Truly random

What do legsore travellers think when they disembark at Gatwick airport and find that the route to central London is through the tatty sadlands of Croydon and Streatham? Streatham, in particular, has that odd narrowness of streets British cities achieve without ever straying close to either the chic or the quaint.

Streatham is the sort of place you quickly remember not to stop, unless it’s for the magnificently conceived bulk-buy Indian supermarket (AKA the cash & curry). As I reluctantly pulled the car over at a petrol station one evening last week, it was therefore only after careful calculation had shown that I would conk out in Croydon.

The forecourt was gloomy, underlit and overlooked by a dark brick building of indeterminate purpose. The sign on the pump was both grim and baffling:

A PRE-PAY SERVICE IS NOW
BEING USED AT THIS STATION,
RANDOMLY
PLEASE SEE THE ATTENDANT
BEFORE PUMPING

Back in time

A particularly curious edition of the BBC’s venerable science strand Horizon last night. Is time travel possible? it asked.

The programme put forward the usual theoretical evidence for mechanisms for time travel that are completely beyond our means. Then it finished matters off with a marvellous rhetorical flourish.

Time travel, it is claimed, is perfectly possible, as long as we completely redefine what we mean by time travel. Let’s redefine it for these purposes not as literally moving to the past or far future, but as having access to the past. I know, I know, but stay with me on this for a minute.

The hypothesis goes something like this:

Computing power in our society is increasing exponentially. From this we can extrapolate that a sufficiently advanced civilisation (i.e. not us) would have increased their computing power infinitely.

The realism of computer image rendering is also increasing massively right now. So we can also extrapolate that this hypothetical advanced civilisation would not only be able to compute an infinite amount of information infinitely quickly, but would also be able to render images of such fidelity that we would be incapable of telling the difference between reality and simulation.

In effect, they would be able to build a perfect virtual reality, the inhabitants of which would not even realise they are not ‘real’. By carefully recording everything, they would be able to recreate it with perfect fidelity at a later date for their own amusement or study.

One further assumption gets us to a horrifying realisation: this advanced civilisation with infinite computing power would not, of course, limit themselves to building one virtual reality; they would build, we are told, billions.

Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

We are left with a multitude of seamlessly perfect simulations. The consequence is that statistically, we are vastly more likely to be unknowingly living inside a simulation than in the real world.

Isn’t that disturbing?

On the other hand, if this Matrix-like shocker has failed to put the willies up you, maybe that’s because, recalling Descartes’ struggles with his ‘malicious demon’ and difficulties with telling dream from reality, you suspect this is just an attempt on familiar philosophical issues with a bit of dot.com era technodazzle.

Or it may be because you’re uneasily aware of the number of unproven assumptions it contains. It’s an a priori argument; an attempt to move from a small set of secure assumptions to a logically sound conclusion.

So let’s go back in time to the start of the virtual reality hypothesis and have a quick look again at some of those assumptions.

First, you will recall, we note the current exponential increase in computing power and imagine that, for a sufficiently advanced civilisation, this exponential increase would increase until processing power reached infinity.

Infinity is a pretty big number, you know. The first test here should be whether infinite computing power is, in principle, even possible. I doubt it is. Nevertheless, this could be Horizon oversimplifying. You might not really require infinite computing power. Unimaginably large might be sufficient, and I’ve got noa priori reason to doubt that someone, someday, could achieve a massive, finite amount of computing power.

Next up, and correlating with our unimaginably large computing power, is infinitely realistic image rendering power. Well, for starters, if we can get by with just unimaginably large computing power, I don’t see why we can’t reduce our requirement here to unimaginably realistic image rendering. Our eyes have a resolution limit set by the number of rods and cones on our retinas, and there’s no a priori reason to doubt that image rendering fast and good enough to fool us could be achieved.

Horizon does, however, only mention imaging. We have four other major senses that would require fooling. Again, I’ve no particular reason to doubt that a sufficiently sophisticated linkup to my brain could stimulate in me the smell of bacon cooking, the touch of silk (both with and against the nap), or the taste of a good 12-year old Scotch. I do think, though, that the hypothesis should take account of the other senses, because the ‘exponential increase’ measurement simply doesn’t apply equally across them all.

