Nothing Important

I found the website that is linked to in the title above by one of those serendipitous chains of events that are so much more apt to occur during web-surfing than in any of life's more tangible experiences. I am still undecided regarding my distinct lack of awe that philosophers and mathematicians are still arguing so fiercely over the status of zero. Why the hell is it so problematic? You have to have a number that fits between plus one and minus one and, for want of a better candidate zero is not only the best choice, it's the only choice. Mind you, Constant Reader, it just about freaked my chicken to read those pages and find that (a) the universe's existence is in doubt and that (b) I am not the only one to have figured this out. God knows what'll happen if everyone else comes to the same conclusion; maybe so-called reality is only actually held together by the faith of its own compenent ephemera. Oh now I have a pain ... no hang on that's a real one.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. This afternoon I returned through the unseasonal (read: too early) snow in triumph. I had secured a superb coat for a mere thirty five of my English Pounds and inside its perfectly proportioned pocket I located a printed brand card bearing a bar-code and the information that the product's intended sale price was €232.41. How's that for precision? (In case you have a gas-powered browser that was 232.41 Euros ... get Firefox now and see the web as it is meant to be seen ....) Precision European pricing aside it was a double bargain because it came as two full coats that can be worn zipped together or individually according to season. I am so pleased I feel like going outside to play in the slush —

— or I would be if my left upper second premolar hadn't chosen this afternoon to have a pet of the peri-radicular septic variety. If I do not now need to submit to some urgent root canal work I may as well mail my certificate of competence back to the Royal College ... not that I was planning upon relying on the thing anyway, although it does look awfully pretty with all that copperplate script and wax seals and the heavy striations of machine-made cartridge paper. Having said all of that the pain has become bearable and (she asserted with the baseless confidence of a true professional) another couple of aspirin will be sure to do the trick. Although the bottle of red Californian plonk may also have assisted in the dulling of senses, if not of my wits.

Meanwhile I am in for a stormy night. Little Mad is slightly discombobulated. So excited was I with my bargain acquisition that my subsequent tour of duty in the nearby Asda was less focussed than it might have been. I returned home with all the accoutrements of a successful hunt but a closer examination of the spoils revealed a shocking omission. No cat food. I attempted to gloss over my sheer stupidity by gaily bringing forth a box of Go Cat from the cupboard by the back door where it had been consigned since the time, six months previously and another house entirely, when it had first been the subject of a refusal by the "Lady of the House" who, then, deigned to approach it closer than a cautious sniff-distance. I shook the package with as convincing a display of candorous "I'm not trying to con you"-ness as I ever imagined I could muster. Little Mad wasn't fooled for a second. She is on hunger strike and my bad tooth must take second place in the agenda for tomorrow.

I know. It's my own fault. It's that old rascal, Beadle Bumble's assertion in paraphrase rearing up to bite my arse. She knows what she likes and that's what she eats. All the same I wish she would stick to her diet and not supplement it with spiders, mice and birds. I am neither squeamish nor overly sentimental and for all my capacity for enduring messiness I really do draw the line at treading, barefoot, in a litter of the discarded and inedible body parts of a sampling of my locality's vertebrate and invertebrate fauna.

I think I'll have another glass of that vintage the Joad's were hoping to stamp out ....

Racked Off

Disembowelled might be just as good a title. Until this morning my new, simpler, life style has been mostly plain-sailing. Today I found the inevitable aerobatic member of the order insecta in the emolient grease. Oh! How bitterly did I lament as I fought my umbrella while battling the squally blasts of rain during my race up a street with the word green in its name, no doubt a reference to a bygone age before mister Macadam did his thing with tar and crushed stone thereby sealing the deal on the transition betwixt rural and post-industrial ....

Oh my gawd! This seasonally affective curmugeonliness is seriously unbecoming!

Not owning a car is such fun really. Driving is such a right royal pain in the arse, and I should know. This morning I ventured out of my little house to ride the lovely bus into town. I had a meeting to attend. Can't miss a meeting. Committees, eh ... what would we do without them? The weather was ... well pretty 'british'. The wall by the bus stop was wet; it's as good as a bench in more clement conditions, but this morning it was just a heap of wet bricks. There were a lot of locals waiting for the bus. It was that kind of morning: nobody in their right mind would be walking when conditions were as apt to change — for the worse, natch — as rapidly as the fortunes of the chief protagonist of a gritty northern soap. I wish I had been a passenger on the bus that duly arrived, ontime and visibly filled to capacity because then I would have been able to write at length on the subjects of schadenfreude, guilt and empathy because the damned thing didn't bother to stop. Worse it appeared that the driver slowed down as he approached we damp and dispirited mendicants for transportation the better to torture us. I am sure that I wasn't the only one who was thinking how nice it would be to spend a few minutes wedged in closed proximity to a lot of nice warm .... Cold does odd things to one's pleasabilitiness.

