Error logged

I've mentioned the found poetry of the error message.

One of the software concoctions keeping me entertained at the moment is particularly prone to the odd snort of poesis. This morning it offered:

Uncaught galaxy exception

On second thoughts, this may not after all be a Miltonic tag for the cosmic misdeeds of Lucifer, but instead Professor Hawking’s latest workaround for black holes.

Splendidly, while I was musing the poetics of this crash, the computer upped the ante:

Crash within crash

Bravo, machine. It only leaves us to ask whether a crash that crashes means thateverything’s all right.

Flow my tears, Philip K Dick said

If you ever think you’re having a particularly odd day, stop and consider a while the phenomenally (or perhaps phenomenogically) strange life of Philip K. Dick, professional questioner of reality.

This absolutely characteristic essay (titled ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’) gives you a sense of how endlessly weird it must have been to be the man who, as he indicated himself, had two basic questions: “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?”

One of the most destabilising things about Dick was that, like Borges, he was an intellectual magpie: he read widely if not deeply. This allowed him to flutter down onto an idea, strip it out of context and reuse it in a way that had never been intended. The results were often logically unkempt, but always interesting. Watch him do it here:

In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

Much of this particular essay is devoted to a serious of coincidences Dick experiences after completing one of his later novels, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. He comes to wonder if he is actually living in AD 50, experiencing the events of the Book of Acts, and it is only the existence of Disneyland that reassures him that this is not the case.

The uncanny thing is, you quite believe him.

Imperial London

I don’t know who’s responsible for this online text of Arthur Henry Beavan’s 1901 charmer ‘Imperial London’, but, whoever they are, they’ve done a service.

Beavan can be acute:

I would remark that, topographically, Modern London is essentially Protean, and there can be no finality in its depiction.

He can be forensic, as with this description of a typical ’seamy’ London street:

The houses are chiefly one story, or at the most two stories high; the shops, small, and such as minister solely to the necessities of life: butchers’, who deal in cheap New Zealand mutton and inferior beef; fishmongers’, whose stock-in-trade is of uncertain age, with mussels and whelks, and every kind of dried fish well to the fore; pork-butchers’, and ham-and-beef shops, generally of superior size, and well patronized; “purveyors” of cow-heel and ox-cheek, of tripe and trotters, their windows innocent of provisions until the day’s “boiling” or “dressing” is accomplished, then overflowing with these popular dainties; fried-fish shops, very much to the front up to all hours of the night; and general-dealers, who sell anything from firewood to tinned salmon; public-houses, of course, but of a subdued order, with plate-glass, paint, and gilding waiting to be renewed.

He is tremendously a Victorian male. There are, for instance, separate chapters on ‘Utilitarian London’ and ‘Romantic London’. But, my goodness, by romantic London Beavan means that which is found in the romances (novels), so we get a guide to places found in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.

Finally, Beavan is, to my surprise, the T-leaf’s friend. Consider this overhelpful note on the monetary habits of the Daily Telegraph:

Its advertisements - the life-blood of a newspaper - usually occupy forty-six out of a total of eighty-four columns of an ordinary twelve-paged issue; and it is an open secret that every day in the week, the trusted clerk, who, well-shadowed by a private detective, pays the cash receipts into the Bank, leaves the premises with a sum generally running into four figures.

A seamy side of Beavan you perhaps wouldn’t have anticipated. I note that he also published a book with the not entirely unambigous title ‘Birds I Have Known’.

Package tour to the centre of the Earth

We had been wondering about the next holiday. This year’s excursion had taken us no further than the bottom of the next country down from here, which was pleasant and gastromonique but hardly adventurous. The next destination really ought to be somewhere more … exotic.

How about an expedition to the centre of the Hollow Earth with Steve Currey’s Expedition Company?

Reading the description, it’s hard to know how to refuse:

“This expedition will conduct scientific observations in the Artic that is hoped will resolve once and for all whether the hollow earth theory has any validity.”

Seems reasonable enough.

“Don’t miss this chance to personally visit that paradise within our earth via the North Polar Opening and meet the highly advanced, friendly people who live there. We are of the opinion that they are the legendary Lost Tribes of Israel who migrated into the North Country over 2,500 years ago and literally became lost to the knowledge of mankind.”

Ah. OK. (I do like that oxymoronic last clause, by the way. You always know you’re in the presence of madness when you’re told “literally nobody knows what I’m about to tell you”.)