But these are minor cavils compared to my problems with what the hypothesis seeks to do with these assumptions. For they are supposed to add up to the conclusion that a sufficiently advanced civilisation could build a simulation so good that we could not distinguish it from the real world.

It doesn’t.

In fact, it’s very hard to see exactly what the hypothesis is claiming would occur; a fault, I assume, of the documentary rather than the hypothesis itself. Does it suggest that we are flesh-and-blood creatures linked, Matrix-style, to a massive VR machine? If so, there are a number of practical matters to consider, many of which concern synchronisation. If I really cough, do I cough in the simulation, and vice versa? What happens when a flesh-and-blood person dies? Co-ordinating a sudden collapse may be possible, but what if the person is revived in the real world — or in the simulation?

It could be argued that the requirements of synchronisation would be so onerous that, in effect, the distance between real experience and simulation would be decreased to the point that simulation would be pointless.

I think that, instead, the hypothesis suggests that we are just artificial constructs in a wholly artificial environment. This sounds a whole lot more possible, a little like a vastly more sophisticated version of Sim City, with us as the Sims. But, note, Sims don’t ’sense’ anything in any way that would would understand. They have directly coded responses. They carry numerical values, not sense impressions. They have, in short, no consciousness as we understand it.

I think you can see where I’m going. The whole simulation hypothesis has wandered into the artificial intelligence argument, with all of the baggage that carries; free will, determinism, the Turing test, mind/body problems, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. I don’t intend to rehearse the whole set of issues here. Even if I wished to, I couldn’t. Suffice to say that Horizon alleged that the hypothesis raises difficult questions about the nature of free will. No it doesn’t. It reiterates the difficult questions about free will that we already have, just in a different context.

In short, though, we can dump those first two assumptions about computing power. They’re irrelevant. The real assumption is that computer-generated constructs can achieve consciousness. This is such a big deal that although you can argue it, there’s no way you can assume it.

In fact, it’s slightly worse than that. The Turing test aside, I don’t think that most versions of AI argument would require that an artificial consciousness be or appear the same as a human one. But the simulation hypothesis does just that. It argues that your feeling of consciousness, your experience of being you, could be a simulation. Tricky, to say the least.

Not only has the simulation hypothesis boxed itself into a very hard version of AI, it’s done it for an oddly meaningless reason. We can’t help our starting point in this argument. We have to look at it as someone simulating Earth, 2003, because that’s where we are (or seem to be).

But in order for a sufficiently advanced civilisation to simulate Earth, 2003, theymust be recording it in perfect detail. There is no other option. The fossil record is, I’m afraid, not good enough to perfectly reconstruct every event on Earth, neither are the admittedly huge number of radio waves we’re sending out.

Now, maybe you could argue that alleged UFO sightings are evidence of aliens recording every detail of our lives for later reconstruction. I won’t, but maybe you will. They would, of course, have to appear inside the simulation every time they appeared in the real world, so I think we avoid any discrepancies between real and simulated world, but I still don’t think there’s any way around the enormous improbability of it all.

Finally, there is the assumption that a massively complex, massively fast, massively extensive simulation could run indefinitely without crashing. This is an assumption that cannot be extrapolated from current computing capabilities. Ironically, the site that sets out the simulation argument is, as I write, not responding.

It’s curious, though, that the hypothesis could be reworked to avoid a large number of these problems simply by having it not be a simulation. All of the problems except the fundamental one of consciousness can be removed from the equation simply by having our experiential world be a fiction. As Charles Fort teasingly suggested, ‘I think we’re property’. I never knew what that was supposed to mean. Maybe he meant we were counters in some great computer game, just Sims, part of a wild abstract of life tweaked for entertainment value.

Time travel? I suppose games are very good at that. You can always return to the beginning for another go. If, that is, you’re really sure you want to quit this game without saving.

A spammer by any other name

Are spammers’ names getting more outré?

