Symbolic Forest

One thing about yesterday’s post: it gives you a good look at the state of one of our bookshelves. Not a good enough look to make out what most of the books are, though, unless they’re books with distinctive spines that you’re already familiar with – like Peter Ackroyds’s London, for example.

Over on top of that pile on the left, though, is a book I mentioned here a few months ago. Shortly after restarting the regular blogging cycle, I mused aloud as to whether I should restart the Books I Haven’t Read reviews, and predicted one book that might fall victim: Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. It’s there on top of the pile, in the blue cover. And, I have to say, so far the prediction’s been right. But not because of the book itself; because there’s been too much else to read. Below it on the pile there’s Graves’ White Goddess, also mentioned as a potential Book I Haven’t Read. I still haven’t read it. Further up, though, there’s a biography of Robert Graves, which I picked up on a bookstall outside the Watershed cinema. I thought: if I’m going to write about The White Goddess, I need to know more about him to do it justice. Coming across the biography by chance, I bought it. I started to read it. I still haven’t finished it.

Elsewhere in the house there are many more books I haven’t finished reading. Amazingly, though, yesterday, I finished one, and it was a book I only made a start on a few weeks ago.^* Fatal Purity, a biography of Maximilien “The Incorruptible” Robespierre, by Ruth Scurr. A shy, fastidious man, who I find very intriguing; someone who found himself trying to impose morals by whatever means necessary, because his cause was justified. He was shortsighted both literally and figuratively, and was a logical man who became trapped in his own logic. He was willing to execute his oldest friends, because he thought his cause, the Revolution, was more important.

I’m not sure I read the book properly, because it left me feeling I’d stepped through a lacuna at one point: I wasn’t sure at all how he went from being the people’s leader, to giving a speech that he apparently could see was to try to save his own life. One thing I definitely learned about, though, was Robespierre’s inability to ever, at all, admit that he had been wrong, even after his stance had changed, or when condemning people he had earlier supported. I’m still not entirely sure whether, for that, he should be applauded, or condemned himself.

* Because it was a Christmas present from K’s brother.

Keyword noise: biography, books, Books I Haven't Read, Fatal Purity, France, French Revolution, history, literature, Maximilien Robespierre, review, Robert Graves, Robespierre, Ruth Scurr, The White Goddess.

You might have noticed the little mascot of this site – up there in the top right, at the time of writing, although that might change given time. Really really long-time readers might remember me explaining what it was, back in the mists of time. It is called a gruntlebeast, and, because of the considerable lack of evidence for their existence, is often believed to be mythical, invisible, extinct, very very shy, or possibly any combination of those four things. You will, I’m sure, have noticed the distinct lack of sightings of gruntlebeasts mentioned in the news.

However: things have changed! The Symbolic Forest Militant Invective Laboratories have, after many years of trying,^* apparently managed to capture footage of a gruntlebeast in the wild. Indeed, the footage seems to confirm the conjectured “partially invisible” hypothesis, and also possibly the beast’s legendary shyness. See what you think:

Apologies for the low quality; but, well, if it wasn’t low quality, it wouldn’t be a proper controversial mythical-creature sighting, would it? The next task: get some evidence for its famous “Arrg kxrrt!” hunting call.

* well, you saw how old that last blog post was

Keyword noise: animation, fake mythology, gruntlebeast, Militant Invective Laboratories mythology, photography.

The weather has turned warmer, but it hasn’t done the water pipes any good.

The roads round here are mostly tarmac, but tarmac on top of cobbles. The tar doesn’t extend right to the edge of the road – the gutters are still cobbled. It’s a common arrangement around here, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

Anyway, we got up yesterday and went out of the house, only to notice the gutter full of water. Walking uphill a little, we found that it was pouring into the gutter rapidly – from underneath the tarmac road surface. At the edge of the gutter, a stream was gushing out from a small crack between the tarmac and the cobbles underneath.

I’ve reported it to the water board. A chap drove up a few hours later, and painted a big blue arrow on the road, pointing at it. Hopefully, it will get fixed, before our foundations start to get washed away.

