Symbolic Forest

It’s still the Yuletide season, although we’re now very much into the time-between-the-years when everybody is grazing on snacks and leftovers, has battened down the hatches against the storms, and has completely forgotten what day of the week it is.^*

As it is still Yuletide, though, I thought I’d post a couple of the seasonal Lego videos I put up on my YouTube channel last week, before the holiday season had really got under way. Both of them are Lego build videos, for some seasonal sets that I picked up earlier in the month.

Firstly, a “Winter Holiday Train”…

…and, secondly, Santa’s Workshop

In a few days they’ll be going away ready for next year, but for now, I hope you enjoy them whilst you’re still feeling a little bit seasonal!

* No, don’t ask me either.

Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, Lego.

The year turns, and the seasons change, as has happened many times before. Tomorrow evening, if you’re in Europe, is the winter solstice, and the days start turning back towards spring. Right now, as I write this, the sun is well below the horizon and the moon is a thin misty sliver behind dark and rain-filled clouds.

This site has been quiet since I posted about putting The Mother’s body in the ground, back at the start of November. Since then…there has been too much other stuff on the horizon to have space in my mind to assemble words into sentences for here, or for that matter, to add video for things to go on YouTube. When you’re dealing with a death in the family, there is an awful lot of paperwork to do, correspondence to answer, and many hours spent on hold to banks, energy companies, everyone she had to deal with. I’ve even had a few letters to answer from organisations who now suddenly think my dad has died, three years later, because The Mother never cancelled all of his direct debits.

Tomorrow, though, is Yule. The end of the year and the start of that time between this and the next, the strange unofficial intercalary weeks that we all somehow seem to obey. Everyone is wound down, yet still tense. Everyone needs the light to change and the sun to move backwards in the sky; and so we have candles and glitter and the warmth of a fire.

At the turning of the year, albeit not the Great Year, it’s worth looking back at what has and hasn’t happened. I’ve made huge strides in life, even if it feels like I haven’t. I’ve taken massive steps, even though I feel I haven’t moved for a long while now.

The other week I was at the beautician’s salon and she asked if I was seeing any difference in how I looked. “It’s hard to say,” I told her, “because I look at myself day to day so I never notice a tiny daily change. You’re more likely to notice a change than I have.” I’m sure, if I were to go back to photos of myself a year ago, I’d see a massive change, even if I feel right now that no massive changes have happened. Hopefully at the next Yule there will have been more changes, even if I feel there haven’t been still then.

I will sit back, imagine lighting a fire, imagine watching the log crackle in the flames, and drink a warming drink. Hopefully, a clear sky, and I can watch the stars spiral and turn. Here’s to one year gone, and here’s to the next just starting, the old gods bringing the sun back around to us once more.

Keyword noise: winter, solstice, winter solstice, Yuletide, Christmas, transition, The Mother.

It was a bright, crisp, autumn afternoon, the sun still high in the sky. I put my hand in front of my face to shade my eyes from it. Nobody else did, and I wondered if they thought I was saluting.

“Private committal”, I had said on the Order Of Service, so it was only a small group of us. Two of The Mother’s brothers, and their wives; the third brother was too sick to travel. A nephew, a couple of nieces, and my children standing by.

The Child Who Likes Animals was taking a great interest. “She will be buried next to Grandpa,” he kept saying, no matter how many times people explained that, no, Grandpa’s grave had been made specially deep so Grandma could be slotted neatly on top in her matching wicker coffin. When the funeral director had us, the mourners, stand well back by the hearse as the coffin was carried over the damp grass to the temporary trestles at the graveside, The Child Who Likes Animals had ignored him completely, had run circles around them and peered down into the hole. He was the only mourner who saw the bottom of the grave, before the coffin went in.

“Earth to earth,” said the priest, in her hard-edged New England accent. I don’t mean that to sound like a bad thing: she is a very good priest, but her public-speaking voice is firm, and clear, every syllable carefully divided and enunciated. “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.” She sprinkled soil from a small plastic takeaway container, finely-divided to be straightforward to sprinkle in.

“Take as long as you want,” said the funeral director, after the ceremony had finished. We stood, not really knowing exactly what to do, or how long to wait before leaving. I thanked the priest, and the director; the pallbearers, two old men and two young women, had drifted away discreetly as soon as the body had been lowered into the ground. We stood, chatted a little, said how nice the flowers were, and it was something of an anticlimax. When she had died, in a hospital room, it felt inappropriate some how to be the last one to leave the room and leave her body, on its own, slowly cooling. At the graveside, it felt the same.

