A homage to loading screens.
Or, things are looking up
As I came home, after midnight, the skies were clear. I looked up into the sky, and could see it full of stars, clouds and clouds of them like a sprinkling of dust, more stars than I’d ever seen before. I looked up and spotted constellations: Orion, Cassiopea, Lyra, Pegasus, the Great Bear. The sky was filled.
And then I walked into a tree.
Or, time to start planning next Yule
Next year, and in future, I’m going to make my own Yuletide and/or Christmas cards, pretending to come from intriguing-sounding fictitious organisations.
Blessed Yule from the Chocolate Digestive Research Association
Or, if I feel really energetic, invent complete round-robin letters in a similar vein
2007 was a busy year for everyone at the Calderdale Explorers And Adventurers Society. In January, Sir Reginald Outhwaite (membership no. 207) discovered an entirely new and unmapped area of wilderness near Denholm Clough, but was soon overshadowed by Col. Andrew Davidson-Spong’s discovery of a lost Andean civilisation in the hills just outside Todmorden. February was quiet, but March brought our annual big-game hunting expedition, this year in a part of the world our members rarely visit—Scarborough.
Seasonal tidings to anyone who has come online today. I’m off now, to throw balled-up wrapping paper for the cat to play fetch with.
Or, time to go shopping
A very nice man said to me today: “It’s been a good year, I think.” And it has for me, too. It’s been a very good year, and a very bad year; and the strange thing is, the good and bad parts have been together at all times. It’s been an extreme year, I think, a year of travelling and new experiences, of meeting very nice people, very nasty people. Most people aren’t specifically nice, or specifically nasty, but can be either if they want to be. A few, though, are at one extreme or the other; and luckily I know more of the former.
In the news today: the shops are supposed to be busy. They’re not, though. I’ve just got home from a trip to Leeds, which is usually a horrible place to visit on a Saturday; and compared to most weekends, it was positively quiet. York was the same today, I’m told, and the roads everywhere in the region weren’t exactly busy for a Saturday. The predictions of huge floods of shoppers are more down to the wishful thinking of the shops, I think.
Someone else said to me recently: “do you know what an emo is?” And I found it a rather hard question to answer. So if you have any suggestions, tell me.
In which we have to save ourselves before even thinking about saving someone else
So, Big Dave has left, in a cloud of adulation and office stationery, getting ready to move house over the break. Everything is booked, and everything is ready to go, and when I get back after Christmas I will have someone new to share the office with.
Things have been a little strange lately, and not just because of Dave. Work has been very stressful, and other things have been very stressful too. I see someone and I want to try to help them, to save them from themself and from dangerous people, but I know they would not accept my help. The stress of all this, and all the work that has been piling on me at the office, makes me want to curl up for a thousand years, not sleeping, just dormant. A bit like King Arthur, maybe.
Talking of King Arthur, here’s more Susan Cooper:
For Drake is no longer sleeping in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, it all its beauty and marvellous joy.
Maybe that should be my epigram for the coming year. In the meantime, I’m going to occupy myself with the King William’s College General Knowledge Paper. I might only get a handful of answers,* but it will keep me busy for a while.
* which may or may not include “Copernicus”, “Theodore Roosevelt”, and “The Waterloo and City Line”. That’s how random they are. Feel free to guess what questions I think those are the answers to.
In which it’s the season of the new year
The fog is thick all over the country at the moment, but it’s only now it is affecting The South that it makes it into the news. Up here in The Forest we’ve had thick fog all week, but it hasn’t troubled the press at all. I’ve been driving the Town route home rather than the normal Country route,* because a fog-bump at 30mph is a lot safer, to my mind, than one at 70.
I’ve recently been rereading *The Dark Is Rising*, by Susan Cooper, for the nth time. And with the weather gripping the country, I couldn’t help thinking about that book. It’s set at this time of year, between Yuletide and Epiphany, and as the great force of evil, the Dark, rises and attacks the land, it brings on a great freeze and blizzards, stopping anyone from leaving their home. A great freeze is rather more dramatic than all-consuming freezing fog, but the fog has the same effect, muffling us all and slowing us to a standstill.
But now it’s the 21st of December, the time the festive season really starts. The solstice is tomorrow, I believe, and the year will have turned over. The solstice is the proper new year – it’s not an arbitrary date, it’s a measurable point in the turning sky. From tonight, everything will get lighter and brighter and on its way into spring. This is the time of year for flame and warmth and remembering that sunlight will come back into our lives.
* which is longer but a lot quicker
In which it gets colder
No, that has nothing to do with the content of this post. It’s just a nice word that I’ve just discovered, flipping through the dictionary whilst chatting on the phone. Let me know what you think it means.*
Through the week, it’s been getting harder and harder to clear the ice off the car each morning. A light frosty sprinkling on Monday has become a thick carapace. At this rate, by Christmas we’ll have a small glacier on the front drive. My hands each morning are covered in a chilling icy powder from the scraping.
* without cheating, of course. That would be naughty and wrong.
In which we have problems
Well, in addition to not being able to find any of the Christmas presents I want to buy in the shops; the computer has started misbehaving. It crashed in the middle of an update, and hasn’t been working right ever since. For those of you who have been on the internet since the early 90s: I’m posting this using the text-only browser Lynx. because it was the only one I could get working quickly whilst getting the rest of the machine back on its feet.
So if anything in this post looks a bit strange, that’s because I can’t really see what I’m doing, because the text-entry widget in Lynx is a bit…
The Plain People Of The Internet: So what was the explanation for all those other posts looking a bit strange, then?
Me: Har har.
More whining posts tomorrow; or if I’m in a good mood, I’ll tell you about the pantomime I went to see.
Update: Although Lynx lets you create posts in WordPress, it doesn’t seem to like you editing them. Grrr, again.
In which we’ve been banned
Well, I’ve passed a milestone, or so I’ve been told. This site has finally been banned somewhere! If you’re an employee of a certain large courier company, you won’t be reading this, at least not at work. It’s not China, but it’s a start. I was chatting to someone about it in the pub last night; they were mildly disappointed not to have all this rubbish to read when they’re stuck at their desk. Poor thing.
Big Dave’s still here, for another week at least, but his replacement has been announced. He’s also called Dave, of course, and he’s starting in January. I have no idea how large or small he is, but I’m going to have to call him Wee Dave just for symmetry. I’m not really looking forward to it.
In which there’s work to do
Today, the boss spent the afternoon over at our warehouse. It’s fifty miles away, so it does at least keep him well out of our hair, with no risk of him suddenly popping down to find me and Big Dave playing poker,* or The Good-Looking One From Accounts skiving behind my desk.**
Right after he left to come back over to Head Office, one of the warehouse staff phoned:
“Your boss was on my computer for ages fiddling about with stuff. And now it doesn’t work.”
Oh, hurrah. That was the rest of the afternoon gone, then – working out just what he’d done. I realised what he’d been trying to do; and had to work back from there to sort out what he actually did.
* for our collection of spare computer case screws. I reckon I’m about 15% up on him at the moment.
** if she kneels next to my chair, and the door is shut, you can’t see her through the window.
In which we listen to Stereolab
That’s the title of a song I’ve been listening to a lot lately, by Stereolab. It’s a beautiful lullaby of a song, sung in a way that makes it almost an instrumental, structured almost as a round, with a single verse which starts in the middle of a musical phrase. I’ve liked it for a long time, but just recently I’ve been listening to it quite often. It sounds like whirling stars.
I have a cunning Christmas present plan – but I’m not telling you what it is.
Anyway: what do you want for Christmas?
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