Symbolic Forest

Today’s top news story: Ian Gibson, a Norwich MP and former scientist has announced that a cluster of child diabetes cases in Norfolk may be caused by inbreeding. Cue, of course, all the usual jokes about Norfolk stereotypes: country yokels marrying their sister, and so on. Dr Gibson, interviewed on Today,^* seemed rather affronted by any suggestion that he was being insulting. His response: he was using “inbreeding” in a purely technical manner which us laughing yokels don’t understand. I see.

Much as Dr Gibson has been criticised for “not understanding genetics” and so on, he may well have a point. As I’ve mentioned before, people don’t move around very much. In years gone by, people moved around even less; migration is hard work. It’s not too surprising, in other words, to find that illnesses with a strong genetic factor may have strong regional variations too.^** It might be simplistic to say “diabetes may be regionally concentrated because of inbreeding,” because there are lots of other causative factors involved. You can’t pretend, though, that regional variations are unlikely to exist.

* only a few minutes ago! Damn, this blog can be up-to-the-minute occasionally.

** My psychotic aunt – clinically diagnosed, I’m not just being rude about her – is from Norfolk too. I wonder if anyone has looked to see if there are similar clusters of mental illnesses with a strong hereditary component.

Keyword noise: diabetes, genetics, hereditary illness, Ian Gibson, illness, inbreeding, migration, Norfolk.

Well, I’m glad I’m not going anywhere today. Not just in a plane, but anywhere that might involve driving past an airport, because no doubt the traffic around them will be awful too.

Today demonstrates the horror of 24-hour news. I’m just as bad as everyone else, refreshing the BBC News site every five minutes to get the latest on the Terror Alert. The news reports, meanwhile, are filled with hyperbolic phrases such as “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”.^* No it isn’t. People have imagined it. To quote The Princess Bride, “I do not think you know what that word means.”

The government seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, when it comes to statements. “We have arrested everyone involved, apart from the ones we haven’t”. “This is nothing to do with race, but we’re talking to Community Leaders about it.” How do you become a Community Leader, anyway? Are there elections?

No doubt bottled liquids will be confiscated on planes for the next few months, before everything goes back to normal, and the next terrorist attack comes along with something completely different. The ones that get through are never the ones you expect, after all.

* To be fair to the media, it was a police spokesman who came up with that exact phrase.

Keyword noise: airport, security, false alarms, flying, terrorism, travel.

Things that would make my life better:

• A better job^*
• Living away from the parents
• A social life that is closer to home
• A partner who, also, was reasonably close to home
• The self-belief to always do what I want to do.
• The wisdom to know what I need to do.
• And the self-confidence to be content with what I can do, rather than being disappointed at not doing what other people can.

This post was brought to you by Self-Reflective Lunchtime Breaks, Ltd – purveyors of angst to twentysomethings everywhere. Feel free to add further suggestions.

* but “better” is such a nebulous term there.

Keyword noise: angst, self-reflection.

As mentioned the other day, I spent most of the weekend at Caption, the annual small-press and self-published comic convention in Oxford. It wasn’t somewhere I’d visited before – I’m someone who looks on people who can draw properly with awe and admiration – but it turned out to be a nice day out. Held in a community centre which felt like an overgrown collection of church halls inside, it was a nice quiet relaxed event. “Ooh, it’s a bit quiet this year,” said the people I was with, who were veterans, but I didn’t mind that myself. It helped that it was on Cowley Road, which made it easy for us to pop out for a meal in the early evening, then nip back to the convention. And, unlike the centre of the city, Cowley Road isn’t completely flooded with tourists.

Keyword noise: Caption, comics, Cowley Road, indie, Oxford, self-publishing, small press, zines.

Yesterday, I mentioned in passing that my friend W’s birthday is upcoming; but it didn’t register that W’s birthday is today. So, if you’re reading, happy birthday!

(I don’t think W reads the site very often, but he has looked at it occasionally)

Keyword noise: birthday, celebration.

Lounging around on a sunny Sunday morning, I was planning, plotting, and thinking of things to write here. Planning on writing about the cake K was promising to bake, or W’s upcoming birthday, or yesterday’s trip to Oxford with C and P and various other people. And I started thinking: why do I refer to people by letter like that?

I quickly realised where I might have got it from: the scientist and writer Jeremy Bernstein. I have, somewhere on my shelves, a copy of his book Experiencing Science, a compilation of articles he wrote for the New Yorker. It is mostly a series of pocket biographies of prominent scientists, from Kepler through to Oppenheimer via Lysenko, Franklin, and others; but at the end of the book is a slightly strange, partly fictional essay on the work of Turing and Gödel. In which all the main characters – the fictional ones, at any rate – are referred to by their initial letters. K, W, and so on.

I can’t say I fully understand Gödel’s theorems. My maths isn’t that good. I do love its implications, though. It underwrites and undermines the whole of computer theory; and, as someone who works in IT, I know from experience that computer theory hardly ever matters in real life. Someone once asked me, politely, to shut up, on a train, because I was trying to explain Gödel’s theory rather loudly to Δ and I hadn’t realised we were in the Quiet Coach. I try to reread Bernstein’s book every year or two, and not just for the Gödel chapter; clearly, though, it’s been a bigger influence on my own writing than I’d realised before.

Keyword noise: biography, books, Experiencing Science, Gödel's Theorem, influences, Jeremy Bernstein, journalism, Kurt Gödel, maths, pen portrait, pocket biography.

