TRAVELLERS

"Whose then?"

We've got travellers. As I walked onto the business park this morning, I saw the little enclave of caravans, motor-homes and transit vans in one of the car parks. There was a spindly looking dog poking around in one of the flowerbeds with a lead trailing behind him. No other signs of life, except a generator, buzzing away like an unattended campfire.

I don't know much about the travelling community. I don't watch a lot of TV so I missed that whole thing of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding that was popular a few years ago. I'd guess though, that the travellers came out of that looking quite insular, fiercely proud of their way of life and almost oblivious to the mainstream ideas of what is socially acceptable. To have survived at all, in fact, they must have depended on marrying only each other for generations, and camping in the fields of angry farmers across the country.

It's not just farmers who are angry. Nimbyism stretches to everyone with a  yard, a garden, a patch of land, a bit of scenery, a walk-to-work. Even the mention of the travellers is enough to get some folks disproportionately hot under the collar. Suddenly, the nicest people are labelling a whole community as thieves, irresponsible trespassers, verminous carriers of disease, and perhaps most terribly of all, scruffy-looking litterbugs.

A couple of summers ago, I went to a little festival to play in a band. I was only there for one evening, so after I'd packed up the keyboard and loaded my stuff into the car, I asked someone how to get back off the campsite and onto the main road. It wasn't that easy in the dark; I turned off the bumpy track as directed, and suddenly found my headlights illuminating a vast open field in the middle of nowhere.

Before I'd even had a chance to reverse, a range rover beamed in, flooding my car with light and squealing to a halt. A car-door slammed and in a flash, a silhouetted man in a flat cap was pointing a shotgun at me, asking what the hell I was doing.

I very quickly babbled an explanation and he apologised, telling me that they'd 'had a few problems with "pikeys" recently' and that he 'couldn't be too careful'.

I wasn't really in the mood to point out that he really could be more careful. It was only afterwards, half-way down the M5, when the adrenaline had subsided that I realised I had had a gun aimed at my head! That's the kind of thing you really do need to be careful about, in my opinion.

A few problems... They were like rats to him then, like an infestation of pests that needed to be dealt with. I think that's disgraceful.

This morning, as I settled into my daily routine of starting up the computer, updating my stats and checking emails, I noticed one from the Park Manager to all members of staff, sent with high importance. Without explicitly mentioning the travellers, he said:

From 8pm this evening locked metal bollards will be installed into the main roads leading to your plot/building. This will also be the case for weekends.

Whilst in place only our security will able to unlock them and allow access. We are not trying to restrict access to the park but protect from security risks.

... which you'll agree, is very carefully worded.

I'm not suggesting a solution to the discord between travellers and landowners, between those of fixed abode and those of none. I don't have one. They've never really bothered me, at least not as much as the closet racism and bile that sometimes accompanies the nimbys. I'm just fascinated by the clash of culture, the lack of tolerance for a lifestyle choice and the reasons for it.

By the way, how unsightly will 'locked metal bollards' look?

GIBRALTAR? SUITS YOU, SIR

A recruiter sent me an email today offering me 'an amazing opportunity' in Gibraltar, working for a 'top FTSE 100 client'.

I'm not going. Let's just get that straight from the top: I've got nothing against Gibraltar, I just know it's not for me. These recruiters are nothing if not persistent though; a while ago it was Bulgaria that apparently had all the technical writing jobs. You'll love Sofia, they said, it's where all the coolest tech authors hang out... Now it seems these agencies have upped their game a bit: a warmer climate and British soil. I'm still a little cynical if I'm honest.

What amused me was that this particular recruiter seemed to be selling Gibraltar to me and not the job. It's an odd tactic for a recruitment agent, I thought. Someone who deals mostly in the currency and detail of jobs you'd expect to be less like a kind of lifestyle travel agent.

She even included a link to a nine minute video telling me all about this little corner of paradise. It featured a tanned, barefooted supermodel floating leisurely across sandy beaches and through the historical markets without a care in the world.  "It could be you, working here, living with people like this," the narrator may as well have  said in a Fast Show kind of way, "Imagine that eh, sir? Sunshine, sea, sand, beauty, ooh you deserve it sir, suits you sir, ooh, suits you."

No information about the actual job then? Right. Jog on.

I'm not sure I like this culture where strangers try to tell you what you deserve. Sometimes adverts give you a kind of knowing wink as if to say, "Hey, treat yourself, we know you're awesome." Or worse, they try to convince you that it's the rest of the world - your boss, your neighbours, the people who didn't go to SpecSavers or haven't booked that river cruise... and especially their direct competitors... who are a bit stupid or lousy or just rubbish. Oh but not you - you're amazing.

Well, you are amazing, but not because you bought a certain brand of shampoo or you feed your cat with whole chunks of tuna. You're amazing because you're you, created to be inspirational in a way that only you can be - and you're quite capable of making great decisions for yourself, without being manipulated around the supermarket.

I tell you something else as well...

I'm too good for Gibraltar.

HOW RAINBOWS WORK

It's a very pleasant, sunny day. The sky is springtime blue and the air carries a little promise of warmth, hinting at a season yet to come. Not much chance of a rainbow today.

I've been thinking a lot more about rainbows after yesterday. I'm not far off the mark calling them magic, you know. They are, after all, an illusion: a kind of optical trick of the light. As with all illusions, behind the scenes in the structured world of science, there is a perfectly rational explanation with which we're all familiar: sunlight refracts (bends) through water droplets in the air, the light is dispersed into its constituent colours by the raindrops and it forms an arc of coloured wonder in the sky. Magic.

Although, if you dig a little deeper, it doesn't take long to get to a world that's much more magical and tricky to explain. For example, why does light bend in water anyway? What's happening to it as it passes through? Why don't you see a rainbow when you look towards the sun? If light is made out of particles (photons), why does it bend and refract at all? How can you disperse a particle?

Now I don't think this is necessarily the place to discuss phase-velocity or quantum mechanics. Those are huge, imposing words for a light-hearted blog. Five-Year-Old-Me doesn't care anyway, he just loves rainbows.

Rainbows have a lot to do with change. When the waters recede and Noah steps from the Ark, it's a rainbow that teaches him that the world is different. When the storm rumbles off into the distance and the sky is washed with fresh sunlight, that's when you see the transition from darkness to light. Everything has changed. Even the naughty leprechaun, chuckling away from his unsearchable treasure at the end of the rainbow, promises change of golden proportions.

The physics is about the way things change too. Light changes at the moment it meets a raindrop - its direction changes, its velocity changes, it bends and twists into something new and wonderful. The constituent colours (wavelengths) interact with the water molecules in different ways because they're all slightly differently spaced. Reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, indigos, violets... all emerge from the wall of water at different angles and form a rainbow. The light itself has transformed at the point very point where heaven intersected earth.

I quite like this idea of change. There's an air of it in lots of areas in my life at the moment and I'm fascinated by my reactions. It seems I swing wildly between excited and furious, humiliated and hopeful, depending on what it is. The one thing I don't want it to be is boring.

But as Five-Year-Old-Me has worked out, the place where sunlight meets rainfall, where art meets science and where storm clouds meet sunshine... well it should be anything but that.

WEATHER TALK

It's the kind of day when you talk about the weather. As I was walking back from lunch, I saw a guy struggling with an umbrella while the wind blew up and underneath it, throwing rain in his face. I noted with a wry smile that he was wearing sunglasses.

Surely this can only happen on this 'sceptred-isle' of ours? One minute the sky is blue and the sun reminds you that there was a thing called summer, the next you're walking through curtains of rain with wet knees and a broken brolly.

