Symbolic Forest

Feeling sad today.

Went to the pub for pizza and beer; then strode up through drizzle to the cemetery and did a circuit of the place. Then home, and I sat quietly on my own in the kitchen staring into space and drinking a cup of tea.

Keyword noise: weather, rain, drizzle, seasons.

Went into town today, walking via Riverside Park. As we walked down River St, we were overtaken by a Hipster Dad pushing his buggy, rather faster than us.

At the passageway from St Matthias Square through to Temple Way, there are usually homeless men sheltering, by the huge hot air outlet vents from the local branch of Future Inns. Today, when we reached it, there were several. One hunched up on the floor, back against the wall. One stood, arm outstretched touching the wall, body shaking with tremors, face fixed solid. Another next to him, concerned; Hipster Dad on his phone calling an ambulance.

After getting a few things in town we walked up and down the harbour: along the north bank from the Centre down to Gas Ferry, across on the ferry boat then back along the other bank to Prince St Bridge - which is now a temporary scaffolding bridge way up above the normal one. The harbourside was much busier than town, with people out and about for a New Years Day walk. People who, of course, didn’t really know what they were doing. There was a long queue for the ferry boat, with people standing about, getting confused, trying to count up if they had enough money for the fare. “They’ll be needing to make twin and triple wheelchairs soon,” said an old woman in the queue who saw our double buggy, “because there’s not enough people to look after us all.” As we walked back along the other side, The Child Who Likes Fairies was very excited by the stabled stock of the Harbour Railway - “Choot! Choot!” and insisted on giving it all a very close look and playing with the vacuum bags.

Keyword noise: Bristol, homelessness, Riverside Park, walking, Harbourside, The Children.

Central Station: the transport hub of the city. Trams and metro to all parts of the city; buses to all parts of the suburbs. Ferries to get you across the harbour. And trains, of course, to the airport, to the rest of the country, to the rest of Europe. Underneath the station a crisscross of subways provides the usual transport-hub range of things a traveller in need might be looking for. New luggage, flowers, quick food. There are fast food units in the subway, selling chips, fried chicken in a bun, other forms of quickly-cooked meat, where the shy but hungry traveller need not even speak to the staff; and conversely a shy fast-food-frier never need speak to their customers. The whole front of the unit is a wall of clear plastic coin-operated boxes, each with a door at the front and a door at the back, each hopefully containing some tasty but unhealthy morsel. The hungry traveller puts their coins in the slot and opens the box; at the back, the staff fill up empty boxes with more hot food. Everything is, under heat lamps, on display behind its little perspex door to tempt you.

We didn’t, I have to admit, arrive in Amsterdam by train. We arrived on the cheap overnight bus from London, which drops you off first thing in the morning in a car park on an artificial island in the harbour, midway between the city and the equally artificial suburb of IJburg. The tram then takes you onwards into the city, tunnelling under the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal, backpackers and budget tourists packed in alongside commuters on their way to work. It takes you, naturally, to the vortex of looping tram tracks and platforms in the forecourt of Central Station. We changed trams to head off to our hotel, stood waiting for our next tram to arrive, and took in the sounds of the city.

The main entrance of the Central Station has a clock tower at either end, square, topped with a pyramidal spire. On the right-hand tower is a clock face. The left-hand tower has something that at first sight looks similar, but with only one hand On the day we arrived the single golden hand was sweeping back and forth rapidly, with no apparent pattern to its movements. Bells were clanging, and I thought through some natural pattern-seeking train of thought, that each clang of a bell corresponded with the swish of the single hand through each segment of its face. It was an auditory illusion: the bells were the bells of trams pulling away from their stops, a sound you will hear all over the city. After a few minutes I realised that the markings on the face - N, NO, O, ZO, Z and so on - were the Dutch compass points. The hand was a wind indicator, connected mechanically to the weathervane atop its tower, responding to the gusty wind blowing across the flat waters and flatter land surrounding the city, telling everyone with the skill to read it which boats they might expect to be coming into harbour from which directions, and which might find the weather fit to sail. A suitable sign for a merchant city whose golden days were created by sailing ships gone for months at a time, where the traders left back at home would carefully watch the wind, wary of whether it would indicate fantastic profit or total ruination.

