatoes, though disappointingly leather-skinned, profuse. The garden also suffered from a very hot spell in July, which turned the lawn into coir matting. Now, in mid-September, it is coming back again, and the balmy Indian summer has tempted out some soft shoots that make it a bliss to walk on. Meanwhile, there are regular Newtonian thuds from under our largest apple tree as the unreachable cookers fall to earth like short-haul cold-green comets.
The summer turned up little that was new. The world of work was uncharacteristically consuming, with hardly a week without some grand project or other, mostly delivered with some languid success or other. The annual holiday, this year a misplaced fortnight in Brittany, was a learning experience. I, now 14, is a determined networker and socialite, known to the entire under-16 population of the semi-urban town that we inhabit. From the moment we set off for the 2 ½ hours drive to Dover, followed by ninety minutes on the ferry and an eight hour drive to Huelgoat, she pined. Her mobile phone had been emptied of its usefulness by mid-month (we fathers impose limits you see, much to our profligate daughters’ chagrin) and the house had no PC (“how cwap is that”, she opined), thereby robbing her of M-S-N-ery. The rain is another matter. The heavens broke as we broke and we spent the first week and a half indoors or under cover. By mid-week 2, the sun emerged and we mild-footed it to the south then north then south coast of Brittany for three consecutive days. I’s mood did improve – whether it was the sun or the relief at not being dragged off to look at sculptural adornments on a gothic façade, I’m not sure.
Three week gap between this and the last sentence and the holiday actually feels like it was OK. They’re a bit like wine or marmalade or Christmas puddings – the best bits out after a while and the less than satisfactory episodes fade into the background.
Now daylight is the remnant of each 24 hour spin as the winter gets nearer, Sunday roasts are back on the agenda and the prospect of a Saturday evening closing in is an idea to be welcomed rather than feared. There is a point in the Autumn when it all seems OK again – the dimmer switch being twiddled downward and the days when the garden goes stationary and what we cut away doesn’t race back in the space of a week. I moved the compost to its new place this weekend, moving the old decaying pile of logs and upsetting a few dozy frogs in the process. The spiders are at full fat now, having dined on Crane flies, which have been pathetically abundant and abundantly pathetic this year – stupid airborn prawns. Billie the cat has been having his fill as well.
Back to Tae Kwon Do tonight after a lay-off for a week. My ageing knee got a knock last week, but has more or less mended. We'll be going for our black tag exams in December and then our black belt exams next year – most likely October, but perhaps April. I’m determined to get there, even if have to hobble.
The office is settling down for the evening now, the rush and hum of the airconditioning more apparent than the voice of my closest neighbours who by now are the accountants down the end, worrying their calculators endlessly. What a life it must be to be constantly asking how much. The fluorescent lights and the apple green walls give this place a sense of anywhere and nowhere and with my senses now attuned to what happens next, Ill close this down, go and sweat and kick for an hour before settling back to look this over briefly and then plant it.
The summer turned up little that was new. The world of work was uncharacteristically consuming, with hardly a week without some grand project or other, mostly delivered with some languid success or other. The annual holiday, this year a misplaced fortnight in Brittany, was a learning experience. I, now 14, is a determined networker and socialite, known to the entire under-16 population of the semi-urban town that we inhabit. From the moment we set off for the 2 ½ hours drive to Dover, followed by ninety minutes on the ferry and an eight hour drive to Huelgoat, she pined. Her mobile phone had been emptied of its usefulness by mid-month (we fathers impose limits you see, much to our profligate daughters’ chagrin) and the house had no PC (“how cwap is that”, she opined), thereby robbing her of M-S-N-ery. The rain is another matter. The heavens broke as we broke and we spent the first week and a half indoors or under cover. By mid-week 2, the sun emerged and we mild-footed it to the south then north then south coast of Brittany for three consecutive days. I’s mood did improve – whether it was the sun or the relief at not being dragged off to look at sculptural adornments on a gothic façade, I’m not sure.
Three week gap between this and the last sentence and the holiday actually feels like it was OK. They’re a bit like wine or marmalade or Christmas puddings – the best bits out after a while and the less than satisfactory episodes fade into the background.
Now daylight is the remnant of each 24 hour spin as the winter gets nearer, Sunday roasts are back on the agenda and the prospect of a Saturday evening closing in is an idea to be welcomed rather than feared. There is a point in the Autumn when it all seems OK again – the dimmer switch being twiddled downward and the days when the garden goes stationary and what we cut away doesn’t race back in the space of a week. I moved the compost to its new place this weekend, moving the old decaying pile of logs and upsetting a few dozy frogs in the process. The spiders are at full fat now, having dined on Crane flies, which have been pathetically abundant and abundantly pathetic this year – stupid airborn prawns. Billie the cat has been having his fill as well.
Back to Tae Kwon Do tonight after a lay-off for a week. My ageing knee got a knock last week, but has more or less mended. We'll be going for our black tag exams in December and then our black belt exams next year – most likely October, but perhaps April. I’m determined to get there, even if have to hobble.
The office is settling down for the evening now, the rush and hum of the airconditioning more apparent than the voice of my closest neighbours who by now are the accountants down the end, worrying their calculators endlessly. What a life it must be to be constantly asking how much. The fluorescent lights and the apple green walls give this place a sense of anywhere and nowhere and with my senses now attuned to what happens next, Ill close this down, go and sweat and kick for an hour before settling back to look this over briefly and then plant it.
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