Keyword noise: Bristol, leaking, roads, water, weather.

As I mentioned recently, I’m embarking on a Grand Epic Ground-Upwards Redesign of this site, because, well, the design hasn’t been changed since I first set it up. I knocked it together in a few days holiday in August ’05; back then my holiday year ended in August and I often had a few spare days at the end of the month where I had nothing to do and needed to keep myself occupied. In 2005, this blog was the result.

Anyway, my point is: it was put together in a bit of a hurry, with most of the design code ripped out of a standard theme I downloaded, without me really understanding what each bit did. The design’s always had a few rough edges, and there are lots of things that I’ve meant to develop further but never have. Hopefully, some of those points will be addressed, attacked, and taken by storm.

Thinking about the design, though, and what I want it to achieve, has made me think about one of the things I was most unhappy with when I first put this site together. One of the things I liked about this theme when I first saw it was:^* the little boxes for the date on each post. You know, these ones:

But one thing I didn’t like, though, was the cardinal number. Maybe it’s because I’m English, that that’s how I was taught, but when I read a date, I always read it with an ordinal number. “January 11^th”, not “January 11″.

I can’t remember, to be honest, if it was possible to fix that easily when I first started using WordPress. Possibly it was, possibly it was something that’s been added later.^** In any case, I didn’t fix it. I know I tried to, at one point; but abandoned the fix and didn’t go back to it. Then I forgot the issue, until, coming back to the redesign, I tried the fix again the other day. When I retried it, I remembered that I’d given it a go before. Because this is the result

Those two extra characters mean that on most days, the text is just marginally too long to fit in the box. The box gets pushed down. Which isn’t so bad; but, it doesn’t always happen. You can’t necessarily know what the date box will look like; how it will relate to the elements around it. Moreover, I don’t know how it will look on other computers, where the fonts have slightly differing metrics to mine.

There are ways to fix it, of course. The box could be slightly wider. I could make sure that the horizontal line always comes underneath the date box, although that might leave annoying white space under the post title. The question, though, is whether it’s worth doing. However many times I tweak it, I’m not sure I’d ever get it quite right based on the current design.

And so, this all is partly why I’m going to start pretty much from scratch. The risk is that I’ll reinvent the wheel; the upside is that at least I’ll know how it works from its heart.

* and still is

** To be pedantic: it’s not a feature of WordPress itself, it’s a feature of PHP, the underlying language. I’m too lazy to go back through PHP’s version change logs and find out when the feature in question – the “S” character in date formatting strings – was added.

Keyword noise: beauty, blogging, CSS, design, perfection, PHP, tweaking, web design.

The summer holiday photos might well all be up online now; but there’s still a bit of a backlog.

In October it was surprisingly hot and sunny; so we had a day out at Weston-super-Mare. Most of the beach was cordoned off for some motorsport event; so we ended up taking pictures of warning signs and derelict buildings.

Keyword noise: Avon, dereliction, disused, hotel, North Somerset, photography, Somerset, warning, Weston-super-Mare.

Sickness is a strange thing. So psychological, that you can almost think yourself sick. I’m wondering if it’s going to happen to me – and, of course, wondering about it makes it more and more likely.

Everyone we know, pretty much, has been horribly ill over the past month or two, in bed for a few days, aching, throwing up, incapacitated. I can’t think of a single person, in fact, who says they haven’t had it.

Except, that is, us. We’ve both felt awful, we’ve both been tired and aching, too exhausted to do very much, but we’ve both stayed out of bed. Neither of us has given up and retired to bed for a few days waiting for it to blow over. But the exhaustion and the achiness has gone on for much longer, longer than it would have if we’d actually been ill in the first place.

Now, thinking about it, I keep wondering why we’ve managed to not get too sick when everyone else we know says it’s sent them to bed at some point. Which in turn means: is it our turn? Is it going to come around.

In the real world, I really don’t think epidemiology works that way; but I don’t know about my head. So this morning when I had a sudden attack of dizziness, I felt: is this the winter flu? Is that what’s coming on? The way things are going, I’ll convince myself to fall ill, and fall ill, when otherwise I’d stay fine and healthy.