It is, of course, fake. Almost brazen in its fakery. I don’t mean that it doesn’t do anything, that there’s no weathervane and the hand’s movements are random: it is genuinely displaying what the wind is doing above Amsterdam right now. What is fake about it, is the thought that any merchants ever watched this particular weathervane for signs that their fortune was about to be lost or made. Central Station wasn’t built until the 1880s, and it was built on Station Island, which as the name suggests didn’t exist until it was needed to put the station on. Station Island was dropped right across the old harbour mouth, roughly on the spot where, back in the city’s golden days, a floating boom was laid out every night to defend against attack from the water. The Central Station sealed off the old quaysides along the River Amstel, the source of the city’s wealth, from the wilder waters of the IJ. It was controversial; it was the final death-blow to the old, decaying Golden Age city’s harbour. The wind indicator on top of the station is, in some ways, the first sign of tourist theme-park Amsterdam. Telling all those waiting for their trams that today the winds are good for boats at anchor in the Zuider Zee to come into port and land their precious cargo, even though the building it is part of would fox any attempt by a temporally-adrift East India boat to reach the city’s merchant quays. For that matter the Zuider Zee itself is no more: the IJ, the bay that Amsterdam teetered on the edge of, is a freshwater inlet of the Markermeer lake, one of several different and separate patches of water and land which the old, treacherous Zuider Zee was carved into during the twentieth century.

Only a few minutes’ walk from the station, the Oude Zijde is the real tourist heart of the city. And by that, I mean, tourists flocking to Amsterdam will generally reach Central Station and pour themselves into the Oude Zijde to get drunk, get stoned, and have sex. By “tourists” I mean a particular type of tourist, of course, largely young alcoholic men, and by “have sex” I mean mindless mechanical fucking. I might not know the city well, but the Oude Zijde seems to be constantly crammed with drunken tourists staggering about, gawping at the fetish shops as they wander from bar to bar, joking about how many whores they’re going to use, should they find the courage. The brothels themselves are unmissable: shop frontages consisting solely of glass doors, pink neon strip-lights above them. Behind each door stands a woman in cheap satin underwear, posing for the passing drunkards to try to entice them in. Should one of them have enough courage - each, I imagine, thinking of the amount of “banter” he will get from it back home in Corby or Hexham or Andover as long as nobody tells his fiancé about it - the woman will take their cash and lead them through the door, upstairs into a tiny bedroom, leaving her doorway empty until she is ready for the next fucking customer. Then she comes back to present herself on show again, like a bag of chips, or some fried chicken in a bun. “I can’t believe you did it, mate,” the customer’s friends will shout, all too willing to believe that women will.

I don’t like to think that the Oude Zijde, popular though it is with all the tourists, represents the real Amsterdam. It horrified us. Some streets in Britain have a bad reputation on a Saturday night: St Marys Street in Cardiff, for example, or the Centre in Bristol. The Zeedijk of the Oude Zijde, though, was hardly any more pleasant than a British city Saturday night, on a summer weekday afternoon. When I think back about Amsterdam, I try to block the Oude Zijde, its endless vomit-bars and its women-as-fast-food out of my mind. We never even tried to see any of its great sights, such as the church which gives the district its name.

Walk, instead, in the other direction. Start, again, looking at cheap food beneath Central Station; but walk the other way, through the tunnels under the station platforms, under the bus station, and on to the banks of the IJ. At one time you would have been looking out on open water; swimming in it, in fact, before Station Island was built. Nowadays it seems more like a river, a Thames or a Hudson, but back in time this was a wide bay. The water, whatever you call it, is busy here, with little boats darting back and forth; free ferries linking North Amsterdam with the main part of the city, and longer-distance boats slowly ambling past them. “Upstream” and “Downstream” are meaningless concepts on this stretch of carefully-managed water. Originally the way to the sea lay east, via what is now the Markermeer and the IJsselmeer; then, after a canal was dug, north; nowadays west via the newer, larger North Sea Canal.