This morning I had offers of genuine prescribed medication from, amongst others, Demetrius Column, Arnulfo Mcleod and the titanically monickered Inflorescence B. Afghan.

Either there are some very bored people being forced to come up with an ever-increasing number of names or this is an escalation of the spammer-punter arms race. This arms race is based on grabbing the punter’s attention. Arguably this means grabbing attention by whatever means necessary, even if this draws attention to the fact that this is spam. You see it in subject headers too. I had one this morning titled “parenthesis maid spinal”.

The only alternative that I can imagine is that these are being sent by the sorry tail end of the once great clans of the French surrealists.

I imagine Duchamp’s grandson, struggling now to maintain the crumbling pile into which he was born, one wing of which is now entirely closed off for repairs that will never happen. All over the house heaps of grandfather’s eccentric constructions fight for floorspace with heaps of accumulated tat. That pile of damp mattresses was probably one of his, but now nobody’s quite sure. Their spring has sprung long since. The famous urinals are now pressed into service as urinals. Duchamp III is forced into hawking the familial talent for a meagre living, handcrafting and sending up to a thousand gibberish emails a day, each one uniquely absurd. “Sati fa tion gua teed!”, he types furiously, “yygd mryu”.

He knows that he is the last standard bearer of a lost movement. Magritte’s grandson has been doing cigarette advertising for years. Any surviving Dalis are fully engaged in setting editorial policy for British tabloids. This week he heard that Man Ray’s son — Boy Ray — breathed his last in a Parisian garret (which he insisted to the last was a railway carriage shaped like a woman’s behind).

Only the callow Duchamp, the end of his line, relentlessly sends out his incomplete messages into the vague night of the web, refusing to surrender his final nub of hope that some unknown Dadaist will pick one up, add to it, and send it on again, in memory of the great games of consequences once played in Paris.

(Nearly) lost weekend

A curious, rather private weekend. I don’t normally get them to myself, and I certainly wouldn’t normally take a long weekend to be at home, but sometimes it just happens regardless.

Saturday was spent firstly transporting foetid bags of garden waste to the municipal dump, a task I wouldn’t wish on George Bush. By the time I’d done that, cleaned up all the dank smudges of putrescent leaf that I’d managed to spread through the house, gone shopping and cooked a very nearly edible Creole lamb dish for myself, it was time to light the evening fire and settle down to watch Alejandro Amenabar’s first film (nasty minded rubbish; don’t bother).

Sunday, as usual, revolved around the midday football in the park. Hit the post twice and, eventually, nicked an equaliser, thank you for asking.

Today. Today was odd. I’d booked it off to go on a little shopping excursion for a small but important something I’ve been meaning to get for a while now. I got it, and the usual other bits and pieces one picks up when shopping with some time to waste; a new cartridge for my printer, which somehow cost over three times as much as the 14-disc set of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ I picked up. Now, I’m no particular fan of Wagner, but at something like 70p per hour of volcanically serious mythomania, it’s vastly cheaper than the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films (which, in their extended forms, will be almost as long as the Ring cycle). If I start trying to annexe Austria, please remind me to change the record.

I was meaning to go to the National, but in my excitement got it all wrong. I had my valuable shopping with me by this stage (no, not the Wagner), and really didn’t want to be leaving it in the cloakroom, no matter how well attended. I’ll have to catch the Bill Viola exhibition one evening this week on my way back from work.

Walking back down the Strand, I passed one of the theatres as two workmen outside were fitting one of those eight foot tall posters into one of the glass display panels outside. I felt a whisper against the back of my neck, and half turned as the metal and glass panel smashed onto the pavement right behind me.

There is really very little you can say to someone who has nearly brained you without noticing. So I didn’t attempt any more than the basics. It certainly didn’t require more than words of one syllable.

I’m amusedly aware that I was not in the slightest unnerved by the whole incident. I’ve been trying to work out why ever since. I’ve ruled out curiosity value; being lamped by a display window may not be the way I would choose to go, but at least it would have been…theatrical. While death by defenestration has a venerable history, I suspect fenestration is altogether rarer.