So being separated from my meeting by five miles or twenty minutes I was faced with a dilemna. Should I phone and feign illness? Maybe I could phone for a taxi ... but full buses do not a rapid taxi service make. This left me a single option. Phone a friend. OK the friend lives halfway between my house and the meeting so they'll have to double back but, hey! What are friends for? I'd do the same for them if I had a car .... Oh my god! I just turned into a sponger and what's worse I am making a truly terrible job of my attempt to gloss over this shameful shortcoming.

I did not have to worry about scoring a comfortable and fragrantly warm ride home. My friend had to leave early and that was why I ended up on the road with a green name and a greyer than soot character and fighting wind and rain with umbrella and mostly losing.

It was kind of par for the course that was today's eighteen holes of hell that the bus I was aiming for left the stand just recently enough that the nearest bystander was able to confirm that it had indeed just gone in spite of the fact that I was wet and windblown and had only missed seeing it go as I approached because I was hiding behind a quivering mass of multicoloured nylon and flimsy metal spars. If I wasn't already on anti-depressants I would have begun to feel a little depressed. Instead I chose to experience a little paranoia. Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

Plan B called for a bus of a different number. It was too bloody cold to hang around doing nothing but wait thirty minutes for the next scheduled useful bus. The smart traveller takes a setback and turns it into an opportunity. I waited a few minutes and leapt on the next bus that stops at my local mega-mall (that is closer to my home but a nicer place to be). I planned to hit a store that had some serious yardage of racks that were groaning with coats that ranged from the cheap and cheerful to the top of the range label. If the coming winter lives up to predictions then a good coat might be a sound investment.

I get racked off very easily. One thousand coats later I discovered that I am not as easily pleased as I am racked off. Too pale and easily soilable, too flimsy, too young, too old, too tight, too baggy, too dressy, too casual, too much decorative flim-flam, too plain. The only coat I found that I really wanted was a nice black wool coat that had been reduced from £300 to a mere £119. Nope that doesn't do it for me. I'd rather freeze ... besides it was a size too small, dammit. Worse I was experiencing pain of the urgent bowel movement variety.

Hey I can handle this. Clench and concentrate. Clench and concentrate. It makes a total nonsense of shopping. Of course everything looks like shit. It's all one can think about. I can hang on for ever. It isn't easy and it isn't at all pleasant in the sense of comfort and painlessness, but it is possible. I just have to avoid public toilets. My insides will obey my conscious control as long as they do not apporach the vicinity of a toilet bowl. I dare not enter the ladies room in case there is a queue; no way would my large plumbing comprehend the concept of waiting in line for a turn at ... [ahem] ... stool.

So I came home without a nice new coat and I am, as they first started saying in Australia, racked off —

— and it gets worse. Almost as if I had transformed into a barroom drunk who promises undying affilition to anything that doesn't run away (eg a hat stand) I now recall that I volunteered at the meeting to produce a script for a role-play exercise. If life can get worse I would really like to see it try ... on second thoughts I retract that wish.

Patty Cakes

Little Mad has become such a darlin' .... She is rarely far from my side, unless I connect Mister Dyson's infernal machine to the national grid. Lucky for her that I am such a slattern.

I am writing because I am reminded of the comic verse I threw (spewed) out back in the mid nineties partly to prove that any collection of words made poetry and partly to see if I could prove my own unproven theory. Yeah, it was as glib as that.

What emerged was such suitably comic stuff as: I like my cat/Cos he's a little catty/If he was a Beatle/He'd have a girlfriend named Patti ...

The points of ellipsis being deliberately left un-stopped with a period.

How arty-farty is that? (Given that the verse is just ghastly anyway.)

Little Mad is doing her laundry.

To be honest Little Mad is utterly careless of my concerns.

Saturdaylia

For the third day in a succession the day has begun with brilliant sunshine. The street has been dusted with liberal layer of frost and if you're planning on driving out of here in the next half hour I'd recommend heading north because south is downhill and stopping might be problematic at the tee junction with the main road. It's been a funny sort of a week really. Most often weeks merge into months and there is little to separate one from another ....