I think the weather shapes a great deal of our Englishness. In a meeting earlier, I had to dial in a German colleague, Sabine, while we waited for the other attendees to show up.

"Hi Sabine," I said, cheerily. "How are you?"
"Oh, fine thanks," replied Sabine, crackling over the conference phone.

There was an awkward pause. I was debating with myself whether to ask the question - the one question that would leap like a march hare into the mind of every British person in the same slightly awkward situation. For centuries this question has kept us victory-rolling through the small-talk-holding-pattern, and we, we blessed race of tea-drinking cricket-loving, umbrella-waving bowler hats, we take to it like Biggles to a Spitfire. I looked up to the grim sky over the car park.

"How's the weather today, Sabine?" I asked, politely.

One of the up-sides to inclement weather (other than putting off potential invaders across the English Channel of course) is that we get rainbows. I saw one today, just after passing Mr RayBan-Umbrella-Man. It arched over Tilehurst, bright and bold against the grey sky.

Do rainbows make you feel younger? Well they do, me - I always feel about 5 years old and enchanted by the strange coloured bands in the sky. Oh I know how they work, I've a degree in physics after all, but somehow rainbows are still a bit like magic, painted across the sky to remind me that hope is still alive, even in the darkest of storms.

THE GRUMPS

My friend Emmie says I might get cranky cravings if I'm giving up sugar. I must prepare for being a bit of a grump for a while.

I'm not sure what preparation I'll need to be honest. I could ask my friends to phone me in the middle of the night at random intervals to ask me daft questions. I could get my mischievous colleague (everyone has a mischievous colleague) to interfere with my desk while I'm not looking. That'll do it. Or I could give one of my sisters access to my twitter account... perish the actual thought.

Or I could just wait until tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off at 5:20am. It's like the grumpy-hour, that - perfect preparation for a sugar-craving energy-free vacuum of a day.

Anyway, it's alright for Emmie. She runs two businesses from her studio apartment in downtown Toronto - no sitting at a desk trying to work out whether a user will care about an event type code in an exported CSV file while her colleague flicks elastic bands at her. If she gets grumpy, she can go for a run in the park or wander along the beach in the pleasantry of the Canadian climate and her own sweet time.

Someone who might help me is my old friend, Carlos the Liberator. I had a little email chat with him today about the way people think. He's a fascination to me because he never defaults to the commonly accepted opinion about anything. People like that are rare and beautiful creatures. He always asks why, especially when it's uncomfortable, and although we disagree about a great many things, he enjoys the process of debate and is not afraid to embrace his own discomfort.

We chatted about theology and about bankers, about hypocrisy and Martin Luther. He gave me a reading list on non-violent protest and I made a lame analogy about yoghurt pots and tension. He doesn't do shallow conversation well, but when you're in the mood for thinking, Carlos the Liberator is great. Importantly, I have never known him to be grumpy in the fifteen years I've known him. He suggested that we visit London and nail a print-out of 95 of his ideas to the door of a city bank with a rusty nail. You can't help smile with crazy friends like Carlos around.

I think though, if I am going to be hit with the sugar-free incredible sulks, the best thing I can do is get a good night's sleep.

I'll get right on it.

WEEK 100

"It was me: I ate all the pies."

It is my one hundredth week at work. If you follow me on twitter, you'll know that I keep count of how many days I've been here - it's part of my great obsession with statistics. I believe you can observe a lot if you carefully record the little details: you can spot trends and averages, you can see cycles and you can congratulate yourself that you made it a little further than last time. You can guess what might happen next even... if you've collected the numbers.

Anyway, according to my OCD counting, the clock has ticked over to Week 100. To celebrate, I'm giving up bread, as much sugar as possible and juice.

Actually, celebration isn't really the reason, but as it is a significant milestone, Week 100 will do. The real reason I'm giving up those things is because I'm trying to be a bit healthier and a bit slimmer. I realised that if it came down to a choice between a short, fat life and a long, lean one, I know which one I would choose - and sugars and high carbs line the path to the other option.

So today, Day 1 of Week 100, I've kicked in... which is how I found myself staring at the vending machine with a collection of silver coins in my hand. My reflection stared back at me through the glass. He seemed perplexed, as though we'd met there by accident. He also looked drawn-out and a little tubby. I clutched the coins in a fist and slipped them into my jeans. So did he.

Hopefully, a little more of the healthy living will keep me from insomnia as well. You'll be pleased to know that I slept right through the night last night, after keeping myself thoroughly awake all day yesterday. Alright, playing the piano for two hours helped. All I've got to do now is go to bed early on Friday. Combined with a better diet, maybe my body won't lie there in fat-storing mode while I stress it out.

Oh don't worry. I'm not going to go on about it. You won't see pictures of delicious healthy meals on my facebook wall. I won't be gym-tweeting either. For now, all I'm doing is ratcheting up the running and ratcheting down the processed food.

THE BATTLE AGAINST SLEEPLESSNESS

Bear with me. I'm trying to keep myself awake.

I couldn't sleep last night. The house was making noises and I was trying to ignore it. Plus, whenever I closed my eyes, all I saw was enormous robots punching sea-monsters in a gigantic spray of foam. Alright, I probably should have watched something gentler than the movie Pacific Rim, but I was in the mood for daft escapism and this popcorn blockbuster seemed to fit the bill.

When the alarm went off at 6:50am this morning, my eyes were glued together and my whole body felt deeply pressed into the sheets as if weighed down into the mattress by some great immovable bulk. It all felt rather wrong, as though I'd woken in the wrong part of the sleep cycle altogether.

The consequence is of course, that now, this afternoon, I'm feeling shattered. It would be the easiest thing in the world to sink into a chair, close my eyes for a while and drift off to the sound of jaegers thumping kaiju. However, this would lead to yet another sleepless night tonight and a day of thankless toil at work tomorrow.

So, you join me on a Sunday afternoon, literally writing to stay awake.

Here's another problem with being over-tired: your brain has to reroute the signals to the most important tasks - like processing the visual input and writing it to memory, like controlling the circulation and the lungs and reminding you to breathe. However, there's not a lot of energy left for sensible conversation, turning off the oven or sometimes being vaguely normal. Emotions get tumble-dried, tempers get frayed and important things get forgotten. I wonder how different the world would be if we could all just get a good night's sleep?

I'm blaming Fridays, myself. I reckon a late night on a Friday has a knock-on effect that displaces my normal sleeping pattern right the way through until Sunday afternoon, when I often feel like collapsing into a 'well-earned' siesta. I'm pretty sure that a late night has a time-delay of 1.5 days attached to it. In other words, it always hits you the day after tomorrow.

Well, no siesta today. I'm riding it out to see what happens, I'm fighting back - it's tough though. I'm properly tired. I've got a pot of Russian Caravan on the go, which might help. I might also drive to Starbucks in a minute for a chocolate muffin and a people-watch. It's en-route to church, so it's do-able.

I've got to play the piano and speak to people tonight! Hope no-one wonders who the twinkle-fingered zombie is in the corner. Hopefully I won't drift into accidentally playing the soundtrack to Pacific Rim either.

THE INTREPIDS' WEEKEND

Snowdon, at 1,085m is the
tallest mountain
in this photograph.

The Intrepids have gone off to North Wales for the weekend. No doubt they'll be rambling about Snowdonia, commenting on the weather and praying that I remember to do the bins on Sunday night.

We have an assortment of bins, boxes and bags of course, each with their own designated haul. It's like a kind of multi-coloured Deal-Or-No-Deal that's been organised for local foxes. The downside of course, is that I have to try to remember which one goes out for the dustbin-men. I think it's the green recycling bag (plastic bottles) and the brown box (card and paper).