This is also something of an anticlimatic way to end this post. When my father died, this blog was on pause, but I wrote about watching him die straight away. The Mother’s death was four weeks ago, and so far, I haven’t written anything about it, about what led up to it, about the sudden shift in realisation that a life will be ending, not in months or years but in a few hours or days. This, though, might be a good point to start writing about it: the end of the process, not the end of the legal and formal processes, but the end of the ritual part.

Keyword noise: death, funerals, burial, The Mother, religion, cemetery, The Children.

Sometimes, given that I often work with people who are twenty years or so younger than me, I feel old. I mean, the archives of this blog go back over twenty years now: these are serious, intelligent colleagues, and when I started writing my first blog posts they were likely still toddlers.

Sometimes, though, that has an advantage. I was thinking of this when debugging some code a colleague had written, which worked fine up to a point, but failed if its input file was more than, say, a few tens of megabytes. When the input reached that size, the whole thing crashed with OutOfMemoryException even on a computer with multiple gigabytes of memory, a hundred times more memory than the hundred-megabyte example file the client had sent.

When I was younger, you see, that would have seemed a ridiculous amount of data, unimaginable to fit in one file. Even when I had my first PC, the thought of a file too big to fit on even a superfloppy like a Zip disk was a little bit mindblowing, even though the PC seemed massive compared to what I’d experienced before.

Back when I was at school, I’d tried to teach myself how to code on an Amstrad CPC, a mid-1980s 8-bit machine with a 64k address space and a floppy disk drive of 180k capacity. It was the second-generation of 8-bit home machine really, more powerful than a C64 or a Sinclair Spectrum despite sharing the same CPU as the latter. Unlike those, it had a fully-bitmapped screen with individual pixels all fully addressable; however, that took up 16k of the 64k address space, so the actual code on it had to be pretty damn tight to fit. The programmers’ Firmware Manual—what we’d now call the API reference documentation—is of course scanned and online; one of the reasons I was never very succssful coding on the machine itself^* was that in the 1980s and 90s copies of it were almost impossible to find once Amstrad’s print run was exhausted. On the CPC, every byte you used counted; a lot of software development houses ended up cross-assembling their code purely because for a large program it was difficult to fit the source code itself onto the machine.^** That’s the background I came from, and it makes me wary still nowadays not to waste too much memory or resources. I’m the sort of developer who will pass an expected size parameter to the List<T> constructor if it’s known, to avoid unnecessary reallocations, who doesn’t add ToList() automatically by reflex to the end of every LINQ operation—which is a good idea in any case, as long as you know when you do need to.

Returning to the present: what had my team member done, then, that he was provoking a machine into running out of memory when in theory he had plenty to play with? Well, there were two problems at work.

Firstly, yes, we’re talking about someone who has never tried building code on a tiny tiny environment. The purpose of this particular code was to take an input zip file, open it, modify some of its content, recompress it, and send it off to an API elsewhere. Moreover, this had been done re-using existing internal code, some of which wanted to operate on a Stream and some of which, for whatever reason I don’t know, wanted to operate on a byte[]. We had ended up with code that received the data in a MemoryStream, unzipped it in memory, and copied the contents out into more MemoryStream objects. Each of those was being copied into a byte array which was being passed to a routine that immediately copied its input into a new MemoryStream, before deserializing…well, you get the idea. The whole thing ended up with many, many copies of the input data in memory, either in essentially its original format, or in a slightly modified form, and all of these copies were still in memory at the end of the process.

Secondly, there was another issue that was not quite so much the developer’s responsibility. This .NET code was being combined in “Portable” form, and the server was, again for reasons best known to itself, deciding that it should run it with the 32-bit runtime. Therefore, although there should have been 16Gb of memory on the server instance, we were working with a 2Gb memory ceiling.

I did dig in and rewrite as much of the code as I thought I needed to. Some of the copying could be elided altogether; and as this wasn’t a time-critical piece of code, I changed a lot of the rest to use a temporary file instead of memory. The second issue had an easy, lazy fix: compile the thing as 64-bit only, so the server would have no choice of runtime. As a result I never did get to the bottom of why it was preferring the 32-bit runtime, but I had working, shippable, code at the end of the day, and that’s what mattered here.