This week began with my slow emergence the muddy fugue of a spiritual crisis (previous post). I have so often wished for the solace of religious comfort, a belief that everything is in order and that everyone and everything has a purpose and a place in a greater plan. Unfortunately the individualist in me quails at the very idea; far too deterministic. I am at one with that mad woman in the Terminator movies: there is no fate but what we make. It's just a little tough sometimes to keep that idea in focus. In the end, of course, the only sane choice is to set aside the unresolvable and mark it carefully so as to avoid treading on it again in error.

On Tuesday I planned to spend the day tearing around with Dyson and duster and Spontex. However I was barely out of bed and dressed when I saw a guy standing in the street right outside my house. He was standing beside a large reel of yellow tubing and he was wearing a da-glo yellow high-visibility vest. Ooh workmen digging up the road. What fun. I went through to my kitchen to put the kettle on and returned to my living room to take a better look. The guy was now in my front garden, gingerly probing about under the unkempt roses. I was also able to read the name on the back of his safety vest. It was my cable company. After three months of waitin they have finally come along to lay me a new connection under ground. Wonders never cease. It turned out they needed power and later they also needed access to the phone socket inside so I was glad I didn't bother cleaning up.

I got up early on Wednesday to tear round cleaning up. The task occupied less than a quarter of the hours it was spread over because I multi-tasked a few other chores into the schedule, for example taking a poke about in the remaining packing cases to see if anything utterly useful remains before I decide to drag them up the garden and put a match to them. I decided to leave them another month. Not certain if that was the best decision I made this week but it's hardly a fatal one.

At midday I had visitors. How unlikely is that? That people visit just after you have cleaned your rooms to a shining, sparkling example of domestic perfection? The answer, of course, is that it is beyond any belief and any cynicism is entirely apt. I'd cleaned up because I was expecting a visit ... which is utterly pathetic but I'm not too proud to admit to having some vanity.

Thursday and the fun continued when a pair, no less, of engineers arrived to perfom the annual safety checks and servicing of my gas fixtures and fittings. I had the distinct impression that they believed I was expecting them but with a clean house to show off I wasn't about to quibble over such a thing as an appointment. They bore the right ID and so I let them in and continued to work on my laptop while watching out the corner of my eye as work-experience boy dismantled my gas fire under the watchful direction of wise old bird who looked a little like he maybe ought to be standing over a camp-fire with a pipe clamped between his teeth as he stirs a pot of beans. His sagacious advices were all succinctly delivered.

"Yep, just wriggle it out ..." Like that. It was an impressive act.

I am though easily pleased. I used to adore watching engineers and fitters at work whenever we had any work done at home. I was always especially fascinated by the magical skills of the TV repairman who could turn on the set gaze for a few moments at the scambled mess on the screen before unerringly gripping the dusty glass bulb of a valve and yanking it out before replacing it with a new one from his commodious tool box.

Oh damn! This wasn't going to be a long one ....

Roe, Row, Rho

I suppose we all have a number of books on a shelf somewhere (or even packed, hidden away, in boxes in attics) that were bought or gifted and kept with the intention that one day they would be read. Perhaps some of these are books that did not quite fit the category of un-put-downable. I am certainly one of those who is more than capable of setting everything on hold to read to the back page without stopping. In extreme situations I have been known to unplug the phone. I am not an especially fast reader; I like to savour a book, fiction especially, and am prone to breaking off actual reading for short daydreamy asides the better to adsorb a particularly chewy philosophical nugget. Unpacking, therefore, has uncovered some interesting items: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead for example.

I bought both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged at the same time from Amazon a few years ago after coming into contact with someone who repeatedly made reference to objectivism and to his own adherence to the same philosophy. I am not and never have been much of a philosopher ... at least not in the academic sense. My education lamentably was all in science subjects, as if the study of human thought and society is not the grandfather of all science! Sheesh. Anyway I got Rand's two major works and for no particular reason I opened first Atlas Shrugged and began reading that. Sadly it proved what I suspected: that an objectivist hero might prove a little too impervious to the warmth of a Constant Reader's earnest desire to engender some affection. Maybe that was the point ...? In any event I put the book down and as days rolled into weeks it gathered dust, first on the bedside table, then on the stand beside the bathtub — because I used to adore to read in the bath — until eventually I gathered it up with a load of other 'stuff' that was doing nothing for the feng shui of my various domestic tantiens and lost it in the back of some dark cupboard.

I lost the plot, so to speak, because I couldn't find a single protagonist in there with whom I could identify other than in some vaguely risible sense: for example by likening the characters to the playing pieces in a game of Monopoly ™ and thereby finding they have as much personality as the little alloy shoes and hats and cars. It was sad to use the modern vernacular with a punnish nod to the adjective's principle definition.