As if to demonstrate how lost to the knowledge of mankind these tribes are, there is more detail:

“Within Our Hollow Earth at the City of Jehu, expedition members could take an inner earth monorail train to visit the lost Garden of Eden located under America on the highest mountain plateau of the Inner Continent. It is also the capital city of Inner Earth, according to Olaf Jansen. Perhaps in this City of Eden we can visit the palace of the King of the Inner World, as did Olaf Jansen and his father.”

Remember that ‘could’ in the first sentence, because here comes the itenerary:

Day 8 - Spend the day at the North Pole and even call home to talk to family or friends!
Days 9-11 - Start the search for the North Polar Opening to the Inner Continent.
Days 12-14 - Once found, travel up Hiddekel River to City of Jehu.
Days 15-16 - Take a monorail trip to City of Eden to visit Palace of the King of the Inner World.
Days 17-18 - Return trip back to City of Jehu on the monorail. We will then continue our journey through the North Polar Opening, on board the Yamal, for the return trip home.

Which implies, if nothing else, that the Palace of the King of the Inner World in the City of Eden takes group bookings. And, no, I don’t know why it’s a monorail, which does seem rather 70s.

To their credit, the organisers do carry a disclaimer:

GUARANTEES: By joining Our Hollow Earth Expedition, expedition members agree that there are NO GUARANTEES that this expedition will reach Inner earth. The expedition will make a good faith effort to locate the North Polar Opening and enter therein, but worst case scenario is that we visit the geographic North Pole, explore the region, and continue on to the New Siberian Islands. At all times the expedition will also be at the mercy of the weather, ice and sea conditions.

Like that phrasing. “At the mercy of the weather, ice and sea conditions”. Gives me such confidence.

My only surprise is that the expedition wasn’t organised by Voyages Jules Verne.

Music for smaller people

I was at the splendid Somerset House last night to see the utterly lovable Belle & Sebastian, part of a very hip summer season also featuring PJ Harvey, Lemon Jelly, Orchestra Baobab and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars. That’s quite a line-up.

B & S were, indeed, as lovely as their records suggest, winsome in the peculiarly Glaswegian manner that always takes me by surprise. Their music glittered and shone, whistled and shimmied, sweetly harmonised and rang out across the courtyard and up into the purple evening sky.

In deference to their surroundings there was a quick version of ‘Taxman’, and in deference to their slightly broader surroundings a full blown version of that old Madness stager, ‘Embarrassment’. And a bowler hat.

I was very struck how everyone there failed to be any taller. I’m an unexceptional six feet tall, and I found that I had a pristine, unobstructed view of the stage. I couldn’t spot one person in front of me who I would have said was a six-footer.

I think the band themselves are all not particularly tall; though these things are notoriously difficult to judge on stage. After the sparkling music had faded away, I was left wondering whether:

(a) A small band attracts small fans.

(b) Belle & Sebastian happen to make music that attracts small fans.

(c) By a sort of sympathetic recognition of the very limited confines of Somerset House, larger fans had shied away, leaving only the smaller ones to attend.

(d) The same as (c), but with the additional factor that Belle & Sebastian themselves had unconsciously been selected for the venue by virtue of their essential unlargeness.

(e) The same as (b), but with the added consideration that Belle & Sebastian were chosen to play Somerset House because their fanlets would be conveniently small.

(f) Short and tall people are attracted to different types of music; or, at least, tend to look for and express different emotional sets in their choices of music. Thus, both band and fans grew alike together in their musical education, and are bound evermore in a swirling mutual appreciation of the smaller person’s universe.

(g) I could have been standing on a step.

Index of the year

It seems it’s official: Francis Wheen’s pugnacious How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World has the index of the year. Samples of its uncompromising micronarrative style are easy to pick:

Aitken, Jonathan: admires risk-takers, 59; goes to jail, 60

Merton, Robert: says markets aren’t too volatile, 272, loses fortune because of market volatility, 273

tycoons 29; as heroes, 59,277-8; sexiness of, 40; superstitions of, 56; wearing socks in bed, 60

In fact in some respects the index is rather better than the slightly disorganised book itself (see, again, Philip Hensher on the index).

