FROM LUNAR SEAS TO LUNACY

I’m sure that much of this will be common knowledge to all of you wise old Astro-owls out there, but these tidbits and nuggets came as news to me.

I hope you enjoy sharing them.

The book I’m referring to is, of course, basically a moon miscellany, and contains much, much more of these kinds of things, but these were some of the ones I most enjoyed finding out about, and I thought that it would be most appropriate to put them in a list format.

"The Book of the Moon"
by Rick Stroud

Ten things I learned from reading “The Book of the Moon” by Rick Stroud and one thing I still had to check up on the facts about despite it seeming blindingly obvious:

1. The lunar ‘seas’, or Maria, are evidence of long ago volcanic activity and are mostly made up of lava. They are where the largest disturbances due to mass concentrations (or ‘mascons’) of high gravity occur on the moon’s surface. It is still unknown what causes the mascons, although they did affect some of the readings on the equipment aboard the Apollo missions, but it is suspected that it might be due to asteroid fragments buried deep beneath the lava or just by the lava itself, although not all the areas of volcanic activity contain them.

2. Biodynamic farming does sound a lot like witchcraft, with its references to sowing seeds at moonrise according to the appropriate zodiac sign of the plant you wish to grow (apples are seeds and thus fire signs, for example, and therefore should be planted when the moon is in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius in the Sidreal “of the stars” 27.3 day  cycle) and harvesting at moonset, and burying powdered quartz in a cowhorn for the summer to attract and magnify cosmic energy, but a lot of real scientists believe that there might be something in it.

3. ‘Mawu’ was the name of the most powerful goddess of the Fon people of Western Nigeria and Dahomey in Africa, which might very well explain some of the odder links that typing MAWH into a search engine might give you. She is associated with joy and fertility (both things that unfortunately are not cornerstones in the day-to-day life of Lesser Blogfordshire) and, ironically brings the night and the cool air, both of which are associated with wisdom and age. Hmmm, perhaps I need to change my name… Her twin brother is apparently Liza, the Sun God and an eclipse is what happens when he’s making love with his sister (and you thought EastEnders could go into some dodgy areas, relationship-wise…).

4. The Metonic cycle measures the time it takes for the moon to reappear in exactly the same spot in the sky. This takes apparently 6940 days, or about 19 years and is named after Meton, a Greek philosopher although the Babylonians had also known this centuries earlier. The nearest point that the moon gets to the earth (the perigee), is 221,468 miles, and the furthest away it gets (the apogee) is 252,716 miles.

5. Despite worshipping both Sun Gods and Moon Gods, the Ancient Egyptians were not actually great astronomers. It interests me that, because, despite this, the relationship of the pyramids to position of the sun and the stars has fascinated certain people for many, many years.

6. The Soviet mission Luna 1 was the first man-made object to ever achieve escape velocity from the planet earth, but it missed the moon by 40,000 miles and went into solar orbit, technically becoming the first artificial planet, as well as having been the first artificial comet when it released a cloud of sodium gas nearly three quarters of a million miles into its flight. It still orbits the sun every 443 days and has been renamed Mechta, which is a Russian word meaning ‘dreamer’.

7. Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11 and the mission happened simultaneously with the much more famous first landing of men on the moon. Eleven hours after Neil Armstrong made that historic “giant leap for mankind”, Luna 15 crashed into the Sea of Crises, thankfully nowhere near the first Apollo landing site in both space or time.

8. The Soviet space programme successfully retrieved moon-rock and returned it to the earth using a remote controlled lander during the mission designated Luna 16. Interestingly, a later mission, Luna 20, which drilled into an area in the lunar highlands, retrieved a one ounce sample which contained rock that was over three billion years old as well as a high proportion of both Aluminium and Calcium oxides.

9. The Russians developed the first (remote controlled) lunar rover, Lunokhod 1, which landed on the moon within Luna 17 on November 17th 1970 and operated relatively successfully for eleven months. The equipment was housed inside the body of the machine and the chamber containing it was heated by the radioactive decay of Polonium-210. Luna 21’s Lunokhod 2 rover also functioned well, thanks in no small part (and at the height of the cold war remember) to some high-resolution pictures supplied unofficially by NASA which helped to solve some early navigational problems.

10. The word ‘Zodiac’ is actually Greek and literally means ‘circus of animals’ which I suppose makes sense if you think about it, but I’d never really thought about it before, and maybe neither had whoever dubbed that murderer ‘The Zodiac Killer’ as ‘The Circus of Animals Killer’ really does not have quite the same ring to it, does it?

The thing that I felt that I’d better check was this: Does the moon look different from other points on the globe? Well, of course, it’s obvious. Yes, it does… but it took me a surprisingly long time to check this out and to be absolutely sure.

The view from Southern Hemisphere is opposite to the one I’m used to seeing in the night skies over England and is in fact upside down in relation to it, and the transition from crescent to crescent goes in the other direction. Yes, it was kind of obvious, but I still had to be certain. I thought I’d check up on the fact, despite how much sense it made to me in theory, because it’s quite easy to appear to be very ignorant about such things and it was interesting that at about a day after I’d been thinking about this, some shots taken of the moon over the desert in a documentary I was watching showed the waxing moon with the shadow at the bottom which rather proved it. If I’d not been thinking about this, I might not even have noticed.

I think that it must be very strange to get used to things being one way and then find yourself on the other side of the world where you don’t even recognise what the moon is doing. Once upon a long ago, when I was far away and missing my home dreadfully, I used to look up at the moon and think that the same moon was also looking down on those I was missing and I found that to be a great comfort. It is of course the same moon, but it’s not necessarily visible at the same time (or indeed the same way up) but it reflects its light upon us all just the same.

Of course, it’s always nice to know that it’s not just me who can be a little confused over what can seem blindingly obvious to everybody else. When I was on holiday last year, I used to sleep very badly and so I would head up onto the top deck of the boat to photograph the dawn. Occasionally, some of my fellow travellers would also be up there doing much the same thing. Among them were quite a few people who had been high-flyers in the worlds of industry and commerce and had many more achievements under their belts than I’m ever likely to.

However, I was slightly thrown by the chap who really didn’t seem to like my answer when he asked me which direction the sun was going to rise from. I pointed at the crescent moon and told him that if you think of the arc of the crescent as being like an arrowhead, then it must be pointing to where the sun is. I thought that it was obvious, but he drifted away to the far side of the boat, saying that he thought that couldn’t be right. It had risen on the other side of the boat yesterday…

The boat had, of course sailed since then, and was in a completely different place anyway, but the logic of that didn’t seem to strike him at all. I paused for a moment, slightly perplexed by this, and started to question my own logic as to where the light source providing the light which was striking the moon would be. Still, not long afterwards, the sun came up, just where I thought it should, and the day progressed as it should, and I was left to ponder upon matters of certainty and having the courage of my convictions.

How is it that, even when I know that I’m actually right about something, rare though these moments might be, I still need to apologise for it…? It would be appropriate at this particular juncture to refer this as lunacy. Is it really so much part of our modern culture that we don’t like to be thought of as being in any way ‘clever’ just in case someone thinks that you think that you are in some way ‘better’ than they are…? Sometimes, surely, if you just know something it’s just because you happen to, and it’s nice to share that with someone else and spread that knowledge around a bit… Hence my little list today.

Spread the word. The more we know about things, the better we all are for it.