I’ve never really been to sea, other than the occasional ferry. The longest I’ve spent on a boat, as far as I can remember, is on the cross-channel ferry from Dover to Dunkirk, an entire two hours spent steaming across the mad dash that is the Strait of Dover, dodging heavily-loaded container ships heading from China to Rotterdam. According to my mother though, a hundred and fifty years back our family consisted of a tight-knit bunch of Cornish fishermen and wreckers living in a village so nautical it didn’t even have road access. Before that, according to family myth, the Cornish fishermen had in turn descended from a group of Spaniards who decided to switch sides in 1588 and never made it home again. However implausible this story might be, however unlikely it is that I could inherit tastes specifically from a branch of my ancestry that can only make up, at the most, a sixteenth part of my genetic heritage, I have to admit that I do rather enjoy the abstract concept of being in a boat. In, I promise, an entirely armchair way. I love to walk alongside a harbour watching canoeists capsize and trainee sailors send their sailboats in the wrong direction, and think it might be nice to try it out, some time in the future. The one time I did actually try canoeing, back in primary school, I was the only child in the entire class to fall in, so it’s probably a good idea if this theoretical aptitude remains completely hypothetical. Nevertheless, getting on board one of the ferries that run back and forth across the IJ, hand resting on the side of the boat, looking out across the choppy water studded with red buoys, I certainly felt in my element. The boats are simple straightforward things, symmetrical, both bow and stern consisting of a large fold-down gangway via which pedestrians, cyclists, scooters and tuk-tuks all pour aboard; the passenger deck runs straight through from end to end, with the bridge up above in the centre, the boats shuttling back and forth from one bank of the IJ to the other without ever needing to turn around. When they get going, they get going with a purpose, forcefully pushing their way blunt-ended across the water or up and down the harbour, past warehouses turned into flats and shipyards turned into offices. The working docks are now east along the canal towards the sea, so large on the map they dwarf the city itself.

Over on the far side of the IJ, we found a café which seemed put together from random timbers and pieces of plastic panelling, sitting on a point overlooking the water. Tucked away behind it was a sty, to raise its own pork and bacon. We sat indoors and relaxed as rain battered the windows, surrounded by dereliction repurposed for offices and street art. The stumps of shipbuilding cranes still stood, sawn off abruptly at their hips: it had a disconcerting effect, as if their upper parts had been Photoshopped out of the scene. This redeveloped dockland was nothing at all like the hard, shiny, corporate enclaves of Canary Wharf; instead, it was if the residents of Stokes Croft or Shoreditch had suddenly been teleported to some derelict post-industrial wasteland and left to get on with things. We don’t seem to do redevelopment like that in Britain. If you visit somewhere with partly-redeveloped docksides - Cardiff Bay, say - you see a complete and severe dichotomy between entirely rebuilt landscapes filled with expensive and privately-guarded flats, and over the fence, a scene of empty desolation where the remaining port tries to hang on to docks that might, maybe, be required for trade again one day. In North Amsterdam the two blur together. Just like how, throughout Dutch history, the marshy land has blurred into the reedy inland seas.

