CATHEDRALS

Well, it's chucking it down again. I mean it's properly hammering with rain - like one of those movies when someone gets thrown out of a car at gunpoint and has to stumble dramatically along a road-bridge.

I splashed back to the office, umbrella-thumped and soaking. Rain-recess then. Perfect for a little poetry. This one's called Cathedrals...


Cathedrals

Lovely, velvet comfy chairs
Cushions plump for fervent prayers
Finished woodwork, polished brass
Sunlit panes of coloured glass

Muddy hut with mango leaves
Rain that thunders through the trees
Outstretched arms and shoeless feet
Sweltering in jungle heat

Golden lectern plush with light
Open Bible, bold and bright
Marble pulpit high and cold
Carved in wood and glinting gold

Tinpot roof and rusty nails
Splintered wood the sky unveils
Faces tight and voices cry
Together lifting heaven high

Silky satin banners fall
Cascading from the whitewashed wall
Where oaken frame meets knotty pine
In smoothly crafted wood design

Sticky Bibles, sweaty palms
The strength and sound and song of psalms
As tears and joy and freedom meet
The rhythm of the dancing feet

Sunday morning sunlight streams
Suspending dust within its beams
And cherubs sing in silent stone
Their ancient tune unheard, alone

Vaulted roof and velvet sky
Where eagles rise and angels fly
Cathedrals soar between the trees
Where humble hearts are on their knees

EMBARRASSMENT

I made a mistake today and sent an email to 'All UK Staff' by accident.

The colour drained out of my face, then rushed back to my cheeks as my heart thumped. I was almost certain I'd heard the sound of the Death Star tractor beam being disabled (you know the sound) while everything around me wobbled in and out in a teary kind of zoom-fade.

This is embarrassment. The fragile image we project of ourselves flickers out, the walls of self-constructed respectability come crashing down and the real us is awfully exposed.

This latest gaffe comes hot on the heels of the last. I was in a pub on Friday, meeting a friend with whom I catch up from time-to-time. Despite drinking only Coca Cola, I still managed to get disorientated in the gents. I washed my hands, held them under the hand-dryer and then found myself using them to push open what I thought was the exit door, only to walk straight into a man who was urinating into the toilet bowl.

"Terribly sorry," I said, switching imperceptibly into upper-class twit. For some reason, we become particularly and peculiarly British in embarrassing situations. I think that's why we like tea so much - it's the perfect ice-breaker to awkward conversation.

I've decided to do nothing about my email error. I don't want to make things worse - and it's not too bad. I don't think it will result in me clearing my desk anyway.

MORE RAIN

The rain thunders down. It reminds me of the Lake District - with some notable exceptions: I'm not on holiday, there are no fells to look at through the mist and I have work to do.

Sort of.

Nonetheless, it's raining like it does in Cumbria - and that's rather nice. I strode along the high street, tiptoeing over puddles and twisting my umbrella into the wind. I walk faster in the rain, more purposeful, more focused, with that kind of determination you get when you tie your shoelaces really tightly.

Mind you, I was also ten minutes late for work.

BERTHA, LOVELY BERTHA

I'm sitting here at work, thinking about Bertha. I have a solid mug of tea and a computer with two monitors. A small pot of propelling pencils stands on my desk, next to a plastic pirate (I call him Captain Assertive). A Lego piano I built one Friday afternoon sits next to a copy of Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and a pack of post-its.

Who's this Bertha? you ask. Not who though - what. And maybe when. Bertha was a children's TV programme that was on in the 1980s - a golden age of television, when I was a curly-mopped twinkle-eyed lad who spent his days playing with Lego and plastic pira... hmm.

It was great, Bertha. It was a motion-stop animation show, featuring a factory-machine with a sort of programmable personality. Bertha, the eponymous contraption, could make anything required: cuckoo clocks, spinning tops, beach balls, garden gnomes. All you had to do was push the right buttons, feed-in the right instructions and off she went with a blink and a squeaky pop.

I mention it now because it occurs to me that this little show might well have influenced quite a lot of how I see the world of work.

There was a very clear divide in Bertha, between the overalled engineers who fixed her whenever she went wrong (roughly once per episode) and the smart bespectacled office workers who surveyed the factory floor from the comfort of an upstairs office.