What I couldn’t help thinking, though, was that the rewriting might not have been needed to begin with. A young developer—who’s never worked on a genuinely small system—has spent so much time, though, never worrying about working anywhere near the boundaries of what their virtual servers can cope with, that when they do hit those boundaries, it comes as a nasty, sudden shock. They have no idea at all what to do, or even where to start: an OutOfMemoryException may as well be an act of the gods. Maybe when I’m helping train people up, I should give them all an Amstrad CPC emulator and see what the result is.

* My high point was successfully cloning Minesweeper, but with keyboard controls.

** Some software was shipped on 16k ROMs, to go along with third-party ROM socket boxes that attached to the expansion bus; this kept the assembler and editor code out of the main address space, but it could still be difficult to fit the source code and the assembler output in memory at the same time. The ROMs were scanned on boot and each declared named entrypoints which could then be accessed as BASIC commands. At least one game I can remember—The Bard’s Tale—crashed if too many ROMs were attached, because each ROM could reserve an area of RAM for its own bookkeeping, and the game found itself without enough memory available.

Keyword noise: software, software development, resources, coding.

It’s been quiet on the blog for the past month, what with one reason and another. Work has taken priority; other writing projects have taken priority; and more than anything, I didn’t realise just how long videoing my crafting exploits, recording a narration and editing the footage into something at least semi-watchable would take. I will put a link to the YouTube channel over on the sidebar at some point.

I did think it would be nice to make sure I did have at least one thing posted here in September, though, and handily The Mother said something yesterday that I thought was worth writing down. “You probably won’t believe this happened,” she said, “but when I was in town today…”

When The Mother says “you probably won’t believe this happened,” it usually means she’s about to say something that’s extremely believable—much more believable than a lot of the things she claims as straight-up fact—but also unintentionally hilarious. I pricked up my ears.

“…you see this top I’m wearing, how it’s covered in animals?” she said, veering off on a tangent. She was wearing a horrible brown sweatshirt, the colour of estuarine mud, coveerd in embroidered birds.

“There were these two women in town with a pushchair,” she said, “youngish lasses, and one of them came over to me and said: ‘scuse me, can you come over here and show my friend your top?’ So I went over, and she said to her: ‘see! Birds do have legs!’”

I almost wish I’d heard the rest of the conversation, which could be settled most quickly by finding an old woman with the right clothing, rather than, you know, an actual seagull or something. The matter, though, had been decided. The Mother can’t quite get over it.

Keyword noise: overheard, The Mother, birds.

It’s been quiet around here lately, partly because I’ve been trying to hide from the various summer heatwaves, and partly because I’ve been beavering away at something else in the background. I’ve set up a YouTube channel, and have posted my first proper video, the start of a Lego build. It’s only small, and I’m still learning, but one thing I’ve already learned is that coming up with the idea, shooting all the footage, writing the narration, recording it, editing the whole thing together…well, it’s a lot more work than just writing a blog post.

It makes me think, actually: years and years and years ago, Radio Scotland had a documentary about blogging, and included posts from me, read by an actor. I wonder if the actor who played me found it as much effort.

Incidentally, after the previous post on the Perseids, I did go outside for a while each night last weekend, lie down on the grass, and watch for meteors. There were a few, each night, streaking across the sky; and lying on my back looking up seemed to be the best, most comfortable way to get a full view of as much of the sky as I could. The grass is much nicer for lying on, at this time of year, than it will be for the big meteor showers of winter.

Keyword noise: videos, crafting, Lego, astronomy, Perseids, meteors, meteor shower.

Just as it was this time last year, it’s Astronomy News time because we’re coming into the season of the best and biggest meteor shower of the year, the Perseids, which reach their peak next weekend. This year the peak coincides roughly with the full moon, which is in the early hours of Friday morning, but hopefully the brightest meteors will still stand out—or you can always wait a few days into the following week, because the like most meteor showers you can still see plenty of meteors in the few days either side of the Perseids’ peak. Get a chair you can lean back in, sit outside on a clear night, and watch the sky until you see them flash across it.

Incidentally, Saturn is also the largest it gets in the sky at the moment, as we’re the closest that we will be to it this year. I might be tempted, if there’s a clear sky, to get the telescope out and have a look, to see how well I can spot its rings. Of course, annoyingly, it will also be close in the sky to the full moon next weekend just because that’s how the geometry of the solar system works. The moon is full when it’s directly opposite the sun from us. The outer planets are closest to us when we’re directly between them and the sun—which is the same thing. At least the moon moves relatively quickly in the sky, day to day, so even one day after the full moon it should be far enough away from Saturn to not be too much of a problem. I’ll just have to hope the skies are clear.