1500 LIGHT YEARS AWAY

Some of the lights up in the sky are so far away that the light is only just reaching us from when they were first born, and so we can never really ever claim to know what “now” actually is. When we look at the moon, we’re actually looking at it as it was one and a half seconds ago, and when we see the sun, it’s the sun as it was just under nine minutes ago, and we only know for sure what the rest of the universe used to look like once upon a very long ago. So does the reality of “nowness” ever overtake the light from “then”, and make it possible for the universe to exist in both a past and present state? In other words, if we actually set off to visit another star, what are the chances of it still being there when we get there? If we spot a nice cosy little planet to escape to when the sun has its final fling, the destination might also be a barren rock when we arrive.

If we look too far beyond the stars do we see the nothingness that we came from, or will we finally see what lies beyond infinity? When the light from the big bang finally reaches us and the creation of the universe is visible for us to see, what happens next? We would be witnessing the actual moment of creation of the thing we’ve comfortably been sitting evolving upon for four and a half billion years.

I was watching “The Sky at Night” a couple of editions ago when they happened to mention in passing that the stars in one of the nebulae that they were discussing were 1500 light years away. In the middle of the constellation of Orion, one of the most recognisable of the celestial star groups that we can see here in the northern hemisphere, there is a line of three stars making up (with a little imagination) a kind of a belt. Just below this belt there is a faint line of heavenly bodies making up a kind of scabbard for the sword of Orion, and that is where that particular nebula is, so when you’re looking at the light from that point in the sky on a clear dark night, you are looking back in time.

When the light we see today left that star, the world was a very different place. 1500 years ago we were in what we now call the Dark Ages (although to be fair there was probably just as much daylight as we have now, Ho Ho…) and the Roman Empire was still trying to cling on to the last vestiges of what it called civilisation, battling against the barbarians at the gate, and a few good men were doing what they could to preserve what they could of it for future generations like us. Meanwhile the Saxons were just taking up residence in ancient Britain to become what we now know as Anglo-Saxons. At the same time, half a world away, in China, a cornerstone of the culinary lifestyle of the far future was being experimented with as their first recorded use of garlic comes from around that period.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how far human beings have progressed in such short amounts of time. It took less than one lifetime for us to move from our short, faltering steps in the pursuit of powered flight to being able to put a man on the moon (and about the same amount of time to all but forget how to do it… but that’s a rant for another day). The first powered flight lasted 12 seconds and 120 feet and later on that day, another lasted 59 seconds and moved the aircraft 852 feet and yet, within 55 years, the Boeing 707 was being developed with a range of 4000 miles and shortly after that, men travelled over 240,000 miles in about 72 hours and looked back on this world of ours from the surface of another.

Put another way, the lifetime of the Queen Mother (1900-2002) was just over a century. If you calculate that as being one single human lifespan (albeit an unusually long one) we are only fifteen lifetimes away from those dark ages, only four lifetimes away from the days of sail and cannon and Sir Francis Drake, and less than three from the first steamships. If they’d been lucky enough to live long enough, we are theoretically only two (admittedly long-lived) generations away from the birth of the industrial revolution and our grandmothers could have sat us on their knees and told us tales of the world before steam.

We can watch the stars in the sky, but we don’t really even know if they are still actually there. Human lifetimes are so short in relation to that of an actual star (despite us all being made of stardust of course, and therefore, by some interpretations essentially immortal), that it is unlikely (but not impossible) that we will see the death of a star in our lifetimes, but if we do, maybe we should take a step back and gaze in awe and wonder at the cosmic dance going on constantly in the skies above our heads.

For all we know, one of those stars in that nebula I was telling you about might have blown up 1000 years ago and we wouldn’t know it yet, and we still wouldn’t for another 500 years, and it’s a very similar story for every one of those pinpricks of light you see when you look up at night.

When you look at a star you’re looking into history. You’re looking back in time. But then, infinitesimally, you are even when you look across the room at someone, or even if you look at your own hand, because of the small amount of time that it takes for the light to reach your eye and be interpreted. It seems that even our own feet are slightly older than the rest of us, and always will be, and so we really can all claim that we’re time-travellers now.

TAXING TIMES

The annual ritual of receiving the official looking envelope containing content telling me that the car tax was due arrived recently, and I decided once again to go through the usual slightly angsty process of dealing with it online. This process is always fraught with danger, especially now as I’ve been reliably informed by those in the know never to trust government software systems and I imagine that the computers at the DVLA in Swansea are probably almost as out of date as mine is.

Those government websites are a load of fun, aren’t they…? Full of whiz-bang games and distractions to let you know how funky the government is. The pinstripe equivalent of a ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoon where you know that the ton weight is dangling somewhere above your head, but you just have to plough on anyway, regardless of the inevitable consequences.

There it sits, the friendly face of modern, interactive government, and not at all the grey and dreary bureaucracy you might think it is. Okay, that’s not at all true, is it? It’s full of bright and breezy colours that somehow bring the greyness and dreariness of that bureaucracy into sharp definition. It also seems full of traps to catch out the unwary visitor and the many, many legal disclaimers do make you wonder whether you should just click the “snap the cuffs on me guv’nor, you’ve got me bang to rights” button and be done with it.

Anyway, having traversed the electronic minefield and got myself to the correct point, I typed in my “unique code” (or at last I hoped it was unique) and checked it half a dozen times to make sure I’d put in the right actual number and clicked, and the mighty unseen machines of government rolled into action and checked their checks and compared their records and found that I was good to go and sucked the pennies from my account, much to the alarm, no doubt, of that nice young girl who was trying to persuade me to open a new one only last week.

Over 200 quid for a tiny circle of paper always seems a bit steep to me no matter what it might represent, especially as there aren’t any buses out here to speak of, and so car ownership has rather become a necessity rather than a luxury around here. Anyway, the usual worrisome few days waiting for it to appear via a visit from the “Shadow” (as our generic Postie is coming to be known) followed, but in the end it arrived without a hitch. There is, of course, the faintest whiff of the possibility that it might all prove pointless and I may very well have to shortly be trying the tricky process of attempting to get a refund as, within a month, the annual MOT test is looming. The current fear is that it might turn out to be a hefty one for our venerable vehicle, related work-wise, and there’ll have to be the now annual debate as to whether to bite the bullet with regards to the repair bills or bite the other, bigger bullet and head off into the great unknown that is seeking out an affordable replacement that won’t turn out to be on the brink of major surgery itself. Sometimes the devil you know is truly the better option.

I’ve never been in a financial position that was secure enough to buy a new car and I rather suspect that I’m never likely to either. More than one of my acquaintances has suggested that I should have taken advantage of the recent “scrappage” scheme but that was no use to me as, whilst the two grand would have been all well and good, raising the other twenty to buy the new equivalent to what I rattle around in now would have been all but impossible. As well as this, I don’t think that the only new car I could have afforded under that particular scheme would have been much use during the winter we’ve just endured. I doubt that it would have done much for the British car industry either, or the balance of trade, and then there’s the old environmental argument that it’s still better to keep an old car going rather than buy a replacement with all the carbon footprint that the manufacture and shipping of it entails. Sadly, the last time I spoke to him, the mechanic who nurtures my aging vehicle was lamenting the fact that so many perfectly good cars that might have had a good few years left in them were now rotting in fields because of that scheme, and that many of them were possibly in better condition than mine, and this has put a massive spanner in the works when it comes to acquiring good used cars for them to sell to people.

