Wild life Delayed no doubt by our December postal strike, but arriving safely today: the Alaska wildlife calendar Jack & Janet Lyons send me every year from Anchorage.
Actually, all life in Alaska is wild, Jack & Janet's no exception. Many thanks, good on ya both, and every good wish to you for the new year Up There in America's own peanut gallery.
The Flying Dutchman’s Christmas Party Business at legendary APL software house I.P. Sharp Associates might have stopped in 1987, after its purchase by Reuters, but the Christmas parties never have. Hats off to Graeme Robertson for organising this year's reunion at the Plumber's Arms in Belgravia, long IPSA's local in London. Startling after twenty years to see former colleagues Raj Chauhan, Habib Jeeto and Rashmi Kakad, who now all look middle-aged and prosperous. Phil Chastney of course I know from the BAA, one of the few of us still engaged with the language.
Love, actually Post-Christmas visiting with mum in Birmingham, and a trip to see Love, Actually, a feeble movie, but unquestionably entertaining.
Or is there a hard core to this apparently soft confection? Director Richard Curtis throws it on the screen right at the start: we think love is so hard to find, but it's all around us if we'd only look. Actually. By the end I felt I'd overdosed on sugary sentiments. But perhaps this is Curtis' idea of radical cinema: shove it in their faces?
Meanwhile been reading Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. Here too the author takes a stand against the Good Joe Theory that we are all rascals deceiving ourselves we are Good Joes. Dickens certainly provides plenty of support for the theory: cruel schoolmaster Wackford Squeers excuses himself with great generosity of mind. But his chief villains, Ralph Nickleby and Sir Mulberry Hawk, delight in their own thorough badness. And, in contrast, the hero and his sister are models of noble good nature.
Curtis' characters conform well to the Good Joe Theory. They are hapless self-deceivers entangled in romance and desire. The best of them plod gallantly on, holding to their ideals as best they can. Pace Dickens, this is the best any of us can do.
Kelvin cool High on my personal list of Good Joes is the Kelvin family, whose youngest daughter Nadia Kelvin brought her boyfriend Nahd round for lunch yesterday. Our first entertaining this holiday season, and we were able to do it in style as my mother has now passed on to me her late mother's silver and Rosenthal crockery, and gave us steaks from Donald Russell Direct for Christmas. Miki acquired a taste for mulled wine, and roasted chestnuts over the fire.
To Jane Pinckard, alone this Christmas:
All us humans live with our internal narrators of failure and despair. If we don't celebrate Yule with others, we spend it with our internal accusers, which is why Christmas is always such a busy time for the Samaritans. It's all bollocks, but it'll bring you down anyway.
My own birth family is wary of gathering. This year Miki is with me, and though uninspired by the season, we are invited to a huge Christmas lunch with friends. Last year she was in Japan, and I brought my mum to London and we did the whole nine yards: tree, carols, lunch for 6 including a beggar invited for the second year running, and various friends otherwise seasonally stranded.
Don't spend Christmas alone again, dummy. It's not good for you. Jane, reconcile with Anne. What, you gonna die still pissed with each other? Fly -- flee! -- to Chicago and celebrate with Robin. Hire a hall and invite your gaming friends to a 48-hour LAN party. You can see from the talkback you're not the only one otherwise alone at Christmas.
God rest you merry gentlemen, and gentle lady writers too. Lawd bless us all, turkeys every one.
Miki’s photographs and article on the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square appear today in the Japanese webzine AirBePal.
Took my mother Bel Macdonald a year ago today to join a small crowd around the carol singers under the tree, much as shown in Miki’s pictures.
I have a vivid memory from my childhood. My father loved spectacles and to see them would drive our family on what in the 1950s were fairly long journeys. I remember standing in Trafalgar Square on the edge of a large crowd listening to the carollers. The crowd filled most of the Square, and we stood near the traffic coming out of Whitehall, where we had bought bags of hot chestnuts, one of which was warming my hand through a woollen glove.
to Miranda Richardson. We’ve been admiring her work as Queenie in Blackadder II, and remember her mesmerising Jude in The Crying Game.
