Symbolic Forest

Regular readers will know I’m the sort of person who always has an eye for odd little details, odd little quirks of history or mechanical gubbins. You’ll probably be unsurprised to know that this has never really changed much.

Last week I posted photos of my first ever trip to the Ffestiniog Railway, from back when I was still in primary school. I can still remember being intrigued by the “chopper” couplings the Ffestiniog has used as standard since the 1950s (and to some degree since the 1870s—naturally the full details are online). I can’t say it was the first time I had seen them, but it was the first time I had been close enough to notice they were a novelty to me, enough for me to want to take photographs of how they work. So, naturally, I did.

This is my grainy 110-film photo of the coupling on FfR Car 100. On the far left is its electrical connector, with a hood to shelter it. In the middle is the coupling: a central buffer with a hinged hook fitting into a slot, and a weight (the “bob”) hanging below. Bear in mind that when I took this picture I didn’t know any of this; I was just intrigued by this peculiar metal prong. I’ve learned the technical details since.

After the loco (Mountaineer) coupled up to the train, this is what it looked like. The hook on each coupling is swung down into the opposite slot, but initially it doesn’t drop all the way; it’s blocked by a camshaft attached to the bob. The bob is swung to one side until the hook drops into its running position, and then swung back; the bob’s camshaft locks the hook into place and prevents it lifting. After that, you can attach the brake hoses.

Nowadays, of course, there are probably a thousand videos of how this works online, that you can go and watch whenever you like. I’m quietly pleased with myself, though, that back in the day when you couldn’t do that, this is the sort of thing I felt worth recording on film.

Keyword noise: railway, rheilffordd, Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, photography, couplings.

Serious posts are hard to write, aren’t they. This article has been sitting in my drafting pile for a couple of months, and has been sitting around taking up space in my head for most of the past year. It’s about an important topic, though, one that is close to me and one that I think it’s important to discuss. This post is about diversity and inclusion initiatives, in the workplace in general, and specifically in the sort of workplaces I’ve experienced myself, so it will tend to concentrate on offices in general and tech jobs in particular. If you work in a warehouse or factory, your challenges are different and I suspect in many ways a lot harder to deal with, but it is not something I am myself in a position to speak on.

It’s fair to say, to start off with, firstly that my career has progressed a lot since I first started this website; and also that attitudes to diversity and inclusion have changed a lot over that time too. I’ve gone from working in businesses where you would have been laughed at for suggesting it at all mattered or should even be considered, to businesses that care deeply about diversity and inclusion because they see that it is important to them for a number of reasons. What I still see a lot, though, are businesses that start with the thought diversity is important, so how do we improve it, and I think that, frankly, they have things entirely the wrong way round. If instead they begin from a starting point of inclusivity is important, so how do we improve it diversity will naturally follow. If you try to make your workplace an inclusive workplace from top to bottom, in across-the-board ways, then you will create a safe place for your colleagues to work in. If your colleagues feel psychologically safe when they are at work, they’ll be more productive, you’ll have better staff retention rates, and people will actively want to work for you.

The Plain People Of The Internet: But I’ve always felt happy at my desk, chair reclined, just being me, anyway. It’s not something we have trouble with!

But this is where the inclusivity part really comes in to it. There are always going to be some people who feel at home wherever they are. They’re usually the people who are happy in their own identity, which is very nice for them. They’re also the people who expect everyone else to go along with what they want, which is less nice. The people who say “well I have to put up with things in my life, so I don’t see why we should make life easier for everyone else,” and “they’re just trying to be different because they want the attention.” These are the people who are going to have to have their views challenged, in order to make the office round them a truly inclusive place for everybody. At the same time, though, you can’t ignore these people, because inclusivity has by definition to include everybody. You have to try to educate them, which is inevitably going to be a harder job.

For that matter, you always have to remember that you don’t truly know your colleagues, however well you think you do—possibly barring a few exceptions such as married couples who work together, but even then, this isn’t necessarily an exception. You don’t know who in your office might have a latent mental health issue. You don’t know who might have a random phobia or random trauma which doesn’t manifest until it is triggered. Whatever people say about gaydar, you don’t know the sexuality of your colleagues for certain—they might have feelings they daren’t even admit to themselves, and the same goes for gender identity and no doubt a whole host of other things. You can never truly know your colleagues and what matters to them, or who they really are inside their heads.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So now you’ve gone and made this whole thing impossible then!

No, not at all; it’s just setting some basic ground rules. In particular, a lot of companies love “initiatives” on this sort of thing, but they tend to be very centralised, top-down affairs: “we’ll put a rainbow on our logo and organise a staff party”. Those aren’t necessarily bad things to do in themselves, but I strongly believe that to be truly successful, inclusivity has to come from the ground upwards. The best thing you can have is staff throughout the organisation who care about this sort of thing, if they can be given the opportunity to gather people around them, educate them about the importance of the whole thing, and push for change from the bottom upwards.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Aha, I get you now! Get all the minorities together, shut the boring white guys out of the room, and get the minorities to tell us how to sort it out!