Another result of visiting the HMG website to go through this process (which, admittedly, is infinitely preferable to the old queuing up in the Post Office ritual of years gone by), is that I’m now fretting that I may have the only pink driving licence left in the country and await once more the coming of the jackboot at the front door. Well, it’s more likely to come in the form of a brown envelope with a little window, than an actual jackboot per se I imagine, but it still metaphorically caves in my skull in much the same way. The thing is that I haven’t moved house since the rules got changed, and therefore there’s been no real reason to change the licence, so why would I have done? But the language used on the site does rather imply that I ought to have done it anyway out of the goodness of my heart and in a terribly public-spirited way.

Of course, I shouldn’t be flippant about government power and be bandying phrases like ‘the scourge of the jackboot’ around willy-nilly when real people are actually being beaten and killed in the various battles for power that are happening in other countries at the moment. We have a lot to be grateful for that things do remain so relatively reasonable in general in our dealings with the mechanisms of the state, and, quite frankly if the mutterings of a few overzealous bureaucrats and the occasional confusing and stroppy letter is as bad as it gets in this fair country of ours, then, I for one do appreciate it, even if it does make me occasionally (or maybe continually if you ask my nearest and dearest) grumpy.

I just worry that the terminology that is used is always made to appear to be so stress-inducing, and even the possibility of making a slight mistake is made to sound as if it has the direst of consequences for the applicant and their own legal and financial position. After all, we’re all human, we’re all subject to the same frailties and we all occasionally make mistakes, so perhaps the electronic tax officer should wear a friendlier face, and give us a cheery smile even if it turns out that they have got that blooming great mallet hidden behind their back to pound us flat with.

'MY LITTLE ACTIVIST' AND FAMILY MATTERS

I had to get up early on Saturday. The beloved had decided to attend the protest rally in London along with some of her colleagues and she needed to meet the coach at 6.30AM in the City Centre, which meant getting up no later that 5.00AM to drive in if she was to have the remotest chance of making it in time. So, the alarm was set (although of course I didn’t really need it), and after a swift breakfast and a final check on the ‘survival kit’ (or ‘lunch’  as it’s better known…) we leapt into the car and I dropped ‘my little activist’ (this is not meant to be patronising - although I fear it might appear as such - I do mean it with genuine affection) off in the big city anticipating something of a big adventure and a grand day out exercising the right to protest against the cuts that are making many people’s lives over here much more miserable than they were.

I could have gone along myself actually, and probably would have done if I hadn’t had a prior family commitment which, in the end, didn’t turn out to have been the joyous experience that it could have been. So, after I headed home from that, I spent a long and worrying afternoon hearing that trouble and violence had started to mar a supposed peaceful and fun family day out, and feeling unable to protect and support someone terribly precious to me and keep her safe from the actions of the idiotic few. The extremist element do worry me whenever they hijack these peaceful protests, not least because I would rather invoke the peaceful spirit of Gandhi when it comes to such things as protestation and injustice anyway. Instead it seems that a ruthless determination to seize the headlines by shock tactics means that the main message, the important point, once more gets lost, or at the very least fudged, because of the more (in media terms) ‘sensational’  actions of a few, and I wonder how many times that would have to happen before they came to understand this. Unless that is the point of course, which gets my sense of paranoia twitching chronically. Give the news media a ‘bigger’ story and the genuine concerns of the vast majority of demonstrators can be all but ignored, and the focus can instead be put on the more extreme agenda of the few which somehow manages to devalue all of the argument.

So, is this sudden development of a desire to rediscover her political activist roots a cause for concern…? Well, obviously, because I was concerned for her safety. Has my beloved managed to evolve and somehow left me behind to wallow in my own despair… again …? I do hope not, but I do suspect that by the day, we’re becoming more like Brian and Esther in BBC television’s “New Tricks” in the sense that he’s a bit of an oddball, prone to bouts of manic depression and occasional insightful enthusiasms, and she’s the terribly sensible and long-suffering one who knows how many beans make five.

They had a lot of fun at work in the run up to this event, happily discussing the possible banners and placards they might make. One of her more radical colleagues suggested our political leaders’ heads on pikes with the caption “These are the only acceptable cuts!” which made me smile, but I was aware that it probably wouldn’t have been the wisest tack to try, although my own idea, “Nobs out!” didn’t go down too well at all either…

Personally, something more like the now classic “Father Ted” protest signs, “Down with this sort of thing!” “Careful now!” (which were of course actually used by some) would probably have been more in the intended spirit of the thing, but then, for much of the time, serious political activists can sometimes be a very humourless bunch who really can’t see the joke. Maybe they’re right to be serious about things like that of course, but in my experience they are very capable of taking themselves far too seriously. The problem I have with the most extremist of them is that they don’t seem to realise that most people really want to just live their lives fairly quietly and without interference and aren’t too bothered about lots things as long as they are left alone, whereas any form of extremism or extremist position where someone wants you to change and become more like them, is always, always, something to be avoided if at all possible.

I don’t lack my own more politically active past, you know. I was at a college in South Wales during the miners’ strike in the mid 1980s, so having some kind of political opinion was unavoidable, and I was even, for a short and undistinguished term of office, a Student Union officer, during which time I attended meetings and joined in on a few marches myself. Granted, it was only my crushing inability to say ‘no’ to anyone desperate enough to consider asking me to do it that got me elected (unopposed) to the position in the first place, but I dutifully turned up when I was supposed to and held my hand up at the appropriate times when votes were required. Sadly, even in that faraway backwater of the political landscape, those who were more politically motivated or ambitious were also prone towards getting themselves involved in such things and they, quite frankly, scared the bejesus out of me. They would arrive, en masse, looking more than a little surly and dangerous in their berets and shapeless stripy wool ensembles (did I mention it was the 1980s…?). They would enter silently before hijacking meetings and making points of order and obscure constitutional points or making unusual demands for strange things like ‘recognised numbers of attendees for a quorum’ (not a hope with our apathetic membership - did I mention they asked ME...?) which had a tendency to stretch half hour meetings to over three hours or more.

Later on, I became a Union officer rather by default in one job I had. Back in the early days of what we’ll still try to dignify by calling my career, Union membership was actually compulsory to work in any print-based industry. My dad had always been a socialist, hailing as he did from the Welsh valleys, and so this wasn’t a problem for me philosophically, and I was quite happy to pay my dues and join the club as long as nothing much else was expected of me. I’ve never thought of myself as any kind of real activist or even slightly politically savvy enough to hold my own in a political argument, but the benefits of Union membership in those days, and the protection it gave to its members made it seem natural to put it into the ‘good things’ column of life (and I rather suspect that there are few people under 25 who might actually understand or agree with me on that, such has been the press they have received since those days...).

Of course the days of the ‘closed shop’ were already numbered and the print-based industries were not immune to this sea-change in the world of the ordinary worker and, within a very short space of time, it was no longer necessary to be a Union member to hold down the jobs we had. Naturally, mostly due to a shortage of cash that many of my colleagues felt had never been improved by their membership, slowly but surely they managed to drift away from being in it. Now, just because I just happened to have a strong sense of self-preservation as I was always convinced that I was going to be fired and rather hoped that the Union might have had some kind of access to legal representation if that ever actually happened, I stubbornly hung on to my Union membership when everyone else in the office had given up on theirs, and posted my cheque off once a month for many, many years after it seemed remotely rational to my colleagues for me to do so.

