+++*

Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

Blog : Posts from February 2006

London Weekend Blogging: Big Box, Little Box

Or, visiting the Tate

Deciding to do something cultural whilst in the Big City, I visited Tate Modern to see Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, her Turbine Hall installation made up of thousands of plastic casts of cardboard boxes.

As I’d visited the work warehouse earlier in the day, my first reaction was: “this isn’t a very neat warehouse”. My second reaction was “ooh, I could just do with a cup of tea”, because the stacks and stacks of white boxes make me think of a giant pile of sugar lumps.* One leak in the roof, and the whole thing would just dissolve.

It was good to see, though, that kids love Embankment. They were all over it, playing hide and seek, darting in and out between piles of boxes. It’s good to have art that you can get inside and move around in, and use for your own purposes like that. The kids might not be thinking about the plight of London’s homeless, but Art** isn’t just for the artist’s purposes. It’s what you make of it that counts.

* In fact, I’m tempted to make a model replica of Embankment entirely out of sugar cubes and starch paste.

** With a capital A, of course.

Ravens (part two)

Or, myths of the literal and the figurative

(read part one here)

I thought I’d better get around to finishing this post off, because the Tower Of London ravens are in the news again. Now that bird flu has started to make its way into Western Europe, the Ravenmaster is getting ready to move his birds into the top-quality indoor aviary mentioned previously, and the story is making its way into all the papers.* We can’t have the ravens dying on us; the fate of the country isn’t at stake.

Except, though, that the idea that the fate of the nation depends on the Tower’s ravens is all a big misunderstanding. The myth isn’t about living ravens at all. The real myth is that the fate of the nation depends on the raven god staying at the Tower. Furthermore, according to some, he already left.

The closest we have to the original superstition is in medieval Welsh myth. In Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, part of the Mabinogion, the hero Bran – “Raven” – is mortally wounded in a battle with the Irish. He tells his companions to cut off his head, and bury it on Tower Hill. The head stays alive for 87 years, but eventually the spell is broken, and they do as they were told:

[The followers of Bran] could not rest but journeyed forth with the head towards London. And they buried the head in the White Mount, and when it was buried, this was the third goodly concealment; and it was the third ill-fated disclosure when it was disinterred, insamuch as no invasion from across the sea came to this island while the head was in that concealment.**

The Iron Age people of Western Europe were big on heads and head cults. Stone heads have been found buried at various archaeological sites, and this passage is the best evidence we have as to why they were buried: they were protective talismans. Clearly, the writers of the Mabinogion believed in their power, too. They have to explain why the Welsh lost control of south-eastern Britain, when the raven god’s head was protecting them from invasion. Answer: the English only managed to invade after the head was removed. The blame for this is placed on King Arthur, who, not being superstitious himself, deliberately dug the head up in the hope of making his armies try harder. It worked, whilst Arthur himself was around; but after his death, Britain fell to the English.***

So, in short, the Tower Ravens might be a twisted survival of an ancient Welsh myth. The modern version of the story doesn’t appear in print, though, until the late 19th century, well after the Celtic Revival, and well after the Mabinogion had been published in English. Furthermore, the original story is that the promised fall of the nation has already happened; and England is the country that replaced it. If the Tower’s ravens do all leave one day, we English don’t have much to worry about; we are the people they were meant to be protecting the country from in the first place.

* and a lot of people are searching the web and coming here for more information.

** From the Charlotte Guest translation of the Mabinogion available from Project Gutenberg.

*** This part of the story isn’t in the Mabinogion; I’m taking it from Mythology Of The British Isles by Geoffrey Ashe. It’s mentioned in at least one set of Welsh Triads.

Gossip: Date Update

In which Big Dave is threatening

Last week, I told you about Big Dave’s Impending Date. This week, I’ve been finding out what happened. This is all retold second-hand from what he told me; but this is pretty much exactly how he said it.

Quick summary of the Story So Far: Big Dave asked a girl from the Darts League out, even though she wasn’t single, because her dad kept pressuring him to do it. On Saturday, they were supposed to be going out for a drink.

Well, she cancelled. Then, on Sunday, she didn’t show up at the darts. So, Dave asks around a bit to see what’s going on. It turns out, she went to visit her ex, who then decided to beat her up.

Dave pops round to visit, and sees the rather nasty bruises all over her face, which explain why she hasn’t been about. “You won’t do anything though, will you?” she said to him, nervously.

“Of course not,” says Big Dave, fingers crossed behind his back. As soon as he leaves her, he goes straight round to the man’s house. As soon as he opens the door, Dave’s hands are round his neck and he’s up against the wall.

Now, there is a reason he’s called Big Dave. And the man in question is, according to Dave, your typical kind of girlfriend-beater: small and skinny himself, and a coward. The sort of bully who will take his anger out on people he knows aren’t going to fight back. With Dave there, he needs to change his trousers. “I don’t have a problem with you, mate,” he kept stammering. “You do now,” Dave replies. He leaves without doing any damage, but with Dire Threats should anything happen in future.

I’m slightly in two minds about all this myself. On the one hand, the scumbag sounds like a nasty piece of work who clearly had it coming. Nevertheless, I’m still a little nervous around vigilante justice. Especially when I share an office with the vigilante in question. And the girl Dave was trying to help isn’t talking to him at the moment. Because she didn’t want anyone to make a fuss about it. She just wanted everyone to ignore her hideous bruises and let it all die down again.

Image

In which we wonder what we’re hiding

Gordon has written something very interesting about why he likes reading blogs.

…now and again I’m still taken aback when I read something on a blog that I hadn’t previously considered. … I mean when someone, as part of a post, mentions something specific about themselves that I hadn’t previously noted.

