Symbolic Forest

I like bank holidays and long weekends. I especially like pairs of bank holidays, and extra-long weekends. Today really felt like a Friday at the office, particularly as The Secretary^* was handing out buttered hot cross buns (albeit cold).

Getting home, The Mother had been baking ready for breakfast tomorrow, so the house smelled of warm cinnamon. Hot cross buns for breakfast: the one thing Christianity really has going for it.

* no, she is nothing like the film

Keyword noise: baking, Easter, food, holiday, hot cross buns, long weekend.

My rather cruel jibe at Fife the other day only seems to have invited a single complaint, from Greig, who pointed out that Fife was the birthplace of Sir Sandford Fleming. I’d never heard of Sir Sandford Fleming myself; but it turns out that he was rather important, particularly in Canada. He invented time zones, designed the first Canadian stamp, and surveyed the route of the first trans-Canadian railway line; more importantly, he was apparently the inventor of the in-line roller skate.

Now, I’m not being deliberately cruel to Fife again here; but it made me think: just how many famous people were born there but had to emigrate to do Great Things? Sir Sandford, clearly; Andrew Carnegie is another obvious one. Adam Smith is the exception – a lot of The Wealth Of Nations was written in Kirkcaldy. If you widen it to the rest of Scotland, you could add Thomas Carlyle,^* Daniel Wilson,^** and probably many more. Does it outnumber the people who stayed behind, though? No doubt this is something I’m going to be proved very wrong about.

My passport renewal application was sent off the other day – and, no, you’re not getting to see the photo. My current plan is for a trip around Bavaria and Austria, by train – I could apparently get the train from here to Munich in a single day without too much trouble. Big Dave thinks I’m mad.

More on bird flu: it’s all a bit over-hyped, isn’t it? The big news story this evening seemed to be: people are still buying chicken. The ever-helpful BBC has come up with a page of Useful Information, answering the questions on everyone’s lips. “Will my cat have to be put down?” “If I find a dead duck, who do I call?” DUCKBUSTERS, naturally.^***

In other news, I’ve found that people still do suffer from curvature of the spine, after all. Clearly, this week was my week for insulting random strangers. Roll on Monday!

* Moving to Chelsea counts as emigration if you ask me.

** The famous Scottish-Canadian archaeologist, not the other one.

*** “Symbolic Forest – for the freshest 20-year-old memes around!”

Keyword noise: Adam Smith, Andrew Carnegie, bird flu, Canada, curvature of the spine, Fife, flu, holiday, in-line skates, kyphosis, passport, philately, roller skates, Sandford Fleming, scoliosis, Scotland, stamps.

Driving to work this morning: the sun was warm, and the sky blue. Leaving the office at lunch time: the car was hot, and I zoomed along with the windows down.^* “Lovely,” I thought, “why not go to the beach?”

So, I popped down to the seafront, and sat down on the beach with my sandwiches.

And, as soon as I did, the heavens opened. It pissed down.

It’s not quite summer yet.

* and with a Herman Düne album on the stereo.

Keyword noise: beach, lunch, rain, sea, seaside, summer, weather.

Breaking news report: a bird has died of H5 bird flu, in Fife. The authorities are concerned, and have sealed off the area, for fear that it might spread to civilisation.

(I haven’t been there for about five years, I have to admit. Apparently it’s quite nice now – they even have electricity!)

Keyword noise: bird flu, cruel jokes, Fife, flu, news.

Yesterday, I was idly wondering: does anybody suffer from “curvature of the spine” any more? Or was it just one of those Victorian diseases which you just don’t see nowadays?

You see, I remember reading, years and years ago, that Catherine Mumford, wife of anti-poverty campaigner and Salvation Army founder William Booth, suffered from it badly when she was a teenager. So much so, she was forced to spend a few years lying face-down in bed reading the Bible and writing letters about the evils of booze.^* Today, though, you don’t hear about it very often. Does it still exist?

I spent a while thinking about it yesterday, googling up things like kyphosis and scoliosis. It’s still around, then – but is it common? Do people still get problems like that, or was it just a result of bad nutrition and poor mattresses?

And then, this morning, I woke up in rather severe pain. I couldn’t move, because my back was in agony. It’s stayed rather painful all day, albeit not as bad as it was when I awoke. Clearly, my spine has a twisted sense of humour.

* Thinking about it, though, her life probably wouldn’t have been much different if she had been allowed to leave her bed. The entertainment options for teenage girls in 1840s Lincolnshire were rather limited, and she was rabidly religious from an early age.