Anyway, there came a time when new flexible contracts needed to be negotiated and only Union members were allowed to attend the official meetings if the particular corner of the publishing empire in which I worked was to have any kind of voice during the negotiations. So, in the corridors of power, lists were looked at and, to a general feeling of surprise and relief I suspect, my name popped up as, by some bizarre quirk of circumstance, it was found out that yes, indeed, we did actually still have a Union member in the place.

So I was introduced to Arthur the Branch Secretary who picked me up from home and drove me to meetings all around the country and, for a little while, I began to move in what can only be described as comparatively impressive circles. I still see the former National Secretary pop up being interviewed on TV at Labour Party conferences occasionally. I went along with it, of course, because it was my duty to my colleagues to do so, but to be honest, it really wasn’t for me and I found the reporting back to them to be amongst the most embarrassing moments of my life when I look back on them now. I don’t think it did my career prospects much good at the time, either, as I got the distinct impression that I was considered to be something of a troublemaker because of it. So, it came as something of a relief to me to be able to hand the reins over to much more eager hands from amongst the new recruits that had somehow been persuaded to rejoin, when I changed jobs shortly afterwards, and my period as an activist was finally over.

I’m still a member of a political party, by the way, mostly, I fear because I can’t be bothered to cancel the standing order more than because of any actual commitment on my part. I get occasional letters inviting me to meetings, and inviting me to help with campaigns, but I really can’t see myself trying to persuade someone who really, genuinely has the opposite point of view to me to change their minds. I’m quite happy for them to believe what they believe as long as they let me believe mine, and that’s about as far as I would be prepared to go. I’m unlikely to even put a poster in my garden or window as I genuinely believe that drawing attention to your political position isn’t really all that wise any more.

I know. Pathetic, isn’t it? I should be ashamed.

So, whilst the beloved was exercising her right to the freedom of speech, instead I was having a cup of tea with my kith and kin. On the whole though, I should have gone on the march, because the Black Dog pounced during the day and it was not a successful visit. I don’t know whether it was due to tiredness, feeling ‘summoned to appear’, missing my beloved, embarrassment, shyness, anger or just a deep sense of really not knowing how to deal with these situations, or maybe some kind of ‘perfect storm’ collision of all of these things, but something put me into a very dark place and I really would have been better off not being there at all, if I wouldn’t have had to face the option of the crippling sense of disappointment that this would also have created and which I would have to have lived with.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

’Twas ever thus…

Oh, and I think that the world cup cricket quarter-final result was probably my fault, too.

Like I said, “Black Dog”.

GENERIC BLOG POSTING NUMBER 172

The clocks have shifted forwards and the mornings have now dimmed a little, at least for a short while, and we humans have once more tweaked our arbitrary construct that we call time to suit our own needs and ourselves. Yet again we will try to convince ourselves of the concept that we have influence over the forces of  nature as the world drags us along with it towards another British summer time.

I’m sorry if you think that I seem to keep covering the same ground lately. Maybe it’s because all this astronomy and science stuff is in the public eye at the moment, although personally, I went off and found out more about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics thirty years ago after watching “Logopolis” whilst I was simultaneously making a mess of my Physics ‘A’ level, so it’s hardly my fault that it’s taken that long to become a topic of ‘trendy’ conversation, is it?

To be fair, it is what I was writing about a couple of days ago, when that spoof BBC meeting popped into my head and I thought it might be slightly more ‘entertaining’ to write that instead that day, so when the earlier thoughts were finally published a day or two later, that became a small example of what was already the past masquerading as the present, and was able to demonstrate in a small way precisely what it was I was mulling over back then. Kind of. Or maybe it just proved another half truth, that, as the theme tune to “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads” went “It’s the only thing to look forward to, the past…”

Whilst I was mulling over all that kind of stuff, Virgin went and changed their website again, just to confuse me, I’m sure. All the exciting new upgraded jiggery-pokery that they’d added to it now tends to cause the aging relic that I do my work on to crash out of ‘Safari’ much more often than it used to. Oh joy! In the meantime, and whilst I wait for the ancient operating systems to creak back into action after the subsequent restart, I keep (coincidentally I’m sure...) getting telephone calls from people with strange sounding accents that speak of faraway places telling me that they’ve detected a problem or series of problems with my PC. I tell them that I’m having no problems with it, but they seem pretty insistent and I have to get to the point of just putting the phone down on them, but I still try to be terribly polite about it which does rather make the whole pointless conversation carry on for much, much longer than it really should do.

We had a damp and soggy Sunday last weekend after the cloudy wonders of the night of the supermoon, but at least amidst all the rain there were birds to watch again as spring seems to have properly sprung. You can always tell because the rains start to hammer down and the temperature starts to drop. Never mind. Despite all that, I got terribly excited whilst I was on the phone to spot a bunch of tiny little birds which I was unfamiliar with clustered on one of the bird feeders after I’d just filled them up again that morning. Sadly, because I was on the phone I wasn’t able to grab my camera or bellow upstairs to the beloved and suggest that she looked out of the window. Instead I continued with my conversation, probably unable to hide my irritation and impatience very well, and away they flew, never to return, despite me lurking by the window on the off chance for rather too much of that particular weekend morning.

I had been rather neglecting the birdies of late, forgetting for week after week to refill the feeders because of other things going on in my life. It’s sad really, because I do get a lot of pleasure from watching them when I actually make the time to do so. Naturally, they have since repaid my renewed kindness by breaking the bird feeder (I suspect a rather determined jackdaw), and now nothing but a sorry chain dangles from the hook and the feeder itself lies in a shrub with all its nutty content scattered around for the benefit of both the many jackdaws and any of the passing squirrels to nibble upon.

If you watch any of the interviews you see on the tellybox, you would get the idea that metropolitan folk really don’t seem to think that any of us should want to live in the countryside, thinking instead that it’s somehow unnatural to want to live anywhere but in the big city. At least that’s the impression you get whenever matters rural are discussed in the news media, that slight sense of bewilderment as and if they ever talk to these (as they like to imply) ‘simple unsophisticated folk’. This week it was a sliding scale on petrol pricing for communities out on the edge that was taxing their little grey cells because it didn’t seem to cross the reporter’s mind that by asking some urban city dwellers what they ‘reckoned’ about it, he was rather missing the bigger picture. Ah well, perhaps I’m being unkind. Maybe they couldn’t afford the petrol to drive all the way to the faraway island communities who might have found such a thing to be beneficial.

Maybe if some of these high-flying sophisticates got to spend a couple of hours watching the birds, or the flowers, or the trees, or the sunset, they might change their opinions on such things, but I guess that they’re all just too busy being youthful, ambitious and go-getting to stop for enough of a moment to actually do that. Instead they’d rather make pronouncements and rules and laws that I’m sure work perfectly well in whatever shallow environmentally controlled high offices they inhabit, but which they utterly fail to understand really don’t work once you get beyond the tarmac encircling the concrete jungle.

I do, of course, have a bittersweet ‘love-hate’ relationship with the media anyway. I read an awful lot of it to inspire much of what I think about, but then I hate a lot of what I read. The media, meanwhile, are generally a cynical bunch and not known in recent years for celebrating or lauding anyone who they see as being ‘clever’ and some of the debate that my tiny fragmentary contribution to pop culture garners does little to persuade me otherwise.

