Symbolic Forest

The Mother has discovered The Internet. Specifically, she has discovered a plethora of genealogy websites, and is using them to try to track down our family tree.

Now, her family is fairly easy to trace back into the 19th century. They had a family bible, kept newspaper clippings and wedding invitations, and are nice, simple, and straightforward to track. My Dad’s family, on the other hand, is another matter.

Dad doesn’t know anything at all about his family tree, beyond his parents, sisters, and the names of a few more distant relatives. Questions to my grandmother, before her death, always went unanswered. However, my aunt has kept plenty of details about our family, and does know a lot more about how they’re all related. As we were visiting her anyway, The Mother asked her if she could get out her family births book so The Mother could copy it all down. And we quickly found out just how complex and baroque my father’s family really was.

For one thing, their surnames are all rather confusing. Once you go back beyond the current generations, very few people in our family bothered to get married. This was, it turns out, one of the reasons why my grandmother always refused to answer queries about family history. It’s very unclear whether her parents ever did marry – there’s no record of it, and my great-grandmother kept paperwork in both surnames until her death – but, my aunt told us, anyone who asked my gran directly about this would usually get punched. Some of my gran’s brothers and sisters shared her surname; but some of them took their mother’s name. My great-grandfather was apparently in the Cavalry – “there’s a photo of him in uniform, on a horse” – in India, in the 1920s, but nobody knows any other details about him.

My grandfather’s family is just as confusing. They, also, rarely bothered to marry. When they did, it often made things worse. One of my grandfather’s close relatives married a man called Frank. Her sister then married Frank’s son – I’m not even sure how you draw that on a family tree. Their son, incidentally, was the mayor of Southampton a few years ago. Having a grandfather who is also your uncle, in an entirely legal way I should add, clearly doesn’t stop you entering politics.

The Mother, being upright, respectable, churchgoing, and definitely no-sex-before-marriage, was rather shocked at all this. She is one of those people who sees The Past as a golden age of morality, when things were done properly and you didn’t get all these single mothers all over the place; so she was rather surprised to see that before her own generation, a lot of my ancestors just didn’t think that way. Myself, I’ve always had a suspicion that Victorian morals are both fairly modern and a middle-class innovation, so I was rather pleased to find all this out. Even though it might make genealogists blanche at the thought of trying to draw the tree out, I rather like my ancestors now.

Update, September 24^th 2005: we’ve since discovered that my gran’s parents never were married, because my great-grandfather already had a wife, who he never bothered to divorce.

Keyword noise: family secrets, genealogy, history, morality, The Parents, The Mother, social history.

This morning I awoke like any other morning: with The Cat sitting on top of me and doing cupboard-love purring as loud as he possibly could. “Aren’t you a nice cat!” I said, sleepily, tickling him under the chin. “Ooh, you are furry!”* Eventually, I dragged myself out of bed to go downstairs and give him some breakfast. It was only then that I realised that today is September 1st, and my month is therefore doomed.

You see, I keep believing that it’s vital that the first thing you say every month is “White rabbits!” and if you don’t, you’ll have a month of bad luck. Or maybe you’ll just miss out on a month of good luck; I’m not entirely sure. It’s hardly something you can do meaningful experiments on, given that most months – like today – I forget about it anyway.

Last month, I did remember about it. I cheated slightly: I pegged a reminder note to my dressing gown, and managed not to mumble anything to the cat. Last month, I guess, I did have a rather nice month, so maybe it does work after all. Luck is where you find it, though. I have no idea what will happen to me a month from now; maybe, though, when October 1st comes around I’ll remember to look back and see if this month was lucky or not.

* Yes, I regress to twee baby-talk when I’m near cats. Shoot me now, please.

Keyword noise: The Cat, superstition, white rabbits.

Today’s Top News Story: the government is planning to ban extreme pornography.

Now, as this idea goes: where’s the downside? It’s going to be a vote-winner, and the Opposition are bound to take the “well, we would have done this years ago!” line. But it does open up a rather nasty can of worms which. Being your stereotypical Woolly-Minded Liberal, even to the extent that I actually read The Guardian regularly and occasionally even agree with parts, I have no idea what to do about it. The question is: what is porn? And more importantly, what is extreme?

There’s no doubt that an awful lot of the stuff out there on the internet is only going to be attractive to a tiny minority of people. If you think you’re the only person out there with your particular fetish, then you’re wrong: someone somewhere will already have created a website devoted to it. The problem with that, of course, is that some people’s fetishes really are not things that anyone else is going to approve of. Now, I personally have no problem with what anybody wants to do in private, but the keyword there is consensuality. Where fetishes involve doing things without the other person’s consent, it’s not acceptable to me.

The can of worms comes into it, though, when you consider that the proposed law would outlaw pornography that shows illegal acts. In British law, the legality of a lot of S&M sex is a very grey area. Even if you want your partner to do certain things to you, it might not be legal.^* The second can of worms is that, looking at downloaded graphics, it can be impossible to tell if consent was given at the time. Indeed, some writers and campaigners would claim that no porn is consensual at all, because of the cultural context surrounding it.

There’s a lot of stuff out there, and a lot of it makes me sick to the stomach. But, even so, I’m fully expecting that this law – and it will become law – will go too far, and that we will see people being prosecuted for downloading images that, to my mind, are entirely harmless.

* The most famous legal case in BDSM circles is the Spanner Trial, in which a group of gay men were convicted and imprisoned for actual bodily harm even though the “victims” had consented; it is not the only one, though.

Keyword noise: bdsm, consensuality, Jane Longhurst, pornography, S&M, Spanner.

