Answers and Questions

Unmentioned but now explicable tension

It has recently come to my attention that there is a gap in the self-help market. While there are plenty of weighty tomes with titles such as Life After Separation: Coping with the fundamental meaningless of existence, or DVDs like I've been smacked in the balls with a sledgehammer - what now?, these are all aimed at what one might diplomatically call the completely losing side of the leaver/left divide.

However, there appear to be no such works designed to assist the leaver of a relationship in coming to terms with the inevitable and dramatic emotional trauma that such an experience involves. This is because they are far too busy swanning about having the time of their lives to read a book.

So, leaving no bandwagon unjumped, my vast wealth of professional experience in the fields of separation and heartbreak allows me to offer the following handy hints for those who suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves single after many years of domestic bliss underscored by a nameless, unmentioned but now explicable tension.

Sue and I have split up. Reaction to this news has varied from shock to, I was rather startled to discover, an almost complete lack of surprise. So, if anyone is still in any doubt, yes, this time it's serious, and no, we're not getting back together. It's been a curious mixture of all very sudden and coming for some time (and failing to notice that is probably largely my fault). And it's definitely the right thing to do. I'm upset, obviously, and probably still in shock, but bearing up pretty well all things considered.



I'm staying at my Mum's for Christmas. She moved this year from Ealing, where I grew up, to a house just outside the Devon village of Bratton Fleming. It's a glorious piece of 1920s architectural mayhem, perched on the side of a valley. The view from my bedroom window - once I've wiped it clear of condensation - stretches all the way to the sea on a clear day. Right now, though, the valley is a bowl of mist, the sunshine marking a golden crest on the treeline opposite, with the meadows in shadow a frosty white peppered with deer. It looks like someone invented the scene, as though there's no way something that beautiful could exist in reality. (The camera - or is it the photographer? - completely fails to capture this, as ever.)



Only the cold - it's sub-zero out there right now; you can see your breath inside the house before the fires are lit; my brother's just woken up complaining that his head's gone numb - takes the edge off. I'm heading into Barnstaple this morning to pick up some gloves so I can smoke without losing my fingers, and some spices for mulled wine because it's that kind of Christmas and it helps keep your hands defrosted. Cheers!

 
Posted largely on the basis of the first one, which sounds about right.

A friend recently mentioned that a friend of hers associates days of the week with colours, which reminded me of something I wrote years ago about the different characteristics of letters of the alphabet.

In the course of my work-related researches today, I have discovered that this company will be running the UK's largest offshore windfarm, the London Array. 

DONG Energy guarantees a reliable supply of energy and an accountable utilization of our natural resources. 

I wish there was a more sophisticated level of humour going on here so I could feel good about myself. But no, there it is. 

PS: Google video. Three times the datarate, and it still looks like pants.

I sometimes worry that I seem to be smarter and more inventive when I'm half asleep, as though being conscious somehow interferes with the operation of my brain. I mean, I know that all sorts of stuff can bubble up from your subconscious in the netherland between waking and sleeping, stuff that you weren't even aware of that surprises you with its intellectual shortcuts, poetry and deftness. But I'm talking about stuff orders of magnitude away from the lumpen, plodding activity my mind seems capable of when fully awake.

Case in point. Yesterday I watched the new Superman animated movie, Doomsday. Aside from the fact that the PG-13 rating seems to have been used purely to justify some gratuitous violence - "SEE! Superman coughing up a stomachful of blood! WATCH! As more blood drips from the Toyman's flattened corpse! REVEL! In the kind of child endangerment they never let us get away with in the 90s!" - it's really rather good.

Sue wasn't remotely interested. This is disappointing to me, since one of my joys is sharing the excitement of watching cheesy SF, or reading cheesy comics, with her. Indeed, instead of watching Doomsday last night, we struggled through five episodes of 'The Armageddon Factor', the highlight of which was Sue's gasp of disbelief at K9 Turning Evil.