We decided to try walking along the waterside to a different ferry terminal, the one directly opposite the Central Station, but the banks of the IJ are so indented with canals and dockland that it turned into a very long way around, compared to the direct route along the water. All of this land is unreal: instead of docks being cut into the land, land was dredged up and squeezed between the piles to form docks in the negative space. Perversely, it reminded me of growing up in Lincolnshire, in another town where the ships are higher than the buildings and modern housing estates give way to industrial sheds. We crossed a canal packed with houseboats, passed a vast, humming electrical substation, and decided to wait for the bus instead. I can imagine myself living in North Amsterdam, in a little suburban idyll only a quick bike ride from the ferry into town. Normally I think of myself as a city person, and as I said, I can’t stand the centre of Amsterdam, but I can imagine myself being entirely happy just outside. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Out in the suburbs, even in the fashionable inner suburbs where tradesmen’s tenements have been converted into designer boutiques and vegetarian restaurants, it’s easy to forget about the nasty Amsterdam that the stag parties head straight for and stay with. We tried to stick to the quiet parts of the city; we’re quiet people. Even heading out away from the centre, though, we couldn’t help noticing more of the glass-door brothels: on the edge of the Pijp district, for example, overlooking the Boerenwetering canal. You can spot them from a distance, by the distinctive pink strip-light over each door. It seemed to be the largest we’d noticed in the city to date, and we had to turn ourselves away.

You could easily accuse me of being dismissive over this, I guess, or of brushing over these Empowered Women’s right to sell their bodies and their sexuality to anyone they choose to. And I admit: I have never met any Amsterdam prostitutes, still less, to the best of my knowledge, talked to any. I have no idea what their stories are, where they came from and why they are behind their little glass door. Why shouldn’t men be able to buy sex in exactly the same way they buy a chicken burger? What harm is being done? And it’s true that the lot of an Amsterdam prosititute is, in most cases, nowhere as near as it is in those parts of Britain where prostitutes are regularly murdered by serial killers the police are usually uninterested in catching. But why should I not find it distasteful and horrific, that these women are being advertised and commoditised like this? How many end up chewed up like food? It’s a continuum, you could say: at one end there’s don’t touch performance, strippers and burlesquers showing their bodies off; in the middle you have the dominatrixes; next to them, the prostitutes. If burlesque dancers and dominatrixes are intelligent, modern, empowered and independent women using their own confidence to turn the system upside down and take advantage of the patriarchy, why doesn’t that apply to prostitutes too? To which I reply: show me a burlesque audience there to admire a woman’s empowerment and not her tits. Show me a dominatrix who dresses for herself and not for her customers. Tell me that putting a person on display behind a glass door isn’t degrading and inhumane.

I’ve read accusations charging the Dutch, or the Amsterdammers at any rate, with hypocrisy for features like the wind indicator atop Central Station. Features like tne Nieuwmarkt metro station, whose architecture commemorates the riotous protests against its own construction. But would these accusers prefer it if history and controversy was completely forgotten? It strikes me more to be a manifestation of, what we could call if we were to descend into national stereotyping, the traditional Dutch compromise. The habit which supposedly arises from the need of the medieval Dutch to agree quickly on how to fund and build each dyke, before the waters submerged them. We must build the railway across the harbour-mouth, but the railway we build will hark back to our great seafaring days. We must knock down the neighbourhood to build this metro, but we will memorialise it when we design the station. There could, you could argue, be a similar degree of pragmatism at work in the open brothels of Amsterdam. No nation on Earth, after all, has been able to ban prostitution; so put it out in the open where it can be seen. Maybe the problem I have, the revulsion I felt, is not with the brothels themselves as much as the men who flock from around the world to use them.

On a different day, as we again found ourselves walking through Stationsplein towards the city, some passing tourists with Geordie accents asked us if we knew the time. They were I assume fresh off the train from Schipol, and were astounded to discover that we, the first people they’d spoken to in the city, spoke English. I couldn’t help thinking, they should have been more surprised if we hadn’t understood them. Shortly after we came home, I received an email, one of the standard “would you like to apply for this job?” fishing emails that recruitment consultants send out in their thousands every day. This one, though, was for a job back in Amsterdam, and it promised hard that I wouldn’t need to speak a single word of Dutch. It was sorely tempting. Find ourselves a flat in a quiet part of North Amsterdam and catch the ferry to work every day. Follow all the old Dutch customs, like eating waffles and paying in cash at the supermarket. But would I really not need a single word of the language? Tempting as it was, I didn’t follow it up. Maybe nowadays, after a little reflection, I would do. Maybe I could turn a blind eye to all the tourists drawn like magnets to the Oude Zijde, and teach my children that the women displaying their bodies have nothing, but the men drawn towards them, have everything, to be ashamed of.