Now news comes that not only have Wheen’s American publishers renamed the book for the US market (it’s now “Idiot Proof”), they’ve redone the index, taking out the wit and screwing up the page numbers in the process. Proof, if needed, that nothing in this world is too delicate to be stamped all over by a publisher.

Hareios Poter

I’ve already mentioned it in the linkbar on the right, but you really should take a gander at this page by the translator of Harry Potter into ancient Greek.

The question of how best to translate has always taxed even the nimblest linguists and the most poetical of scholars. In essence, the translator must find a satisfactory point along the continuum that runs from ‘what the original author must have meant’ to ‘what sounds best in the destination language’. The problem is clearly seen in attempting to translate idiomatic phrases (such as ‘as happy as Larry’), but will occur throughout.

The problems are usually seen, though, in the light of wishing to translate a living language into another living language, or from a dead language into a living one. Andrew Wilson’s experience in translating a modern book into ancient Greek isn’t unique (I have a copy of the fabula de petro cuniculo tucked away somewhere), but it is very unusual, and his comments on the exercise are fascinating.

He’s particularly good on the problem of translating fictional names. Now, for most translations you wouldn’t bother even translating the names - maybe just tidy up the endings a little - but Wilson has made a serious attempt to acknowledge that the names in fiction (not always, but certainly, as with so much children’s fiction, in JK Rowling) are intended to trigger associations.

So, Voldemort, by name alone, must be a villain. Wilson goes for Pholidomortos, meaning ‘Scaly Death’. Hareios Poter himself means ‘goblet belonging to Ares’, which seems a good compromise between homophony and meaning.

I was most pleased, though, to learn of the untranslatable Greek verb phthano, meaning, according to Wilson, “I do something before someone else realises that I’m doing it”. It is, you must agree, a vital concept. The next time I’m asked what I’m doing, I’ll reply that I’m just phthanying about.

Green eyes for green fingers

I was listening this morning to, of all people, Monty Don being interviewed by, of all people, Bel Mooney.

Monty (a gardener) was fluent and passionate about the feeling of spiritual connectedness that he gets from gardening, and from just being in a garden.

It was quite clear that the garden he was describing was an English idyll sprouting cow parsley, chestnut trees and long green grass. It hums hot with all manner of insects, and implicitly involves a discreetly separated kitchen garden.

Well, I can see what he’s getting at. It’s the sort of vision with which I tease myself with increasing regularity. Sadly, my urban garden is more a bricolage of outsize paving slabs, raised borders, bags of green waste waiting for disposal and, predominantly, shed.

The shed is going, to be closely followed by half of the paving slabs. Then we’ll see what those borders are made of.

We have made positive changes, but they are in the main chopping out odd and hopeful plantings that have gone straggly or died, and adding in Things That Will Do Well (such as potted hostas and lilies that are doing frighteningly well).

Now it is time to change the nature of the garden. I’ve been reading a fine book on growing edibles in urban gardens, and it’s turned my head rather.

The first tomato plant went in a couple of weeks ago, and is looking splendidly hale. Yesterday, working from home due to the tube strike, I had time to go out and get lettuce seeds. The runner beans, peppers and beetroot might have to wait until next summer (particularly as we have yet to see how the cats respond to the temptation of tender young vegetables appearing on a kind of feline deli counter).

I can already almost taste, as a form of roundness in my mouth, the home-grown tomatoes (slugs and cats permitting). I am coyly eying reserved areas of flowerbed for tightly-packed crunchy green leaves. Unoccupied trellises promise that they can bear the weight of a full crop.

There does seem to be something in the soil. I don’t think I’m alone in yearning after a life of bucolic fruitfulness. I sense that it’s bursting up through the tarmac again, like the Slow Food movement and the gradual emergence of recycling into everyday life.

Alternatively, perhaps this need for the slow seasonality of living things is a human desire that’s always there, and I’m just beginning to approach it.

On consideration, I prefer the latter for its implications of continuity with a past way that has, therefore, never really been lost. It makes me feel like a child again.

Into views

Another rollicking Alan Moore interview:

On becoming a magician:

About ten years ago now, in 1993, when I turned 40, I suddenly decided to announce that I’d become a magician, just for a bit of a laugh really. But everyone took me seriously, so then I had to actually do some magic.