Floating only in the neighbourhood of consciousness this morning, I recalled watching an old Justice League ep, "Comfort and Joy'. with her. She'd enjoyed the fact that one of the Flash's enemies, the Ultra-Humanite, had used the word 'jejune'. This is funny on several levels. First, the Ultra-Humanite is a large, albino gorilla with an outsized brain. It's well established that monkeys doing human things is funny - lorry-loads of tea have been sold on that very principle - so making them big monkeys with brain cancer is even funnier. Secondly, the Ultra-Humanite is a comic-book baddie with refined sensibilities - the kind of evil genius who takes a child's toy called 'DJ Rubber Duckie' and reprograms it to tell the story of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.

You'll find the 'jejune' moment at about 04:53 in this:






Most importantly, however, 'jejune' is funny because it's being used in a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, and because the writer, Paul Dini, knows that we'll find it funny because it's in a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, and because he knows that we know that as well and, what's more, that to boot. And so on. It's an infinite "I know, he knows" regressive loop.

Although, crucially, it's not actually a loop, because each circuit depends upon the previous circuit for its humour value. It's actually a never-ending conceptual spiral, spinning down into increasingly abstract humour until our minds simply cannot keep track of it anymore and we are left with no option but to laugh. Or, under similar but less amusing circumstances, scream.

Which is where we come back to one of my pet hobbyhorses, the Cogito. I've heard it described as 'self-fulfilling', a tautology logically incapable of revealing anything. But I contend that, like 'jejune', it's a hall of mirrors: an infinitely regressing reflection of one's consciousness, with the value of each cycle dependent upon the cycle before it. In that sense, it is less a syllogism than a mantra, something that not only proves the existence of the individual, but can be used to express the nature of that existence and thereby, hopefully, encourage people to understand it.

You might not actually find the Cogito funny, of course. But I'm sure it makes people scream from time to time.

Sorry about the lack of updates, but Australia doesn't seem to have heard of in-room internet access and before that we were out in the wilds of NZ where they've barely heard of the 1960s.

Now in Singapore, waiting for room service to bring our breakfast up, looking out over a city which last night was a blistering array of neon and moonlight and is this morning a dull, Surbiton grey. Singapore is one of the rainiest cities on the planet, and we were both woken up last night by what I thought was an earthquake - our 12th story room actually shook - but which turned out to be thunder. Even now, four hours later, lightning is crashing across the sky.

Sue's done her usual thing of jumping into the path of whichever bug is most likely to cause snot and sore throats but, on the plus side, her croaky voice does have a certain sort of Fenella Fielding something going on. Am trying to persuade her that Singapore not much cop in this weather, and that we should stay indoors having sex and ordering more room service all day.

Back in Blightly tomorrow, what ho, with more in the way of Youtubery to follow. Although it might be Googlevideoery, given the quality of the previous uploaded snippets.

Full-on video of our first proper day in NZ tomorrow but, meanwhile, here's an out-take. Sue has a funny turn while walking in Wellington's botanical gardens...

What ensues when you site a popular tourist attraction of a temple with 10,000 Buddhas next to a rather un-tourist friendly Buddhist cemetary?

We're now in Wellington, all settled in after a couple of days' worth of non-stop travel-related disasters. That'll be a fun post. Right now, though, the second of three HK video diaries:

Thoughts on the former British Colony to follow. In the mean time, here's the first video diaryette, with my brother outlining his own feelings about the place interspersed with footage of the Harbour taken from the Star Ferry, the Peak tram and the view from the Peak itself. Enjoy.

Osama Bin Laden is said to be preparing to release a video message to appeal for any information regarding the whereabouts of missing four-year-old Madeline McCann.

Despite a fan campaign, Bin Laden has not been seen in a video since October 2004, when he threatened new attacks against the US on the eve of the presidential election. An audio tape was released in January 2006, but failed to chart.