I refound The Fountainhead a few weeks ago (I still haven't found Atlas, maybe he shrugged too hard and lost his ball ...) and after it had been moved from here to there and back again, gaining an unsightly coffee mug ring in the process, I finally deigned to open it last week and to commence reading. I cannot say that I find it hard to set down. It is too challenging for me to maintain a long sessions with my eyes in focus and brain in gear. For one thing the woman's literary style is a little too 'artsy' for my simple taste. And, although the protagonist is rather obvious in his selfish devotion to his ambition, at least I can empathaise with his idealistic opposition to the establishment that is holding him back.

None of which explains why I passed much of the last seven or days in a fugue of amorphously colourless despondency. The foregoing perhaps might go some way to explaining that I am a somewhat lazy reader. I read firstly to be entertained and only secondarily do I expect to be informed. Most times I suspect the information, but entertainment is perfectly real, absolutely tangible. If you fall asleep before the fat lady starts to warble then you should get a refund!

It is perhaps no surprise then that my favorite literary entertainments come from the giants of science-fiction with side-orders of other stuffs like Steinbeck, King and P.D. James. Such stuff is light and easily digestible reading. Its only purpose is to be highly entertaining and only infrequently does it disappoint by running against the grain of its own genre-specific raison d'être. However sci-fi is more unusual in that it much more often carries a weightier philosophical conundrum as a plot-sustaining strut. One of my long term fascinations in this field is that of the idea of non human intelligence.

I have no belief whatsoever that humans have ever been in contact with extra-terrestrial aliens and little faith we ever will. The idea is too silly even if the notion of extra-terrestrial life isn't. Ask any biologist how many species of plants and animals in their locality are threatened by 'alien' species imported by humans from another continent and the answer will be too many! How much worse would the situation be if the Things from Alpha Cenaturi decided to pop over and say hello? Even if they didn't care about what might happen to our planet they wouldn't want to muck up their own unique ecology with a load of accidental imports. Or maybe I just want to believe that aliens would be more ecologically advanced. Wells made the first effort to expound this idea in War of The Worlds but he overlooked the possility of importation of infection. Whatever. As far as non-human intelligence is concerned it is much more likely that we will make it ourselves.

Over the years of the twentieth century sci-fi struggled, more or less in vain, to keep pace with science. Various writers made varying yarns out of in vitro fertilisation and gestation and some even debated the legitamacy of the humanity of such people. Imagine!

A good argument can always be had on a religious forum by asking the question: "could a robot have a soul?" These questions have been asked over and over and are not even the perquisite of sci-fi. I'm literary hack but I bet that even the Pinocchio story is not even the first example of this time-worn argument with no definitve answer.

Meanwhile it happened that I was channel-hopping on my TV a week or so ago looking for something light and I chanced on an episode of Star Trek Voyager, a programme I normally shun because that franchise lost its freshness long before Rodenberry's heirs noticed. There wasn't much else on at the time so I stuck with it. By coincidence the plot referred to a previous incident in a prior episode that I had also seen and remembered (what are the odds of that? Out of a hundred or hundreds of episodes I doubt I have seen more than 5 or 6 all the way through.) They had been to a place where some of the crew had been duplicated by a weird quicksilver substance and now they realised that they, and the whole ship, were all duplicates and that they were therefore not the real versions of themselves. As if that wasn't bad enough, they were also decaying back into a silvery goop so they decided to race back to their home planet. Unfortunately they blew up before they got there, their final attempt to leave a record of their existence failed in the last moment and those still alive just before the end died with the shatteringly distressing knowledge that everything they knew about could never even know they had ever existed.

It's just a 15 minute, coffee time fiction in the middle of your weekly magazine. Nothing to lose sleep over and yet it does actually pose the same great question. If I think then I must be. Period. If we take that indefinable element that distinguishes a live human being from a beetle, or a cat, or a computer and call it a soul for want of a better and more meaningful word (mainly because ego is too easily misunderstood and too anthropomorphisable: Little Mad has more ego than an army of Samurai!) then it is not just possible, but undeniable, to argue that souls must be capable of spontaneous self generation. I stipulate that because to ascribe the allocation of souls to God is merely to pass the blame or else just to fudge the question.

A beginning a middle and and ending is what I desire. You cannot have a chicken without an egg; nor the egg without the chicken. Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty are the benchmarks of sanity in a universe so cock-a-mamie that if I'd had it designed to order I would want my money back. So I'll just carry on waiting for armageddon to come in my pleasant little dream world.