When I was a kid we had two bins: one black plastic one for 'rubbish' and an old fashioned metal trash can with the ancient and wise words 'HOT ASHES" inscribed upon its lid. You don't see that any more.

On the plus side, while they're off adventuring in the Wild West (Wales) it means I get a very peaceful weekend at home on my own, writing and thinking about what music to arrange next for choir.

After my quirky arrangement of You've Got a Friend, I wondered how You Raise Me Up would go down (in a manner of speaking). I was pleasantly surprised last night when they all just got on with it. It went down a storm. We had some beautiful cadences - imperfects and perfects resolving like a dream. I was quite impressed that they managed to hold it together.  For a group of people who can't read music and who've never had any formal singing training, they are amazing and I'm really proud of them.

Next up for Calcot Community Choir is Any Dream Will Do or Angels (by Robbie 'Look at Me' Williams). Now before you groan, I should point out that we let the choir choose their own music and Angels is a very popular song... apparently. It'll be tough to sing though.

Another benefit of being home-alone (as I skirt neatly and quietly around the crushing loneliness) is that this weekend, I don't have to explain what I'm doing. It's not usually a huge problem. Over the years I've developed a kind of cryptic bartering system which means I don't have to have a massively intrusive conversation about it. There's nothing worse than that game of twenty questions parents play with their teenagers, where each answer to where, with whom, for how long, what about dinner.... slowly degenerates into a series of neanderthal grunts. I know I'm old enough to be two teenagers, but somehow, that doesn't seem to matter to my parents. Anyway, here's what you do:

Give a little bit of unrequested but vaguely non-specific information in a polite and firm manner some time before it's relevant. The Intrepids are satisfied as long as they know that I'm eating well. No further questions required, your honour.

They're back on Monday night, which means Sunday night will consist of tidying up and returning the conservatory to its normal state instead of the little glass recording studio it's likely to resemble: laptop, keyboard, headphones, cables, pedals, manuscript paper, photos of Robbie Williams sporting a pen-and-ink handlebar moustache, that type of thing will have to go away.

Oh and putting the bins out.

I must not forget the bins.

A TALE OF TWO TICKETS

I don't know why I've remembered it this year. Most years, the date just goes right past me and it's only a few days later that I click my fingers and realise. For some reason though, today, I've recalled that it is the 21st of February.

I kept the car-park slip from the station for a long time afterwards. I kept it in a little summery box with other things that reminded me of her: a photograph, the wrapper of a chocolate heart she once gave me, and a poem I wrote for her. Sometimes I'd open that little box and thumb through the memories. Thu Feb 21 2002, said the numbers on the yellowing square of printed paper. Proof then. Proof that I had been there at Reading Station, that I had offered her a lift home, had nervously asked her out and had been astonished when she said yes. Proof that I had embarked on an incredible relationship with the most beautiful girl I knew.

I kept another ticket too for a long time: a train ticket with a very different date - 13 Nov 2002. I remember holding it in a gloved hand as I slumped into the seat by the window. I stared at my weary reflection as Cambridge station jolted into motion and began to recede into the night. Blackness overtook and soon I was hurtling away from her with nothing but sadness and confusion. Her life had changed and everything was different in that bright bubble of a place - specifically, there was no room for me, a shadow of the past and a stranger in a land of cleverer people - I knew it, and so did she, long before I'd worked it out.

The ticket told the story - from Cambridge to Reading, a long dark journey, rushing through fields and floods and the lonely night, every moment further and further away from her. But it was where I needed to be.

I don't have either of those two tickets any more. I let them go a long time ago and allowed my heart to heal without the afflictions of the past tempting me from an old box. I've been back to Cambridge Station many times since (it's on the mainline to Ely) and it no longer bites. All is well.

It's just on days like this, when the date leaps out, I remember 2002 and I am at least, thankful for that cloudy February day, that beautiful sparkling summer and that cold confusing autumn - because all of it's part of my learning, part of my story and part of what makes me me.

UKRAINE, BOWIE AND VERTICAL TEXT

So, Bowie's way too cool to turn up at the Brits, Facebook have bought WhatsApp for a preposterous $19bn and TeamGB have snagged another bronze at the Winter Olympics. Meanwhile, Kiev, the capital of Ukraine is descending into an apocalyptic nightmare.

The situation seems to be a sort of cold-war echo. Ukraine, after all, used to be integral to the Soviet Union; it's bordered by Russia, which broods away to the East, and the rest of Europe shimmering with promise on its Western frontier.

The protestors, who started out as peaceful, are all in favour of a stronger, progressive link with the shiny modern freedom of the European Union. The President, Viktor Yanukovych, is not. He'd much rather cozy up with Mr Putin in his snowy Russian palace of nostalgia and rule Ukraine with a disciplined iron glare.

The problem is that the 46 million Ukrainians don't much care for being told what to do any more, and even less so now that their government is firing bullets at them. They (on the whole) would like to decide the direction the country takes themselves, like a proper democracy. Mr Yanukovych isn't in the mood for listening to the pipe-dreams of the powerless when he's steering the ship. Conflict is inevitable.

It's fascinating to me how quickly these things escalate, especially here in the 21st Century. This tense ripping apart of a country from East to West, this clash of big ideas about How Nations Should Be Run is the hallmark of the last Century, not this one. It's long past the peaceful stage. Protestors are shielding themselves behind makeshift barriers, fire rages bright and hot through the shells of blackened vehicles and bullets tear across the rubble-strewn Independence Square. People are dying.

When you see the golden tops of Kiev's beautiful buildings and the black smoke billowing between them, you can't help but think about that terrible old clash of ideas and where it always leads.

-

Meanwhile, here in Theale, things are a little more peaceful. We deal with less important collisions of opposing ideologies: like whether or not vertical text is acceptable in a software user interface. I proposed 'no' as I'm fond of the idea of not having neckache. The developers countered with 'yes' as it saves space and we've already done it once before. In the light of the problems faced by Ukraine, this
seems like the triviality of trifles. Still, you can find yourself in trench warfare over trifles, can't you? I suddenly wished I could be more like David Bowie and be cool enough to stay out of it.

I argued that these weren't justifiable reasons for doing it again and that they were outweighed by the localisation cost (imagine the length of vertical Japanese strings!) and the uncomfortable experience of rotating your head to read them. This is a negative experience for our customers and will only seek to devalue the product, I found myself pointedly tapping out on my keyboard. It's funny how these things escalate. Pomposity had taken over my fingers all of a sudden.

In the end they reached a kind of compromise.

They're going for diagonal.

Weird.

DO IT YOURSELF

The Intrepids ordered some flat-pack furniture last week. When I heard about it, I gulped and promised myself I'd leave the house when they tried to put it together. They bought a shoe-cupboard, a desk and a normal two-door cupboard to stash away the 'untidy cables' and hide the printer.

In the old days, expert carpenters and joiners would build finely-crafted, solid furniture from sturdy English oak and elegant mahogany. They'd lovingly fit the joints together, smooth down those rough edges and gently pat the carefully varnished wood with a satisfied smile and a leathery hand.

Not any more. These days, you buy a box of cheap wood, a spurious collection of shiny screws in plastic packets, some bits of dowling and a screwdriver... and you get on with it yourself.

You do get a flimsy instruction sheet though, so you're not completely on your own. If your Swedish is up to scratch, or you can figure out the two-dimensional flights of fancy of an overly enthusiastic procedure-boffin, you might be alright.

I failed to leave the house. I had to arrange music for choir this week, so last night, while I sat in the conservatory with headphones clasped to my ears and my laptop balanced on my knees, the Intrepids dutifully got on with it.