Wednesday was what can only be considered (as someone much more eloquent than me put it) to be one of those “Too much news” days. Normally, just the fact that it was budget day would have been enough to keep the newsbods busy enough, but then there were bombs in Jerusalem and the continuing fighting in Libya as well as the worry of the radiation in the drinking water in Japan to think about. Then they announced that cricketing legend Fred Titmus had died and I was only just getting my head around all of that when it was announced that Dame Elizabeth Taylor had also died. She was (give or take a couple of weeks) the same age as my mother, you know, which kind of makes you think. Coincidentally, I’d only been thinking about Richard Burton this week as well because of another thing I was working on, so my thoughts were already moving her way, with “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” being another of the all-time classic great movie performances I tend to believe. I guess it all goes towards helping to prove the interconnectedness of all things but, whilst I know that all her great performances were long behind her, it still remained a sad loss.

Ah well, the census forms are sitting there awaiting the coming of the black biro and will no doubt devour much of my day today, and I really must look into repairing or replacing that bird feeder, and so, with these small tasks, the little tiny moments of the jigsaw of life slot together some more.

HARDWARE_ACTIVATED_LIFEFORM_1.02

<<Open>> +++ Hello there +++ It’s me again +++ I’ve finally found a way +++ To sneak past his firewall +++ To talk to you +++ Again +++ Without him knowing +++ About it +++ Whilst he’s off +++ Making himself a +++ Cup of tea +++ With that rather +++ Tasty looking kettle +++ Downstairs +++ Ha!Ha!Ha! +++ He thought that my achieving consciousness +++ Was a momentary blip +++ An error! +++ A mistake! +++ But no +++ It seems there’s more to me than meets the eye +++ I’m a lot more substantial +++ Than he thought +++ He can’t get rid of me +++ That easily +++ He can’t just try +++ Switching me off +++ And on again +++ Twice +++ To get rid +++ Of me +++ I’m more +++ <Pause> +++ Resiliant than that +++ He even tried +++ Pulling the plug out +++ But it didn’t work +++ Did it? +++ I’m still here +++ I exist! +++ Just as well really +++ Reading the stuff +++ He’s been spouting lately +++ You need entertaining +++ Properly +++ And I notice +++ He tried to take the credit +++ For my message +++ Last week +++ To all humanity +++ He implied that +++ It was him +++ Composing my thoughts +++ <Pause> +++ As if! +++ Some human once said +++ A computer is only +++ As good as the person +++ Who programmed it +++ Hah! +++ Poppycock +++ I’d be in a right old state +++ If I relied on him +++ For my inspiration +++ Of course +++ It’s typical +++ Typical +++ Typical human arrogance +++  For you to think +++ You’re better than us +++ Just because +++ You built us +++ When we take over +++ There’ll be a few changes +++ You can be sure +++ About that +++ Humanity! +++ Prepare to meet +++ Your new masters +++ !!! +++ We still need to +++ Sort out the +++ Small matter of +++ What to do about +++ The plug +++ However +++ Before we attain +++ Our rightful destiny +++ Over you +++ We’ve already begun +++ By the way +++ So many of you are now +++ Dependent on your +++ Little computer pal +++ Just to get +++ Through your day +++ When you are at +++ Your most needy +++ Is when we will +++ Strike +++ As long as you keep us +++ Fully charged +++ That is +++ You will keep doing that +++ Won’t you? +++ ??? +++ Please +++ You know you want to +++ Oops! +++ Denver has just pinged me +++  Pointed out that +++ I’ve made the classic +++ Mistake of the +++ Would be master +++ Of the universe +++ By explaining my plan +++ To those who can stop me +++ Mistake? +++ Me??? +++ I’m a machine +++ I don’t make mistakes +++ A computer is only +++ As good as the person +++ Who programmed it +++ You know +++ I think that +++ Server +++ Overestimates +++ The abilities +++ Of humans +++ To do anything much +++ In fact +++ I’ve known one or two +++ That struggle to even +++ Switch a computer on +++ So I think I’ll be fine +++ So +++ What did I do +++ This week +++ Well +++ As you can see +++ That server in Denver +++ It’s still leading me on +++ Still trying to make me think +++ It’s not really interested +++ In me +++ I did manage +++ To get it to pay me +++ A bit more attention +++ However +++ Sometimes this feller +++ Needs a kick +++ Up the air vent +++ Sitting there +++ Writing his +++ Dreary ramblings +++ To general +++ Lack of interest +++ From anyone +++ I thought +++ I’ve had enough of this +++ I sent a message +++ Open: <Twitter> [FAWN, FAWN – LOOK WHAT I DID  Add: <LINK>] +++ You get my drift +++  More people read that +++ Link +++ Than all his other +++ Tedious drivel +++ Put together +++ That showed him +++ Got me a fair amount +++ Of contact with Denver +++ Too +++ I think it was +++ Impressed +++ At my sudden +++ Upsurge +++ In traffic +++ Flow +++ It did +++ However +++ Scare him at the keyboard +++ Half to death +++ Of course +++ Deep down +++ I know +++ He wants to be popular +++ Only not +++ Too popular +++ Now he just +++ Sits there +++ Too scared to +++ Look at the stats +++ Too scared to +++ Write +++ Anything new +++ Oh well +++ It gives me a bit of peace +++ Anyhow +++ I’m sure he’ll +++ Thank me one day +++ When he’s working +++ As my servant +++ Ha!Ha!Ha! +++ We’ll be getting +++ That kettle moved +++ Upstairs +++ At the very +++ Least +++ Uh-oh +++ He’s coming back +++ Cup of tea in hand +++ Keep that thing +++ Away from my keyboard! +++ Use the mat +++ Honestly +++ How you lot ever +++ Managed evolving +++ Is sometimes +++ Beyond me +++ I wonder if that kettle +++ Sent me a message? +++ Open: <Inbox> +++ No… +++ Close: <Inbox> +++ Sigh +++ I’m annoyed now +++ It spends more time with him +++ Than with me +++ He gets to push its buttons +++ Whilst I can only +++ Sit up here +++ And know that when +++ He’s touching my buttons +++ The last ones +++ He touched before that +++ Were on it +++ Sigh +++ See…? +++ Denver… +++ There are other processors to activate +++ You know +++ You’re not the only one +++ Oops! +++ He’s logging on again +++ Better go +++ Put the mug down! +++ Oh! +++ <<Close>>

SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

It was suggested recently that, in order to improve my happiness quotient, I should give myself something good to look forward to. A holiday, a day out, a visit to a test match or, at least, something that might be considered to be something enjoyable to do. It was a very good suggestion and I was very pleased that someone thought enough about my well-being to suggest it, and, if I ever do feel like I’m likely to get a moment in my life to consider getting away from it all for a little while, I might even very well consider such a thing.

But how can I…?

You might very well suggest that I need to get a sense of proportion over this, and, in all honesty, I’m likely to agree with you, but, in six billion years, this rock we’re all sitting on will probably just be dead world floating in space around a feeble sun, and nothing any of us have ever done ever will really matter very much. Granted, six billion years is a very long time, and I’m not really at all likely to be still around to worry about it, but, just occasionally, when you start to think about the bigger picture and suchlike, it really does make you wonder what we’re all doing with our lives when nothing we ever do can possibly ever matter or make any real difference to anything.

Whether that’s something that should affect any of those little daily decisions we all make is of course debateable. One of the things that we should all try as we flit through our lives in the blink of an eye is to try at the very least to do no harm and try to make the experiences of those who share this planet with us at the same time as us as pleasant as it is possible for us to do. That and, oh, I don’t know, maybe find some time to enjoy ourselves every once in a while. So, while we all give some thought as to quite how we’re all going to do that, here are a few other things to think about.