Keyword noise: flu, psychological, psychosomatic, sickness.

Wednesday night was New Year’s Eve; and, for once, we went out. Counting on my fingers, I worked out, it must be about seven or eight years since I last went out to an event on New Year’s Eve, rather than just pop round to a graveyard or a friend’s house. Last year, I remember very clearly where I was at midnight: in bed, ill, groaning and wishing the bloody fireworks and cheering would shut up.

This year, though, as I said, we decided we’d go out. Find somewhere which sounded like Our Sort Of Thing, something new to try, and enjoy ourselves. And, indeed we did.

We ended up at the Cube Microplex, the independent cinema off Stokes Croft, for a night called Fascinating Virtue; and fascinating it was, with a stream of small folk-ish, indie-ish bands taking to the stage. One performer, Rachael Dadd,^* had flown in from Japan that day, and flung a boxful of Japanese confectionary into the audience for us all to try. One landed right in my lap. We kept the wrapper:

Other performers included alt-folk storyteller Jetfly, quiet harmonium-equipped duo love.stop.repeat, storyteller Hannah Godfrey telling a tall and beautiful tale in-between, and complex local five-piece Boxcar Aldous Huxley. The latter sounded like a cross between the Everything Is Illuminated soundtrack and the Decemberists,^** had not only a harmonium but also a saw, clarinet^*** and euphonium, and sang lively songs about such things as the Hellfire Club and how debauchery isn’t as good as you might hope; or the difficulties of being an astronaut in the 19th century. The stage acts finished with Men Diamler, self-proclaimed drunkest act of the evening, who went on to DJ by the bar for a couple more hours. We danced, energetically; skilfully in K’s case, not so much in mine.

K pointed out that often, when you go out on New Year’s Eve, it can be a bit of a compromise: you go out to something that you wouldn’t normally go to, just because you feel you should be going out somewhere. Fascinating Virtue was an event we’d be excited to go to any day of the year.

* I was tempted to ask her if she was related to the famous mentally-ill Victorian artist Richard Dadd, but I didn’t get chance. Which is probably a good thing, because I’d forgotten his first name.

** It was me who thought they sounded like the Decemberists, and K who thought they sounded like the soundtrack. K rather likes klezmer.

*** Any band with a clarinet in has to be a good thing. Except possibly for Supertramp.

Keyword noise: Boxcar Aldous Huxley, Bristol, The Cube, dancing, Fascinating Virtue, folk, Hannah Godfrey, indie, japanese, Jetfly, Kingsdown, love.stop.repeat, Men Diamler, music, New Years Eve, Hogmanay, Rachael Dadd, Stokes Croft, storytelling.

Overheard in a group of smokers outside a pub, as we entered it:

Woman: … I was shagging my dad’s best mate …

Keyword noise: overheard.

One new year’s resolution I didn’t mention yesterday: finally getting all of last summer’s holiday photos online. I didn’t mention it, because, well, it should be finished already by the time you read this. Not really worth calling a resolution, to be completed so soon.

Keyword noise: boats, Cornwall, fog, harbour, Marazion, Mounts Bay, Penzance, photography, rope, St Michaels Mount.

So, what are my resolutions for this year?

Well, really, they’re all project-based. This is going to be the year of getting things done – not Getting Things Done^TM, but the general, non-trademarked sort of getting things done.

This year, I will: for a start, redesign this website. It’s not been changed since it was first written, and it could do with being freshened up a little. Then there’s the other website project that K and I have been working on, that’s almost ready to go live, but not quite just yet – that one needs finishing off. And then, there’s everything else we’ve got planned. Everything else that we’ve thought about doing, and said: we really should do that one day. We really should do that. Everything from publishing our own zine, to getting some photos saleable, to writing a movie and a novel, to cataloguing all our CDs and DVDs. I’m going to have a stab at all of them.

Keyword noise: completion, new year, optimism, plans, resolutions.