Richardson’s debut film role was as murderess Ruth Ellis, associated with The Magdala pub at the bottom of our road. We gather Richardson was sitting in front of us at the gala premiere of In The Cut at the London Film Festival.
It’s clearly time we met properly, Miranda. If you're reading this, there’s a cup of tea and a mince pie waiting for you next time you're walking on the Heath, just ring the bell.
Must be precognition at work again. Last year my mother Bel Macdonald and I did the whole nine yards for Christmas: tree, carols in Trafalgar Square, Christmas Day lunch, pantomime, and had a whale of a time. Somehow neither of us has the inspiration for doing it this year. And then it turns out that a software development opportunity I’ve been awaiting for months opened up this week, and with it the chance to work on it all through the holiday period and replace some of the fresh air in my bank account. Christmas? Bah, humbug!
...a simple and sophisticated form of government This fragment of a conversation still in my 'aural memory' when I awoke from a dream this morning. Beside me, Miki muttered something Japanese in her sleep. What is the relationship between consciousness and dreaming?
It’s startling how little our science has learned about something so fundamental to our lives.
We spend a third of our lives sleeping. Sleep is extraordinarily dangerous. We could get all the physical rest we need just staying still, but no, we lose consciousness, and become vulnerable. What rewards such risk?
Here’s what we know about the relationship between dreaming and consciousness: without dreaming we are unable to stay sane and conscious. If deprived of sleep, at the first opportunity we’ll catch up, not necessarily on all the sleep we missed, but definitely on all the REM sleep. (REM sleep is named for the rapid eye movement that indicates dreaming.) Allowed to sleep but not dream, study subjects' personalities start to change.
No one has the least idea why.
Is consciousness toxic? Everything I’ve learned on the subject so far is consistent with the idea that waking consciousness is an effort that can only be sustained for limited time. A recent study reports that cognitive function declines predictably after 15.84 hours of wakefulness.
» www.sleepforscience.org | www.journalsleep.org
Another pair: pair programming tonight (Ruby Tuesday) with Ray Cannon — email us at r-s@5jt.com with your questions.
Pair programming tonight with Adrian Smith. You can email us your questions tonight at s-a@5jt.com.
No matter what speed the body travels at, the soul is restricted to the speed of an Arcturan mega-camel, or so The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us. The body waiting for the soul to catch up is what we doctors call jet lag.
Miki said she’d like to celebrate a pagan Christmas. Well, no problem: decorate a fir tree, hang druidic holly and mistletoe, burn a Yule log, sing loudly, exchange gifts, drink and feast. I’m just not sure what a non-pagan Christmas would look like.
The early Christians in this country had a brief to adopt local festivals under Christian themes. That’s where Easter and Christmas and a host of lesser holidays, now mostly forgotten came from. (Michaelmas, anyone?)
Christmas revels enjoyed a bad reputation for centuries, and when the Roundheads gained power in the English Revolution, they banned the holiday. Cromwell even sent out patrols to compel merchants to open their shops.
The holiday became respectable only when repackaged by Dickens in A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers. The Royal Family then introduced the Christmas tree, its Nordic pagan roots still intact.
It’s hard to believe that Santa Claus, that icon of Christmas, was a thin and minor saint, usually depicted in white and of doubtful connection with the holiday until the Coca Cola corporation recreated him with the help of a fat employee dressed in the corporate colours.
In short, Yule is a venerable and disreputable pagan celebration piously hijacked by arriving Christians. Since Christmas and Easter (another pagan festival) represent the limit of most people’s religious participation these days, it’s tempting to conclude that Britain's dalliance with Christianity is nearly over.
It’s certainly a challenge keeping a straight face to the plea to keep Christmas Christian.