'Upstairs' was a world of pot plants, umbrella stands and graphs with jagged red trend-lines pinned to the wall. A thin pane of glass separated them from Bertha, who was churning out watering cans or jigsaw puzzles or whatever else was required that week.

'Downstairs' was a world of greasy sockets, spanners and troubled engineers, sweat beading from their plastic faces while someone's pet squirrel climbed into Bertha's inner workings and jammed the conveyor belt.

I'll let you work out how this dichotomy of worlds might have influenced me... and perhaps everyone in my generation. Which of the two worlds would you feel most comfortable in?

I'll say this much though - I sit downstairs in my building and I know exactly what 'Bertha' is and is not capable of. And I think I got here by accident.

HOW TO BE ENGLISH (BY ST GEORGE)

I don't really know where this came from. Well, that's not true: first of all I suppose, it is actually St George's Day; that must have been the start of it.

However, when I started this poem, I had no idea it was going to end up saying what it says. No idea at all.

As a result of this, I feel like I should write some sort of disclaimer, like, The views expressed in this poem do not reflect the views of the person who wrote it... but that seems a bit ridiculous... because I did write it, every word of it.

So do poems always have to be a kind of extension of how the poet feels? Did Wordsworth secretly hate daffodils? Was John Betjeman to be found on frequent open-top bus tours of Slough?

While you ponder the great man taking in those 'bogus Tudor bars' for himself, or Wordsworth ripping up the Cumbrian hills in a shower of yellow petals and a fit of Nineteenth Century rage, I should point out that I wrote this from the perspective of St George... sort of. You'll see what I mean.

How To Be English (by St George)

Quosh a dragon, quaff an ale
Grab a wench and spin a tale
Belch an anthem, raise a cheer
Wash it down with frothy beer

Fly your flag with English pride
Tell 'em how that dragon died
Fiery English heart unquenched
To rule the waves and hate the French

Red as blood and white as snow
Our shining armour, dragons know
Show 'em all the bloodied spear
And watch 'em snake away in fear

Grab the treasure, clutch the gold
English spoils for men so bold
Lion hearts and dragons' blood
Trampled coins from foreign mud

Quosh a dragon, quaff an ale
Tell 'em how the knights prevail
Belch an anthem, raise a cheer
Wash it down with frothy beer

A WHISTLESTOP TOUR OF THE EASTER WEEKEND

It's raining. In the dark world beyond the curtains, the rain spatters playfully against the window and the guttering gurgles with glee.

It seems like a good moment to reflect on the Easter weekend, I suppose. Four days of holiday, tea, trips out, and chocolate-powered children. Not mine of course; I mean the collection of nieces and nephews that make up the sugar-loaded, hyperactive, indefatigable sextet of miniature power-rangers that I call the Niblings. More about them in a bit. Here's the whistlestop tour of the weekend:

Maundy Thursday

I was immensely tired on Thursday night. I dropped my piano on my foot, setting up for the Calcot worship night, and as I doubled-up in pain, my back joined in. I hobbled on and managed to mumble through a few songs, but by the time I got home I was ready to collapse.

Good Friday

Friday then was a bit more restful. Hot-cross buns and tea awaited us at my sister's house, along with a recycled conversation about why I haven't yet found a wife. For a bonus, we also went with the topic of my brother-in-law's grand plan to use his voluntary redundancy money to study theology, which was equally as awkward. In the end, the Niblings wanted to play Ninjas versus Uncle Matthew, a game which resulted in me lying in the grass, pretending to be dead.

Saturday

The day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is the most profound, I think. It doesn't have a name, which somehow adds to its deep, glorious mystery. Between despair and triumph, between death and a life re-born, this dark day of silence marks the longing, the hope, the emptiness of waiting. I wanted to write a poem about it, but I ran out of words in the end.

Plus, we spent most of the day visiting Hampton Court Palace: home of Henry VIII, grand apartments of William and Mary and red-bricked-magnet for back-packed camera-happy tourists. It's a melancholy place. I learned a lot but it really did feel like the heart of Hampton Court Palace was always the people who kept court there - and they were, of course, missing. I found myself feeling rather sorry for every character I read about: Wolsey, Katherine of Aragon, the great king himself, Anne Boleyn, the terrified Catherine Howard. Later, the widower, William III, throwing back the great curtains and surveying his late wife's grand garden, stretching neatly down to the banks of the river.