I suspect that the reason why I’m not more disturbed is that windows do not look aggressive. Buses, lorries, elephants, panicking hippopotami, trains, even cars can loom menacingly towards you. Windows can only ever loom transparently. Besides, any looming that was going on was entirely behind my back. I missed the entire looming part of the process. My near-miss was entirely loomless.

Eventually, I got home to find a message from the bank. Sweet, I thought; checking that I’m safe. In reality, checking that my day’s purchases were not the result of a stolen bank card.

One final pleasure: on the doormat was a second hand book I had entirely forgotten I’d ordered; Defoe’s The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton.

That’s it. Pirate ships loom. Out of the mist. They do it all the time. That, if ever was, is the way to go.

crunch crunch crunch silence

Winter is coming.

If only winter in London was a little more like this, and a little less like, well, nothing in particular. The British Isles, with their freakishly temperate climes, manage to be chilly and damp, but in a vague way. It is rarely properly cold in the south, but it almost always fails to be warm. I remember my old geography teaching alleging that Britain has no climate; it only has weather.

And, by and large, that weather is limp and washed out.

That said, it’s been raining a great deal recently. Last Sunday’s weekly football was conducted in a wind-whipped rainstorm, the looming cloud cover spouting bathtub after bathtub onto the grass. It was both miserably foul and curiously exhilarating. Once we were running, the trickling clamminess of my top seemed less chilling. At the same time, my legs either warmed up or went completely numb, blocking out the pain.

I was irresistibly reminded of school sports, standing shivering on the rugby field at three quarter while the games master attempted to explain precisely why he’d blown up for yet another foul (knock on, handling in a ruck, offside, coming in from the side; plenty to choose from). At least this was preferable to tackling practice, always performed on the muddiest patch in the field.

Of all the things I thought I might end up repeating from my schooldays, I never thought it would be this.

Chants for socialists

Since we are having an nostalgic autumn of wildcat strikes and pay disputes, I thought I’d dig out one of William Morris’ least starry-eyed ditties for the workers, electronically transcribed and released into the public domain by that marvellous creation, Project Gutenberg.

DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN

Come, comrades, come, your glasses clink;
Up with your hands a health to drink,
The health of all that workers be,
In every land, on every sea.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!

Well done! now drink another toast,
And pledge the gath’ring of the host,
The people armed in brain and hand,
To claim their rights in every land.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!

There’s liquor left; come, let’s be kind,
And drink the rich a better mind,
That when we knock upon the door,
They may be off and say no more.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!

Now, comrades, let the glass blush red,
Drink we the unforgotten dead
That did their deeds and went away,
Before the bright sun brought the day.
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!

The Day? Ah, friends, late grows the night;
Drink to the glimmering spark of light,
The herald of the joy to be,
The battle-torch of thee and me!
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!

Take yet another cup in hand
And drink in hope our little band;
Drink strife in hope while lasteth breath,
And brotherhood in life and death;
And he that will this health deny,
Down among the dead men, down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down,
Down among the dead men let him lie!

(From Chants for Socialists by William Morris)

sdfsdf

I don’t think that qwertyuiop has made it into the dictionary yet, as it’s one of those very few recognisable strings of characters that has no semantic meaning.

Or does it?

Leaving aside the fact that the string has appeared in at least one book title (Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings by Anthony Burgess), surely there’s a case to be made that ‘qwertyuiop’ is a form of performative expression; that by writing it, you indicate that you are typing. Thus, ‘qwertyuiop’ means ‘I am now typing’.

I’ve been spotting more and more frequently another of these rare birds I’d also like to add to the dictionary.

‘sdfsdf ‘means, I would argue, ‘I am testing’, or even more specifically, ‘I am now testing what can be seen’. It’s another performative expression because there is no semantic distance between typing this string and doing what it says, in the same way that there is no semantic distance between saying ‘I do’ in your marriage vows and actually performing your marriage vows. Saying is doing.

In a time when saying seems very much unrelated to doing (and, I fear, vice versa) it’s encouraging to feel that there are a few more of these performatives around.