On the illustrations for the new edition of Voice of the Fire:

One of the big advantages - and probably why I really agreed to it - is that I’m the writer of the last chapter, so he had to take a glamorous-looking picture of me. I think my extraordinary physical beauty really does deserve a full-page picture, instead of one of those little panels on the back cover. I’m looking forward to that. I still don’t know if anyone will be able to make heads or tails of the novel itself, but when they find the text incomprehensible, they can always sit and stare at the pictures for an hour or two.

On the usual rumours (including the one that he is a recluse):

I don’t venture far outside. I mean, even the other end of the living room is a bit of a mystery to me.

Has it occurred to anyone yet that Alan Moore has given up comics in order to spend more time with his interviews?

Five hundred Genghis Khans

The Times has a charming article about Mongolia’s reintroduction of second names, which were banned in the Soviet era because they reinforced tribal bonds.

The problem is that, in a still largely nomadic culture with relatively few written records, many people can’t remember what their family or tribal name was. Hence, they’re allowed to choose anything they like, leading to a wholly predictable glut of Genghis Khans. Others are helped by Serjee Besud, director of the Central State Library:

“I tell them to think of something they were born near,” he said, “the name of a river, valley or mountain. Or people might call themselves after their occupation. We have many Mr Writers and Mr Hunters, even a Mr Policeman.”

So, if you could choose your surname, what would it be? I’ve currently got a soft spot for the horse-gallop name of the Latvian left-back Blagonadezdin, one of the few names that sounds better the faster it’s said.

How to find things

Walking the fine line between ingenious simplicity and just simplicity:

How to Find Things

I’m particularly impressed that it takes four steps before you get to look in the place the thing is supposed to be. I must admit to being slightly disappointed: I was hoping for a Derren Brown-like self-reading.

In it’s absence, here are Dr Jon’s failsafe rules for finding things:

* If you’re right-handed, start by looking at places on your left (and vice versa): you’re probably subconsciously biased to looking to the same side as your handedness
* Don’t look at your eye level (which is the instinctive thing to do), look at yourhand level: depending on the surfaces available, this could be anywhere from hip to head height
* Get a large portable mirror and look at the area you’re searching in it. Failing this, lie down on a sofa/table/bed, hang your head down and look at the room upside down
* Move everything, paying attention to what you’re moving. If you’ve moved everything, you have, by definition, moved the thing you’re looking for
* Ask someone else to look for it: not because they’ll look at it with ‘fresh eyes’ but because they probably borrowed it and need an excuse to suddenly ‘find’ it without you getting angry with them

The goalkeeper's fear of infinity

Of all the admirably barking pop stars thrown up in the 50 or so years of rock & roll history, in Britain we can proudly claim more than our fair share of moon-shouters. What’s more, wheareas American musicians tend to go in for gun-toting (Phil Spector, Ted Nugent) or public breakdowns (Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey), over here we tend to serve up unclassifiable eccentrics such as Vivian Stanshall and the self-designated third Earl of Harrow, Screaming Lord Sutch.

Alas, both are now dead. The mantle of oddness falls on the likes of the KLF’s Bill Drummond (who, these, days exhorts people to do pleasant subsurrealist tasks like bake cakes and deliver them to complete strangers).

Head and shoulders above any others, though, is the ‘drude’ himself, ‘Saint’Julian Cope. Literally head and shoulders, as it happened, during the Poll Tax riots, when our Jules reputedly wandered among the rioters dressed as a giant.

Cope came to notice in the early eighties with The Teardrop Explodes. It was only later, after going solo, that he went all interesting, becoming a devotee of prehistoric Britain. This culminated in his lavish and useful guide to visiting megalithic sites around the country (and included some particularly joyous essays, including “Why the Romans were so heavy”).

It’s nice to see Julian is still on top form, causing the evacuation of the British Museum. My eye was caught, however, by his theory of the goalkeeper as shaman. As any fule kno, goalkeepers are always themselves deeply eccentric. Cope suggests that this is not because they are peculiar loners, but because they’re channelling the goddess.

“All those people gathered in an unroofed stadium [is] not unlike what must have gone on in pagan sanctuaries. The goalkeeper is the ultimate shaman, guarding the gates to the underground, wearing the No 1 jersey in a different colour and not seeming to be part of the team.”

So that explains it. It’s because he’s protecting the underworld that, on Sunday last, David James looked as though he wanted the earth to open up swallow him up.