You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s good. Essentially,* he loves the occasional sudden reminders that you don’t know much about even your regular reads. There are fundamental parts of their personalities that don’t get mentioned.

Personally, when I started this blog, I particularly wanted to hide certain things. Well, “hide” is the wrong word – “omit” would be better. So, there are lots of things about myself that I don’t talk about, largely because they would be really quite boring to most people. Some of the things on the original list, though, have probably seeped through by now. It makes me wonder, though: those of you who read this site even though you don’t know me personally, or from one of the messageboard sites I post on. Do you care that you don’t know very much about me?**

* and, Gordon, if you’re reading this, I hope I’m not misrepresenting you by my overly-trimmed summary

** For one thing, your mental picture of me is probably better-looking than reality.

Return

In which I return from London

Well, I’m back at the office again, pleased to see that WordPress‘s advance-publishing feature works as advertised, to get Saturday’s post up whilst I was still waking up in my hotel bed in Barking.

I had a wonderful weekend away, got a bit emotional at W and P’s wedding, and danced very enthusiastically at their wedding party. I’ll be posting more about it in the next few days, partly because I’m going away again next week, and “what I did on my holidays” will be easy to get written in advance. So, coming soon on this blog: flirting by chocolate, failed blogstalking, sugarcube art (with hide and seek), a stressed registrar, adventures on the District Line, posing for photos, fairy lights, laughter, and lashings and lashings of ginger beer champagne.

Photos will be coming too, once I get my rolls and rolls of film back from the chemists, and get them all scanned. I’m old-fashioned, me.

How to win girlfriends and influence people

Or, Big Dave may be on to something

Big Dave At The Office is making a move back onto the dating scene. He’s mostly doing this, as far as I can tell, by playing darts.

I knew he was on his dad’s darts team, playing weekly at various dodgy-sounding pubs round the area.* I knew, too, that there was a woman on the team – also there with her dad – who he was getting friendly with; but that as she isn’t single, nothing had happened.

“So, I was at the darts last Thursday,” says Big Dave, “and you remember that lass I was telling you about? She wasn’t there, but her dad just comes up to us and says: ‘Why haven’t you boned my daughter yet?’ As if he’s insulted that I haven’t, or something.”

“But I thought she wasn’t single?”

“Well, yeah,” said Dave. “Anyway, this week, I was stood talking to her after the match, and her dad comes up to us again. And he says to her: ‘Why haven’t you let him bone you yet?’ I think he’s trying to drop hints.”

“Subtle,” I said. “Very subtle. What does he say to her boyfriend?”

“Well, I dunno,” he replied. “But we’re kind of going on a date on Saturday.”

If I hear how he gets on, I will keep you posted.

* such as the one where local pre-teens will hang about in the car park offering to get you practically anything for twenty quid, and if you take them up on it, will return with a freshly-nicked anything within a couple of hours.

Terminology

In which we prepare for a wedding

Just another brief snippets post. Tonight I’m busily packing, because tomorrow I’m zooming off to London. Hurrah!

One thing that’s been on my mind recently: when the government came up with Civil Partnerships, did they deliberately invent as cumbersome a term as they could, so that people would end up calling it marriage? Consider these two statements:

“My friends W and P are holding a civil partnership registration ceremony.”

“My friends W and P are getting married.”

Now, which of those are people actually going to say?

I’m only in London for the weekend, sadly. I will be spending most of the weekend trying to find the register office on Bow Road, because my friends W and P are getting married there.* Most of what I know about Bow Road, I learned here.

(someone should probably explain to me some time that London is more than just its railway system. In fact, there are entire areas of London with no trains. That’s what the rumours say, anyway. I don’t think there’s any way to actually get to those places.)

Someone recently reached this site by searching for “shimura curves mailing list”. I don’t know much about pure maths, but I asked someone from the band Shimura Curves, and they do indeed have one.**

To close, a sign which has been hanging around our redecorated offices lately. It made me smile:

WET PAINT!
Please be careful
Touching up drives me CRAZY.

I have to admit, I often feel the same way too. Have a nice weekend yourselves.

* Except that they’re not. Because they’re registering a civil partnership. But you knew that.

** Update, August 24th 2020: I am presuming this mailing list no longer exists, as it was hosted on Yahoo Groups.

Medals

In which we consider heroism

People often say that the honours system is old-fashioned and out-dated. There are many good reasons to criticise it: the unofficial system of honours-for-cash,* or the automatic medals given to high mandarins of the Civil Service. I don’t even see the point of awarding honours to sportsmen, or celebrities.

Sometimes, though, there are people who do deserve to be recognised. Occasionally, during an ordinary day, some people do something heroic. Even though I only have a very slight link to those events, it’s still painful for me to think about what they had to deal with, and what they saw, heard and smelled.

One thing I know, though, is that many more people than these 20 were deeply involved, and have received nothing. If anything is wrong with the honours system, it’s that there’s always a cut-off point. There’s always a point after which people stop being officially heroes.

* which was a much more serious problem in the 1920s, when the Liberal government even had a price-list for various honours.

Sadistic

In which we listen to abuse

As I drove to work this morning I was listening to Today on the radio, and I heard them play the sound from the video of UK troops abusing Iraqi civilians.

The soundtrack, and the voices of the British soldiers on it, were self-evidently sadistic. Moreover, they weren’t just violent; they sounded as if they were enjoying it. The unseen soldier sounded to be getting a thrill out of humiliating his helpless captives. This was his way to have fun. It sounded to me as if he’d be replaying the scene over and over again in his mind, to get every little bit of pleasure back again. Replaying it over and over, faster and faster, in his own private time.

Or maybe that’s just my own interpretation of it. Getting pleasure from people like that without their own agreement is always wrong, whether you enjoy it or not.