They set out with the best intentions. Unpack everything, arrange the bits across the carpet in some sort of sensible order, check it's all there and then unfold the instructions, laying them out like some sort of annotated tablecloth in the centre of the room.

When I went back a couple of hours later, my Dad was furiously banging nails into a piece of wood with a hammer, while my Mum was looking for a tiny bolt that had shot under the fridge. A rickety looking skeleton of a cupboard was standing in the middle of the room like some sort of ramshackle wood-henge, and the instruction manual was crumpled in the corner, spewing ripped pages and sporting a giant bootprint.

I offered to make the tea.

They did manage to get it all assembled in the end. Alright, the shoe-cupboard doesn't close properly and the first-aid kit needs significant replenishing, but it's all there and assembled...

I wondered whether I ought to have helped. Is that what you're thinking? Well, you might be right, but I have a strange feeling that I would have made the experience much much worse. I don't think my flippant remarks would have been too welcome and my track record with practical tasks isn't exactly glorious either.

You have to know which battles to get involved in, after all.

Where did this whole thing of DIY come from anyway? What happened? It's a terrible idea!  Did furniture makers in the 1970s suddenly realise that they could make a fortune by getting their customers to do the difficult bit of their job for them?

"Hey Mick, What are we doing, building this stuff for other people?"
"What you on about, Jerry?"
"What are we doing? It takes bloomin' ages and it's proper fiddly."
"Yeah. I'm always buildin' wardrobes."
"Why can't they do it?"
"Who?"
"The customers, Mick, the customers."
"The customers! Course! All they need's a packet o' screws..."
"They can build it themselves!"
"Yeah! Brilliant! Then, when it all goes wrong..."
"... and it will..."
[laughter]
"... it's their fault and not ours!"
"What's more, Mick, pack it in a box an' they can flamin' well drive it 'ome n'all; save us the trouble!"
"Brilliant, Jerry, brilliant!... But what do we do?"
"Crack open the champers, Micky boy. Crack open the champers."

One of these days of course, I'll be in the same boat, surrounded by punctured wooden boards and an assortment of tiny fixtures, wondering why on God's green earth, we have to go through this Krypton Factor exercise every time we want somewhere new to store our books and our shoes. I can't really complain until I've given it a go I suppose. If I do ask for help on that stressful day, don't be afraid to tell me to do it myself.

THE PURPOSE OF FRUIT

Today, in a meeting, a colleague opened her laptop and flicked through a piece of work that I'd done, not realising that its author was sitting opposite her. I watched her eyes scan across the page.

"This is just too wordy," she said without looking up, "...and out-dated; I mean it's not very good at all really."

I bit the inside of my cheeks and focused on the clock behind her head. It was 10:55 and the second-hand was jolting round with a silent click. I watched it tick predictably past the numbers: the 4, the 5, the 6, the 7... tick, tick, tick.

What would you have done? Would you have subtly slipped a comment into the conversation? Would you have hinted that it was you who had created this wordy monster? Would you have reacted defiantly, would you have joked about it? I didn't. I didn't do any of that; I didn't own up and I didn't try to defend myself in any way at all. I silently watched the clock as she ripped my work apart.

In the end, she volunteered herself as the solution. "I'll take a look at this... 'beautiful' site," she said, smirking with sarcasm. I did a long blink, clutched my chair with white knuckles and tried to smile. You crack on, love, I thought, somewhat pragmatically.

It hurt a little bit though if I'm honest. I think sometimes we allow ourselves to be defined almost exclusively by our output. I used to take criticism really badly, even if it was intended to encourage and motivate me to improve. Some Sundays I'd come home from church feeling miserable, simply because I hadn't sung loud enough or someone had told me that I was playing too many fiddly bits on the piano. I had allowed my output to become so attached to my identity, that it had become an extension of me - and everything was suddenly personal.

I particularly remember one camp I was leading, when I wandered around the site one night, anorak hood pulled tightly over my head, trying to hide my tears in the rain because a lady had told me that the worship time had made her ears bleed.

How do you deal with it? How do you separate out your work, your art, your produce, your songs, your poetry... from you? Is that even the right thing to do? After all, it's OK to judge a tree by its fruit, isn't it?

I don't have the answers. All I know is that a while ago, I decided I was going to hold all of it very lightly, particularly the worship-stuff. It is much better to give something up than it is to have it ripped away from you, I realised, and I started praying some of the most dangerous prayers of my life. I heard myself saying things like, "God if I never get to play in worship again, I want that to be OK," and "Lord, please help me do this for you and not for me."

I actually don't think that the purpose of fruit is to bring glory to the tree. It's a subtle distinction, but it's an important one. The purpose of fruit is to be delicious for a season, but more importantly, to be the catalyst that reproduces itself in the next. Or, more succintly, as Jesus puts it somewhere: Unless a seed dies it can't produce any fruit at all. I don't want my output to reflect me - I want it to reflect the life in me and the One who put it there.

I flopped open my notebook and clutched my propelling pencil. LET IT GO, I wrote and underlined each word twice.

Good advice.

I'D LIKE TO FLY

Write about what you know, they said. Alright then. This is where I'm at. This, undefined group of advice-givers, is what I know.

Here's this week's poem. It's not big and it's not clever, but it is honest: 

I'd Like To Fly

I'd like to fly away now please
To flap these wings and feel the breeze
To soar into the atmosphere
And take myself away from here

I'd like to soar on summer air
The wind to ripple through my hair
The fluffy clouds to linger low
As tiny troubles rage below

I'd like to be so high, so free
To see the world that eagles see
To twist, to turn, to hope, to fly
Through silent air and perfect sky

I'd like to fly away now please
To flap my wings and feel the breeze
I'd soar into the atmosphere
And take my self away from here

FIGHTING THE VORTEX

I've pulled myself together today. I'm still... disappointed with myself, but less despairing about my self-inflicted state.

My trouble is that I get convinced that the way that things are now will always remain. If someone makes a decision that affects me, I can't see the end of it; I can see the situation I'll be in, I can see the discomfort it causes me, but I can't see beyond it. It lasts indefinitely. The chances are, the next thing will be a lot better but I can't even begin to think about that second change. I get stuck in the absolutes.

"I can't believe I've ended up [insert adjective]," I'll say to myself, not really 'ending up' anywhere. It's just more steps on the journey. The trouble is that this journey is much longer than I expected and I am tired of fighting the vortex. I am tired.

I am really tired.

THE VORTEX

I can't do it. I cannot do it. I just can't seem to... be... do... have... what it takes... whatever it takes. I'm so hopeless and it's killing me.

In some ludicrous part of my brain I'm a sparkling wit, an extrovert with a spectacular sense of humour, equipped with perfectly-paced comedy-timing, sensitive and flexible, gracious and intelligent, a master in the art of performing the part of the charismatic racconteur.

The reality is stark in its difference. I am a bore. I'm dull and uninteresting like a piece of furniture you never wished you'd brought with you. When I eventually chime in, it's not the sound of hilarity; it's the predictable bells of tedious depth, clattering and discordant, reminding you that I don't belong, that I don't fit in. Wit sounds like sneering sarcasm, humour crashes into the air, stumbling awkardly through the silence, and charisma is sucked out into the vortex with a hiss and a squeaky pop.

Worst of all, the vortex spins around me, laughing and swirling and pushing me ever closer to an ever lonelier future. Who in the world is ever going to pick me for their team? Anyone? No-one?

No-one.

Nothing scares me more than that.

TABLE FOOTBALL

"Oi ref, you sure it was an 'andball?"

I played table-football today. I am terrible at table-football. There must be a knack, a technique that's more elevated than spin it and hope for the best. It's a game of quick reflexes and wrist-flicking agility that has outfoxed me. Time and time again, the ball zipped past my rows of players, streaking through them like a yellow bullet and rattling into the goal.