Vote for vote's sake

At eight this morning I zig-zagged by animal memory to the backroads school where my local polling station appears, like a rare flower, every couple of years. Walking down the street towards it, I could see figures flitting in and out of the gates; a man in short sleeves with his jacket slung over his shoulder, an old man in a shabby t-shirt, a woman looking as though she were about to go for her morning run, another woman pushing a baby buggy.

Inside, the new-style voting forms were being accepted with the slightest shrug of indulgence; it changes, it stays the same. The booths, chipboard and cheap wood, looked identical to every set of polling booths I’ve ever used. Even the stubby brown pencils seem eternal.

As I posted my votes in the boxes, I noticed with a start of pleasure that the lady in charge of ensuring that white forms went in a separate ballot box was my next door neighbour; a retired woman of the type who seems never to go anywhere in particular or do anything in particular. I recalled that she spent her working life in some sort of council activity, and so is liable to feel the ache of civic duty. As we exchanged civilities I felt a peculiar turning inside my chest; I really don’t know, but I think it may have been pride.

As I left, I was thinking about the duty to vote, the long and bitter fight for the universal franchise, suffragettism, the great reform acts. A yeomanly tear was pricking at the corner of my eye as I stepped out across a small junction and was nearly mown down by a scooter.

The young couple crammed onto it, making it ride low on its springs, were both clutching their polling cards.

Still too much monkey business

A couple of months ago I had a little bash at a comical experiment thatpurported to show that the ‘infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare’ thought-experiment was impossible.

Thanks to the ever-reliable things, I’m now aware of a far more useful experiment: the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator. This unleashes virtual simians at the problem; a far more suitable approach to a virtual experiment than wasting a month watching a handful of real monkeys bash a poor typewriter to junk metal.

As I write, the current record is this:

“KING RICHARD. OlazZtssi0cwX?QDjqkP9r]xfaBmlVU]e…”

That’s sixteen whole consecutive letters from King Richard II (from a range of 80 possible letters and other characters). And it only took 24,115 billion billion monkey-years to get past the speaker’s name (that capital O is, significantly, the first letter of “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,”).

Of course, the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator can’t do infinite monkeys; it just does the very accelerated work of a large number of monkeys (thousands, I think) over a geologically long time.

Remember: infinity is big. Really big. If it were really running a simulation of infinite monkeys the experiment would be successfully completed in precisely the amount of time it takes to type out the entire works of Shakespeare one letter per second (say a few days).

Unfortunately, success is not proof. We wouldn’t know the experiment was successful until we had collated the results of those few days work from our infinite monkeys and compared them with the accurate text. You see, for every monkey that gets it right, there will be 79 who reproduce Shakespeare perfectly except for the very last character, and 79×79 who will get only the last two characters wrong, and so on, back to through the infinite chaos of an almost infinite amount of proofreading. It’s not monkey work, you know.

Sometimes, it seems, knowing you’re right is harder than being right.

Lipogrammatron

Announcing our stunning lipogrammatron.

For too long, any author licking at nib of a quill and poising it on a blank folio to scratch its mark lipogrammatically has fought against an unusual limit. In combination a human brain, its optic organ and linguistic flair usually do. But in tumbling up such a concoction of words as Tryphiodorus hard won, common skills will not always carry all. Our cunning author of such tricksy things must show also constant vigilant rigour. This taboo must not slip.

Now, lipogrammatron allows authors of a formalist colour to banish doubt by making any occult consonant vanish from sight - and from touch. This occurs by disabling that block on your touch-pad as out of bounds.

Lipogrammatron: as writing such a toy is not a work of E’s.

[Links:

Hairy Oulipan
Lipogrammatic fictions
A book without words of action
Thoughts from this in Mr Hamm’s blog]

Past the infinite of thought

I would have thought, had I been asked, that you couldn’t go wrong with a news story that starts as follows:

Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard.

As usual, I would have been wrong.

The story (from last year, but somehow it passed me by) ran with the curious idea that a month-long experiment involving six monkeys being left alone with a computer somehow proves that the famous (and idle) gedankenexperiment is wrong.

Six monkeys. For a month. The news item rather charmingly suggests that in the course of the month, the monkeys moved on from their basic keyboard repertoire (the letter S) to more daring flights of prose (mainly involving A, J, L and M). Nearly there already, I’d say.

I do like the idea that after a month the researchers threw up their hands in the air and exlaimed “Pah! They’ll never do it!”