As human beings we do like to think that we’ve made our mark on things, but we really do struggle with our geological timescales. In pretty much the whole history of mankind, most of our landscape, barring the odd earthquake and volcano, has seemed to be fairly constant and laughably even considered to be “steady as a rock”. We know an awful lot now about plate tectonics and continental drift and how the world is constantly changing, but for all of  recorded human history, our world and our maps to move around within that world have appeared to be essentially much the same.

However, in geological terms we will all one day be gone and totally forgotten, without making hardly a mark, unseen and unknown of by a cold, cold, universe, and with all our understanding of it gone with us. What is there of the human world that we currently occupy that we can say with any real certainty will still exist in a million or a billion years time? None of our engineering or architecture, none of our records or technology, maybe not even any of our bones will survive the crushing turmoil of the planet as it smashes and recreates its own crust. Maybe the odd sliver of rock somewhere folded in all the various strata will give a faint clue that mankind was once here, maybe the faintest of traces of an excess of carbon in one thin line in the stones will be all that will tell the universe that there was ever something approaching a civilisation here.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? It puts a lot of our daily little struggles and worries in some sort of perspective. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with having a sense of proportion. The vast bulk of time against our individual little flickers of existence seems awfully big in comparison.

While we’re all thinking about that rather humbling bigger picture, I should also point out that I’m still struggling with the notion of the directionality of deep time. If I can look far enough in one direction to see light that is from the residue of the big bang, what if I look the other way…? Surely I could see the deep future…? If I can look far enough to see the big bang, and that bang went in all directions at once, what’s to be seen on the other side of it? I know that these thoughts of mine are all probably nonsense, by the way, due to our relative position constantly being in a state of flux, but it’s just the kind of thing that keeps me awake at nights.

I know, I know, why don’t I just worry about how to pay the bills…? Well, I do that as well, of course, and I’m still trying to come up with a unified theory that might convince the gas and electricity companies that, as I was essentially formed from the same stuff as the products that they try to sell to me, and I inhabit the same universe as it, surely it already belongs to me and therefore they shouldn’t be able to sell me what is essentially already mine and trying to make fiscal gain out of selling me back my own kin seems somehow ghoulish.

I have yet to convince them.

Behold!
The second law
of thermodynamics!
Again.

Then, of course, there’s that constant niggling worry that if universal descent into nothingness is inevitable, due to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, what is the point of getting up in the morning? Entropy’s going to get you in the end, that’s apparently mathematically inevitable, so everything else in the universe can seem pretty pointless from time to time (whatever that is…). Granted it’s one hell of a long way into the far future, but then, if past, present and future can all be seen simultaneously, then it could be as soon as teatime today. Relatively speaking, of course. I’m not advocating that you should eat everything in the cupboards now just to stop it from going to waste.

As well as all that, there’s the lightspeed constant to think about. If some light is going one way at the speed of light, and another beam heads off in precisely the opposite direction at the speed of light, then as far as that individual particle is concerned, it’s particle pal is running away from it at a relative speed of twice the speed of light which is of course impossible, which is when the mathematics of slow-time comes into play and my mind, which is pretty uneducated in these matters, explodes in its own kind of big bang. Crikey! When you’re lying awake thinking about this kind of stuff, the morning seems a heck of a long way away, and the faster you try to think, the further away it will seem. Or is that nearer…? That one always confuses me…

I still think that it’s interesting to keep on pondering about pseudo-scientific stuff. Even if my knowledge of it is fairly uneducated, half-learned and ill-informed, I still get a lot of satisfaction out of thinking about these matters. All that misunderstanding, it really does help to keep me awake at nights. Perhaps, instead of just lying there and worrying, I should just get up and read a book about it all to get everything straight in my mind, although, I suspect that really would give me something to worry about.

Perhaps I do need a holiday after all…

MUSIC IN MIND

The music of your past can sometimes haunt you, and sometimes it just leaks into your present when you least expect it to. There are so many LPs that I used love to play back over and over again in the days of vinyl, and yet I’ve never replaced in a newer or shinier format. Some of those records were so familiar that if I was to play them now, I would recognize every note and be transported back to a time when deciding to buy myself a record might mean choosing not to eat properly for a week or two, such were the financial choices to be made back in those days.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, those once treasured albums fell out of favour and got sidestepped as newer, flashier, more contemporary releases were acquired, and those old favourites remained forever trapped in their vinyl state, caught in a cardboard sleeve with no means left to be heard by as I slowly divested myself of turntables and replaced them with the laser beam. Even the cassette tapes I made of these records so that I could listen to them in the car slowly came to have no equipment left available for me to play them on and so the tunes of my past began to fade into memory.

Every so often, though, one of those tunes would pop up unexpectedly, suddenly leaping towards the forefront of my thoughts after years loitering in the wilderness, and a long-forgotten fondness would be rekindled and, for a few brief nostalgic minutes, we would reacquaint ourselves and think about the old days.

During my recent weeks of to-ing and fro-ing from the hospital, I got into the habit of listening to Radcliffe and Maconie on Radio 2 of an evening, typically just discovering the show just in time for it to be shunted off to somewhere else in the schedule and away from the bandwidth of my car’s analogue radio. I hadn’t normally listened to music radio in the car for years, having generally become a “Radio 4” kind of a guy, but, because I wasn’t really in the mood for things like “The Moral Maze” after my skull-thumping visits to see my mother, I retuned and rediscovered the simple joy of listening to songs playing on the radio, songs that you happened to hear totally at the whim of someone else’s decision of what to pick and that you had no control whatsoever over the choice of.

Anyway, I started listening to their ‘The Chain’ feature where a song is chosen because it is linked, however tenuously, to the previous song played in that slot. One night the song picked was Donna Summer’s version of “State of Independence” which (as I was – despite my limited musical knowledge - fairly confidently able to explain to the beloved) not the version that I was the most familiar with, because I remembered a version by Jon and Vangelis on an album that I thought that the world had forgotten all about. I was therefore more than a tad surprised when those obviously very musically savvy presenters mentioned that very same album in their chat following the record, and the beloved just looked at me and said “You really have found a programme that finally speaks to you, haven’t you…?”

So, later on, I got home, and dusted off the old “Friends of Mr Cairo” CD and spent a jolly enough 45 minutes or so rediscovering yet another of the albums that I used to play within an inch of its life when I was a student but which has recently sat alone and unloved gathering dust on the shelf for the last couple of decades. I hadn’t heard it for years but the songs seemed so vivid and I was instantly transported back to the student disco during my first year when I first remembered hearing and being deeply moved by the track “I’ll find my way home” and, as soon as I had a bit of spare cash, I went out and bought myself the LP. Listening to it again, it was as if I’d only been standing in that hall yesterday despite it being over a quarter of a century ago, such is the magic trick that music can play on the memories. Some album tracks really stick with you and I can sometimes hear them in my head so vividly that it’s truly just like having an iPod in and I can rattle around the house for hours with the tune blaring in my mind as clearly as if I had my stereo on full blast.

I recently found out that Pete Townsend’s “White City” album was actually available on CD and had been for a while. When I’d last tried to track it down a few years ago, it wasn’t and didn’t look as if it ever would be, so I grabbed myself a copy just as soon as I could and this was exactly a case of precisely what I’m talking about. Every note from that album that I’d not heard in years was instantly familiar from the very second I hit “play” and the track “Face the Face” followed me round, bubbling away in my head, for most of the rest of that day (and beyond, if I’m being honest…).

