Symbolic Forest

Why do things happen together? Why do bad events congregate, and bad things happen at the same time? Why do unrelated things all break, and why is it always the Most Important People who break things.

Like on Friday at work; when the Managing Director’s daughter’s laptop needed fixing; then, the MD’s email became corrupt enough to crash the email server; then, a Very Important piece of software, without which we do not get paid, lost its internal databases to file corruption. All unrelated machines, unrelated events. There’s no way any of them are connected, I’m absolutely sure about that, so why did they all happen together?

Especially when, on Saturday morning, H’s laptop bluescreened itself and then refused to boot. Checking its disk for errors resolved things,^* but not before H had had a major panic that the whole machine had died. Oh, and then, H’s DVD player decided to spit out loud white noise instead of any audio it was supposed to be playing. The last few days have left me tired, stressed, and annoyed at the slightest little thing, because it feels as if every piece of hardware around me is set to attack.

* apparently resolved things, at any rate. I am wary of what may have caused the original bluescreen.

Keyword noise: Blue Screen Of Death, crash, IT support, problems.

Special offer! Medieval torture kit, only £9.99^*

* while stocks last

Keyword noise: comedy, humour, jokes, puns.

Ardal O’Hanlon is bound to turn up in Doctor Who again, before long. The only question is, when:

• Later in this series
• Some time in the next series
• Don’t be silly, Russell T Davies has already spent BBC Wales’s entire makeup budget for the next five years.
• Answers on a postcard as usual, to Symbolic Towers, Iambic Avenue, By The Banks Of The Swampy Tea-Brown Swamps, The Forest.

Seriously, there’s logic behind this. The only minor characters to appear in both New Series One and New Series Two were your giant face chap, and Cassandra, both in the same episodes. The second of which also introduced Nurse Thingy Cat-Face.^* Now, the only minor characters to return in New Series Three have been… your giant face chap again, and Nurse Cat-Face. Logic suggests that in the next series, then, Ardal O’Hanlon and his wife will come back, because they were the only decent characters at all in Saturday’s episode.^** Logic, you know, is unarguable.

H rather liked Saturday’s episode, incidentally, for resurrecting a monster not seen since ye olde Black And White days. H is far more of a Doctor Who geek than I will ever be.

* Wikipedia suggests her proper name is Novice Hame, and that she’s apparently classed as a Henchman. Ooh!

** I keep trying not to imagine Mrs Brannigan giving birth, and failing. Must … wipe … mind …

Keyword noise: Ardal O'Hanlon, BBC, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Russell T Davies, science fiction, television.

The Parents have always been fans of gadgetry. Moreover, whenever they get a new gadget, they become strangely devoted to it. I can still remember, when I was small, and The Parents bought a dehumidifier. My mother set it up in the middle of the kitchen with its back off, sat down in front of it on the uncomfortable kitchen stool, and watched it operate: watched the ice slowly and imperceptibly build up on its freezing tubes, before melting off again into the collection bucket.

My dad’s always been worst, if anything, so I knew what would happen as soon as his latest toy was fitted. A solar water heating system, complete with dials and gauges and sensors and settings to tweak. As soon as someone gets in the shower, Dad is in the airing cupboard watching all the sensors slowly change, checking that the solar pump starts up at the right point,^* watching the water tank temperature, the solar collector temperature, the glycol flow rate, the system pressure, monitoring all the dials he possibly can. And, as soon as you get out of the shower: “Was it hot enough? The tank temperature was down to fifteen degrees – the pump activity reached 90% because the collector was still up around thirty”.

He loves it; he loves tracking all the various numbers. But, as a wise person once said: just because something is measurable, or tweakable, doesn’t mean it’s worth measuring or tweaking.^** Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if, the next time I see him, he’s started drawing graphs.

* Yes, we have an energy-efficient environmentally friendly solar water-heating system now: so why does it need an electric pump, powered by our local gas-fired power station no doubt, to run it?

** I have no idea who first said that, but I’m sure I first read it in Essential System Administration.

Keyword noise: energy, environment, gadgets, heating, solar power, renewable energy, technology, The Parents.

Keyword noise: beach, Dee, estuary, Merseyside, photography, resort, River Dee, sea, seaside, West Kirby, Wirral.

I was expecting to be disappointed by the ending of Life On Mars, and, of course, I was. There was no way, to my mind, that they could wrap everything up and leave everyone happy, because too many contradictory things had gone before.^* The ending I had in my head was, to my mind, a better one, but that of course is because it’s the sort of ending I like.