I suppose that nobody these days has the patience to conduct an infinitely long experiment, although recently I’ve been feeling that projects can go on forever (hence incidentally the quietness in these here parts).

At least one good thing has come out of this; in order to get the right title for this post, I had to track down a good Shakespeare concordance. All’s well that ends well, eh?

Most wanted

The sandwich board promoting this week’s Ham and High reads:

Hampstead’s Most Wanted

I live in South-East London and work in North-West London. Nothing could illustrate the difference between the two more effectively than that headline. If the South London Press ran a board saying “Peckham’s Most Wanted” you know it wouldn’t be talking bijou chi-chi, it would be talking bang-bang shoot-shoot.

In fact, if it were up to me, I’d have led with the hard crime story, Shopper injured in cabbage attack.

Brian Lara's Chesterfield sofa

Football may be a funny old game, but cricket is downright peculiar.

England have tonked the West Indies for their first series victory in the Caribbean for 36 years. They are leading 3-0 after three tests; a remarkable scoreline. The Windies are in complete disarray, demoralised, staring in disbelief at the possibility of an unprecedented home whitewash in the four match series. Brian Lara, the Windies only remaining genuinely great cricketer, has scored 100 runs total in the first three tests.

So what happens?

Lara scores 400, reclaiming the world record for the highest individual score in a test innings. It is brilliant, unique, a ridiculous, fabulous end to an increasingly preposterous series. Lara, with the single most outstanding individual batting performance of all time, will probably lose the captaincy of the Windies because, in reality, his team have been thrown to the wolves in this series. If this makes any sense, it must be in a different world to our own.

This is what non-lovers of cricket don’t really understand. It isn’t the sluggish, endlessly unchanging mystery of repute; it’s a constantly fluctuating and developing series of myths. That’s why, for many people, Test Match Special is the true home of cricket. It’s not just a bunch of old stagers chuntering away, talking gibberish about silly points and fine legs, and eating cake (though it is unashamedly all of these). It’s a constantly evolving narration of myth. Devon Malcolm’s “you guys are history” incident, David Gower buzzing the ground in a biplane, Bodyline, Botham at Headingley and a thousand thousand minor tweaks and chirrups of myth bouncing along in an endlessly amiable tide of observation, the trivial bumping alongside the momentous in a joyfully unjudgemental carnival of human nature.

The very best summation of this charmingly batty world is found in one of the late Douglas Adams’ finest moments, where his interstellar travellers, Arthur and Ford, find themselves unexpectedly in the middle of a test match at Lords, sitting on a Chesterfield sofa. Adams, deliciously, switches to the commentators, telling us far more about cricket than about anything so silly as space travel:

“For those of you who’ve just tuned in, you may be interested to know that, er … two men, two rather scruffily attired men, and indeed a sofa - a Chesterfield I think?”

“Yes, a Chesterfield.”

“Have just materialized here in the middle of Lord’s Cricket Ground. But I don’t think they meant any harm, they’ve been very good-natured about it, and …”

“Sorry, can I interrupt you a moment Peter and say that the sofa has just vanished.”

“So it has. Well, that’s one mystery less. Still, it’s definitely one for the record books I think, particularly occurring at this dramatic moment in play, England now needing only twenty-four runs to win the series. The men are leaving the pitch in the company of a police officer, and I think everyone’s settling down now and play is about to resume.”

(Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything, chapter four)

The unimprovable line in here, typical of Adams, is “Well, that’s one mystery less.” Well played, sir. A perfect reverse (logic) sweep.

From the archives

I’m not quite sure how I’ve managed to overlook The Guardian’s Online Archivesup until now.

At the moment, it’s a fairly thin selection of obvious stories, covering theinauguration then assassination (reported by one Alastair Cooke) of John F Kennedy, Beatlemania in America, and the like. There’s a gem of a report on1966 and all that:

Ball cannot have worked harder in his life. He and Stiles were almost twin souls even to the extent of disagreeing with some of the referee’s decisions. They played until they were entitled to drop, but neither of them knows the meaning of the word “surrender”. They never will be everyone’s cup of tea, so to say. Occasional naughtiness apart, however, they are first class fighting men and England cannot do without them.