I really wanted it to be a game of strategy. After all, real football is, isn't it? Alright, I was terrible at that too if I remember rightly, but at least I understand that it has some thought involved, some planning, some tactics. The radio pundits talk about strategy all the time. So-and-so's got a great 'footballing brain' they say, good anticipation, playing the offside trap well, long balls, short balls, passing to feet, 3-5-2, ruthless efficiency, and the other million cliches you've heard before.

Well there's none of that in table-football. You can switch off your footballing brain. Long balls will not be required, no strategy, no short passes to feet lads, none of that if you want to jouer au babyfoot. Nope. Spin your men in their somersaulting rows, push them in, pull them out until your body jolts with the motion, and somehow, in a way that makes it look planned and cool, one of them will accidentally score.

"I like games where you have to think!" I protested as the small crowd of laughing spectators looked on. I realised how nerdy that made me sound as soon as I'd said it, but there's not a lot I can do about the truth. I fished the ball from the goal and my ever-gracious team-mate and I carried on with the humiliation.

SORE THROAT

I've got a sore throat.

It feels like I've swallowed a cactus, like I've picked it up by the flowerpot and tipped the whole thing upside down into my gaping mouth, soil and all.

I'm annoyed because I've spent the whole winter deliberately keeping my nose warm. Viruses love cold noses - they get themselves airborne and then go nostril-hunting. I've wrapped my own hooter in a scarf, rubbed it with warm gloves, buried it inside my hood and kept it firmly out of other people's business.

Yet still it seems to have found a pesky little sore-throat virus, or something. I've had a Lemsip. I reckon they might be placebos, Lemsips. Throat sweets help, but as soon as they're gone, the papery cactus is back, growling and grovelling behind the old Adam's Apple.

I'll be alright tomorrow.

I say that a lot.

TWO GENTLEMEN AND VERONA

"Ah, the splendid canals
and bridges of...  Verona..."

"Ferdinand, I'm going to have to overrule you," I said, scratching out the word Verona on the answer sheet. Ferdinand was adamant that Vivaldi was born in Verona. He protested that he, a well-travelled German and connoisseur of European culture, had lived in Italy for eleven years and that Verona was well known as a hotspot for classical music.

This is the kind of thing I dislike about quizzes. Oh, I love a quiz, don't misunderstand! There are just some aspects of it which really wind me up. Top of the list is this all-too common collision between people (Ferdinands) and stuff (correct answers to a quiz)...

I've long been an adherent to the idea that People Are More Important Than Stuff. I've seen parents treat shiny objects as more important to them than their own children; I've seen rogues with effortless  smooth-talk stealing from the vulnerable and the frail, and I've seen the wreckage left when fathers put work in front of their families. It's a little simplistic I know, but in general, I needed no persuading that People are much more important than Stuff.

That's why this tiny collision of ideas with Ferdinand bothered me. He's a person, with pride and passion in his knowledge, with an outspoken culture and a gentle heart. As I pressed the pen firmly against the paper and struck through Verona I felt as though I were eroding Ferdinand, redacting him from the quiz and scrubbing him out with two clean strokes of a biro.

The trouble was, he was wrong. Vivaldi was born in Venice and I couldn't let it go. I said I would buy the whole team a pint if I was wrong and that seemed to break the ice a little bit - but was I guilty of putting stuff before people? Should I have deliberately let the wrong answer stand?

-

Well, no, actually. I don't think so. This is the same scenario as letting my nephew win at draughts isn't it? It's dishonest not to go with what you know is right, unless it's a team decision. How would Ferdinand have felt knowing that I let him give the wrong answer, deliberately costing the team a point? This is where figuring out the boundary between people and stuff becomes the hardest part of the puzzle - the fuzzy line between the two is tricky to find.

Maybe simplest is best. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Everyone can quote it, but it takes real courage to make it fly. It trumps P.A.M.I.T.S because you are a person and you do have stuff. In the shimmering light of great reflection, in the illumination this golden commandment is asking you to observe, you quickly realise that we're all in the same boat: each of us deserves the same respect, honour and dignity, and that in itself trumps all stuff, even our own - especially our own.

How would I have felt at the end of the quiz if my German friend had scrubbed out my answer in favour of his own, and he turned out to be right?

Good old Ferdinand. When the answer was read out, he gave me a high-five and grinned. A little later when the quizmaster went through the "match-up-these-rivers-with-countries" round, I was immediately grateful that Ferdinand had somehow been to Namibia. I high-fived him back.

THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

Turold the dwarf in the
company of William's knights

Yesterday was my birthday. As I mentioned before, I'm now 36 and old enough to claim as many adult years as went before. You'd think I'd be more excited about this than I am - but life goes on. I didn't really make a big thing of it, so I'm not surprised that only a few people remembered.

For the last few years, I've spent my birthday in London, visiting a museum and generally enjoying the anonymity that the capital affords me. However, as it stands, a large proportion of the countryside between here and there is currently underwater, and train travel is famously tricky. And by famously tricky, I mean of course: a total nightmare.

I didn't fancy cramming myself into the buffet car with a herd of grumpy commuters, phoning their bosses with the 'I'm-going-to-be-late' call and huffing into each other's armpits. I decided to stay in Reading.

I did go to a museum though. I went to Reading Museum. So it is then that Reading Museum is next on my list for the Tour of Reading's Interesting Places.*

Reading Museum is inside the Town Hall and it displays a whole load of things that are relevant to our history: There are artifacts from the Abbey, there are old-fashioned biscuit tins and sepia pictures of Reading Football Club from the 1920s. There are bronze-age fragments and Victorian bus stops alongside stuffed badgers and glass-cases glistening with old coins and ancient ivory teeth.

Pride of place though at the Museum, is the famous Reading copy of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Embroidered by 19th Century seamstresses, this facsimile stretches almost endlessly around the upstairs gallery, displaying the famous events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. Not for the first time, I followed the story around the room.

I like trying to work out what the Latin bits mean. They're all translated underneath the display but it's fun working out the story first-hand. It's like a code and a puzzle, wrapped up in this colossal 11th Century comic-strip.

UBI HAROLD DUX ANGLORUM ET SUI MILITES EQUITANT AD BOSHAM
Here's Harold (English Duke) and his soldiers riding to Bosham

UBI HAROLD ET WIDO PARABOLANT
Here's Harold having a chat with Guy

HIC NAVIS VENIT IN TERRAM WILLELMI DUKIS
Here's a ship coming to Duke William's country [to tell him that Harold has taken the throne of England, after previously having promised allegiance to William's own claim].

HIC WILLEM DUX IUSSIT NAVES EDIFICARE
Here [and rather ominously] William says, "Build some ships."


It's great. You can trace emotions, loyalties, fears, power-plays, miscommunication, religious fervour, superstition, patronage and biased-reporting... right the way around the story. Even a dwarf makes an appearance, not to mention a tabloid-style expose of a recent scandal. Human behaviour has not changed much, it seems.

Alright, it doesn't have much to do with Reading. It was embroidered in Gloucester, I think, and one of those moustachioed benefactors bought it for the town. However, it is here and if you get a chance, you should definitely go and see it.

*Last year I got fed up with people bad-mouthing my town and me joining in, so I decided to document interesting things and places in Reading to prove that it's not all smelly-alley and festival-litter.

MOON LANDINGS

Since the other day, when I was thinking about the phases of the moon, I've been looking up at its silvery glow most nights. While the South of England is marooned between enormous fields of floodwater, the little bright disk beyond the night remains pleasantly beaming.