Easter Sunday

We call it Resurrection Sunday where I come from. I really love this day - every creative part of me wants to burst into song, especially when the morning is awash with Spring-time sunshine and the air is buzzing with the hope of new life. I still felt a bit like that, even though, when I woke up, it was raining.

I decided to go with the rest of my family to the church that they attend*, rather than my own. I figured it was best to be with my family on such a day, and they were happy for me to be there. There are a lot of reasons why discussing church with my sisters and the Intrepids is awkward. I was half-expecting them to interrogate me about what I thought afterwards - a game of diplomacy I do not enjoy, and find grossly unhelpful for anybody. Thankfully, the Niblings were on-hand with ninja swords and guns made out of lego. I dutifully rolled over onto the carpet and went limp.

Easter Monday

After a lie-in, the Intrepids and I went off in search of bluebells on Greenham Common. Not five minutes after parking, checking the map and heading off down the leafy path into the woods, we'd gone off-road and were walking through brambles. Unbelievable. About half-an-hour later, we were almost hacking through the undergrowth, trying to get back to the path. I scrambled over logs, my Mum held bendy tree-branches back as she picked her way through, and my Dad commented on the Latin names of just about everything in sight.

My Mum and I had a wager about how long it would take him to mention the fact that you can't take a good photo of bluebells without losing the colour because of the UV light they give off. She won - hands down. Three minutes, twenty two seconds. 

Well, that's pretty much it I guess. Work tomorrow - and with it the usual post-holiday kitchen-chit-chat. I'm steeling myself against it with my stock answers:

"Yes thanks, and yourself?"

"Yeah, still, it's a four-day week, this one, so it's not all bad."

"Really? You want to try rambling through the undergrowth with pensioners or pretending you've been caught by miniature ninjas."

Also, I need to reset my spreadsheet to count down to the next bank holiday. Brilliant.

*My oldest sister, her husband, their children and the Intrepids. My younger sister is in the Lake District, trying to convince her husband to buy her a dulux dog.

POLLEN DIARIES: PART 1

Here we go then. I felt it kick in today. At five minutes past three I sneezed and the Hayfever Season began.

My eyes are red, my throat is sore and my nose feels like it's some sort of burning beacon: a landing strip for any wayward pollen that might be circumnavigating the air conditioning system.

It seems so unfair to me that just when the weather is at its nicest, nature forces some of us to snivel through it with streaming eyes and an itchy throat.

I checked the Clarityn app I downloaded two summers ago. When I'd updated it and told it to bleep at me every morning, I refreshed the map and clicked in on Berkshire, which is where I live.

Basically it said, 'Don't go outside.'

Brilliant.

TODAY

I walked to work without a coat today.

As I haven't written any poems for a while, I thought I'd capture the moment with a little rhyming study. This one's called Today.




Today

Today the sky is perfectly blue
The clouds are a candyfloss white
The shivering breeze caresses the trees
And the world is a canvas of light

Today the grass is a glorious green
The lake, a spectacular view
The fountain cascades with colours and shades
And the birds sing their chorus anew

Today the air is deliciously warm
The promise of summer to come
The lingering light, the blossom in flight
The season of Spring has begun

VULNERABILITY

I feel really tense inside: anxious and nervous like a coiled spring, waiting for something or other. I haven't felt like this for a while.

There's no particular reason for it. I'm not about to ask a girl out or sit a thermodynamics exam. Neither have I left the cooker on or forgotten to lock the front door. It's just something out there in the atmosphere I can't quite put my finger on.

I've just seen the Giant Pirate Captain in our building. It seems he's a new starter. Gulp.

Still, it's a good job I've never accused gigantic bearded people of looking shifty... right?

I wonder whether this nervy-feeling has something to do with the latest OpenSSL vulnerability. The news today is that the heartbleed vulnerability might have been open to hackers for more than two years. You can read about it here. I'm no expert but I reckon you should change all your passwords. We're rushing to get a patch out, which of course means release notes.

I've got lots to do.

HERMIT'S WEEKLY GRUMBLE

Phone trouble again.