Correspondents say a new video - if indeed one does appear - would serve to dispel persistent rumours that the al-Qaeda leader might have abducted Madeline from her parents' holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, leaping from a second-story window with the child stuffed down his pants. US homeland security officials have refused to confirm or deny such rumours.

It's a sad truth that the longer something runs, the greater the chances that it will  go shit. Doesn't matter what it is, sooner or later the puff will run out and it will start to retread old ground in a half-hearted, middle-aged sort of way, degenerating into a caricature of itself. TV shows jump the shark, Robinson's jam changes the formula to reduce the amount of fruit, New Order fails to split up, Superman III merely hails the impending Superman IV and John Cleese insists on paying the mortgage on his fifth home by cashing in his 'comic genius' credentials at a Hollywood brothel. Where once was Life of Brian and A Fish called Wanda is now a succession of lazy corporate voiceovers and, Christ almighty, 'Rat Race'.

Still, everyone deserves a reevaluation once in a while.

Taking its cue from the entire rest of the internet, wnbc.com is promising video of a "suburban teen sex party". Up next, Fox News endorses herbal penis extensions.

I've recently been expanding my knowledge of languages foreign through the medium of catfood. In this pan-European common market of ours, where Jif becomes Cif because the Spanish can't pronounce 'J' and 'Ulay' becomes 'Olay' because the French are, frankly, difficult, which particular variety of Felix I randomly pull from the kitchen cupboard is revealed in Dutch, French and German as well as English.

What's interesting, however - apart from the fact that the Dutch for 'beef' is 'Rund' - is the way these flavours are presented in different languages. "Yippee... it's with CHICKEN", for example, is a considerably less enthusiastic "au POULET" en Francais. I suppose it's difficult for the marketing guys to image a louche, scowling Parisienne, cigarette dangling from her lip, getting particularly worked up about anything, let alone cat food.

Whereas the German versions are just bizarre. In what seems to be a determined effort to counter the stereotype of the humourless teutonic, little Felix could perhaps be accused of trying just a bit too hard:


Sue has decided that this translates - loosely, you understand - as "Unbetunable". Particularly joyous is the fact that the wordplay, such as it is, is emphasised in Upper Case - presumably for fear that, unless they made it really obvious, thousands of bemused German cat-owners would write in to complain about the typo.

Sadly not pictured, chiefly because I can't be arsed, is the Salmon packet: "LACHSzinierend, es ist mit..." (wait for it...) "LACHS!" A prize to the first person to find a way of conflating the concepts of 'salmon' and 'fasincating' into one word in English, especially if they record a movie clip of themselves saying it in full Vulcan constume and make-up and stick it on YouTube.

The Bean, meanwhile, speaks only one language:

Wow. Those layouts blew chunks, didn't they? I won't be doing that again. On the other hand, nor will I be editing them any further in a futile attempt to fix it, since blood is now dripping from my fingers as a result of having clicked the 'Preview' button upmty-fuckty times.

I am coming to the conclusion that LJ sucks at layout, and its RichText formatting doesn't do the same thing the same way twice. Whoever comes up with WYSIWYG blogging that forces styles to comply to layout will be onto a winner.

CSS, you say? CSS, balls. You're dumb enough to read my blog, you're dumb enough for me to do the layout for you.

While at Kensal Green Cemetery last weekend, as will no doubt soon be chronicled over at tubewhore if it hasn't already, pvcdiva and I were fortunate enough to be able to have a quick gander around the crypt. One of the house rules  was no photography, not even on mobile phones, the point being, I suppose, that it wasn't an issue of flashes possibly damaging some of the materials down there. Perhaps it's an overly IP-paranoid culture, or even that they wish to preserve the dignity of a resting place for the dead.

Is it somehow sacrilegious to take photographs of coffins? If so, why it is not similarly blasphemous to photograph the exquisite mausoleums above ground? And wouldn't conducting guided tours of tarted-up goths for £3 a pop rather undermine the moral high ground there? I honestly don't know. But I do know that I'm buggered if I'm not cracking off a few shots from the hip while nobody's looking.

