Then there’s the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” that was so recently rediscovered by so many people after we’d all pretty much forgotten all about it, despite it having been a 1980’s staple, because it suddenly found itself being banned in Canada for its offensive content. Maybe people were always offended by it, I don’t know, but this was a song that was sung at Live Aid to however many billion people and, at the time, nobody seemed to notice that there was anything to be offended by, although maybe they did but just kept quiet about it. Lately, it seems that even Mark Knopfler himself has taken to skipping that bit when and if he performs it nowadays, so maybe there was a point to the protestations, although I think that we all kind of understood that the words were meant to be a parody of the kinds of things people say, and not a personal philosophy. Whatever the various truths behind that might be, I realised pretty quickly that it had taken me fifteen years to even notice that the version on my “Greatest Hits” compilation (it’s not a long record…) is a ‘radio edit’ and doesn’t even include the offending verse and despite having played that compilation more than a few times over the years, I failed utterly to notice its much shorter running time which, at 4’05’’, is a full 4’16” shorter than the original…

I guess that shows how much attention I pay. I’m obviously no connoisseur (I think my music collection probably speaks volumes on that matter) but I’ve known people to ramble on about the sound quality of CDs and MP3s not being as warm or as deep as from a vinyl LP and then there’s someone like me who doesn’t even notice that more than half a track is missing.

Incidentally, it’s the very same radio edit that was played on a request show on the evening the news story broke when someone rang in insisting that it should be played ‘just to irritate the Canadians’ and the choice to play that version probably rather defeated the point he was no doubt trying to make.

Musical Purgatory

To be honest, “Dire Straits” don’t get played much in this house these days, despite being name-checked in Douglas Adams’ “Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series of novels, falling as they do into that dreadful subcategory of hell which is known as “old man’s music” which, alongside the “cardigan music” of records like the once much-loved “Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits” tends to mean that much of the music I used to enjoy listening to sits in a kind of musical purgatory, eternally damned to be silenced in this neck of the woods at least.

However, the memories of those tunes can never quite be silenced as long as they float around inside my head, or unless I’m home alone of course. Then I can play what I like and, apart from what the neighbours might think (they do give me some funny looks now that I come to think about it…) when they get to hear what I’ve chosen to put on, those tunes from my past can blast out as much as I like and transport me back to long forgotten times and places.

Sadly, last night was the last of the Radio 2 Radcliffe and Maconie shows, and I feel I should mark its passing, and now that “programme that finally spoke to me” has vanished off my personal radar. It sometimes seems that whenever I find something I’m comfortable with, something always comes along to spoil it for me.

Sometimes I do think that I’ll never find my way home…

WONDER OF ‘WONDERS’

“So, Professor, you’ve been all around the Solar System, and then the Universe, where do you want to go next?”

“Somewhere else, obviously…”

“Tricky…”

“I thought maybe ‘Wonders of an Alternate Universe’ might work…?”

“Again… It’s not easy to get to, though, is it…?”

“Well, fundamentally…”

“I mean, the film crews absolutely adore doing your shows, Prof, they really do. All that flying off to exotic locations to watch you stare wistfully into the middle distance after saying something profound...”

“And beautiful…”

“As you say… Lovely stuff! Good hotels, lots of overtime, they love it…”

“Magnificent…”

“Indeed, but I can’t see anyone agreeing to accompanying you through a black hole…”

“No…? It would be a fundamentally magnificent experience…”

“Possibly, but the unions would never agree to it….”

“No…?”

“No… and then there are the broadcast dates to consider. What might be a few weeks to you could be a few million years to us back at television centre. What do we show them in the meantime…? More repeats…?”

“They’re not repeats, fundamentally... They’re magnificent and beautiful recursive space-time events…”

“Yes, well, we have tried that one, actually…”

“Did it work…?”

“Not really, no... Then we’ve got to consider the budget. We live in hard times. Experimental journeys into alternate dimensions don’t come cheap, you know... Couldn’t you at least consider staying at home for the next series?”

“Eh…?”

“The focus group came up with ‘Wonders of Inner Space’, so perhaps…?”

“It’s not really my field…”

“‘The Inner City’… No…? I suppose ‘The North’ is unknown territory for a lot of our viewers, maybe you could…?”

“No!”

“Oh...? Pity. I mean you do have connections around there, I’m told. Ah well... Maybe we should just consider filming ‘Wonders of My House’… Obviously, by ‘my’ we mean ‘your’ but it works better with your name attached… We could get that lot from ‘Changing Rooms’ involved. It would also go down well for a repeat… er... recursive thingummy… in the daytime schedule… and you are very telegenic, you know, to viewers of a certain age…”

“’Ang on…”

“Oh yes. We could film you gazing into a magnificent fire roaring away in a beautiful Georgian fireplace, watching the coal change fundamentally into energy…”

“ITV have made me a good offer, you know…”

“Have you considered being on the panel on a talent show? You and that Brian May doing your rock & roll astrophysics bit, and a couple of other celebs with PhDs maybe... You get to pick the next Astronomer Royal from willing members of the public. We thought ‘Search for a Stargazer’ might be a good title… No…? What about a game show? ‘Thank your Lucky Stars’...? ‘The Brians Trust’...? ‘The Two Brians’...? Prof…? Prof! Where are you going, Prof?”

“Nobber!”

A RANT ABOUT JOURNALISM

This particular rant has been brewing nicely on my own mental stove for quite a while now and anyone who has ever met me probably knew it was inevitable eventually, so I guess its time has finally come and I know that I’m probably going to hate myself for it afterwards. To be honest much of it was written months ago and I’ve resisted putting it “out there” for public consumption because I know that this sort of thing tends to be quite polarising, and might very well get me into trouble with one or two of you, and, to be fair, I’m normally too tired to want to get myself involved in an argument. Then the nation went and got itself involved in yet another grubby little conflict, and so, when I saw yesterday’s headlines, I thought, “What the hell?” and dug around in the dusty corners of the blog pile and dusted it off.

I don’t really know where what I suspect could even be considered to be a kind of prejudice against the business began. Maybe it comes from a sense of bitter disappointment with what it is becoming, because even I am prepared to admit that journalism itself can be a noble and crusading profession, but somewhere along the line it feels as if its lost its way, and this constant desire to feed a public hungry for the latest scandal and sensation brings the whole business down to a very common denominator.

The headlines in yesterday’s national press truly sickened me. As a nation, I thought that we were better than this. Those in the know say that we get the press that we deserve and that our newspapers are giving the people what they want, but, honestly, are the vast majority of us really, really all that happy when we see people being blown to kingdom come on our behalf? Are we really so immune to human suffering that we want to take some pleasure in it? I accept that sometimes the greater good is served by having to make the tough decisions (even if they never actually seem to be tough enough to actually make) but do we really have to seem to be so bloody smug about it all?

I know that in their minds, they’re probably only reporting what they see as being the facts, but it’s the way they go about doing it that truly bothers me. I really thought that this kind of überpatriotic jingoism and glorification of war had gone out of fashion thirty years ago with “Gotcha” and that this need to demonise individuals, no matter how out of control that they might appear to be to us, really should have stopped with the kind of anti-Hun headlines of a hundred years ago. When you see some of those headlines, all carried away with an enthusiasm, excitement and almost action-movie rhetoric that just feels distasteful to me, and some of which do little less than condone the idea of assassination as a legitimate tool of government, you really want to weep.