In case you were wondering, I did, whilst we were in Amsterdam, try out some fried chicken in a bun from a little perspex box in the subway beneath Central Station. It wasn’t the best street food I’ve ever eaten - that has to be an angelic and heavensent hot dog in Copenhagen - but it wasn’t bad either. It had all the magic ingredients that the best Western street food should always have: hot, slightly salty, slightly greasy, a deep-seated feeling of pleasurable guilt, and instant satisfaction followed ten minutes later by the knowledge that you need another. I did not, in case you were wondering where this was leading, try out any of the other clear doors. I’m not sure I will ever be comfortable that they exist, and I can’t entirely put my finger on why. I could quite happily spend all day riding a ferryboat back and forth on the IJ, watching the boats and warehouses zip past as we headed towards the glittering recumbent shell of Central Station, so long as I could block the drunken hordes from my mind. Instead, hold a wet finger in the air, feel the wind blowing across the flat, flat lands of Holland and realise what it means for fishermen in the middle of the IJsselmeer or tall ships out in the wild open sea beyond the dune-belt. I could live here, if I ever learned to compromise.

Keyword noise: holiday, travel, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nederland, Holland, Noord Holland.

Writing this post from the other week, with its long rant about the poor quality of the worldbuilding in BBC3’s Being Human, has made me think more in general about the quality of writing, and the quality of my own writing. After all, am I in a position to excoriate other people’s ability to write and worldbuild, when I don’t exactly have much to demonstrate on my own behalf there?

It set my brain off on a tangent, though. Not so much about worldbuilding, but about the authorial voice. Because that’s something I used to worry about, years back: I would never be any good at writing because I didn’t have my own voice. If you read any of my prose, there would be nothing at all distinctive about it. Whether that was true back then, back when I used to worry about such things, I don’t know, and I have no real desire to go back and read anything that old. It probably isn’t true any more, though. Certainly, one of the things K likes about my blog posts is that, she says, in my writing I sound just as I do when I speak.

I’ve been a reader since I was small: I’ve been able to read since before memory, since before virtually all of my memories, so I have no conception of what it feels like to see words and not understand them. Ever since I started reading for myself, though, I’ve been a silent reader, a very quick reader, and I also tend to be a very poor reader. Because I’m a quick reader I skim too much. I miss things. I miss things out, have to go back, don’t notice Important Plot Points and don’t take in any of the craft involved in the work. However, I think I’ve found a solution to this. I’ve started reading things aloud, and it has turned around the way I look at writing.

What started all this was: I’d just started reading a book I’ve had sitting around unread for a couple of years almost, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.^* Only on the second or third chapter, we had to take a plane journey, and K didn’t have anything interesting herself to read. “Read to me?” she asked. So, since, I’ve been reading a passage of Wolf Hall to her in bed every evening. It’s been a couple of months now; reading aloud is much slower than reading silently, and we’re not awake enough for a chapter^** every single night. In doing it, I’ve learned a lot about syntax, prosody, and prosody’s representation. Hilary Mantel has been one of my favourite novelists for many years now,^*** and Wolf Hall, award-winning and all, is very readable, but it’s not always the easiest novel to read aloud. Its long sentences are just slightly too long for comfort in the voice: lists of things, and there are many lists of things, always have one term too many to easily read aloud. Her authorial voice is very readable, very concise and very accessible, but her sentences are sometimes a little too long to know automatically where the stresses are intended to fall. Which isn’t to deny that it is, absolutely, an excellent novel; it just isn’t perfect for me to read aloud, at least not without a rehearsal.