Keyword noise: astronomy, meteors, meteor shower, Perseids.

There are so many preserved and heritage railways in the UK—there must be something around a hundred at the moment, depending on your definition—that it’s very difficult to know all of them intimately, or even to visit them all. It doesn’t help that still, around 55 years after the “great contraction” of the railway network in a quixotic attempt to make it return to profitability, new heritage railways occasionally appear, like mushrooms out of the ground after rain.

Which is why, a few weeks ago, I decided to pop over to Another Part Of The Forest and visit one of the very newest: the Crowle Peatland Railway. It’s still only about three and a half years since the CPR first started laying track; only about ten years since the railway’s founders first conceived of the idea, and less than a year since passengers have been able to ride on it.

The CPR was built to preserve the memory of a very specific, industrial type of narrow-gauge railway, one that is associated more with Ireland than with Britain. The Crowle Peatlands are part of one of the largest lowland bogs in England, the Thorne Moors, on the boundary between North Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire. Drained from natural wetland by the engineer Cornelis Vermuyden in the late 1620s, from the mid-19th century the area started to be mined for peat, with a network of railways bringing the peat from the moors to factories at their edges for processing and transshipment. For many decades these railways used horse haulage, but from around 1950 the peat company switched to petrol and diesel locomotives.

This map shows the Moors at around the time the railways started using locomotive power: you can see the lines of railways across the moors, following the drainage canals, making sharp, almost-hairpin corners. Even in the 1980s there were still between 15 and 20 miles of narrow gauge railway across Thorne Moors, remaining in use until peat mining ended around 2000; the newest locomotive on the railway was bought new as late as 1991.

The preserved railway is in the area shown on that map as “Ribbon Row”, west of Crowle, reached along a narrow, dead-straight lane across the flat landscape of the Moors. As soon as you are outside the town, it feels disconnected, remote, outside the normal world entirely. As I drove, in my mirrors, I saw a young deer crossing the road behind me.

To date, the railway has a café with very nice home-made cake. a maintenance shed, and a straight line of track stretching out across the moor. The shed is full of the sort of small diesel locomotives that worked on the moors from the 1950s onwards—and also, a Portuguese tram.

I think the loco on the left is Schöma 5130 of 1990; the diamond-shaped plate is the builder’s plate of Alan Keef of Ross-on-Wye, to mark the loco being rebuilt in the late 1990s with a more powerful engine, which you can see here.

The newest loco to run on the peat railways was named after a retired member of staff in the early 1990s, shortly after it was built.

The railway’s other locomotive is a Motor-Rail Simplex built in 1967 and abandoned around 1996 due to worn bearings.

It’s a nice little engine, much less powerful than the newer ones, but I’m not sure what I think of lime green as a locomotive colour.

On a map—if it had made it onto any maps yet—the railway would no doubt appear as a dead straight ine; but on the ground it follows gentle curves and undulations. At 3ft gauge the track feels wide for a narrow-gauge line, especially given the small size of the powered trolley that takes you out onto the moor. On my run I was the only passenger, with a driver and guard to look after me, as we pottered out along the track, surrounded by wildflowers pressing close up to the track, fat bumblebees buzzing close to the car as we went.

No stations; no platforms; no sidings. No signals other than a fixed distant sign warning that the track will run out soon. Just a single line of track, which stops. Back we go; with me and the guard having the best view this time, although I tried to make myself thinner and not block the driver’s line of sight.

That photo shows practically the whole railway, with the shed visible in the distance. We trundled back in, feeling far faster than the handful of miles per hour we were actually doing. Retracing our steps, back to the yard.

The Crowle Peatland Railway isn’t somewhere I’ll be going back to again that soon, because for now, I’ve seen all there is to see. But it is a nice little place to visit, a reminder that everyone starts somewhere, and that sometimes a railway is just a stretch of line running out into a field. It’s open and running trains about one weekend a month at the moment, and it’s worth visiting for the cakes. Or, indeed, if you just want to be out in a landscape where the horizon is straight as a ruler, and there are few noises beyond the wind blowing the grass.