As I said yesterday, I’ve been listening a lot recently to the debut album from The Pipettes, released a few days ago. It’s light, bouncy, pop music, always trying to evoke school discos and teenage fumbling. The band deliberately tries to come across, it seems, as a modern indie version of a 1960s girl group; hiding the musicians behind the scenes and relying on the singers to front the band.

It’s a very nostalgic record – a band full of twentysomethings, aimed at twentysomethings, singing at the emotional level of fourteen-year-olds abandoned on the dancefloor. Even when they’re singing about sex, they still sound somehow childish. It’s not surprising to find that they’re fairly closely connected to The Go! Team, whose debut album – which I do like a lot – always strikes me as being the auditory equivalent of a TV talking-head nostalgia show. The Pipettes are similar, a nostalgia band for the London indie scene; you could never imagine this record having been made anywhere other than south-east England.

On the whole, though, it is good to listen to. It’s an easy listen, and there are some good tunes and hooks in there. Whoever is writing the songs knows how to put a catchy melody to equally catchy lyrics, even if the lyrics of one song – “It’s Not Love (But It’s A Feeling)” – always make me think of that cosmetics commercial with Anna Friel in it.^* They will probably do quite well. By the end of the year they’ll be a Radio One staple, cropping up on Radio Two occasionally too;^** then by the end of next year we’ll be wondering what happened to them.

* You know, the one with the corset and the dirty smirk. That is Anna Friel, isn’t it? The particular lyrics are from the chorus: “touch a little tighter, eyes a little brighter”.

** Actually, I have to admit here, the first time I heard them was on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 2 show, which I listen to if I’m still travelling at that time of night.

Keyword noise: album, disco, girl group, indie, music, nostalgia, review, The Go! Team, The Pipettes.

Sorry to be whining so much about work, but that’s all my mind’s been full of this week. The pressure is so draining, my mind feels numb and empty by the time I get home, and I have nothing else to write about. My mind feels numb most of the daytime too; it’s at the stage where I just sit down at my desk and blank for a couple of minutes until I remember where I am and what the next task is.

At least I’m off away again this weekend, so I should be able to put work out of my mind for a couple of days. I’m going to Caption, a convention for alternative, small-press and zine-style comics. It’s not a scene I know much about, but I am hoping to be educated.

This week I have mostly been obsessed by: Last.fm,^* the website that tells you what bands people are listening to. I’ve been refreshing it regularly just to check that it is correctly identifying which tracks I’m playing – it does sometimes not seem to recognise some obscure stuff.^** I’ll post the link to my profile here, when my profile has more on it. Hopefully it will lead to finding more music I don’t know much about. I am hoping to be educated.

I’ve also been listening over and over to the first album by The Pipettes, a 60s girl-band in modern indie clothing. Review to come when I have time enough to write it.

That’s all for this week, then; one more day of stress stress stress, then at 5pm I can zoom off down to Oxfordshire. And then I’ll come back on Monday all refreshed, hopefully there will be news of the cat, and I’ll be all ready for another week of stress to grind me down. Just maybe, too, I’ll have been educated.

* also known as Audioscrobbler, which always makes me think of The Box of Delights by John Masefield, in which “scrobbling” means “kidnapping”.

** Usually things from Fluxblog, whose mp3s also confuse my mp3 playing software – it can’t read the track length properly, and usually tells me that the file is thousands of hours long.

Keyword noise: Caption, comics, holiday, indie, overwork, Oxford, pressure, small press, stress, zines.

Work, which I didn’t think could go downhill, is going downhill. It’s not something I can talk about here, for the usual privacy reasons, but it’s definitely going downhill. Nobody at all in the office is in a good mood, and me and Big Dave feel as if we’re walking around with Blame Conductors^* on our heads. The office in-jokes are getting darker and more bitter by the day; and our manager, already Most Hated Person In The Building, is becoming more unpopular by the hour.

* spiky things that attract Clouds Of Blame to ground themselves on your head, usually with a sharp zap.

Keyword noise: blame, management, morale.

Talking about pets: the cat has vanished. Not near home, either.

The mother was taking him to the vet, on Monday, in his cat box. She was a few paces away from the surgery – a mile or so from home – and the cat box, in her words, “fell apart”. It’s a plastic affair, with a removable lid, and it’s picked up by the lid too; so if you haven’t done up the catches right, it will fall apart. And The Mother has never shown any ability to be able to do up the catches right. I have shown her how to do it many, many times, but she still refuses to learn.

The cat immediately scarpered, and hasn’t been seen since. Since then we’ve had thunderstorms and constant rain, and The Mother – when she isn’t out looking for him – keeps saying things like “oh the poor dear, I hope he’s found shelter somewhere.” Which makes me think: no, you’re not allowed to say that. You would be allowed to say that if the whole thing wasn’t completely your own fault.

More than anything, I’m angry. I’m always angry with my parents at some level, because they are intensely annoying people. This, though, has left me angrier than normal. My mother has always been annoyingly semi-competant, being able to grasp 90% of an idea, but missing out the 10% that actually gives it its shape and flavour.^* Most of the time it isn’t a big problem, but occasionally, it matters.

* Like the time she saw “Thai curry sauce” in the supermarket, the sort that you add to stir-fried vegetables, and thought “Ooh, I’ll make a Thai curry.” So she cooked some mince, heated it up in a pan with some tinned kidney beans, and added the stir-fry sauce to it. Ta-daa, “Thai curry”. It wasn’t inedible, but she didn’t seem to understand that she’d actually made something entirely different.

Keyword noise: The Cat, cooking, disappeared, lost, missing, pets, The Mother.