Wolf Hall’s sequel will be coming out before too long, and no doubt will be something I will read to K at some point. In the meantime, we are assembling a list of books to be read: The Third Policeman after last week’s opera;^**** some Peter Ackroyd, such as Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem; maybe Lanark, although that will be a mammoth adventure. In the meantime, I am taking a lot from reading aloud. It makes me confident that I do have a voice when I write, a voice I can manipulate if I want to. It makes me confident, too, that I have a readable voice, a voice that might be publishable. Most importantly, it has helped an awful lot to reconnect the craft of writing with the act of reading. The two, obviously, are very closely linked; but I think I’d forgotten just how closely linked they are. I think I’d forgotten to write for the reader.

* I can tell you where I started reading it, too: waiting for a train in Frankfurt an der Oder.

** Strictly speaking, it would be very hard to read a chapter every night, because Wolf Hall has very uneven chapter lengths. Some are getting on for a hundred pages of the book; others are no more than two or three.

*** At root, her earlier historical novel about the lives of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins is one of the things to blame for the time I got myself on the telly the other year.

**** Tricky, with all its footnotes.

Keyword noise: books, Hilary Mantel, literature, novels, reading, reading aloud, Wolf Hall, writing, Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, Alasdair Gray, Lanark, Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem.

Today, we were up in Worcestershire; and as we drove home down the dark motorway, we watched rockets flying up into the sky, from all the towns and villages along the way. Strensham, Tewkesbury; Gloucester and Stonehouse.

Back at Symbolic Towers, we have a tiny little pocket garden, almost all of it rather flammable. Now, if you read the instructions on a box of fireworks, you’re supposed to leave more space between firework and buildings, firework and burnables, firework and yourself, than we ever have any chance of having behind our house.^*

Despite that, when we got home, we went through to the back of the house and stood out in the garden, the air damp and smoky, and listened to the sound of Bonfire Night. Living in a city, the dark evening was a constant bubble of crackles and bangs, deep bass thumps and high-pitched, tense rattles. Every now and then the sky would flash; every now and then there would be a rocket close enough to see. We stood out, until it got too cold, stood still, sniffed the burning in the air and listened to the noises of the fireworks. The noises of winter starting.

* Of course, the same applies to the vast majority of gardens, because you’re supposed to leave a huge amount of space for safety. But that doesn’t really alter the fact that, if we were to try setting off a rocket from our little patch of land, we – and the garden – would end up rather singed.

Keyword noise: autumn, bonfire, bonfire night, Bristol, fireworks, rockets, seasons, smell, sound, winter.

Well, hello again. Apparently, it’s summer.

Regularly, I do get urges to come back to the Admin Interface and write a bit more prose-doodling for this website. There are so many other things to do that keep me occupied, though. Now it’s summertime, the garden at Symbolic Towers is lush and green, and instead of getting on with things indoors you can regularly find me outside, hiding behind the Bee House,* pottering around the garden, deadheading the marigolds and worrying about the effect of leafhoppers on the potato harvest. As the gardens at Symbolic Towers are barely the size of a damselfly’s bandana, though, I am usually easy to spot.

Checking back, I’ve just realised that the entries on the main page still include things I wrote over a year ago now – for example, you can still see the ice monster we defeated when we moved house, down below this one. It’s not very good performance, for a blog that was originally started with the aim of posting every weekday. There are, however, more things in my head that I do plan to write about, some time over the next few months. Maybe I’ll actually manage them at some point. If nothing else, I should start posting pictures of the verdant garden, before it stops being verdant and crumbles back into autumn mulch. The pea plants are already starting to look a bit mildewed.

Lots has been in the news in the past few months about exams: about exam boards getting the questions wrong, about teenagers staring down baffled at unanswerable questions, and then about kids and parents complaining that they don’t want to be marked down for the question-setters’ mistakes. I have to say, my first thought was: surely, this is a learning experience? One of the first tips I was taught at school was: exam questions, numerically-based ones, are usually carefully worked out so that you’ll get nice neat answers at the end. The real world, of course, doesn’t work like that. When you’ve left school, you’ll find out that real world questions don’t have nice neat answers, and that often people will ask you things that are unanswerable, or insoluble with the information you have. Discovering that fact in the middle of an exam is probably a very good place to learn it. Possibly, this is why I should never become a teacher.