Psychogeographical markup language

Existing at the hitherto unsuspected nexus of Situationism and the Semantic Web, the proposed Psychogeographical Markup Language seems oddly, cruelly,workable, seen alongside some of the woolier things already proposed for semantic web protocols.

Sample tagging:

Distinct (is a place distinctive, or has it distinct features)
Border (is this street a definite break with the previous in a psychogeographical sense)
Open (the node present itself as welcoming)
Close (the node present itself as not welcome to visitors)
Lively (a place seems evolving, a centre for social interaction)
Gloom (a place nobody cares for)
Crowds (there are more people than a space can handle)
Desolate (the space is designed for more people than there are present)
Hectic (a space is filled up with objects)
Empty (a space is devoid of objects)
Planned Behaviour (the node implies certain behaviour/way to cross it)
Unplanned Behaviour

Story of the week

Ronnie O’Sullivan is quite a lad. Sometime snooker world champion, perpetually in the tabloids for his substance-assisted hijinks, he’s the quintessence of Essex wide-boy. Just don’t ask what his dad did; or indeed how long he got inside for doing it.

Suffice to say that the body was found.

Given the lad’s reputation, this week’s bemused stories of O’Sullivan filsconverting to Islam in a burger bar seemed to fit into the double-decker-found-on-the-moon category of tabloid fantasy.

Encouragingly, though, it seems that the stories were based on fact and fully lived up to Fleet Street’s exacting standards of half-truth. Ronnie did go to a mosque, and was converted, but, with insouciant style befitting one of snooker’s greats, he didn’t realise what was going on.

“Actually, even when they called me to the front of the mosque I didn’t know what was happening. They were very friendly, and in my ignorance I thought it was just a social thing - their way of welcoming a stranger. I felt a bit overawed by all the people around me, especially because they were talking all the time.”

Further evidence, if it were needed, that when the tabloids proclaim “you couldn’t make it up!”, they’re really whooping “we don’t need to make it up!”

This week’s other “you couldn’t make it up!” moment, was of course, Tony Blair speaking yesterday morning:

“This is an interim report and the issue that people should focus on is this: will they disclose evidence that this a breach of the United Nations resolutions that would have triggered a war with UN support if that information had been before the UN?”

As most people will be answering that with a resounding “No”, perhaps Tony can make use of Ronnie’s bemused conclusion:

“I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to offend, and I just thought I’d keep everyone happy then politely leave. But now I know differently.”

Blood, dirt and nonograms

Sometimes one stumbles across a piece of ostensibly academic research that glows with sense, vitality and fresh insight. It may be because I’m relatively speaking an outsider to the history of science that I often find that it’s in this field one gets the most delightful surprises.

Thomas Hankins’ lecture entitled ‘Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms’ gives the history of graphs, culminating in L.J. Henderson’s ‘nomogram’ representing the complex systems of the blood in a single graph.

It’s a story that starts around the end of the eighteenth century, with the likes of William Playfair’s graph of the British national debt from 1699 to 1800. Playfair, we are told, ‘went to Paris as agent to the Scioto Ohio Land Company; there he assisted in defrauding large numbers of French citizens and, according to tradition, helped storm the Bastille.‘

Graphs were already being considered in France as a means of providing easy conversion tables for the new metric system. These met with limited success, and real progress was made only when graphs suggested a descriptive geometry suitable for engineering drawing, initially to solve the military engineering problem of defilade. (In brief, defilade presents the problem of moving the minimum amount of earth the shortest distance such that no point of the fortification is overlooked by neighbouring ground.)

Defilade problems naturally led to the calculations required for laying out the new railways across France. Here we learn why the French railway is so fundamentally efficient: it was laid out with enormous concern for earthworks, so that curves were as gentle as possible, and gradients never exceeded five millimetres per metre.

From here we move rapidly through the first topographical map, isotherms, isobars, iso-everything, ‘the best statistical graphic ever drawn’ (representing Napoleon’s march on Moscow), the much feared log tables, and eventually to nomograms.