No! Firstly, the people who you need to get to seed things off are the people who are passionate about it, moreover, people who are optimistic that their passion is going to have an affect. That applies whoever they are, too. If you want to be inclusive, you must never shut out anyone who is passionate about the topic—with certain exceptions that we’ll come to—because, firstly, inclusivity is for everyone, and everyone has a part to play in it. Secondly, as I said above, you don’t know your colleagues: you don’t know why any particular colleague is passionate about it.

Deliberately making inclusivity and diversity the responsbility of the minorities on your staff is, I’d go far to say, nearly always a counter-productive option. For one thing, you want to find passionate people to drive this forward: you shouldn’t automatically assume that everyone who doesn’t fall into a particular “minority” bucket in some way will be passionate about diversity and inclusion, or even that such a bucket exists. Equally, you need to be very wary of some people who will ride the concept as their own personal hobby-horse, and insist that they, personally, should be the arbiter of what diversity means. There are people out there who will insist that because they are disadvantaged in one way or another, they have the right to determine the meaning of diversity and inclusion in any organisations they are part of. These are the sort of people who conflate inclusivity across the whole office with advantage for themselves personally; they will insist that inclusivity and diversity efforts be focused solely on aspects that benefit them, and will attempt first to narrow the scope of diversity and then to gatekeep what is allowed inside. If you’ve followed my logic about diversity flowing from inclusivity and not vice-versa, you’ll immediately see that this is a nonsense. The reason the type of person I’m talking about doesn’t see it as such, is that they see it, even if they don’t realise it, as being something solely for their own benefit in one way or another.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Now you’re not making sense again! Find people that are passionate but not too passionate? You’re just looking for a team of nice milky liberals who won’t really do anything!

It’s difficult, really, to talk about hypotheticals in this sort of area, partly because every organisation and every situation genuine is very different to another. I’m confident, though, that when you do start getting involved in this sort of area it’s straightforward to see the difference in the two different kinds of passion I’m talking about: passion to improve everybody’s lives, or passion to get more for themself. Sadly, the latter are often much louder, but it’s often very clear: they will be the people saying that they know Diversity and can precisely define it, because they are themselves more Diverse than anybody else so know exactly what needs to be done. The people who say “I’m not really sure what diversity is, but I know we need to get everyone’s input on it” are the people that you want on your team.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So what was the point of all this again? Just what are our team trying to do here?

Make your workplace a more inclusive place, whatever that takes. Make sure that nobody feels excluded from social events. Try to make everyone feel that they are on the same broad top-level team. Make sure that “soft” discriminatory behaviour is discouraged,^* and that people are educated away from it: for example, teach people to use non-discriminatory language. Make sure your interview and hiring processes are accessible and non-biased—this is particularly important at the moment when doing remote interviewing, because requiring the candidate to pass a certain technical bar is inevitably going to exclude people. But, most importantly, when your passionately inclusive pathfinders of inclusivity come up with ideas and want to get them adopted, make sure they have the support and resources to actually get that done.

The Plain People Of The Internet: And then you’ll magically be Diverse with a capital D?

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. People have written whole books on this stuff; I can hardly squeeze it all into a single blog post. But if you can find people to transform your office into a more inclusive space—a space where everyone can feel safe and at home—then you are one step along the road. Actually generating that atmosphere: another step. After that, your office will become somewhere that a diverse range of people feel comfortable working in, because it is a fully inclusive space and because everyone across that range can feel at home working there. And then your management can start being proud of being a diverse organisation, rather than deciding that you are going to be Diverse but not knowing how to get there on more than a superficial level.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Feel at home at the office? Pshaw! Terrible idea!

I agree with you completely that the office shouldn’t be your home, “working from home” notwithstanding. It’s still important to separate the two and not hand over your entire soul to the capitalist monster. Nevertheless, much as you might hate working for a living, if you do have to work for a living, it’s important for you to try to be as happy as you can be within that context. Finding a workplace that can be a safe place for you to exist in, whilst not being your home, is one way to go about that. It’s not really what this post is supposed to be about, but it’s a digression it might be a good idea to explore at some point.

This post is getting a bit long now, judging by the way my scrollbar is stretching down the screen. It’s a personal view. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, and it’s not a field I claim to be an expert in, but it’s a field that is important to me personally and it’s a suggestion towards a sensible approach to take. Diversity is important to all of us, because we are all diverse: none of us is any more diverse than the other, and none of us has the right to judge another’s lifestyle as long as it causes others no harm.^** The key thing, to my mind, is accepting that genuine diversity does require acceptance and appreciation of this; and that if you want to become diverse, becoming inclusive first is by far the easiest approach.