For now, that will do for a blog post. I will come back and try to write more in a few days; get my writing muscles unstiffened and flexible again. Because, as anybody who’s ever tried it knows, the more you write the more you want to write.

* Not one of those big boxes you use to house domesticated, sociable bees in the hope you can steal their honey, but a boarding-house for antisocial solitary bees. None have, as yet, taken up residence, but neverless I always check.

Keyword noise: bees, exams, gardening, insects, news.

Saturday night: to Bristol Central Library, for a gig by The Wraiths, a local band whose “thing” is setting classic poems to music. We’d seen them twice before, at various events,^* but last night was the first time we’d seen them performing as a full band.

You might think that a library – the Reference Library Reading Room, in fact – is a slightly odd place to hold a gig. Unusual, I have to admit; Lancaster Library is a regular indie venue, but this was only Bristol Library’s second public concert. The tickets impressed me, for a start: the organisers were clearly trying to set the theme.

The library reading room is an amazing space. Part of an early building by Charles Holden, the architect of various iconic London buildings,^** it has a high, vaulted ceiling wtih two gallery levels. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought to bring a camera along; the clatter of a camera shutter can sometimes be a little unwelcome at quiet, intimate gigs. I’ll have to come back on an evening sometime, when the library is open for normal business, and see if they’ll let me take some photos of the interior. It is, allegedly, haunted; the band tried to persuade the gig’s librarian organiser to give us a talk on the various ghosts that live in the building, but sadly it never occurred.

The gig itself can’t really be disassociated, in my head, from the venue. The overall effect was magical, the music filling the vault, although if anything they should have turned the volume up slightly. Although there wasn’t any support, the band played a very full set, two halves and an interval, and the library reference desk had been turned into a cafe-bar for the night. As I said above, we’d seen them twice already, but this gig, with a fuller band, was by far the best; maybe because this time, they were the headline act. They persuaded us to buy their CD,^*** and happily encore’d away, slightly tentatively, at the end.

All in all, a great gig, and the second good gig I’ve been to at the library. I’m hoping now that the library sees fit to extend this event into a whole series of concerts: they have a wonderful room, after all, and it makes the music shine.

* and I have a photo of the first time we saw them performing.

** including Senate House, 55 Broadway, and various other Underground Group/London Transport Art Deco premises. At the time Bristol Central Library was built, of course, Art Deco had not yet been thought of, so it’s in more of an Edwardian Classical style.

*** or, rather, the CD of theirs that we didn’t already have.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Bristol Central Library, folk, folk music, gig, libraries, live music, music, poetry, The Wraiths.

Overheard: a youngish woman walking down Bedminster Parade, phone in hand:

“I think I’m in Bedminster, Mum, but I don’t know where Bedminster is…”

Keyword noise: Bedminster, Bristol, overheard.

I’m inviting a few friends round one night. We’ll have a few drinks, a bit of a laugh, and I’ll show them a pile of stuff that I’m trying to sell. Hopefully, they’ll buy some, and I’ll make a tidy profit.

NB: the above paragraph is not actually true. I am not going to do this, and I don’t have anything to sell.^* As a scenario, though, it’s a pretty common one. People all over the place are handing out Avon catalogues, Christmas hamper brochures, and organising parties for Foreverware storage; or cheap-looking expensively-priced nylon lingerie and sex toys. It makes me wonder: do some people really value money that much over friendship, that they see their friends as a source of income?

On the face of it, evidently so. I hope that maybe I’m just being pessimistic in my analysis. Maybe the people organising these events really do mostly believe that they’re doing their friends a favour, giving them the opportunity to buy Impressive Things at almost-bargain prices; and the money they make back for themselves doesn’t really make any difference to them. Certainly, in the true “multi-level marketing” organisations that are scarcely different to pyramid schemes, most of the bottom-rung salesforce are unlikely to come out of it in profit. On the other hand: I have known people, setting up these events, to excitedly say: “and it means that I can buy them for myself, cheap!” It makes me slightly uncomfortable, seeing people trying to use their friends in this way: it’s more than a little manipulative.