Currently, to charge it up I have to push the charger into the socket with my thumb and hold it there, clamping the top with my other hand, squeezing phone and cable together like a human vice. The lightning symbol appears... momentarily. Then the screen goes blank or the charger falls out, or I accidentally push the power button or the whole acrobatic arrangement slips out of my grip.

"You wanna stop goin' round in coycles; you want me to show you your lousy text messages, how 'bout you do a little somethin' for me, Stubbsy?"

I seriously need to get an upgrade.

THE DAY I SAW A GIANT AND HOW IT MADE ME THINK ABOUT BEARDS

Do you reckon giants still exist? Only, I think I saw one on the way to work. He was bald with a massive bushy beard, dark hair sprouting from his ears, and a toothy grin. He wore an enormous stripy tee-shirt and he had a huge, square, shiny belt buckle. Oh yes, and he was also very tall.

Why do fairytale giants always have beards? Come to think of it, dwarves too. Dwarves are always stroking a thick mane of chin hair or twiddling wispy moustachios. Is it an extreme-height thing? Some sort of attempt to blend in?

Then there's the man with a beard that looks like a scarf. I see him sometimes. He's of normal height, Scarfbeard, and he's young and cool: skinny jeans, pointy shoes, cropped hair. Wrapped around his lower face and neck like an explosion of fuzzy flora, is a curly mass of irritating hedgerow.

Beards are 'in' at the moment. I'm not sure how that happened because most women object to it. Nonetheless, young hipsters with an impetus to prove some sort of rugged masculinity are growing full on facial hair.

It's annoying because I had a beard for most of my twenties - when it wasn't cool. As soon as it was, my own facial hair threw a strop and promptly went a bit grey. Not that I care particularly about such things. Greys after all, are supposed to be a 'mark of wisdom' and I could use a little wisdom.

Perhaps beards were always naturally associated with shiftiness. In folklore, giants are sort of ignorant or malevolent most of the time aren't they? Dwarves also are supposed to bury their treasure deep in the mountains, hoarding their wealth in the granite rocks and the deepest mines - untrusting, beady-eyed secret-keepers.

Perhaps somewhere in the subconscious we believe that the beard is a mark of someone hiding something.

Giants have clubs, dwarves have secrets, sailors have unspeakable adventures. Even the white-bearded Captain Birdseye has that little twinkle in his eye that has nothing to do with fish fingers.

Anyway, it occurs to me that I shouldn't go around making sweeping statements about people of extreme height or extreme beardiness (or extreme fictional-ness either I suppose). If you are a giant though, and you're fed up of people shouting 'fee-fi-fo-fum' across the street... well why not have a little shave and see what happens?

A SEARCH FOR SALAD

I stood in front of the salads, contemplating the ropey pasta, the yellowing eggs and the peeled carrot. It was less than appealing and my plan had backfired, disappointingly. With a little sigh and a shrug of the shoulders, I headed for the entrance, past the greetings cards, the homewares and the towers of chocolate Easter eggs. I ambled out into the rain-soaked car park, hands thrust into my jacket pockets.

It seems like a waste of time, going to Sainsbury's for salad. The good stuff goes first, then there are just empty buckets where the fresh lettuce once glistened next to the succulent chunks of feta cheese. Plum tomatoes bulged where perfect discs of green cucumber burst into colour next to yellow sweetcorn and spicy chorizo - all long before I got there, of course.

I imagined a queue of trendy young things, clamouring for one of those see-through plastic tubs, loading it up with salad and then squashing the lot with a great dollop of thousand island dressing, smeared beneath the air-tight lid.

I should have got there earlier, I thought as I slipped into the car and pulled the door shut. The windscreen was spattered with thundery drops, the sky matching my tired mood, grey and overcast. I rested my hands on the steering wheel and shook my head at my reflection in the rear view mirror.

There's always plenty of chocolate, isn't there? If that's your kind of thing, it's easy to find, stacked up and packaged in its glittering foil and fancy boxes. Come one, come all! it sings out. Room for everyone! The more the merrier! Indulge yourself! Go on, you deserve it... Yet as Shakespeare noted and Portia quoted (and we'd all do well to remember)...

"All that glisters is not gold."

And anyway, I was looking for salad.

FOR KING AND COUNTRY

"In Volgograd, the drains
are wider in winter."