The dichotomy really, I suppose, is between organic growth and forced construction. Consider, if you’ll forgive me another painful analogy, your workforce as the shifting sands of a beach. If you build a Tower of Diversity and Inclusion on top of those shifting sands, it will fall, or get swallowed up by the dunes. If you let a Forest of Inclusion and Diversity grow up through the sand, it will hold it together and make it more cohesive. I know it’s a bit of a daft analogy really, but hopefully it helps you see what I’m trying to painfully and slowly explain. If you try to be inclusive, and if you turn your workplace into a safe space for everyone to be themselves, the latter is hopefully what you will be able to grow.

* I’m working on the basis here that “hard” discriminatory or offensive language or behaviour is immediately called out and shut down, which I know isn’t always the case in all workplaced.

** I have cut a whole section out of a previous draft of this post, discussing how to spot people who use diversity as a shield to do horrible things. Hopefully, in most situations, it’s not something people have to worry about, but it does happen. It’s a shame that we do have to worry about these situations, but they do happen. Going round again, though, if an inclusive workplace is one where people feel safe to be themselves, it’s also one where hopefully people feel safe to report any transgressions and make sure they are dealt with. I have, sadly, heard of people who use diversity-styled language to try to defend themselves against accusations of abuse or of sexually predatory behaviour, and I’m not surprised there are some who think that diversity is some sort of loophole in that regard, because some people will always take whatever advantage they can.

Keyword noise: diversity, inclusion, the workplace, The Plain People Of The Internet.

Another weekend, more work on the papercraft pinhole camera kit I’ve slowly been working on. If you haven’t seen the previous installments, part one is here and part two is there.

This time, I spent most of the time on some of the cosmetic detailing. I glued on a whole set of fake camera controls: shutter button, wind-on lever, timer lever and lens mount release button. They’re not the neatest job, but they’re only there to make the thing look like a camera, so it doesn’t really matter if I don’t get them quite right. More important is the film take-up spool, which I’m trying to assemble very carefully and slowly because, fundamentally, it has to work mechanically as well as look good.

On that photo you should be able to make out that the take-up spool looks as if it has an extra lamination. That’s a strip of card added and only glued at the ends. The idea is, the leader is slipped between that strip and the main part of the take-up spool, and that (with a few turns of the spool) that should be enough to hold the film in place. I’m intrigued how well it’s going to work.

The other part I made up that is fundamental to the camera’s workings is the camera back

Given that if the back comes off at the wrong time the whole thing is useless, and that the integrity of the back relies on four small corner tabs, I thought it worth holding the whole thing together with foldback clips whilst the glue did its thing. Normally I’d just rely on a good firm squeeze between finger and thumb, but this seemed rather more important. I suspect I’ll end up taping the back on with something like washi tape when the camera is loaded in any case, because it’s going to be a fine line between a back that’s too tight to go on properly and a back that’s so slack it falls off.

I’m not sure this camera was really designed to run more than one film through it anyway: as I said last time, the instructions tell you to take the whole thing to your local photography lab rather than try to unload the film yourself. Which would seem a bit of a shame, because how are you supposed to learn from your mistakes with a new camera, and learn how it behaves, if you basically have to throw it away before you get the results back? Hopefully it will cope with at least a couple of films before the back falls apart.

*The next update on this project is here*.

Keyword noise: photography, pinhole cameras, analogue, camera, film, film photography, papercraft.

This week, Microsoft released .NET 5, and it reminded me I’ve been meaning to post a piece of technical advice that has bitten me a few times but which doesn’t seem to be very well-documented or well-described online. It’s a piece of technical advice, though, that will slowly be fading away in relevance because it’s advice on .NET Framework; so I thought I should put it up here whilst it is still helpful to people.

(Note for non-technical readers, who are used to photos of trains and cemeteries and probably won’t find this post very interesting: .NET 5 is the latest version of .NET Core, which is the replacement for .NET Framework, hence Microsoft have dropped “Core” from the name to try to make that clearer. .NET 5 is the successor to .NET Core 3, because there were many very popular versions of .NET Framework 4.x which were and are heavily used for a long time, so Microsoft thought reusing the number 4 would be just Too Confusing. Are you less confused now?)

This problem, too, is pretty much specific to people working in teams. It only happens (well, I’ve only seen it happen) if all of the following apply:

• you’re working in parallel in a team, on a complex system, probably that has solutions containing a relatively large number of projects
• you’re using the MSBuild tool as part of your continuous integration pipeline, deployment process, or similar
• you’re using Git as your version control system

The symptoms of the problem are:

• You can open the solution in Visual Studio and build it with no problems
• When MSBuild tries to build the solution, it immediately errors, claiming that the solution file has a syntax error on line 2.