It’s Friday lunchtime. I’ve popped into town just to get out of the office for an hour, and now it’s time to head back to work. Into the car, and I’m gently drifting through the car park towards the exit with an Add N To X album playing loudly on the stereo, when…

Something is moving too close to me, but before I can respond – BANG!

A big, dark car has driven right into the side of me. I jump out of the car in a great panic, forgetting to turn off the engine or even try to take the key out.

I had absolutely no idea what to do. I’ve been in crashes before, but only ever as a passenger. This was the first time that anything bad had happened to my own car. I was shaky, jittery, shocked and adrenalin-flooded. No idea what I should be doing, other than taking down the other driver’s name and address. Looking back, though, luck was on my side. I’m not hurt, and the shock went away after a few hours. The car still works. I can still drive it, even if it does have a big, nasty dent in the side. If I’d been hit a foot further forward, the door would probably be unusable; and I’d have possibly been hit too. If it was a foot further back, the back axle might well have been wrecked. As it is, though, I just have a big dent until the garage can manage to get hold of some replacement panelling.

Keyword noise: accident, cars, crash, driving.

This post is the first post. The first real post on SymbolicForest.com

At some point, I might put some older things in the archive, things I’ve written at some point in the past. They’re all just imports, though. Things that I couldn’t bear to throw away.

This is the real start.

Keyword noise: beginning.

A few days ago, I talked about SOS Messages, as broadcast on Radio 4.

So, I wrote to the BBC. “When did you last broadcast one?” I said. “Would you still broadcast one if necessary?”

And, apparently, they would do. If the right people asked, they would put out an SOS message before the 7am news and before the 6pm news. Presumably, it’s just that nobody has asked recently.

They were too busy to find out when the last SOS message was broadcast. Which is understandable; I guess it’s not really the sort of thing that gets archived. In future, I’ll set my alarm clock five minutes early, so if one gets sent again I’ll hear it.

Update, 14^th October 2022: The BBC did finally stop issuing SOS Messages on Radio 4, evidently a few years after I wrote to them, but later they seemed rather unsure when the service officially stopped.

Keyword noise: BBC, Radio 4.

Monday morning, back in the office, and nothing seems to have gone wrong over the weekend! Everything is still working!

That’s the second week in a row that nothing has broken or crashed whilst I’ve been away. It’s almost like there’s a pattern emerging. Touch wood, of course.

Keyword noise: work.

Of course, in the end we didn’t discuss Festival stuff at all, just drank ate and gossipped. After that, we wandered round the New Town looking for ideal places for our next Picnic (next Saturday), and looking in people’s front windows.

Notes on Thai food: if you see small purple chili-shaped things, that is what they are. Do not chew them, or your mouth will be irradiated.

As we walked around the New Town in the dusk, it started to rain. That part of the city in the rain always makes me think of Clientele songs, so as we walked I was humming softly to myself. The rain got heavier, fluming down the gutters of the steeper streets. At the corner of Queen Street and Dublin Street, the gutters were overflowing and pouring over the pavement and downhill in a rippled sheet.

We popped into a late-opening bookshop to think up cunning incentives to get people to come to the picnic. We went to a bar and dripped on the floor. Everyone else looked too stylish for me to feel comfortable in my sensible outdoor raincoat.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, The Clientele, rain, weather.

So tonight, I’m off out for a meal with people (woo!) and we’re going to talk about what we want to go and see at the various Edinburgh Festivals. Because they’re almost here already.

I noticed that Richard Bloomfield^* has already started to put up on his site a list of the best stuff to go and see. I never have a clue what I want to see at the Festival, which is why I usually end up staying in and grumbling about the tourists getting in my way all the time. I’m tempted to make my own list, of events I might like, and tell you that they’re all rubbish. “Don’t go and see The Show That Caitlin Really Wants To See Show, it’s awful. You’d have more fun if you poured buckets of cold penguin spit over yourself.” That way, the word gets around, and I get to sit on my own watching the show and laughing evilly at my cunning plan. Afterwards, I get the bonus of telling everyone: “it’s really good, where were you?” and being all smug when it becomes a cult West End hit or whatever.

OK, I’m not really that evil. Laziness is more my thing; not bothering to go. Do penguins spit, anyway?

* Update, October 14th 2022: The link this originally went to is now very, very dead; and although there are other bloggers called Richard Bloomfield on the internet, I’m not 100% which is the former Edinburgh one.

Keyword noise: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Back at work again today. All the machines seem to be still ticking over nicely, which is quite a surprise. I’m not sure whether being back is a good thing or a bad thing; the weekend off ended up being rather traumatic.

Yesterday, I went to the New Acquisitions exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Most of it was rather good, but one installation was rather frightening. A video-installation piece called Breathing Space—I can’t remember the artist’s name—which showed two people laid down with their heads inside plastic bags, the noise of their breathing amplified and deafening. It was horrific, like some awful slow-motioned fetish film. I couldn’t watch, and dashed outside

Well, that’s not true. First, I went to the gift shop and bought some postcards. But then I dashed outside, and breathed as deeply as I could.

When I was little, we would go away camping, and we’d always listen to the evening news on Radio 4. Before the news, they would send out SOS Messages. I’ve not heard one for years, and I keep wondering if they ever still make them. “Will Mr and Mrs John Smith of Auchtermuchty, last believed to be on a cycling tour of Brittany, please get in touch with Ward Z, Queen Margaret Hospital, Dunfermline. It is about their son John Smith Junior, who is dangerously ill.”

If they’ve gone, when was the last one made? What was it about? Who were all those people?

Update, 14^th 2022: The last questions were answered in a way, a few days later.

Keyword noise: work, art, modern art, BBC, art galleries, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.