Keyword noise: Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Crowle, Crowle Peatlands Railway, railway, narrow gauge, photography, maps.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been in the news lately, as many performers were upset that it’s not having an app this year, which led to news stories that some comedians are giving up on it altogether. Which made me feel a little bit on the old side, because when I lived in Edinburgh smartphones weren’t even a thing, an app was unheard of, and you navigated the Fringe using the official programme, ThreeWeeks magazine, and the hundreds and hundreds of flyers constantly thrust at you in the street. ThreeWeeks was the new, modern innovation at that point: I recall, when I first moved there, one of my flatmates proudly telling me about the new Festival reviews newspaper some friends of his—from the EUSA weekly freesheet Midweek—had started putting out when Midweek was closed for the summer.

This isn’t, though, meant to be a “ooh, now, back when I was a wee girl…” post, because generally I try to avoid that sort of thing as much as I can. I was struck by the idea that something like an app, that’s a relatively new part of a 75-year-old event, can now be seen as fundamental to it, and fundamental to the business models of the participants.

The idea that the Edinburgh Fringe has been too focused on big, headline names at the expense of the smaller performers is hardly a new idea: that, certainly, was around back then already. As indeed, was the worry that the Fringe had grown to the point it was all people think of when you mention the Edinburgh Festivals. Never mind the Edinburgh International Festival—the original “Festival” itself—or the Book Festival, or the Film Festival, when people hear “Edinburgh Festival” they think of the Fringe. Moreover, they tend to think of the Fringe purely as a comedy festival, ignoring the drama, dance, poetry and everything else that goes on in the thinner sections of the programme.

I agree entirely with the feeling in one of the articles I linked above, that the “spirit of the Fringe” is all about discovering something new, something exciting, something you’d never even heard of before: because when I lived in Edinburgh there was no way I could ever afford tickets to the big name stars in any case. The things I could afford to do were always those that I would never have dreamed of going to, such as when my friend W found a play at the International Festival that was offering tickets for only a pound or two if you booked them that day and agreed to sit on a beanbag on the stage behind the actors.^* Because I couldn’t afford to attend shows I wrote a series of blogposts reviewing the quality of the flyers I’d been handed in the street instead, which attracted aggrieved comments from the performers of one show, I think assuming I was making fun of them being in Edinburgh. I do recall going to one show, a mid-afternoon spoken-word monologue just off the Grassmarket, purely because the performer was stood outside a few minutes beforehand trying to drag people in as he had no ticket sales at all for that particular day. The main thing I remember, though, is spending very late nights in the pub, as they had their licence extended to 3am for the duration. I probably was not doing my best work on Monday mornings. The spirit of the Festival, to me, is just being in the city that is for a few weeks full of an artistic energy, full of performers handing out flyers, some of them brilliant, some of them terrible, all of them offering something new and different and potentially exciting.

This is the thing with the Festival though: it has barely anything to do with the lives of normal everyday Edinburgh people, save for the place being more crowded than usual. I’m fairly sure most Edinburgh residents don’t really go to many Festival events at all, to be honest, and—at least going by my memories of the Edinburgh of twenty years ago—it has virtually no impact on the city outside of August. It comes, it goes, and the city moves on unchanged by it. The city in August has a completely different atmosphere to the city in June or the city in September, as if a cloud has briefly passed over the sun and drifted away.

* Almost all the dialogue was pre-recorded and lipsynced by the actors, with one character “played” by a mannequin, aside from at one climactic moment when the lead actor screamed aloud.

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

Back in March, I wrote about the architecture of Grimsby Central Library and all its surviving 1960s detail touches—the building opened in 1968 and many original details and interior fittings still survive. I briefly mentioned in passing the five gaunt, slightly macabre figures sculpted in relief on the south side of the building. Well, the other day I happened to be passing, it was a bright and sunny day, so I pointed my camera lens at them.

These are The Guardians Of Knowledge, sculpted in the 1960s by Peter Todd, head of Grimsby School of Art, and moulded from fibreglass but made to look like bronze.

I’m disappointed, slightly, that as far as I know there aren’t any local myths of the statues occasionally coming to life and roaming the town in a ghoulish way. Maybe, on the right day of the year, if you are in the library late into the evening, the staff will give you a haunted look, with fear in their eyes. “Why stranger,” they say, “it’s a bad night to be lost in this town after dark. You had better find yourself a sanctuary.” For who really wants to be given knowledge by these fearsome, cadavarous figures, knowing the knowledge they receive may be a blessing but is more likely a curse?

Keyword noise: Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, Grimsby, Grimsby Library, architecture, art, sculpture, The Guardians Of Knowledge, Peter Todd.