In one way, this is the root of the current fashionable trends in marketing: using the social network to save the marketeers the hard work. Viral marketing, for example, where you, J. Random Netuser, sends the latest cool advert you’ve seen on to all your friends: you receive a frisson of group-bonding pleasure in return for doing an ad agency’s work for free, just as if you’d invited them all round to your house to sell them the product. Facebook games are also similar: little money-churning devices that you, game player, spread awareness of among your social network. Maybe it’s going to become a long-term trend: I suspect the reason it’s so popular is that, after all, it’s cheap; or, at least, the costs are passed on to other people and other companies. It’s slightly different, too, to selling things directly to your friends through a catalogue or at a party: if you’re playing Farmville, your Facebook friends might have to put up with being told how your farm’s doing every few hours, but that’s as far as it goes. You’re not expected to buy things, yourself, until after you’ve been sucked in. You’re not expected to make your friends money, directly.

Maybe that’s the reason I feel so uncomfortable about this technique of monetising friendship: it is about directly turning your social relationships into monetary ones. It probably works best in social networks with a clear or semi-open hierarchy, because it’s potential very much about reinforcing that social hierarchy with money. I know such hierarchical social networks exist — I see them everywhere — but I do tend to feel that the world would be a nicer place if they didn’t.

* Although, if I was going to do that, I suppose we could always knock up some “I visited Symbolic Towers and all I could buy was this beautiful high-quality clothing product” t-shirts.

Keyword noise: Ann Summers, friendship, multi-level marketing, social networking, socialising, Tupperware.

When we first moved to Bristol, we moved into an unfurnished flat that came supplied with white goods, partly because it made life much easier for us when moving. No worries about having to find a cooker, a washing machine or a fridge: but the downside was, we didn’t get to choose them.

When we moved in, the fridge was nice and clean and empty.

A few days later, though, we noticed that a bit of frost had started to build up on the back of the fridge. No problem, we thought. When we get chance, we’ll defrost it; it’s normal, after all, for fridges to get a bit of frost at the back.

A few weeks later, we noticed that a can of Kopparberg at the back of the fridge was looking rather iced-up too. We turned the fridge down (or is it up?) to its warmest setting, to give the ice a chance to melt away a bit. The fridge was still perfectly cold enough to keep everything, even on that setting. The Kopparberg, though, stayed icy. Indeed, it almost seemed as if the ice was still growing.

A few months later, I remembered I had some Kopparberg in the fridge. Except … it didn’t seem to be there any more. And there was, now, quite a lot of ice at the back. It seemed to have a shadow in it at one end.

Twenty-one months or so after we first switched the fridge on, we suddenly realised we were about to move out. So, we’d better switch the fridge off now, and maybe, just maybe, we might have a chance of defrosting it. We stuffed the bottom of the fridge with towels, turned the power off, and waited. Slowly, ever so slowly, the ice started to drip. The can of Kopparberg started to reappear; when I prised it out of its icy prison, and shook the tin, the ice inside it klunked against the edges. After about twelve hours of melting, I gave the block of ice a jolt. The whole thing, along with one of the fridge shelves, came free. I moved it to the sink.

We hunted down a tape measure, and K measured it whilst I took photos:

That’s about 4 inches deep, 14 wide and 11 tall. It’s not a cube, of course; on the other hand, it had already lost several inches in size. Overall, I think we must have had at least 6 or 7 litres of water stuck to the back of our fridge.

Moving to somewhere new, we had to buy ourselves a fridge, along with all the other kitchen equipment. As soon as we went shopping for one, we made a bee-line straight in the direction of the frost-free refrigeration section. I think, from the pictures, you can probably see why.

Keyword noise: fridge, frost free, frozen, ice, refrigeration.