Still, at least, the ending was a lot braver than many that could have been written – braver for the BBC to produce, I mean, not necessarily braver for the writers to write. And the “it was all in his head all along” resolution is a handy get-out clause for all the little anachronistic niggles that pedants like me notice – there’s no way a Victorian stonemason would have used nicknames like “Sam” and “Vic” on a tombstone; the game of noughts and crosses on the TV test card was wrong; and those maroon railway vans were 10 years out of date for ’73, they should have been blue to match the engine.^** Like I said with Doctor Who the other week: it’s all entertainment, and we shouldn’t try to read to much into it. There’s no point searching for hidden messages, Baconian-style, when the writer is here to tell us there aren’t any.

* specifically, episode one of series two, where the audience is at least led to believe that Sam’s behaviour in “1973” can radically alter the present day.

** which was, at least, pretty much correct for the period, albeit not entirely

Keyword noise: Baconian, BBC, conclusion, drama, East Lancashire Railway, fantasy, finale, John Simm, Life On Mars, railway, television.

As promised yesterday.

Keyword noise: beach, Dee, estuary, Merseyside, photography, River Dee, sea, seaside, West Kirby, Wirral.

And, I’m back, myself. From an Easter Weekend away. We went out on an excursion through the Wallasey tunnel,^* to the seaside. Photos to come later in the week. H thought about walking out to sea,x to wade across to the Hilbre Islands, but the tide wasn’t quite right, and the water started creeping up to the knee.

Apart from that, we relaxed, unwound, wound up again, that sort of thing. And ate lots of chocolate, jelly and cake, of course, because it’s seasonal. Are there any festivals which aren’t used as an excuse to eat something, even if it’s something not very impressive?

* Fellow Sinister veterans will be pleased to know that I did hum Marx And Engels to myself as we drove.

Keyword noise: beach, Easter, estuary, Hilbre, holiday, islands, Liverpool, Merseyside, river, River Dee, sea, seaside, West Kirby, Wirral.

A quiet afternoon at the office yesterday. Everyone sitting around waiting for the bank holiday weekend to start. And then, the bell rings.

Someone’s back.

It’s Big Dave.

He wandered round the office, saying hello to everyone, complaining about how noone would let him get away, looking slightly dazed as everyone stopped work and gathered around him.

He was only visiting, which sadly means I still won’t be able to fill this blog up with vicarious stories about the women he’s slept with and the men he’s beaten up. In fact, he didn’t seem to have many things to tell us at all, aside from: his new job is great, he gets on with everyone, and he’s really enjoyed the past three months since he left. It was strange to see him back here, especially next too Wee Dave. In many ways, Wee Dave is the Anti-Big-Dave, so I was kind of expecting an explosion and puff of smoke if they ever did meet, the two mutually vanishing in some quantum space-time event.

Keyword noise: Big Dave.

As we got back home at half-three in the morning, I noticed a man sitting on the other side of the street, sitting on a front-yard wall. I’m always wary of people loitering in the small hours. We got out of the car, and I could hear him mumbling, his hand to his head. I assume he was talking on the phone. I couldn’t make much of it out.

“Yeah, I’m just off Sunk Island Road somewhere. Yeah.”

Which he wasn’t. In fact, he was nowhere near Sunk Island Road. He was on Iambic Ave, which is off Pentameter Road West, which is on entirely the wrong side of the city. Here’s a map. It’s not a very good map, but it’s a map nevertheless:

Pentameter Rd. W. —— Pentameter Rd. —— city centre —— Sunk Is. Rd.
< ———————— a long long long long way —————————————->

Flash forward. Twelve hours later. We’d been out again, and we’d come back again. And as I was parking the car, I noticed a man sitting on the other side of the street, sitting on a front-yard wall.

I looked at him.

I wasn’t sure it was the same man. Similar clothes. It had been too dark to get a look at him.

Just as we were getting the shopping out of the boot, up pulled two police cars, one with its rear side window missing. No glass there; the space was filled with a metal grille. They stopped alongside the man sitting asleep on the wall. I watched the coppers approach him, one holding his handcuffs out of sight behind his back. As one of them checked all the rubbish bins in the yard, the others scooped him up and walked him into the waiting car. Bundled away, as if he was never there.

Keyword noise: arrest, drunk, Hull, lost, overheard, police, Yorkshire.