You can still buy a loculi -  a place for your coffin - for about £1,500. I'd say that was a bargain.

On a side note, while we were there, I was... disturbed by the large proportion of goths in attendance for the cemetery's open day. Now, I speak as someone who looks like a chubby refugee from an early Sisters/Fields of the Nephilim mashup most of the time, but my clothes are not about shouting to the world: Look at me! Look how extraordinary I am! Well, my hat maybe. But that's it.

The Nunhead open day had a contingent of goths who had dressed up for a day out. But, again, for them, it seemed the equivalent of putting on a shirt and tie. There's a distinction to be had between self-expression and exhibitionism. Nunhead was a much more diverse event, with people from all over the community taking part and something of the air of a village fair.

Kensal Green, on the other hand, was a goth convention. A large number of the people there knew each other through the goth community, and a significant number clearly regarded it as a social occasion at which they got to spread their peacock feathers and show off. They had no interest in the cemetery beyond the fact that cemeteries are the kind of place at which goths like to hang out.

Now, I am interested in cemeteries. They are weird, often beautiful, places boasting architecture of the fucked-up school. This appeals to me. What they are not, however, is some sort of Emily Strange themepark with the principal function of entertaining people who don't know when to stop with the crushed velvet. I'm not above taking a few sneaky shots in the crypt but that, it seems to me, is genuinely disrespectful. And that's me being nice about it. You should hear me when I'm cross.

I was holding forth on this subject as pvcdiva and I walked through the gravestones (most people never left the chapel area), with particular reference to one individual who had turned up wearing fuck-me fishnets with her tits hanging out. I wasn't sure that it displayed an appropriate level of respect for the dead - regardless of one's spiritual/religious beliefs, of lack thereof - to turn up dressed as "a fucking cartoon character".

We get back to the chapel to find that fate had proved my point by sending me the bloke (and, yes, he's a bloke) pictured to your riight.

Thanks, fate. Thanks a sodding bunch.

Catching up on some photos I've been meaning to post.

A couple of months back, pvcdiva, the charming young lady henceforth to be known as 'J' and I visited Trewithan Gardens. A certain amount of landscaped strolling was involved. If you squint, you can just about see the young gels in the hi-res distance.




Buried in the cultivated woodland nearby, however, was a camera obscura. I've been fascinated by them ever since a friend took me to one near Hove a few years ago. They used to be quite the attraction, before cinema stole their fire.

I've never really understood their limited application, though. It speaks to a lack of imagination, I think, that military commanders didn't have one mounted on every sea fort on the coast. scanning the horizon for invading craft. You get a 360-degree field of view, and even a bit of lateral movement. They should have been erected at Waterloo, as the generals stood around consulting maps by candlelight. Instead, they were artists toys used for tracing or, as today, mild diversions of the "Ooh, how can I be seeing that thing that isn't really there?" variety - the first form of image projection. How strange that must have seemed, and how much stranger the device I am now using to type this up.

Stupidly, I didn't take a picture of the exterior construction. But this is what happens when you stick your camera's lens up into the projection mechanism while it's looking at a tree.

Using the magic of cellular telephony, I was then able to get this shot of the Diva and J as projected onto the viewing dish. The actual image on the dish is a lot sharper than this, because I'm in an almost entirely dark room and unable to use the flash for reasons which should be obvious.

Later, as the ladies were shopping for plants, I wondered off and, admiring the absurdly mythical countryside view, fell asleep under a tree. Some time later, I awoke to this.

It's always nice to have an audience. Lucky for me, however, that their boyfriend didn't seem bothered by the attention they were lavishing on me. I have never seen an animal quite like this before. He looks like four tons of muscle. Hell, his balls look like four tons of muscle. Rarely has pink seemed so utterly masculine.