This piece is a fine little insight into the development of modern sport. You can sense from the journalist’s slight disdain of the fighting chaps that the age of gentlemen and players was not quite past in the late sixties. First names are not used, a classic public school affectation. Bobby Charlton is referred to throughout as R. Charlton, so as to distinguish from his brother. These days, a nickname or Homeric formula (’the quicksilver Frenchman’, ‘the strong-grieved Irishman’, ‘the volatile Welshman’) would suffice.

In fact, the main virtue of the archive is as an exhibition of the changing notes of journalistic manner. The Beatles piece, striking a knowingly jocular pose, could almost have been written today. This report of a Khrushchev speech burying the spectre of Stalin (by ‘a student of Soviet Affairs’) could not. These days, speeches are not reported straight. They are either deeply contextualised into news or treated as extended parliamentary sketches.

Everything, I realise, now arrives predigested. From newspaper to newspapper in one century.

Curiosity

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.

- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, Chapter 11.

Paul McGrath's knees

I don’t suppose you remember Paul McGrath; that is, if you ever knew who he was in the first place.

He was a grizzle-faced footballer of the oldest school - that of hard knocks and hard drinking. He drank his way through a career at Manchester United, propping up the bar with fellow international class boozers Norman Whiteside and Bryan Robson.

When Alex Ferguson swept in to Old Trafford, McGrath was swept off to Aston Villa to see out the twilight of his career. It wasn’t supposed to take long.

I suppose it may be relevant that McGrath is an Irishman. Judge for yourself. He didn’t stop drinking. He did carry on playing.

It was a remarkably long twilight. The sort you get in the Arctic Circle. McGrath trudged on for several years at the Villa, successive managers expressing perpetual surprise that, however knackered he appeared off the pitch, he seemed to manage to perform diligently on the field, apparently through willpower alone.

For the last few years at Villa, he didn’t even train. His knees had ‘gone’, and he could only manage 90 minutes of running a week; all of it in front of a crowd.

I don’t know what McGrath’s doing now, but whatever it is, I suspect he’s got something to say about persistence.

I’ve never considered that I’ve got anything in common with Paul McGrath. My drinking, my Irishness, my career as a professional footballer, don’t really measure up to his.

Yesterday, however, I got a tiny insight into his world. I had spent all of the day before on my knees with a belt sander, filling my nostrils with sawdust. Then I got up early on Sunday to paint the floor in question. Another round of kneeling.

By the time I went off to play football, my knees felt like old paperclips that have been bent back and forth almost to breaking point. They felt like a couple of spoons in Uri Geller’s hands. They felt, in short, like Paul McGrath’s knees.

Fortunately, I don’t think they’ve ‘gone’; more like temporarily mislaid. I wonder if Paul ever found his?

[2013 postscript: Let me tell you, the knees have now definitively and irretrievably gone]

The magnificent Alphonsos

The Alphonsos have arrived.

A friend, walking down the high street this week, was accosted by a discreet “Hey! I can sell you Alphonsos”. He bought a box, called us, and by the time I got home yesterday, there was a box open in the kitchen, wafting its maddeningly desirable aroma around the house.

Alphonso mangoes are, not to go over the top about it, perfect. Their yielding firmness gives a clue to the quality of the flesh, but not enough of a clue. Inside, when you halve them and flip the skin inside out to eat it, the sumptuous orange flesh is neither watery nor stringy. It’s rich but endlessly soft, and its perfume, tickling up through your mouth into your nose, is a little overwhelming. It’s the sort of food after which you need a sit down and, perhaps, a little cry.

You have to get in quick with Alphonsos. The season lasts less than a month, and our local supplier restricts customers to a box each per visit. For the duration, that means more or less daily visits to the greengrocer, gambling that the week’s delivery has come in, and you’re not already too late.

The truth is that the difficulty of obtaining Alphonsos is part, a significant part, of their lavish perfection. Long may they last, at least until the middle of April.

Chipping in

I wanted to talk about the semiology of keeping a level gaze (yes, really) but I just don’t have the time right now.

Instead, let me share my favourite chip shop name. It’s not The Sea Cow, nor is it the yet to be named Rick Stein chip shop that will mark the man’s final and complete ownership of the town of Padstow.

The best named chip shop in my view is the grubby little place tucked under the bridge next to Waterloo station. It revels in the endlessly inappropriate and meaningless name of ‘Fishcoteque’. The absurd intimation of fun it offers gives me a laugh every time I see it.

I am looking forward to the second branch, which can only be called ‘Fishco Inferno’.