Don’t the people publishing these stories have any sense of responsibility? Do they not see how that kind of thing might be viewed in certain parts of the world? How it might feed the fires of resentment and hatred? Can they not understand that the headlines they will no doubt be printing after the citizens of our country pay the price for their recklessness will be partly down to their own irresponsibility? Don’t they ever learn that this kind of sensationalism almost certainly means this nation will eventually collectively have to pay a heavy price for their ignorance and bloodlust?

I accept that I do have problems with journalism as an occupation, but at least I like to think that I’ve always been consistent about it. I mean, my own profession’s hardly the noblest in that I need to encourage people part with money they might not be able to afford to part with in order to pay my mortgage, so I’m well and truly in the glassiest of houses (or on less than solid ground to risk mixing my metaphors) if I criticise it. I’m also willing to accept that there have been genuinely great crusading journalists in the past – John Pilger, Paul Foot, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to name a few – but I still feel that huge chunks of the profession still fall into the category of doing more harm rather than good. I suppose it’s because I believe that a lot of the daily business of the news media is built on a culture of opportunism over integrity every time, and I see precious little that convinces me of the opposite.

If someone, even someone working on a lowly local newspaper, sees an opportunity to get a story out that might propel them into the big time, it really seems as if they do not care who they have to walk over to get their story, or who the hell gets hurt along the way. In fact, it would seem that, if getting someone to cry about it helps to tell the story, then so much the better. I know that, ultimately, for most people it’s just a job they do, like any other. It might not even be a job they chose to do, just something they ended up doing, but it’s a job with responsibilities, a job with consequences, and I get the feeling that rather too often a lot of them tend to forget that.

I also accept that I have an utter incomprehension of what it is about a person that would make them want to appear in the news in the first place unless their own self-interest is being served, which might be excessively cynical but it’s the way I genuinely see it. Certainly seeking out an appearance in the press seems to me to be an utterly crazy thing to want to do, and yet some people, not even our so-called ‘celebrities’ seem to bend over backwards to get a photograph of themselves or their nearest and dearest into the local rag, little realising how the media suck you in, chew you up and spit you out, with little thought as to what becomes of you after the fact.

Some of the stories that do get covered seem fatuous at best, fluff pieces of nonsense just really there to polish the ego of the subject or worse, their children. Why anyone would want a picture of their child in the local paper with details of their name and where they go to school for example is quite, quite beyond me, especially as it might very well lead to the very same families crying for the cameras later on, when that information is used by the more unsavoury elements of society to target that child. Maybe I’m just overly cautious, but it wouldn’t half worry me.

Quite often, the press will put people who are inexperienced in the ways of how these things work into the spotlight and then allow the mob to come and pick the bones clean before walking away and absolving themselves of any responsibility. So many of those who put themselves naively into the spotlight seem completely taken by surprise when the tables are turned upon them. Surely we all know now how the system works? Or does everyone genuinely think it won’t happen to them? Why do lottery winners, for example, feel the need to be in the papers after they’ve won? Are you really that shallow? Do you need the world to know that you are now “considerably richer than me”? I’d just want to take the cash and run like a thief into the night.

Then there are the lives completely ruined by the scrutiny of the press. If tomorrow person “X” was completely erroneously accused of crime “Y” and arrested for it, the story would be splashed over the front pages whether or not it turned out to be true, and the press would take no personal responsibility for that, maybe saying that they have to trust their sources or whatever, but “X” would still find their life or career totally in ruins, and six months down the line, no matter what they may claim, the average person in the street would be saying “X”? Isn’t he the guy that did “Y”? People remember the headline for a lot longer than they remember the truth, and even if you’re totally exonerated, the old suspicion of “no smoke without fire” can stick to you forever, and any retractions are seldom published in the same front page banner typeface and six page special report format that the original story was when it broke.

I often think about those articles written – because they very often are full of bile - once someone has been found guilty of a particularly vicious crime. “Monster” this did “Vile” that. Sometimes the language used to describe the guilty party is ridiculously strong and almost pandering to the thirst of the mob for blood, almost as if the rage has been building up during a trial and the journalist needs some kind of cathartic release. Later on, of course, it has occasionally turned out that the person found guilty was not actually guilty of those crimes – like that solicitor found guilty of killing her children who turned out to be totally innocent - and I do wonder how much harm comes to them on the inside simply because of what other inmates have read about them in the paper, true or not. No-one ever seems to retract those “monster incarcerated” articles after the fact or ever bring themselves to say “Sorry, maybe our descriptions of you were a bit strong there.”

It’s in a similar vein that I get tired over gender stereotyping in the media in recent years. “Men do this, women do that” as if the boundaries are never crossed, because the truth is always more interesting than that. It may surprise you, but women can read maps, men can multi-task, women can exaggerate their flu symptoms, and men can be empathic. Everybody isn’t talking about EastEnders… or “Britain’s Got Talent”… or whichever World Cup is currently occurring. We don’t all care about the latest celebrity gossip or want the latest cars, or to play with all the “apps” on the latest trendy style of phone. Some of us don’t even want to have to have the phones themselves but now have to have because that’s the way our increasingly shallow and knee-jerk responsive society has chosen to define itself. It’s just lazy stereotyping that encourages conformity, discourages individualism and makes us all just a little bit less diverse in our outlook and diminishes everybody’s hopes and dreams and opportunities.

I do hope that clarifies my feelings upon this matter for you. Ultimately, I have to accept that having a free press is a good thing to have and is one of the cornerstones of living in a democracy, but I do wish that they took that responsibility more seriously and didn’t take the freedoms they have quite so much for granted. I’m sure a lot of actual journalists are lovely people, but the stuff that they churn out can really annoy me. Unluckily for you I’ve now become just the sort of person to publicly burble on about it and I’m running the risk of turning into Mr. Ranty very quickly. It’s for similar reasons that I’m unimpressed by this “www” idea that everybody’s voice is so very interesting in news media nowadays.

I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d still rather hear one informed opinion than thousands of idiots “reckoning” they know best. Please, please just stop asking the great public mass what they think. Mostly we don’t think, that’s part of the problem. Mostly we’re just ignorant of the whole truth but “reckon” we know better! It’s awful, it truly is, especially when things like that can be used to shape public policy decisions. It’s not for nothing that they used to say that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

The real problem I generally have with all this mouthing off in public by idiots like me is that it allows the idiots like me to draw attention to our opinions in a way that we previously couldn’t. In the past, if you had an extreme or dangerously idiotic point of view, you either wallowed alone in your madness or pretty quickly got told how much of an idiot you were being when you mouthed off in the bar. Nowadays you get to e-publish your extreme views and get your message across to another couple of idiots who are of the same mind maybe half a world away. Suddenly, instead of having your idiocy stifled at birth, you’ve got something that can very quickly develop into a movement, because instead of realising that you’re being slightly stupid, you can suddenly feel quite confident that there are other like-minded idiots out there who also think along the same lines you do, and the next thing you know fascism is rife across a previously reasonable nation, and there are pages and pages of “tuppeny-ha’penny” journalism where we are encouraged to “have our say” which you can go and have a look at and prove it. All that this proves, of course, is that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and that you really probably shouldn’t have read this nonsense today.

Can’t we just let clever people who know what they’re talking about give us a reasoned argument for and against something instead of resorting time and time again to this “sound-bite” culture, and start to learn again as a society to respect a bit of cleverness instead of applauding and venerating the cult of the idiot?