Professor Brian Cox thinks that mankind's greatest achievement was the lunar landing of July 1969. Tough to disagree. Within just seven decades of humanity mastering powered flight, Neil Armstrong was bouncing across the surface of the moon, snapping pictures of Buzz Aldrin and pocketing moonrock for scientific research. For me, it was the defining moment of the 20th Century, perhaps even of the Millenium.

Not that I was there. I was born nine years later and grew up in the 1980s with both a fascination for those grainy pictures, and no real understanding of how they changed the world. I drew pictures of space rockets, shuttles and astronauts - I wore cardboard spacesuits and bounded gravity-free from the sofa like all eight-year olds. To me though, it could never be quite as astonishing as it must have been to the children of the 60s.

The Intrepids had been married for less than a year. Apparently, my Dad stayed up and listened to the broadcast on radio. No change there then: he's always staying up for eclipses and aurora-sightings and the like. He loves a bit of astronomy, almost as much as he loves a bit of sci-fi.

"Of course, you know there's more computing power in a mobile phone than there was in the Apollo 11 mission," he said last night, gazing through the conservatory roof. I pointed out that there was probably around 2kb with a backup of 32kb. Mum changed the subject.

You can see the Sea of Tranquility without a telescope. It's quite incredible to look up at this ancient sleeping rock and think of the day we put a man there using less processing power than a digital calculator.

THE CHAMPION

Sunday night. Poetry time again. Maybe this should be a weekly thing?

Today was my day off from playing piano in church so I took to writing some poems through the service instead. In the old days, doing anything other than listening with a Sunday-smile plastered over your face would have been frowned upon while someone was speaking. However, now that we have artists painting away at the front and pint-sized Jedi Knights leaping about in the worship time, I'm not too bothered about scribbling a few verses...

I really wanted to write something called Who Makes Tea from a Lukewarm Urn?... but I decided against it. Far too controversial.

The Champion

Born into a world of pain
Through stormy seas and lightning rain
So far from Heaven's golden throne
A stranger to the dark, unknown

The Champion, he stands assured
Though by the earth despised, ignored
He grips the wood with searing love
While thundrous rolls the wrath above

His heart aflame, his eyes of fire
The Champion is lifted higher
For somewhere slips the thorny crown
As hate looks up and love looks down

Evil stirs with rampant glee
Salacious twisted victory
The Champion is finished, done
The thunder claps, the battle won

The thunder claps, the battle won
The Champion cries, 'It. is. done.'
As far away in priestly view
The temple veil is torn in two

The ripping, tearing, awful sound
Shakes up the earth and blood-soaked ground
And far away through time they come:

The way is made for champions

Born into a world of pain
The champions are born to reign
To raise the earth from stormstruck night
To walk the world as salt and light

THE WOOD BETWEEN THE WORLDS

3am. I slid open the conservatory door and stepped barefoot onto the cold tiles. The sky was a murky grey. Rain was spattering and shimmering against the glass roof. I sat in one of the wicker chairs and gulped the cool glass of milk I'd poured myself. My whole body was aching with sleeplessness.

I don't sleep too well sometimes. In fact, a lot of times. I lie twisted in the sheets, hot, scratchy, stuffy, dry, uncomfortable, exhausted. My mind spins through the day like an overactive computer, calculating the parallel realities and working out what would have happened and what should have happened. I get depressed in the darkness as I over-analyse and beat myself up while the night ticks by.

No wonder today (Friday) turned out to be a bit of a downer. I didn't feel like I achieved very much; even the weekly trip to the pub was spent gazing at my shoes while the conversation swung between drunkenness and rugby. I've little experience of either, and from what I remember, both were excruciatingly unpleasant. If I were smarter I would have found something to latch on to and would have humorously twisted the talk to more comfortable ground. I'm not too smart though - especially when I was up until 3am.

Throw tiredness into the mix and everything sinks into a kind of desperate mudslide.

It started at the Engineering Curry Night last night (Thursday). I can't put my finger on exactly what it was that depressed me - perhaps my crushing inability to fit in. I was not at the Sensible End this time. I wasn't really at the Inebriated End either - I was kind of in the middle. This vacuous purgatory of conversational-no-mans-land combines all the fun of missing out on the hilarity at one end, with the the scornful looks and frowning of the other - the worst of both worlds, I suppose. It might also have been the moment when a colleague saw me poking the candle with a bit of dried stick. It caught fire of course, and I blew it out in a pirouette of smoke.

"I thought you were one of the grown-ups," she said, cheekily. I felt my heart twitch with sadness as I instantly translated her description to 'aren't you supposed to be old and boring?' to which there was and still is, no witty reply. Depressing.

Then, when they split the bill equally between 16 people and I was being asked to cough up for more than twice what I had consumed, I wondered whether I should ever come again. I was too tired to argue about it.

I find myself in this social vacuum a lot. It's like the wood-between-the-worlds*. I could jump into any of these parallel universes, these cultures that surround me, but it would always be a struggle to feel like I really fit in. The result is that I appear as a kind of neutral observer, blending boringly into the background, apparently making up the numbers and keeping quiet and shy in the corner. I try to make conversation, to make the situation work for me, but sooner or later it drifts into realms where I can no longer contribute.

I got home from the curry night to find The Intrepids had left a huge teddy bear propped up on the sofa, apparently reading the Property Paper. I take the hint, though, disappointingly, there's not much I can do about it.

So it was I allowed my mind to kick into overdrive and found myself awake in the smallest and coldest of hours, sipping ice-cool milk in a dark conservatory, in the quietness of the wood-between-the-worlds.

I'm really lonely.


*The Wood Between The Worlds appears in The Magician's Nephew, the prelude to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis. The main characters, Digory and Polly, find themselves in the wood, where different worlds stretch out like circular pools between the great trees. From this meta-reality, they could then jump into whichever world they chose.

THE ROCKET'S LAMENT

Another little poem to try out. This is me imagining what it's like to be a firework. It's a bit melancholy, this one, I think. However, I  like the idea of stringing simple words together in short bursts to tell a story. Somehow it seems right to abandon the punctuation too. I can't work out why, but there it is.

And here it is:


The Rocket's Lament

Damp earth cold night
Bright stars torch light
Short fuse tiny spark
Flickers out in the dark

Wet shoes mud patch
Wool glove lit match
Warm face high frown
Disappears let down

Clear black over head
Fire light yellow red
Smoke spins sparks fly
Destiny ticks by

Hope fades tiny flame
Snuffed out rocket shame
No flight no cheer
Packed up next year

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

"You can choose the kind
of man you want to be."

I was trying to teach my nephew what it means to take responsibility this evening. He's six. I genuinely don't think that's too young to start learning how to be a man. He didn't like his lesson very much, I'm afraid.

Like the famous mismatched-draughts-game, he screamed and he cried when he couldn't get his own way. Half-way through a job, packing away the playmobil, he'd given up because it was 'boring'. I told him that he could choose to do that but it meant he had to sit down and do nothing for the rest of the evening - an infinitely more boring (and for him, difficult) task.

"You've got a choice," I said. "1 or 2. There is no 3. 1 means you tidy up and we play the next game. 2 means you sit here like this with me for twenty minutes until it's time to put your shoes on and go home."

I desperately want him to understand. He screamed, he cried, he kicked and he wriggled, but I could not allow him not to be responsible. It's massively important. He had to choose.

The thing with irresponsibility is that somebody somewhere always has to clear up the mess. It's an intrinsic law of the universe. Whether you're a big city banker or a teenager leaving wet towels in a heap on the bathroom floor, there is always someone who has to deal with it.

Unfortunately we live in a world that's stacked against us seeing it. You can drop litter in the street and it disappears, you can leave lights on in the office all night and no-one bats an eyelid. You can even gamble with millions of pounds worth of other people's savings, pensions and investments... as though it were some game of hooray-henry-roulette...