Friday night, party time, out on the town, out on the razzle?

Nope. I'm a 36 year-old software engineer with a comfortable pair of slippers. I stayed in and watched a programme about spies. It turns out that in the 1950s and 60s, spies really did meet each other on park benches to swap secrets; they really did have one-word codenames, and they really did wear raincoats and trilbies.

I've always been fascinated by the world of MI6 and the furtive arena of global espionage. I used to know a guy who worked as a sort of encryption expert for a government agency - or so he said. He was fiendishly clever, a real Q: the type of chap who could complete chess puzzles in his head. Once, he taught me how to play five dimensional noughts and crosses (which I didn't understand - something to do with vectors I think) and he had a fascination with maps. We all suspected that he might have been working in secret intelligence when he refused to go into great detail about his work. Whenever someone asked him where his office was, he'd just smile a little, then dismissively reply with, "Oh, you know; in London," and then change the subject.

Then again, thinking it through, he was also the type of person who could have taken great delight in letting us believe he was a spy, citing the official secrets act as the perfect reason not to go into any details. Who knows - maybe he was really working at B&Q the whole time.

Carlos the Liberator used to work at B&Q. I think that might be where he learned his passion for arguing. His latest set of emails to me have all been about accountability - a tricky subject, given that half way through I realised we were talking about subtly different things. I think there's a difference between accountability and responsibility, but we'll leave that for another deeper time.

Espionage eh? Reported in a slightly less covert and definitely less classy fashion this week, was the story of the girl who got stuck in a drain. 16 year-old Ella Birchenough jumped into a storm drain to rescue her phone, which had slipped out of her hand and into the sewer.

The media were actually quite quick to portray her as rather stupid. One news channel ran an interview with an eyewitness who said,

"I just saw a girl in the road, obviously, and when I got a bit closer, I realised she was actually down in the drain? I don't think I'll ever see anything like that again - it was amazing."

Someone else commented on the fact that she'll find it hard to live this down. Another, on the national news, said that a girl that size ought to have realised that she wouldn't fit through a hole that was smaller than her waistline.

Actually, I think it's unfair. Reading around the story, I got the impression that she dropped her phone, felt stupid about it and decided to do something drastic to get it back. Single-handedly, she cranked open the drain cover, propped up the heavy iron grill and jumped in, feet-first. I think at that point she realised that she didn't have the strength in her arms to lift herself out - which is a very different thing to being wedged in! What's more, one article I read suggested that her mum, presumably from the safety of the curb, told her not to try in case she did herself more damage:

"I thought to myself, 'I'm not leaving this' and I jumped down to get it. I wasn't really even stuck, I just needed somebody to help lift me out but my mum got all panicky.

I quite like the attitude of 'I'm not leaving this' ... even if it wasn't the best idea. Far too many young people give up at the slightest sign of a difficult situation. To see someone brave enough to say, "Oi! I'm not having it and I'm going to do something about it!" is actually quite refreshing. In fact, I myself, wish I'd been a bit more like that twenty years ago. There is definitely something great about standing up against injustice and declaring that you're going to be part of the solution.

Maybe that was what motivated those young Oxbridge idealists to slip on a raincoat and a trilby and do their bit for King and Country. It certainly beats living a life out on the razzle.

AIR POLLUTION

The Great Smog of 1952

The air is grimy. Hanging like a warm, dirty fog, the tiny particles of Sahara-sand and factory-fumes are almost detectable as you stumble through the mist. It's horrible; it almost gets inside you, coating your lungs with grit.

Still, it's not as bad as all that. In 1952, a four-day smog descended on London that reduced visibility to just a few yards. Driving was impossible, the ambulance service was cancelled and the smokey-fog even penetrated inside, seeping through cinemas and pubs, rolling through the single-glazed, lamp-lit windows of Central London. Thousands of people died as a result of contracted illnesses, enflamed by the so-called 'pea-souper', while the coal-fires burned.

No run today then, I thought as I left the house. I found out later that David Cameron, our shiny-faced Prime Minister, had decided the same; although he got on with some work, rather than going back inside for a giant bowl of rice krispies and a cup of matcha tea.