The beauty of nomograms is that one can lay a straight line (or, as is suggested, a piece of string) from a value on one side to a value on the other, and read off the result from the graph. Henderson clearly found this beauty suggestive, as he ended up speculating teleologically; that just as creatures displayed ‘fitness’ to their environment, so the environment displayed an elegant fitness to its creatures. This - further evidence why it is dangerous to let scientists make philosophical speculations - is the sort of thing that Charles Sanders Peirce used to propose even though he ought to have known better. It’s no surprise that Peirce manages to get a mention in the essay, albeit for other matters.

And so, finally, back to Henderson’s nomogram of the blood, which was hailed for integrating no fewer than 105 different relationships into one unifying picture.

If I’ve engaged in an enthusiastically extended description, it’s because every paragraph of Hankins’ lecture offers something to distract and entrance. Good on him, and good on all the other academics who still believe that the best way to communicate their learning is through communicating their delight.

Urban chess

Inspired by Kevan’s throwaway comments about street chess, I thought urban chess would work better if it were based not on finding, but on setting out chess pieces.

So, take eight pawns of one colour. Set them out on paving slabs along your route to work, each one eight slabs away from some fixed point worth marking (your home, the bakery, a pillar box). Each time you pass them, you may move them one slab further. If any reach their destinations, you win.

Notes:

1. To save needless frustration, play in one direction only.

2. If you know that you walk the same route as someone else, but in the opposite direction, get them to play with the other colour of pawn.

Triple witching day

For one reason and another (including the fact that I was waiting for a phone call that eventually came at 3am), I was notably sluggish and bleary this morning.

Even so, I was sure I wasn’t hallucinating when I heard a correspondent on the BBC casually mention that ‘things might be bumpy today’ as it was triple witching day.

Some previously overlooked pagan festival, perhaps? Some numerical superstition based on 19/09? Something like ‘Nelsons’ in cricket? Some particularly substantial readjustment of the atomic clock resulting in a thirteen-hour day?

No, it’s a term from the financial markets.

Could this be the first evidence that merchant bankers have some mythopoeic spark in their flinty souls?

Another asylum shock

First posted 10th September 2003:

he Daily Mail piece I reproduce here caught my eye.

ASYLUM SEEKERS WILL COVER LONDON BY 2005

The Government suffered a further blow last night as shocking new evidence emerged of previously unsuspected bogus asylum seekers hiding out in London. The sheer number of illegal immigrants is such that it could leave the capital literally swamped within eighteen months.

Mail reporters yesterday were able to visit one previously unknown location in central London where an asylum seeker, known as “David”, has set up an extraordinary rent-free home. There, in full view of thousands of commuters crossing the Thames, this “conman” (© Daily Mail 2003) has built his very own glass penthouse with stunning panoramic views of the river.

Serious questions will be asked in Parliament as to just how this immigrant from the USA - a country not acknowledged by the Foreign Office’s as one where its citizens may suffer persecution - managed to bend our lax benefits system so as to gain a prime piece of docklands location. Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare was said to be shocked, adding “I think I can see him from my window”.

Even worse, the riverside squatter is being allowed to live in the centre of Europe’s largest city without even the most basic form of sanitation. His drinking water comes from a nearby water tower by means of a simple pipe, and his foul waste drops into the Thames itself. Only centuries ago the city was decimated by cholera and typhoid. Now the unmanageable asylum problem threatens an epidemic of similar proportions. And should the worst happen, it would threaten every man, woman and child living in a mortgaged property in the Greater London area not only with death, but with a resulting catastrophic drop in property prices.

Questions have been asked as to what “David” is doing here. His response to being challenged illustrates just what the overburdened and powerless immigration authorities are faced with. “David” has gone on hunger strike - he claims that he will not eat for 44 days and 44 nights, if that’s what it takes. Faced with such do-or-die tactics, Ken Livingstone, David Blunkett and Tony Blair have chosen simply to sit on their hands. If they hope that the problem will go away, they are mistaken.