But the law remains. Somebody somewhere always has to pick up the pieces of our irresponsible actions. It may as well be us, it should be us!

After all, I know grown men - strong, young, selfish-headed men who've walked out on their families because it's too difficult to take responsibility. Seeing it through, honouring their commitment is somehow beyond them. What kind of utterly diabolical role-model is that?

In the end, he gave in. I let him go and in a unique and creative way (that's his style), he did finish the job. I was quick to balance my draconian discipline with some gale-force encouragement. While he pushed the box of packed-up playmobil into the corner with his head, I told him that a hero is someone who completes the things he doesn't want to do; someone who sees it right through to the end because it's the right thing to do.

I pray with every fervency I can summon within that he gets it - that all four of them do! I wish I'd had an annoying uncle sometimes.

RAIN

The lake... but not today.

More rain. I just stood in the kitchen watching it streak down the windows. I love the way it collects and rolls off the guttering onto the glistening stones below. The lake is bursting again - the little bridge, almost submerged and the trees shooting out of the water where the path used to be.

In the summer, this is a really pleasant place for a lunch break. You can walk around the lake in about ten minutes, watching the geese and the swans glide happily by the fountain. The trees rustle in the warm breeze as workers stroll by from Santander, Pepsico and wherever else, chatting intently about sales figures and conferences and holidays. There are lillies and shrubs and butterflies and bees; there are dragonflies and ducks and fish that slink silently beneath the water.

Not today. Today is a rainy day in February.

It always seems odd to me that those besuited workers are not living in the moment. Alright, chatting about an upcoming marketing presentation is much less enjoyable indoors, but it's also far less impressive a topic than a beautiful day, nature and the warm sunshine. Have a lunch break! I want to say: Take a moment! Enjoy where you are, don't rush on to the next thing! breathe in, watch the ducks, find a ladybird, whatever you do, don't miss this!

Career people give you funny looks when you say things like that. They frighten me a little bit, if I'm honest. Their heads are so firmly wrapped around their jobs that anything or anyone who digs a little deeper is probably not working hard enough - as hard as they are - and should do something about it. I hope I'm not like that. I hope I learn to find those moments of wonder.

I sipped my tea and watched the swans as they floated past the marooned benches and bins. Rain pounded into the lake and a strong breeze blew ripples across its surface. I'm really thankful for where I am, I thought.

Indoors.

EMAILS AND MIXED METAPHORS

I feel like I've spent the entire day sending emails: back and forth, back and forth, ding dong, ping pong, la di da. What's that all about? I'm supposed to be a technical author, not a great composer of carefully-worded missives.

I'm not alone on the great carousel of email traffic. Lots of us are busy tapping away at our keyboards, spewing characters across the screen and then hastily deleting them. How much time is spent pondering emails, day-in, day-out, in offices up and down the land? That pausing time, when you purse your lips and your eyes flick up and to the right while you think about the best way to phrase it... that's a lot of time, right there isn't it?

All day for me, pretty much.

It's because of this piece of work I've done that has to be precisely correct. I mean it's been analysed, deconstructed, reviewed and critiqued by three groups of people in two countries, thousands of miles of apart; it's been scrutinised by more knowledgeable minds than mine and it's been bouncing around the network in various attachments for weeks. I get that it has to be right, and to get it right means jumping on the carousel and waiting for the music to stop.

Email's fascinating as a kind of social technology. I love the silly jargon that you get. People talk about 'popping' something in and 'dropping' an email to so-and-so. Why would you drop an email? What does that even mean? Does it come from dropping an actual envelope into a postbox, I wonder? Funny how we've invented a brand new technology but we've actually gone backwards in time to talk about how we handle it.

If we're not popping, dropping, zipping and rattling through emails, we've gone further back in time to describe our email-activity... we're firing them off. How very old-fashioned! You load up your cannon (SMTP server) with your carefully designed projectile (email packet), point the thing in the right direction ('To' header), light the fuse (click Send) and stand well back.

Actually, that's a pretty good description. Boom.

By the end of the day, the music did stop, the cannons did cease-fire and I breathed a sigh of sweet relief and jumped off the fairground/battlefield. (In less-mixed metaphorical terms) I shut down Outlook and rolled my chair back. It might be my favourite part of the day, that. Normally, I stand up, whip my scarf from the back of the seat and fling it melodramatically around my neck. Then I pull on my gloves, slip into my coat, zip it up, grab my rucksack and rush out of the building like a man (quietly) possessed.

Brilliant. The sky was a kind of facebook-blue, laced with purple clouds. The lake was glowing with the warm reflection of office windows and cars sped past to join the trail of brake-lights waiting to shuffle out to the main road. I walked home, thinking of all the things I needed to do when I got there.

It was then that I realised that third on the list (after a cup of tea and a chat with the Intrepids of course) was sending an email to the choir about our next rehearsal. Marvellous, I thought to myself, another carefully-worded email. Marvellous.

THE BUBBLE CHAMBER

particle tracks in a bubble chamber

I was trying to do something difficult earlier. I was trying to fit together five pieces of evidence in a way that made logical sense, but was totally different to the thing I thought was the most obvious conclusion.

You see this kind of thing all the time in those lateral-thinking puzzles. Here's a classic example:

Andy and Tim are professional golfers. One day they're out playing a match. The sun is shining, the grass is green, and away in the distance, lazy cotton-wool clouds are hanging perfectly still upon the horizon. The score-card, for those who take note of such things, is currently showing Tim: 15, Andy: 30.  In two shots' time though, Andy has won the game. How?

While you're puzzling over that, I'm going to talk about CSI and bubble chambers. A bubble chamber is an old-fashioned device, filled with supercooled liquid that was used to detect the activity of subatomic particles. As they zip through the bubble chamber, they leave a trail behind. Atomic physicists used to use bubble chambers to work out what had happened in a particle collision. If the tracks went off one way towards a large magnet, say, they could determine a particle was being diverted and must be somehow magnetically charged. If it took a straight line through the magnets or stopped or curled round completely on itself, it must be a different type of particle altogether.

Bubble chambers (like the cloud chambers and wire chambers that followed them) told a story about an event that was impossible to witness first-hand. Scientists pored over the elegant trace-pictures, forensically examining the evidence left behind so that they could reach a conclusion about what had happened.

That's what they did in CSI too - although far less plausibly. There, the larger than life forensic scientists gradually laser in on an impossibly detailed result from the smallest pieces of physical evidence left at the crime scene: a corner of a piece of paper from a notebook made of paper from one rare species of pine tree, a grainy photograph that can somehow be enhanced to show an identity badge, a UV footprint, a screw from a pair of spectacles, ad nauseum. And they're almost always exactly correct these pseudo-science-nerds, not to mention unfeasibly good-looking.

I wanted to try a bit of 'devil's advocacy' with myself and my five exhibits. I had almost certainly made some assumptions about them, locked them together without really thinking about it and had fashioned a hypothesis quite quickly.

Well, the trouble is that if you have a hypothesis, it's incredibly easy to find more pieces of the puzzle that back it up - what if you could rationally pose an alternative that matches the same set of facts? Even if you don't like that backup theory, even if it frightens you and you don't want to think about it, you have at least got to believe that it's possible, surely?

Here's another example. I'm thinking of an animal. It has a long neck, spindly legs, it eats from treetops and it lives in Africa. Now, you're probably on to me: That Matt Stubbs, you say to yourself with a knowing smile, he's a sneaky old so-and-so... and you've already ruled out the giraffe. Good for you. It's a heron, but you get my point. Sometimes you can draw completely the wrong conclusion from the information you're given, based on your assumption.