Spoiler: there is no syntax error on line 2.

Another note for non-technical readers who are still here: what you might think of loosely as a programming project, in any kind of .NET flavour, has a primary file called a “solution” (its name ends in .sln). The solution contains one or more “projects”; each project contains code. Visual Studio can open your solution file and your project files and turn the projects into some sort of output product, such as a program, a website, a code library or whatever. However, you don’t have to use Visual Studio to do this. .NET Framework has a program called MSBuild that does the same thing. If you have automated your build process (which if you’re working in a team you probably should) and you’re using .NET Framework, your build process will probably use MSBuild to do its work. What happens here is one of a range of problems called “well it worked on my machine”. A developer has code that seems to be in a happy, working state, they upload their code to the team’s server, the automated build process runs, and the automated build process falls over and says it doesn’t work.

The cause of the problem is: two people on the team have added different projects to the solution, in parallel. Now, Git is often quite good, when two people change code at the same time, at either working out how to merge the changes together, or at least, asking you to sort the situation out manually. This, though, is a situation where Git does the wrong thing and breaks your solution file—but it breaks it in a way that only MSBuild notices, and that Visual Studio happily ignores.

The reason this happens is down to the syntax of solution files. The part which lists the projects they contain looks a bit like this:

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "Important.Project.Library", "Important.Project.Library\Important.Project.Library.csproj", "{E6FF8E04-A41D-446B-9F8A-CCFAF4B08AD2}"
EndProject
Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "Important.Project", "Important.Project\Important.Project.csproj", "{9A7E2940-50B8-4F3A-A535-AB6220E6CE3A}"
EndProject
Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "Important.Project.Tests", "Important.Project.Tests\Important.Project.Tests.csproj", "{68035DDB-1C24-407C-B6B3-32CEC1D964E5}"
EndProject

Don’t worry too much about what each line says: the important thing to spot is that each project has a pair of lines: a Project(...) = line that contains the important information, and an EndProject line that, er, doesn’t. The projects are in a fairly arbitrary order, too; on your screen in Visual Studio they get sorted alphabetically, but that isn’t reflected in the file, where they are in the order they were added in.

The real cause of the problem is that Git doesn’t know that every Project... has to be followed by an EndProject. So, imagine two people have added new, different projects to the solution file. Git sees this and thinks: Alice has added Project... to line 42, and Bob has added a different Project... to line 42. So I’ll make those into lines 42 and 43. Alice added EndProject to line 43, and so did Bob, so I’ll just pop that in as line 44. So you get this:

Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "Alices.Library", "Alices.Library\Alices.Library.csproj", "{0902233A-3857-4E5E-99F4-54F3F5E695E5}"
Project("{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}") = "Bobs.Library", "Bobs.Library\Bobs.Library.csproj", "{56ABE9BB-1373-43D3-B1C5-1526E443AD73}"
EndProject

Visual Studio is quite unpeturbed by this. MSBuild, however, doesn’t like it at all. It reads the file, realises there’s a Project without a matching EndProject, and falls over. For some reason, it always complains that the error is on line 2, even though it isn’t anywhere near line 2.

The fix for this, as you might have guessed, is to open up the solution file in a text editor and manually enter that missing EndProject line after Alice’s project. And that’s it. Or, if you don’t feel comfortable going in and hacking your solution file directly, remember I said that Visual Studio is completely unfazed by this? You can make some sort of small change in Visual Studio that will imply a different change to the solution file: for example, tell it not to build one of the projects in one of the build configurations. Visual Studio doesn’t just change that bit, it will write out the whole file from scratch, so the problem gets silently fixed for you. Which one is less work depends on which one you’re happier doing, to be honest.

That’s the abstruse technical post over for now. Next time I write one, I’ll see if I can find something even more technically obscure.

Keyword noise: programming, coding, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, MSBuild.

Occasionally, when I visit The Mother, I look through old photos. Either family ones, or ones from my own albums. My first camera was a Christmas present I’d asked for when I was age 7 or 8: a Halina-branded Haking Grip-C compact camera that took 110 cartridge film. With a fixed focus, a fixed shutter-speed and a choice of two apertures, it was an almost-entirely mechanical beast. The shutter was cocked by a lever which engaged with the film’s sprocket holes (a single hole per frame on 110 film) and the only electrical component was a piezoelectric switch attached to the shutter, for firing a Flipflash bulb if you’d inserted any. I might still have an unused Flipflash somewhere.

A photography geek might look at the above spec and be amazed that I managed to photograph anything recognisable on that type of camera. Frankly, even aged 7 so was I: to go with the camera I’d been given a book called something like A Children’s Guide To Photography which made no bones about this type of camera being a very basic one that it was hard to get good results from. It lasted me a few years though, despite at least one drop that popped the back off; I was still using it in my teens, I think.