The raw statistics raise a prospect so chilling that it seems, on the face of it, incredible. Two weeks ago, the number of foreigners living in glass boxes by the Thames was estimated at zero. Today there is one, making for what mathematicians call an “infinite” percentage increase in numbers. If this rate is sustained, by Christmas the whole of the length of the Thames from Greenwich to Richmond will be blocked off by a wall of glass boxes containing beardy strangers, reaching up to a mile high. By the end of next year, London would be completely buried under the boxes, each containing a sleepy-eyed hoaxer, with just a hole in the floor for a toilet.

And yet the Home Office refuses to acknowledge the extent of the problem, claiming (continued on p.2; David Blaine ‘not really able to levitate’ claim, p.7; Picture, p. 9)

On sports writing

First posted 9th September 2003:

Sports writing is, to borrow a phrase, a funny old game.

It isn’t news, and it isn’t really comment. It reports stories where the reader is often already aware of the outcome.

Perhaps this is why sports writing has a long and peculiar history of being personal, elliptical, even obscure. Hunter S. Thompson is, of course, a sports journalist. His tales of fear and loathing are a product of the fact that his exact turn of phrase would not cause, for instance, the whole machinery of government to turn on him.

Elsewhere, B.S. Johnson’s experimental novel The Unfortunates was provoked by one of Johnson’s forays into the midlands to cover a football match in a strange town, only to find it wasn’t a strange town at all.

Note that I’m not talking here about writers who are sportsmen: though there have been a fair number, from Arthur Conan Doyle (cricket, football), through Camus (football), Nabokov (tennis, football), to Tony Adams (football, drinking). Near the top of that list would be Samuel Beckett, the only Nobel laureate to have played first class cricket. Fascinating, but a subject for another day.

What I’m interested in today is the tradition of sports writers, and in particular, why the greatest of all are the cricket writers.

Anybody’s list of cricket writers would include the formidable Marxist critic CLR James and the immortal Neville Cardus (here he is on the famous bodyline series).

There are many more in the canon, but with the exception of the likes of Frank Keating, it seems ever fewer than there used to be.

In fact, as is usual with this sort of tradition, one of the indications that the tradition is still strong is, ironically, the number of complaints that all the greats have gone. Unlike football, which with small exceptions, continually pretends that the current generation are the greatest we have ever seen, cricket constantly harks to a golden past, where Cardus endlessly reported in glistening prose the sublime performances of Don Bradman, the feats of both remaining ever out of reach.

Well, of course, they’re not. The sprats of the present soon become the whoppers of the past. Dour old Michael Atherton is rehabilitating his reputation nicely, and Devon Malcolm, a frustrating scattergun of a fast bowler in his day, is perfected in the memory as the fellow who was hit on the head while batting agaist South Africa, murmured “You guys are history” to himself, and returned to take nine wickets in the next innings.

It happens to the players, and it happens to the writers. In a decade cricket writers will be harking back to Keating, in thirty years tyros like Lawrence Boothwill be regarded with a sort of puzzled fondness.

Maybe it’s just the relief of England squaring the series against South Africa, and perhaps it’s a soft view of the Boy’s Own performance put in by England’s cart-pulling all-rounder Andrew Flintoff, but this appreciation by The Guardian’s David Hopps tickled me no end.

“Quick, get the beers, Freddie’s in.” A similar cry sounded for Ian Botham 25 years ago. Now it rings for Flintoff. Gary Kirsten might best be admired with your back to the television screen but not to watch Flintoff is like going to Blackpool Pleasure Park and not riding the Big One.

Like all the best sports writing, it captures something you saw, and felt, and wished to share. The art of the cricket writer is knowing not only how to share it with you, but how to fit it into the sense of cricket as a whole entity, a cultural enterprise.

Incidentally, this sense of cricket having a cultural - maybe even a political - resonance, as CLR James would have it, can help to explain many deep-seated feelings. What better metaphor for the meandering curlicues of aggression
between India and Pakistan than a Test series? What better illustration of the different mental universes of the British and the American than the fact that cricket remains a mystery to them? If the typical American could be brought to understand a game that necessarily involved whole mornings in which nothing much happens, perhaps we would be subject to less precipitous handbagging of perceived enemies.

