Answers and Questions

And thanks to ver Stannid for offering us this indispensible advice on coping with the rigours of the Current Economic Crisis TM outside Richmond Station this morning. It's pretty much what I was planning to do anyway, but it's nice to know I have the Nation's support.

Because, if they're honest, they weren't really trying all that hard yesterday?

'Take this,' he said, proferring me a small sky blue bottle.

'What is it?'

'The ecstacy of a true love's first kiss.'

Below us, we heard the clatter of a small troop climbing stairs to the landing outside my bedroom. Forgetting his offer, he flipped the top off the bottle and, in one smooth movement, threw its contents down his throat.

As the door splintered, he drew his sword and hurled himself, fearless and invulnerable, towards it. The madness of saints shone about him.

He'd thought he would find out, some day. Thought he would have the time to enquire as to whose ecstacy was in the bottle, whose lips had brushed against heaven.

He still did, we realised as he fell into the melee, his smile beautific and merciless. But we knew better. He would never find out. The time for idle enquiries had passed. None of us were walking away from this, and him least of all.

On my Facebook profile.

M' part-time colleague alerts me to these Morrisisms. File under 'Why do I even bother trying to make this stuff up?'. (Not that I have this year, but really, with stuff like this, who missed it?)






All to be found right this minute on the front page of bbc.news. Among, I have no doubt, many, many other fine examples of the subeditor's art.

Kudos to Sandford for the sign-off of the decade.

BBC: US President George W Bush said it seemed "efforts might be under way to depose" the Georgian government.

It's good to know someone's keeping an eye on these things.

I'd say, "Picture the scene - but you don't have to because we have video!", except that said video is almost entirely pitch black. It's all about the audio.
So, if you've ever wondered what happens if you go hunting for toads (don''t ask) after chucking out, now you'll know. And no, we didn't see any either.

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...