Sometimes on this blog I’ve mentioned visiting the Ffestiniog Railway; last December for example. The last time I visited The Mother, though, I dug out the photos I’d taken on my very first visit, on which we did a single round trip from Blaenau to Porthmadog and back again behind the Alco. All the photos were taken right at the start of the day, it seems.

The weather in Blaenau is famously murky and damp; I’m not sure quite how much of the murk and grain in those photos is down to the camera and how much is down to the weather. Still, what the photos lack in sharpness, they certainly have in atmosphere.

Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, rheilffordd, railway, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog, Ffestiniog Railway, Mountaineer, The Alco, train, steam train.

I’ve written a few things so far about my father’s death, just over a year ago now. Some were recollections written recently; the post about his death itself was written down not long after it happened. I’m glad I wrote it when I did, because, in trying to write this post, on how it felt to “host” a funeral, to be one of the more prominent mourners at it, there is an awful lot that I realise now I don’t remember.

It’s amazing just how long it takes to arrange a funeral, after someone dies; all the things that have to be aligned in everyone’s calendar. It ended up being booked for a date about three weeks or so after his death, which at least gave me time to discuss with The Children whether they wanted to go or not; give various other relatives time to decide if they could make it, and so on. “There’ll be a good turnout for his funeral,” one of his old colleagues had said. “There’s always a good turnout for funerals.” He had never been social in any way during his working life; after he retired work funerals had made up a good proportion of his social calendar, or so it seemed. A group of his old colleagues had made a point of visiting him regularly during the four years of his terminal illness; part of me thought it was rather nice of them, given I’d never have thought him likely to do the reverse, and part of me wondered if they were just getting themselves stoked up for the eventual social event that would result.

We got to The Mother’s house in plenty of time, we thought, before anyone else would get there; plenty of time to get The Children into their funeral outfits but not enough time for them to get into a mess. We had, I hoped, already sorted out the debate as to who would travel with who; sorting out the various priority arguments as to who would get to ride in the undertakers’ limousines. My father’s family could hold grudges for years;^* if one of his older sisters fell out with the other over some aspect of funeral etiquette, it would be quite plausible they would never speak to each other ever again. Thankfully my cousins all arrived to try to negotiate and marshal things; The Mother sat stony-faced in silence, letting the debate all happen around her, trying to avoid getting involved.

The cortege arrived, and slowly everyone shuffled into their correct seats. “Just follow us in your car,” said the undertaker, “and turn your car’s lights on. That way other people will know you’re with us.” Is this some rule of the road that all drivers know except me, I wondered. The hearse and the limousine pulled away, and I pulled out of the drive behind at dead slow pace.

Being part of a funeral procession gives you a certain amount of privilege, the privilege to make other people stop or delay what they are doing. We glided serenely down the main road into the village, dead straight for a mile. I concentrated on keeping my speed even, worrying throughout what would happen if some random driver did pull out and separate me from the rest of the procession. Who knows if anybody saw us, or realised what was happening? The village church is on the main road, but when we arrived all normal road rules went out of the window. We drove into the middle of the road as if turning into the lane alongside the church; but instead, glided like swans onto the wrong side of the main road to stop on yellow lines, facing the wrong way into the traffic. We carefully unloaded ourselves onto the pavement, and the Rector was there to greet us solemn-faced, her surplice flapping in the wind. I left the keys in the ignition so the undertakers could shunt the cars out of the way for us; it felt unnatural and wrong.

Funeral orations must be a key skill for a priest. As we sat in the front pew listening to her New England vowels, I thought about all the things we had said to her, me and The Mother, when she’d come to gather information for it. I had been pretty open and honest with her about everything I saw as Dad’s faults, his coldness, his distance, his sudden rages. The Mother denied much of this had ever happened; I wasn’t sure if this was a desire to hide things from the Rector, a pair of rose-tinted grief spectacles, or a lifelong inability to admit he had faults. It was impressive to hear the Rector’s editorial skill: how she turned the account of how my parents got together into something resembling a romcom meet-cute, when phrases like “restraining order” are arguably more appropriate. They say, once you’ve seen the inside of a sausage factory you never want to eat another sausage. I’m sure I’ll be rather more cynical listening to funeral tributes in future. Anything at all negative, anything at all that might give the listener uncomfortable thoughts, is carefully wiped away to avoid upsetting them.