A game of life

Computer users who started out in the 80s (and programmers of all stripes) will remember all too well John Conway’s famous Game of Life. I first saw it when it arrived as free software for my 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, in about 1983. It was tantalising but deeply frustrating; the rules are desperately simple and yet it has almost limitless scope for complexity, if only you can find it.

Plenty of people have spent prodigious amounts of time teasing out that complexity-in-simplicity. It exists in its own semantic space of puffers, sparkersand glider guns. To some, these are forms that display key characteristics of living things; birth, development, complex interaction, death. The game has been extensively used as the tiniest of toy worlds displaying evolutionary logic.

If I couldn’t cope with Life (or, I suppose, life) I fear I’ve no chance with Avida, the evolutionary sandbox hosted by Caltech. It is available as a free download, so I’ll give it a try anyway, if only for the reassurance that proper science is forever beyond both my ken and my patience.

Sealed for your protection

I have a tube of toothpaste that bears the warning:

Sealed for your protection

My God, what terrors could it contain? Must send for Quatermass.

Nail bars

For Mothering Sunday I went back to the small town in which I grew up. Winding down the High Street towards the river is always a time-shifting experience. Each shop front is a veil behind which lurks the hidden face of its childhood version.

This bike shop was once the chemist. What was once the butcher’s is now one of those peculiar petite clothes shops, the sort where there will never be another customer to keep the shopkeeper’s oversolicitous eye off your browsing. The monumental mason once sold carpet tiles. The sportswear shop was, well, it was a different sportswear shop.

Just as confusing are the shops that have not changed. The old-fashioned hardware shop and it’s offshoot over the road (selling an unsatisfying array of furniture oddments) are just as they ever were. The grocer’s has evolved into a late-opening convenience store by such tiny increments that it is no longer possible to accurately reconstruct in the memory any of its previous incarnations.

The biggest change since my last visit only suggests itself very slowly. Dotted all down the stretch of the town are almost half a dozen small boutiques, offering a service I am sure was never available in the town as I grew up.

My hometown has a full handful of nail bars.

I feel such a stranger.

Hitting the high notes in Southwark

Continuing our shared enjoyment of local newspaper headlines, the Southwark News today offers:

QUEEN OF THE NIGHT TO VISIT DULWICH

Excellent. That’s where she is then.

It’s funny, because only last week I saw Figaro and Don Giovanni arguing outside a chip shop in Camberwell.

First class cricket talk

[From April 2004]

I’ve written about cricket writers writing about Andrew Flintoff before, so this, to me, has a giddyingly reflexive feel.

After last week’s tumultuous demolition of the Windies, England are preparing for the second test. This gives both Derek Pringle in the Telegraph and Mike Selvey in the Guardian the excuse to write glowing reports of Flintoff’s maturation from being the blacksmith’s son to being the blacksmith himself.

Flintoff, as Selvey correctly deduces, has become the heartbeat of the team; the carthorse that also provides the gallops.

One phrase from Flintoff really caught my eye. In Selvey’s report, he says of the slip-catching:

“Well, we are holding on to a few,” he said. “With players such as the West Indies have, you can’t afford to give them two chances. It is something at which we have worked hard and emphasised.”

Did the farmer’s lad really say “something at which we have worked hard“? I detect the journalist’s punctilious syntactical manners at work here. It would just be too delightful if Flintoff is not only maturing into a cricketer of legendary proportions, but constructing sentences the end of which he knows at their beginning.

Gasper

The man was standing just behind the Hampstead theatre, at the top of a scratchy plot of grass. He caught my eye because, at first, I thought it was Boris Johnson, the bumbly MP for Henley* and part-time PG Wodehouse character.

It wasn’t him, although the combination of straw hair, Bunterish frame and bemused expression made the mistake forgivable, I think.

He was, ever so slowly, performing some Tai Chi. His pudgy arms ghosted around in pondeous arcs, then carefully stacked somethings in front of him. From the waist up he looked like a clubber in slow motion.

After about ten minutes of this, he let his arms fall to his sides one last time and leant back against the wall of the theatre. A few seconds later he’d grappled a quick cigarette into his mouth and was taking his first drag with obvious and deep relish.

Boris would have been proud.

* 2013 footnote: The idea, when I wrote this, that Boris would ever become Mayor of London, let alone be spoken about non-jokingly as a potential Prime Minister would have produced wretchings of laughter.