This is quite a unique thing that we do as human beings. A difference engine - a processor like a computer makes no assumptions from the bottom up. It works the other way round, starting with everything possible and gradually rules out only what logic dictates given the evidence. The idea of ruling out a possibility because it is ridiculous, makes no sense to a computer. Or, as Sherlock Holmes so eloquently and intelligently puts it, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't find my alternative theory for my five pieces of evidence. I recognise though that it's a skill I'd like to be better at. The facts just painted far too strong a picture - which might actually be the only possible conclusion (and therefore the Holmesian truth) but I was a bit annoyed that I couldn't come up with at least a much more fanciful but less likely solution.

Right there in that annoyance is my problem I think: the creative part of my brain, the bit that likes fiction and art and music and stories, is so often at war with the other side which observes, analyses and processes everything as though the world is a giant problem that always has to be solved. My brain itself is a kind of bubble chamber. Some thoughts bend round in circles with all the fanciful imagination  my 36 year old head can dream up; others just power straight on through, unaffected by my built-in opinions, desires and prejudices.

But the world isn't just a puzzle that's there to be figured out. It's there to be enjoyed. That's what looking around at this beautiful world tells me, with its amazing people and incredible potential. Ah but perhaps you have another theory about that, based on your observation of this self-same crazy old world... That's more than OK.



By the way, if you haven't worked it out yet, Andy and Tim are playing tennis.

ATTRACTIVENESS

He's lovin' it.

I hope I wasn't too mean about the students yesterday. They're computer-science guys with a stereotype to live up to. I'm sure they get up to all sorts when they're back on campus, but I appreciate that the rules are slightly different when you also work for a company that expects you to get up and go to work five mornings a week.

Bless 'em.

I got up early today and went to Newbury. I'd booked an appointment with the opticians and I wanted to go and have a look round the town before the sight-test. Newbury is a market town in West Berkshire, about fifteen miles or so from here. It's smaller and arguably nicer than Reading with its dainty streets over the Kennet. It has the feel of a market town with larger aspirations. Unlike Reading, Newbury seems to have somehow resisted the urge to sprawl like a concrete-glass spider, and it's remained much more attractive as a result.

Attractiveness is a difficult quality to define, when you think about it. I thought about this elusive quality when the optician called my name and led me off to get my eyes tested. She had long brown hair tied up in a perfect pony tail, a winning natural smile and lucid green eyes that sparkled in the half-light. She was... beautiful.

"Pop your coat down there, Mr Stubbs," she said with a lilting Northern-Irish accent. Stay focused, I said to myself, ironically.

It was fine. She told me that my eyesight is somehow improving. I told her about my colour-blindness; she tested it with those books of coloured dots with invisible numbers. I told her I wasn't allowed to wire a plug; she told me to press the accelerator only when the lowest light is on. We laughed, then I went off to Costa while they fixed my frames.

Maybe I should have taken some tips from the guy I overheard in Costa. He was chatting up a girl by telling her about his guitar-playing.

"Are you in a band then?" she asked.

"Nah... I used to be but it didn't work er, it didn't work out... I'm solo now. Yeah, it's much better that way, you know, just me and the music. I do all sorts of gigs and people say 'oh you know you're so good, you don't really need a band!' and all that. I think they're right you know - I was at a festival in the summer and it was great because it was all about the music and you could tell people were really loving it..."

I chuckled into my tea. I don't think she was impressed either. A few moments later, he was telling her about some guitar he was going to buy, and she asked him if he'd tried playing it yet.

"Nah - don't need to," he said, decisively. "A good musician can tell the quality just by looking. Anyway, I'm only really interested in the amplifier."

I noticed her raise an eyebrow at that nonsense. He didn't notice though; he was too busy talking about Fenders, pickups and Marshall stacks.

After Costa, I wandered down the high street, looking for lace-up boots. There was a saxophone player outside one of the supermarkets. He was loving it - high trills and super glissandos over the notes, all funking along over a little CD player pumping out karaoke backing tracks. I got the feeling that even if there were nobody listening, he'd still be enjoying standing there, serenading an empty high street with his sax.

Maybe that's a little key to attractiveness - enjoying what you do, doing what you enjoy, but not taking any of it too seriously. Sounds like something to aim for anyway. Attractiveness is almost a helpless thing, I think - rather than beauty which is sort of, well, obvious. Iron filings can't really prevent themselves from the magnet, after all. Moths can't pull themselves anywhere other than the light and lightning always takes the path of least resistance.

Eventually I wandered back through the quiet streets and caught a train back to Theale. Newbury really is quite an attractive place, I thought to myself as the train jolted into life and pulled out of the station. It was time to go home.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO STUDENTS?

"You shall not pass"

I went to university on Sunday, September 29th, 1996. It was literally a lifetime ago: almost 18 years.

I've been thinking a lot about university recently. A discussion about student loans and tuition fees erupted around me, and I suddenly had a thought about how bizarre it is to live in a world of people who are in exactly the same stage of life as you. Everyone you know is no more than three or four years older or younger, all still figuring out their independence while slotting endless twenty pence pieces into enormous washing machines.

I'd struggle to find anyone anywhere with the same kind of lifestyle as me now. As you grow older, your paths diverge slowly, ballooning out from each other across the country, until you look around and it's just you.

Ballooning aside, there are still some little reminders of how things were in those odd-glorious few years, and how far I've come since 1996.

I sent an email to the person running the Reading University Creative Arts twitter account today. They are looking for local people, creatives who might like to contribute some of their work to an anthology. It's a nice idea - local engagement, expression from people outside of the uni-bubble and maybe a little bit of recognition...

Hi,

I have some silly nonsense poems that might be of interest. I'm a writer (of sorts) living in Theale. What happens about copyrights, etc?

Matt Stubbs


It's a very obvious question, I think. I was bemused by the answer from the 'anthology editor'. In fact I said, 'Ha!' quite loudly in the office, if you can imagine such a thing.

Matt,

Thanks for getting in touch. As a humble student, I'm not aware of things like copyright and the way the anthology affects that - next week I will have a chat with the powers above me about copyright and will get back to you promptly. By all means send in your stuff and I will be in touch soon with any questions you may have, answered.

Best wishes,

[name redacted]

I decided not to send my poems to humble students with no awareness of intellectual property. I find it tough to believe that I'm the only person who asked that question. Am I being a bit cynical? Perhaps a little paranoia has crept in?  It struck me as an incredible collision - my 36 year old world where you have to be a bit shrewd with your stuff - and his naive 20 year old one, where it doesn't seem to matter.

We have a number of placement students at work. These are computer science undergraduates, 20 year olds I suppose, who are gaining experience in a 'real' environment before returning to university for their final year. I'm consistently amazed by them.

"Any plans for the weekend?" I said to one, as we walked back from The Bull at lunch today.

"Not really. Might just chill out on my Playstation."

"Right. No nights on the razzle then?"

A thin smile.

"No zany pranks, no tomfoolery or classic student hijinks?" I continued, playfully, "No stealing a bus stop or wearing traffic cones and pretending you're wizards?" He laughed politely.

Alright, I never did that. But I knew people who did. There were countless shopping trolley races through Oldfield Park, statues with amusing items draped across them, fountains bursting with bubble-bath, late-night rolling down Widcombe Hill and tutu-wearing in the middle of Bath.

Do students not do that kind of crazy thing any more? Is that a thing of the past? And what about the protests? The sit-ins, the strikes, the political activism that brought about campaigns for nuclear disarmament, the civil rights movement, the stand against Thatcherism and animal rights? What has happened to students? How did they get so boring?

I think I must be from a different world.