I stared at the coffin, looking awfully small. We’d gone for a wicker coffin, nicely rustic and biodegradable, ignoring the undertakers’ warning that it would creak like a ship in a gale as it was carried down the aisle. It was something Dad genuinely did believe in: self-sufficiency, living at one with the land, biodegradability and so on. Of course, due to the delay between death and funeral, and the amount of necrotic flesh already inside his abdomen by the time he died, the undertakers had also recommended we had him thoroughly embalmed. I knew, therefore, that sitting there by the lectern was an environmentally-friendly fully-biodegradable basketwork coffin with a thoroughly-unfriendly preservative-pumped corpse inside it. I still sit and wonder sometimes, a year since the whole arrangement went into the soil, what the relative rates of decay of coffin and body are, and just how recognisable his body still is.

At least myself and The Mother had immediately agreed on the coffin, knowing he would have liked the idea, because talking to the Rector we had disagreed wildly as to what else he had believed. For example, the Rector had asked if he was an religious man: not a surprising question, given that she had probably never seen him inside her church, whereas The Mother is there weekly.^**

The Mother: Oh yes, he was always very religious.

Me: Really?

The Rector: I’m sensing some disagreement here…

The Mother: Of course he was religious!

Now, if I have to be completely scrupulous and honest about it, I can’t say. At no point in my life, no point at all, did he ever give me any indication of what he did or did not believe. The only thing I can say is: The Mother, ever since a sudden draught of religiosity when I was young, has gone to church every week as routine as clockwork, dragging me with her until I was old enough to say no. My Dad, barring weddings, funerals etc, went grudgingly once a year to the family event where they give everyone an orange and peanuts.

The Mother: Well, I know he was religious.

I don’t remember, now, what hymns she chose, only that the Rector thought them rather too mournful for a funeral and tried to get her to pick something less depressing. The Mother doesn’t do cheerful at the best of times. The Child Who Likes Animals could not cope with the sound of everyone’s voices around him; I held his ear defenders firmly on his head.

The undertakers hoisted the coffin to their shoulders, and started to process out down the aisle. As we had been told to, the family pews followed behind, through the middle of the other mourners, out into the cold of the church porch. Built in the 1970s, every surface of the church porch seems to be tiled, and at all times of year, whatever the weather, it is freezing cold. The cars were where we had left them, but flipped around.

“Do you want to wait and say thank you to everyone who came?” the Rector asked The Mother.

I was all for staying; it would have been good to shake the hands of anyone who didn’t want to go to the cemetery, or the buffet we’d laid on for afterwards.

“Oh no,” said The Mother, “I just want to get going and get it done with.” And so, to the cemetery, we went.

* One of my dad’s sisters once bought him a ticket for an event he was going to go to anyway, as a present. He was so insulted they refused to speak to each other for over a year.

** Barring pandemics, naturally. But it was the case then.

Keyword noise: death, funerals, The Children, The Mother, The Father, undertakers, religion, belief, church.

At the weekend, I did a bit more work on the papercraft pinhole camera I posted about the other week.

Can you see the mistake I made near the start, but didn’t realise until everything was set truly firm and solid? The dashed lines marked on the card are a bit of a clue. The entire central portion of the body is upside-down. Because the film passes through the body off-centre, this means that the frame mask is in the wrong place: it’s about 3mm or so too high. The photos this camera takes are going to have their bottom sprocket holes exposed, but (unless I take a scalpel to the frame mask) will have a black band along the top. Oh well: it’s not as if they were ever going to be perfect photos in any case. I did, at least, realise this before sticking on the film guide rails, because if I’d put those the wrong way round, with the fat one at the bottom and the thin one at the top, the camera would be completely unusable. As a 35mm film canister is handed, they have to be the right way round for the film to slot properly into place. Luckily, I decided to measure up the guide rails against the leader of a new film, and immediately realised what I’d already got wrong.

The next step is the takeup reel, which worries me because, even more so than the “shutter”, it’s the one part of the camera that’s made from card but needs to function mechanically. It feels as if the tolerances in this part of the machine are quite tight, which should hopefully help, so long as they’re not too tight that it takes a camera-destroying force to turn the wind-on knob. You can see that in these pictures: a hollow card hexagon which I would imagine is quite easily distorted if the wind-on action is a bit stiff.

Incidentally this camera has no sort of rewind mechanism. The instructions suggest you take it to a photography shop to get the film out again after it’s exposed. Luckily, I have a changing bag I can use to do it myself.

*The next update on this project is here*.

Keyword noise: photography, pinhole cameras, analogue, camera, film, film photography, papercraft, mistakes.

Overheard on Stapleton Road, around lunchtime: a fragment of a conversation as I passed:

“I got banned from the Esso garage ‘cos I was drinking too much, but I can still buy food.”

Across the road, a man stumbled and slowly, gracefully, went head-over-heels and landed flat on the pavement, carefully protecting a lit cigarette as he fell. He didn’t try to get up, but laid on the pavement, smoking his fag, looking for all the world as if he was as relaxed as he could be.

Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, overheard.

There are quite a few ideas for blog posts lining up on my pinboard at the moment, and most of them are the sort that require work to write: long, in-depth pieces that need some sort of study or concentration. With the state of things right now, both in the world outside, here at home, and in the office, the space for that level of study and concentration has been a bit hard to come by. However, there’s one thing that has been in my head, on and off, for years, and it’s been sitting in my head for so long that it’s about time I tried to put it into words. It’s about a book which (unlike these) I have read, a much-loved book, one I love myself, in fact, at least at some level. It’s a classic of 1960s YA fiction, particularly in Britain. The Owl Service, by Alan Garner.

If you haven’t read it: it’s a retelling of one of the most famous stories of Welsh mythology, the story of Blodeuwedd, an episode in Math fab Mathonwy, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. I realise, typing that out, that if you’re not already a fan of Welsh mythology all those words in the previous sentence might be so much noise to you. The Mabinogi is a collection of four linked stories, written down in the Middle Ages but presumably somewhat older, which survived in two known manuscript copies;^* in the 19th century they were translated into English by the aristocratic philologist Charlotte Guest. Math son of Mathonwy starts with a war between Gwynedd and Dyfed started by a magical pig-theft as a grand distraction from a rather more sordid plan, and traces the threads that follow on from that plan and the destruction and havoc that follows as a result. If it can be said to have a single theme, it’s probably that magic always makes things worse. Blodeuwedd is a woman conjured from flowers to provide a wife for the cursed hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes; she is not particularly a fan of the idea herself, and goes off with another man instead. I won’t tell you the whole story here, but you can probably gather that it isn’t going to end well.

One reason I’m not going to retell the whole story here is that if you haven’t read The Owl Service then you should do; as I’ve said, it’s a modern retelling, bringing the story forward to 1960s Wales and turning it into a triangular relationship between three teenagers: an English girl who has inherited a Welsh country house, her step-brother, and the Welsh son of their housekeeper. The country house is located in an oppressive, narrow valley and the house seems haunted by sounds: motorbikes powering along the road up-valley, and invisible vermin scratching in the roof. As the book progresses there are dark family secrets, mysterious paintings, ghostly reflections, and of course the crockery set of the title. As stories go it is short but dense: there is a lot of information packed into its pages. Garner is very good at offhand description whose significance is not signalled, letting you make the connections yourself later. In the telly adaptation, made by Granada shortly after publication, quite a bit of further exposition had to be added, notably a “story so far” narration at the start of each episode which sometimes describes explicitly events which weren’t really explained or shown at the point they happened.

I must have first read The Owl Service when I was in my early teens, and I know that when I first read it I was already aware that it was an Important Book. I knew this because most children’s novels I recall reading included a few pages of blurb for other novels at the back of the book, and I’d read the blurb for The Owl Service several times in this way before eventually getting a copy of it.^** Certainly, much of it went over my head, but I was taken with its description of 1960s Wales; of the valley, lush and green, that almost disappears when you hike uphill to look down from the surrounding mountains; and the combination of kitchen-sink realism and deep mythology, of the idea that all myths did happen, somewhere, in the real world, and that their ghosts still haunt those places. That, though—I came to realise many years later—is where the problem is.

Nowadays I have two translations of the Mabinogi on my bookshelf, although I carefully keep them apart so that we avoid a critical mass of mythology in one place (or more likely, questions on why exactly I need two different translations). If you pick either of them up, and turn to Math fab Mathonwy, you’ll see the story tells you exactly where everything happened. I said earlier there was a war between Gwynedd and Dyfed: it ended when King Pryderi of Dyfed was killed and buried near Maentwrog, just off the A496. The other man that Blodeuwedd went off with was from around Bala; and the key events in the Blodeuwedd story all occurred close to the Afon Cynfal, one of the rivers that flows down into the Vale of Ffestiniog. I know the area well.

What makes me uncomfortable about The Owl Service is that it’s not set there. It’s not set in some generic imaginary fictional Welsh valley that only exists in Garner’s (and his reader’s) imaginations, either. It’s inspired by a specific place that Garner had visited, Llanymawddwy on the upper Dyfi. If you read the book alongside the Ordnance Survey map of the area, you can track a lot of the walks that the characters take in the book. Garner describes, for example, the walk up to the Ravenstone on the county boundary; and there it is on the map, Carreg y Frân. This is a real place, a real village. But in Garner’s retelling, this is the place the story of Blodeuwedd originally happened, and keeps happening, reoccurring in every generation; when the myth itself is anchored in another real place, an entirely different stretch of the countryside.