Keyword noise: Catherine Booth, Catherine Mumford, curvature of the spine, irony, kyphosis, Salvation Army, scoliosis, William Booth.

As it’s April 1st, here is a post containing outright lies. Roughly half of the following statements^* are currently true. Others are completely made up. Guess which are which.

I know it’s already the afternoon, and by tradition April Fools should only be done in the morning. Nevertheless, I don’t care.

1. I have never driven a train.

2. I have had sex with everyone I’ve ever kissed, apart from relatives.

3. Recurring blog character Big Dave doesn’t actually exist – if I’ve done something I want to blog about, but don’t want to admit to it myself, I write a disguised version, gender-swap it as required, and attribute it to “him”.

4. This website is named after a real piece of woodland called “Symbolic Plantation”, a few miles from my house.

5. I have never worked in any field that I actually have qualifications in.

6. I was born in the Far East.

Go on, tell me which ones you think are lies.

* And all of the footnotes.

Keyword noise: April Fools Day, falsehoods, lies, misleading, truth.

On top of the timezone confusion, work is getting a little pressured this week. I’ve been driving about between branches carrying equipment backwards and forwards, because if you’ve got a large amount of data in the wrong place, the quickest way to sort things out is still to put your computer in the boot of your car and drive it down to Another Part Of The Forest’s branch office. Squeezing it down an internet pipeline takes all day; driving to the other side of the county only takes an hour.^*

The best part of that, of course, is that an hour of driving down the motorway is an hour of not having to answer the phone to be given more work.

* Well, the other middle of the county, at any rate.

Keyword noise: busy, commuting, data transfer, driving, Sneakernet, travel.

The changing of the clocks has left me feeling a little tired and disorientated. It’s not surprising that there are more car accidents in this week, as people adjust to the shift.

Driving home just now,^* in the dark and heavy blattering rain, I wanted to be warm and cosied up in bed. Driving in the rain at night always makes me wonder what it must have been like to live before electric heating and lights. It also makes me think of the Lyke Wake Dirge – for no apparent reason, because there’s nothing to connect the Dirge with bad weather. It’s a very evocative text, though.

This aye night, this aye night,
Every night and all,
Fire and fleet and candle-light
And Christ take up thy soul

* Not from work – it’s gone 10pm. I don’t work that late.

Keyword noise: British Summer Time, darkness, daylight savings time, dirge, funerals, Lyke Wake Dirge, rain, seasons, weather.

Today must have been the first day of summer.

I’m not saying that because the clocks change tonight,^* or because The Parents have gone on holiday, or for some other obscure astronomical reason. Today was the first day that really felt like summer. It’s not just about being warm, or sunny, but there’s something in the air. I wanted to go out into the garden and lie back in a deckchair sipping a gin and tonic. Of course, as I don’t have a deckchair, and couldn’t be bothered to nip down to the local branch of Deckchair World,^** I didn’t. And now it’s pouring down again. That’s this year’s summer gone, then.

* they do, don’t they?

** “Do you need more deckchairs in your life? Come straight down to Deckchair World – we’ve got the deckchair to suit you! Green stripes! Red stripes! Blue stripes! Special offers galore – buy two deckchairs, get one free! Come down and see us – branches in Scunthorpe, Withernsea, Beverley, Barrow and Goole.” I’ve started listening to local radio a lot more recently, and it probably shows.

Keyword noise: commercial radio, advertising, deckchairs, garden, gin, radio, seasons, summer, weather.

Well, I was glad Gordon Brown did take my hints on a couple of things.^* I’m just disappointed that he didn’t single out blue cars for rebates.

Current small reasons to feel pleased with myself: I’ve managed to completely avoid watching anything at all to do with the Commonwealth Games, even though one of the medal-winners is a teacher at my old school. Hopefully I’ll manage to keep avoiding it until all the fuss is over again.

Current small reasons to get pissed off: the computer keeps crashing, usually at the most inappropriate moments. I know what the problem is: a very obscure bug in the disk controller driver which very few people have come across, and nobody seems to know the cause of.^** Bah.

On the other hand, I do have a large box of biscuits on my desk at the moment. But not for long, I suspect. Hurrah!

* although, to be fair, everyone else in the country had already vaguely guessed the road tax changes.

*** it only comes up if you have a Promise SATA disk controller, a Maxtor SATA disk, and are running one of some Linux 2.6 subversions. But not all – the problem apparently disappeared in one revision of the driver, only to come back in the next.

Keyword noise: biscuits, budget, Commonwealth Games, computing, crash, economics, Gordon Brown, Linux.