Dark Fillage ...

.... was — or maybe still is &mdash the working title of my widely ranging and wildly ambitious novel project. It also seems apt to describe a feeble attempt to expiate my seasonally consonant shadowy mood, which crept in under the threshold of my careless attention to such matters. I never much cared for autumn. It was the season when school resumed after the summer break ... and I never grew bored of setting my own agenda; by contrast I could easily lose the will to live before I even finished scratching in the names of the various classes on my school timetable card. Timetables and deadlines are the spawn of the devil ... and as good a reason as any for supposing that holy grail of the mythical WASP — the work ethic — is merely a satanically peverted hijacking of a previously less onerous doctrinal aspiration.

By God! I got it bad, ain't i?

For me, the seasons are not equal. Partly this is geographical. In these fair isles we don not endure much in the extremes of season. Mostly the climate is variably damp. If the grass is green it has rained recently, if it isn't expect rain. The sun will shine most days and when it does it mostly gives pleasant warmth and only at the extremes of its solstician variations is either truly feebly wan or hellishly fierce. It seems to me that most of my countrymen divide their years into four equal portions and call each a different season regardless of appropriateness. I am a little more pedantic.

Autumn begins on the Tuesday after the last Monday in August because that day marks the last week of the school holiday. From then on the trees begin their preparations for winter. The adults slowly wean themselves off cooking and eating outdoors and demonstrate this wimpish fear of Brittania's creeping damp by losing their Balearic tans and opting for a slightly paler orange shade of spray-on dye. Kids prepare to punctuate the long and drearily dreadful autumn school term — which of course ends in the ultimate child-spoiling fest — with the mid-term beano of legalised begging, which in the UK culminates in the drawn out firework season fusion of Guy Fawkes bonfire night, Hallowe'en and in many areas, Diwali and last year and this we had Eid as well. Well it's as good as night as any to mark the end of cook-out weather so for me, autumn ends on on November fifth.

At first sight this might make it seem that my winter gets a longer innings than it deserves and I admit that counting most of November as winter is certainly a problem; mostly because the weather is very rarely wintery. Proper winter begins in January but luckily it also ends there. My eldest son, my sister and mother all have birthdays in February and winter is no time to celebrate something as gay as a birthday so even if there is three feet of snow outside I, at least, do not lose grip on the sure knowledge that there be crocuses 'neath that cosy white duvet. And no thing of such fragile, simple beauty has any place in a dead season of frozen mud and bare-naked trees.

Spring then fills the gap betwen the rash of February birthdays — I mark its exact beginning as the day I see my first gold and purple carpet of crocuses — and it ends on the day before my own birthday, which is pretty close to the summer solstice. This gives the great Brit spring the better part of five months to demonstrate all the glories of nature, from the first crocus, through the first cuckoo, the first new potato, and culiminating in the first strawberry as the mounting pressure to declare the season formally ended becomes unbearable.

Summer is okay ... ish ... but, frankly, even if it lasted twice as long it would still be over too soon. Too often summer is a let down. Whether it be too hot or not hot enough it is always something of a relief to get to autumn and not have to worry about being short-changed.

So my current convention is better than the one I grew up with where autumn lasted until Christmas and winter reigned until Easter and spring was the term of school or university exams and summer was still not bloody-well long enough.

Besides autumn is a fine season for melancholy and I always drew an unseemly amount of pride from my restraint in setting a short span for having the blues. Winter would seem to be a much better time to have a raging depression (if that isn't an oxymoron I wouldn't know one if it bit me!) but I love winter with a perverse kind of joy. I love to watch the slow, rank, mildewed decay of the world. Drifts of dry leaves become a slimy mess, hedgerows, stripped of their greenery display their knotty, tangled, varicose legs buried knee-deep in a midden of nature's discards ... and, yeah, the odd chocolate wrapper, beer-can or condom too. But then if we aren't, too, a part of nature then I declare I have seriously misunderstood everything. Oh well.

It is truly weird then that I have been uncommonly dark in spirit these last couple of days. At first I was bemused by it, then I thought, what the hell, and decided to have a wallow in it. Then I realised why I had it. It isn't an organic thing. It isn't a return to my prior psychiatric crisis it's a genuine melancholia brought on by a sad idea that I picked up on and chewed over and over until I felt I had gotten as near as I could get to grokking it.

I put it away and slowly but surely my mood has lifted but the unencompassable breadth of the original idea .... Ah that needs telling too but maybe not just yet.