I can't cope with this cooped-up feeling. Being snowed-in, waterlogged or under house-arrest would be utterly unbearable. There comes a moment when you just need a little fresh air. I guess at least in the snow, you could crack open a window and fill your nostrils with the ice-cool atmosphere. As terrible as a flood would be, if I were marooned upstairs, I could catch a glimpse of the jack-o-lanterns dancing on the ceiling.

Perhaps though, this freak cloud of hazy pollution reminds us of how great life is... without it. We live, after all, on a temperate isle, surrounded by ocean, windswept and gloriously unpredictable. While Athens swelters in the summer heat and the desperate smog, while Beijing coughs and splutters, and while car-horns punctuate the swirling dust clouds of New Delhi, we're busy finding other things to complain about in our own quirky way. Just like them, I reckon this grotty cloud will soon blow over.

1086 AND ALL THAT...

"And you are certain, my liege, he iz not
called Edward ze 'Compressor'?"

I keep making a fool of myself. This morning someone asked me what an acronym was short for and I told them what I thought it was.

"Matt, what does THP stand for?"

I said it stood for Transparent Huge Pages.

It's not that. I don't even know what Transparent Huge Pages are but they've got nothing to do with our THP at all! No-one seems to have any idea what THP actually is.

Then the other day, while at dinner with friends, someone was talking about being able to trace their family history back to 1066. Ron, who's from Arizona and would be impressed with just three generations of history, said,

"Oh hey yeah, 1066. That's significant, right?"

While I was chuckling to myself, someone else suggested quite innocently that it might have been the date of the Domesday Book. I foolishly dived right in.

"No!" I interjected, "It's the date of the Norman Conquest!" It was tough to keep the incredulity out of my voice, and I was immediately regretting leaping in like an offended history tutor. Softening a little, I babbled on in what I hoped would smooth out the cracked conversation.

"1066 was the Norman Conquest. The Domesday Book was 1085: William the Conqueror undertook a survey, detailing pretty much every field and every sheep in the land following the invasion, but it took a long time..."

And guess what? When I looked it up, it was 1086, not 1085. So much for me stating a half-guess like a concrete fact! Then again, had I said nothing at all, all that time mooching round the Bayeux Tapestry would have been for nothing. Sometimes knowing things is a complicated business.

Any ideas what THP might stand for? I think it uploads a package for a test harness but beyond that I.... oooh... never mind.

The Bible says 'Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps his mouth shut' (Proverbs 17:28). That's good advice, right there.

APRIL FOOLS' DAY

You know the people who say February 14th shouldn't be singled out as the one acceptable day for romantic gestures?

"Oh," they say, indignantly, "There are 364 other days, aren't there? Why have a special day for romance?"

Well, where are those people today? Here we are at the beginning of April: we have a special day for practical jokes, for celebrating the art of japery and for entertaining those closest to us by making them feel really foolish. Where are you, you naysayers, why aren't you claiming it ruins tomfoolery and horseplay for the rest of the year? eh?

For those of us not lucky enough to have a special someone to wind us up, April Fools' Day can be a really difficult time. We race into the front room to see if anyone's reset the clocks forward another hour; we push open doors in the vain hope that a lovingly placed waste-paper basket will tumble from the heavens and drench us in shredded paper. 'Oh to have that joker in our lives!' we lament to ourselves as we eat our very normal-tasting breakfast cereal and check our very ordinary-looking emails.

Then, when we get to work, we upturn our mouses for signs of sellotape over the laser, or a keyboard that's been thoughtfully set to the US layout. But nothing. Even our swivel chairs spin perfectly, without even a hint of a sudden collapse while we slump into them expectantly.

"You've got to get out there, get out on the pranking scene, play a joke or two!" says a thoughtful friend.

"What if they don't like it? What if they get really upset?" we reply, mournfully. "What if they don't even... notice?"

"Ah, but what if they do and they prank you back?"

And then there are those who are out there, rubbing it in. Yeah, they're always firing elastic bands at each other, hiding their stuff and signing each other up for Foot-Fungus-Monthly. Oh they know who they are, those joked-up, chuckling, hounds of hilarity. You'd think they could be more sensitive to us sensible unprankables, wouldn't you? After all, we're just waiting for the perfect joker. You'd think they could leave their insensitive public displays of disaffection somewhere we can't see them... Oh woe is us...

*ahem*

Happy April Fools' Day, everyone! ;)