Is this cultural appropriation? I’m really not sure; in any case, that’s hardly a well-defined term. Garner certainly tried to put a lot of effort into trying to make his story both realistic and respectful. He learned Welsh to write The Owl Service, but not for vocabulary or to read the myth in the original; rather, he learned it so that he could make the English speech of his Welsh-speaking characters follow Welsh syntax, because he felt that this would be a more respectful way to make them sound Welsh than the superficial technique of dropping random Welsh vocabulary into their statements. In general this works really well, with just one spot where he shows off his erudition to the reader in a slightly clunky way. The feeling I am left with, though, is that he did just come along to Wales and immediately feel as if he had found some deep, spiritual, mythological meaning to the landscape that wasn’t actually there, a meaning that was his own romanticised interpretation of that landscape as filtered through one of the most famous of all the Welsh myths. In a sense this is no different to if he’d travelled half way around the world and felt he had discovered something deep and exciting and mystical there; the only difference is that he’d only travelled a hundred miles or so over the border from Cheshire. The village and the valley in The Owl Service are haunted by the sound of motorbikes, because the road through Llanymawddwy leads to Bwlch y Groes, a steep, high pass that has for many years been well-known in the biking world. I have no doubt the reason motorbikes are important in the plot of The Owl Service is that Garner, visiting Llanymawddwy and exploring the valley, will have frequently seen and heard bikers driving through the village and up the valley towards the pass; will have sat up at Carreg y Frân and heard them roaring in the distance.

Am I the right person to point this out? I’m not Welsh either, after all, and although I’ve spent a lot of time there for one reason and another, I’ve never lived there. I don’t speak the language beyond a few simple phrases like “mae hi’n bwrw glaw” or “dw i wedi yfed cwrw gormod”, although I probably speak no less than most people who live in Wales do. As an English person living in England, are my own attempts to learn Welsh and read Welsh mythology just as appropriative as Garner? Some would probably say so. As someone who spends a fair amount of time in Wales—albeit not as much as I did a few years ago when I commuted over the border every day—it feels like the right thing to do.

The Owl Service is still a fantastic book, despite its flaws, and despite the niggling impression I have that it represents one Englishman’s superficial interpretation of a myth more than it represents the myth itself. In some ways I suspect my biggest disappointment is, as always, that the Good is the enemy of the Perfect. The Owl Service is so embedded in the imagination as the reimagining of the Blodeuwedd story, it seems difficult to believe that any other, potentially better, potentially more Welsh reimagining of it would ever take its place in the canon. Am I just being too much of a perfectionist critic? Maybe so. And the story of Blodeuwedd still exists, and is never going to disappear.

* The bound manuscripts are known as the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch. This naming pattern clearly chimed with JRR Tolkien, as in his fantasy mythology, The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings were the translations of a set of manuscripts known as the Red Book of Westmarch.

** Incidentally there are still a few classic children’s and YA novels that I only know in this way, from the blurbs in the back of other novels. The Silver Sword is one that springs to mind; or Smith by Leon Garfield.

Keyword noise: Alan Garner, The Owl Service, books, literature, mythology, Blodeuwedd, Mabinogi, Math fab Mythonwy, Wales, Cymru, Gwynedd, Llanymawddwy, Vale of Ffestiniog, Dyffryn Maentwrog.

Today was the first morning of this autumn with signs of frost on the ground. I sat down at my desk and saw the roofs across the street fringed with white at the edges of the tiles, as the sun rose in a clear blue sky. Winter is coming, and our Hallowe’en pumpkins are in a dark corner of the garden for the local slugs and snails to eat. A robin fluttered around the garden, getting ready for all the Christmas posing; I doubt they go for pumpkin. In the summer the garden was full with house sparrows, as nearly every house in this street has a few sparrow nests under the eaves; but now they are quiet and are staying inside.

A month or so ago, I talked about how awful the world of politics is, too awful to want to write about. This morning, with the results of yesterday’s American presidential election still entirely up in the air, that seemed still very true. This evening, the results of yesterday’s American presidential election are still somewhat up in the air, but not quite as awful. We can but hope.

Since the clocks changed it’s dark now before I leave my desk in the evening, and on nights with clear skies, at the moment, I can see Mars rising, the first “star” visible above the roofline on the other side of the road. It rises above them just as dusk falls, visible already as a dim orange pinprick whilst the sky around it is still blue. Over the course of this year I’ve come to know the roofline opposite my window intimately. I feel like I know all the cracked tiles and broken patches like the back of my hand; I’ve watched the missing tiles on a house down the street get worse as the year has gone on and wonder how the residents cope in rainstorms, and I’ve watched a house a similar distance up the street slowly have its roof replaced, its chimney repointed, everything tidied and neatened and primped. Winter is coming, we are a third of the way through the final quarter of the year. After that, though, things will be brighter again.

Keyword noise: seasons, autumn, winter, frost, astronomy, Mars, Donald Trump.