Very well. I may not be entirely serious here, and the Old Cricketer’s writing style can boom and parp after a while, but one thing is heartfelt:

roll on the winter tours, where nobody in their right mind and gainful employment can watch the overnight coverage, and the writers will take to the centre for another long session.

All souls

Why is that while a good film or play may elate me, a good book nourishes me?

It must be something to do with the length of the respective experiences: the novel has enough time to worm its way into your affections, insinuating itself into your portable world, becoming a fellow traveller on the daily carousel. A great book can become that ‘good friend’ aspired to by innumerable writers from Defoe, Fielding and Sterne onwards.

I think, though, there’s something more to it than that. Theatre and film are, like it or not, external in their approach. They are, to hack William Gibson’s phrase, consensual hallucinations of a world. A good novel competently creates the illusion of another mind.

Even after a lifetime of empirical evidence that other people really do exist, I suspect that we all still find the unbridgeable gap between our mind and others a troublesome thing, that we are all Berkeleyans at heart just as we were as kids. Perhaps novels are the best evidence that over the bridge the world looks pretty much the same. Perhaps they’re the best evidence that there is something over the bridge.

I really think I read to know that I’m not the only soul.

Mad about flowers

“The English, so visually blind in most ways, are mad about flowers” - John Berger

Some serious work got done in the garden last weekend. Such effort for a space approximately 30 feet by 15. The urban garden indicates more about our predicament than I think we’d like to know.

It got me thinking about my favourite tape right now, which contains Lindsay Anderson’s 1957 documentary about the old Covent Garden flower market,Every Day Except Christmas.

Given that my horticultural expertise is limited to identifying about a dozen of the more common flowers, it’s a curious choice. But then, it’s a glorious documentary; precise, unfussy and respectful. That it looks wonderful helps; Anderson and cameraman Walter Lassally gorge themselves on the lyrical evocation of urban space and the harsh poetry of normal faces in close-up.

But it’s the tone of the piece that moves me to tears. Anderson, though heading up the Free Cinema movement that called for an unflinching acceptance of the detail of everyday experience, is far from being a brutal realist. He is endlessly fascinated by the details of working life, cataloguing and describing the rhythmical movements of labour like some displaced 1930s poet.

In fact, the style is most reminiscent of the previous high-point of British documentary, the work of Alberto Cavalcanti and Humphrey Jennings. Every Day Except Christmas is, in effect, a belated prose continuation of Night Mail andCoal Face.

There’s no Auden, of course, to render the motion of these working men and women into rock-solid, echoing verse. Anderson does more than adequately without, using the soft Welsh voice of Alun Owen to caress the viewer into friendship with the characters who turn up, including one particularly noticeable sequence in the open-all-hours cafe.

As the porters take a well-earned break for a cuppa in the small hours, the voiceover introduces the other customers, who drift in ‘from who knows where’. The obvious queerness of many of them easily covers the gap in the narration, and this too is moving, these chaps who pass in the night sharing the warm snug with the workers.

Throughout, the cold shot of gritty reality is ladled over with Anderson’s warm, warming milk of human kindness. It may be too sweet for some, but this type of understated solidarity is the only kind of sentimentalism I can really bear.

I can’t put it better than John Berger in his Sight and Sound article ‘Look at Britain!’ (the Ford-sponsored series for which Every Day Except Christmas was made):

‘There is the image of Bill unloading and stacking boxes, the camera moving with each box across the necessary two yards, this is not the hardest work but we are given the measure of it. There is the image showing the experienced way of getting a sack of potatoes up on to the shoulder. There are the old women flower sellers searching for the cheapest blossoms that with their blarney must earn them their livelihood. There is the boy with thoughts in his head heaving boxes of flowers piled high on top of it. There is the quickest way of polishing an apple. There are the big buyers, busy, shrewd and utterly practical; the earth and what grows thereon is a commodity. There is the moment when the night ends; a new city day, accordioned, not cuckooed in. Above all there is the work, the crooning, clowning, smoking, and again work, of the young porters who have restless hopes on the far side of their knowledge.’

Every Day Except Christmas is available on the Free Cinema compilation.