Next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Bathing consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children, last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it, hence the saying, Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Houses had thatched roofs — thick straw piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof - hence the saying It’s raining cats and dogs.
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed — hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying dirt poor. The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway — hence a threshold.
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite awhile — hence the rhyme
Peas porridge hot
Peas porridge cold
Peas porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could bring home the bacon. They would cut off a little to share with guests and would sit around and chew the fat.
Those with money, had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top or upper crust.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up — hence, the custom of holding a wake.
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people, so they would dig up coffins and take the bones to a bone-house and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one in every twenty-five coffins had scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. They thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift) to listen for the bell, thus, someone could be saved by the bell, or was considered a dead ringer.
Amazing. CSS guru Dave Shea, the original Zen Gardener, is looking for work.
Another competition, another short list: Miki was a finalist, selected from over 10,000 entries for the Travel Photographer of the Year competition.
Coming home at an irregular hour on a train line I use only occasionally, I'm standing ready to get off the train when I hear my name spoken questioningly. A young woman of startling beauty is staring intently at me. "I'm Ilse's sister...!"
Certain people in my life I particularly regret having lost touch with. The clever, passionate, generous and talented Kelvin family is high on that list. For a brief while, fifteen years ago, Ilse Kelvin and I were lovers, the end of which I used as the excuse for a world-class fit of moping. Natasha is her younger sister, and it was she who had recognised me on the train.
But all this had happened in Australia... Ilse had moved to London to pursue her 'cello studies. Ilse and Natasha and their sister Elizabeth were all musicians, and Ilse and Natasha members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Unless I leave Australia, I will never know how good I am. Well, that's a thing about Oz. Last I'd heard Ilse had been living in Hackney and playing accompaniment on her lover Jan's CDs.
Curiously, I wound up living not far from her last address, in Dalston, but her trail was well cold by then. Then Natasha, in Hampstead. Their parents moved to Ireland, where her mother grew up. Ilse is now married and raising a family there. They're all just outside Cork. Natasha and her boyfriend live in West Hampstead; she teaches dance, gave up the violin about 7 years ago, walks often on the Heath near my house.
In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut writes that each of us belongs to a karass, a group of people with whom our lives are bound in ways we can neither predict nor fathom.
Some catching up to look forward to.
Yeah, though I walked in the shadow of the valley of death, still would I fear no evil, even though no support staff comforted me.
Spent a long Friday installing Movable Type on my LAN server: downloaded, installed and tested Perl. Hooked Perl to the Personal Web Server so it would run .CGI files as Perl scripts. Located and installed Perl packages for MySQL access (mysteriously missing from the 5.8 distribution binaries) and for Image Magick. Downloaded, configured and installed Movable Type, a Perl-based blogging software package with 14 pages of installation procedure: a touch daunting for someone with zero experience of Perl.
All this software is open-source and free, which is wonderful, but which also means no support staff. I restrained my nagging suspicion that only Perl programmers and Unix undergraduates could find their way through this work. The software is widely used. MT, for example, has user forums. The Installation thread there has over 6,000 posts with over 24,000 replies. Is this comforting or worrying? Turned out that with online documentation, searchable user forums and Google, I was able to resolve every problem, including the ones I introduced myself. By 1am Sat I had the MT web management screen visible on another machine on my LAN.
But why ontology? This summer I distinguished that my timidity disinclined me to try new technology, expecting frustration but no results. In contrast, technical people I admire seem free to dive into, review, summarise, exploit new technologies. More traces of my catastrophe monkey. So I resolved to adventure into new programming languages and technologies.
This autumn I've been getting results with PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Regular Expressions, RSS, XHTML, pure CSS layouts, Blogger, text editors NoteTab and SciTE -- and now Perl and Movable Type.
Once again, the future is a secret. The adventure continues.
And a new political party was born. Norman Fyans has started a blog on selective schools.