Symbolic Forest

First Christmas present bought already, but I’m still going to have to devote the weekend to running around the county hoping desperately to find something inspirational. I’m not saying what I’ve already bought. It’s for my dad, and I don’t think he reads this place, but you never know.

When I get up in the morning, I have Radio 4 on in the background. I like Radio 4, but I normally try very hard to avoid listening to Thought For The Day, in case of the very real risk that it will make me want to throw the radio through the kitchen window.^* Today though, I caught a quick flash of it. I can’t remember the exact phrase I heard, but it was something along the lines of “lots of Christians use phrases like ‘God willing’ and ‘if God wishes it’ all the time”. Which left me rather puzzled, because even though I’ve known a large number of devout Christians over the years, none of them have ever said any such thing in normal conversation. Maybe one of the good aspects of Thought For The Day is that it makes you realise there are people out there whose view of the world is so partial and skewed, that they really do believe they are standard conversational phrases, just because that’s what all their friends say.

I was talking to someone last night about the next Book I Haven’t Read that I’m going to write about: House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. “Oh, I don’t think anyone’s read that all the way through,” she said. “I don’t think you can.” So maybe I should invite additional contributions to the next Book I Haven’t Read post – if you have read House Of Leaves all the way through without cheating, let me know.

Big Dave says he’s found a flat now. A “one-bed studio flat”, or what people Up North^** still call a bedsit. At least this means he has the weekend to do his Christmas shopping in, rather than worrying about property-hunting trips down to Barking and Beckton.

* especially if Anne Atkins is the writer/presenter.

** apart from if you’re a property developer, of course. Or you live in Leeds, probably.

Keyword noise: Anne Atkins, BBC, bedsit, Big Dave, books, Books I Haven't Read, Christianity, Yuletide, Christmas presents, house hunting, House Of Leaves, literature, London, Mark Z Danielewski, presents, radio, reading, religion, shopping, studio flat, Thought For The Day.

It’s not quite the Christmas season for a while yet, but it’s getting near the time when I’m starting to think about what presents to buy. And, particularly, what to buy for the parents. I never know. I always try to think of something unusual, different and interesting, and I usually end up buying the same old books and DVDs for them.

Last year, the mother received a fossilised fish, because Colleague M Emily^* had bought something very similar for her mother, so that gave me the idea. On paper it was a terrible present for my mother, because she hates ornaments. Everyone else at the office said “a fish? Why are you getting your mother a fish?” As it turned out, though, she loved it.

This year, though, I haven’t spotted anything equally unusual; and I have to think of things for my dad, too. Any suggestions?

* she asked I use her real name, in case you were feeling confused. Her mother’s present was a pair of polished stone bookends; I bought my mother’s fish-slab from the same shop.

Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, Colleague M, gift ideas, presents.

In the news recently: the Antikythera Mechanism, a cunning ancient device which, it turns out, could predict planetary positions and eclipses. It was first discovered around a hundred years ago, but it has always been little-known. Partly, I’m sure, because of the domination of Greek archaeology by classisists and historians. The Antikythera mechanism is unique, and its purpose unclear without careful analysis, so it’s not too surprising that for most of the time since its discovery it lurked, little-known, in an Athens museum.

Around 1980, Richard Feynman wrote about the mechanism, in a letter to his family:

Amongst all those art objects [in the museum] there was one thing so entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible. It was recovered from the sea in 1900 and is some kind of machine with gear trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock. The teeth are very regular and many wheels are fitted closely together. There are graduated circles and Greek inscriptions. I wonder if it is some kind of fake. There was an article on it in the Scientific American in 1959.

I asked the archaeologist lady about the machine in the museum—whether other similar machines, or simpler machines leading up to it or down from it, were ever found—but she hadn’t heard of it. So I met her … at the museum to show it to her. She required some explanation from me why I thought such a machine was interesting … but after a bit she believed maybe it was striking, and she took me to the back rooms of the museum—surely there were other examples, and she would get a complete bibliography. Well, there were no other examples, and the complete bibliography was a list of three articles (including the one in the Scientific American)—all by one man, an American from Yale!^*

It’s not that surprising that the Antikythera mechanism was little-studied for a long period. It’s an anomaly, at least as far as surviving records go, and anomalies are often ignored if they can’t be made to match up with everything else. It’s disappointing to me, in fact, that often the only people to treat anomalous objects seriously are pseudoarchaeologists, who nearly always come up with ridiculous conclusions. Pseudoarchaeologists are often condescending to the past in their own special way – “these people were too primitive to do this! Aliens must have helped them!” – but in many ways traditional archaeology can be just as condescending, by sometimes hunting things it does not understand out of the way, because they’re inconvenient or too complex to understand.

* published in What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the second book of Feynman’s memoirs.

Keyword noise: anomaly, Antikythera Mechanism, archaeology, calculator, computing, Greece, history, mechanical calculator, pseudoarchaeology, Richard Feynman.

This is the final part. If you need to catch up, here is part one, and part two.

The next day, crowds went to the carpenter’s workshop, as usual, to try to ask him to build and carve for them. But he was not there. They looked through the windows, but his workshop was empty. They looked through the windows of the house, but there was no sign of him.

They searched the entire village, but there was no sign of the carpenter. After a while the village constable agreed to break into the carpenter’s house, to find him. But he was nowhere to be found.

The whole county started searching for the missing carpenter, but he could not be found anywhere. He had disappeared, completely. They searched for months, but the carpenter never returned.

Some people thought that he had got so angry with being asked to paint everything he made, that he had decided to retire and move away. They could not explain, though, how he had disappeared so suddenly. Others thought that a disappointed client, who could not find a painter, had done something; or that a great lord elsewhere had kidnapped him to create beautiful furniture for the lord alone. Noone ever saw any furniture in the carpenter’s style, though, but somehow this made these people even more adamant they were right. Some thought he had been murdered for the great riches they assumed he had made from his work; but they were wrong, for he worked for the love of carpentry and had spent all his money on expensive woods from overseas.

The carpenter never returned to the village, and noone ever saw furniture like his again. Those things he had made were preserved carefully by their owners, because they knew they were irreplacable. To this day, what happened to the carpenter who refused to paint remains a mystery. As far as anyone could tell, he just varnished.

Keyword noise: carpenter, jokes, puns, shaggy dog, story, storytelling.

Big Dave is busy at the moment. Not with work, but with finding somewhere to live. As he’s moving down to London at the end of the year, he’s spending nearly all his office time scouring the internet for affordable flats; mouse in one hand, A-Z in the other.

I’ve become his guide to London, it seems. “What’s Bermondsey like?” “What about Beckton?” “Silvertown? Where the hell’s Silvertown?” Work, so far as he’s concerned, has gone out of the window. Which, in a way, is a good thing. In a few weeks time, I’ll have to do all the work myself anyway. So, I may as well start doing nearly all of it now, whilst Dave is still around to bug if I get stuck.

The other main job for the moment: thinking up jokes about Windows Vista ready for its years-late release tomorrow.^* There’s no chance at all we’ll be buying the thing at work, because none of the company’s PCs will actually run the behemoth at all well. PCs we bought a fortnight ago fail the Microsoft upgrade check. Hmm, maybe there was a reason they were so cheap.

* To get some idea why it’s so delayed, and why it’s such a behemoth, read about the byzantine management arrangements responsible for the shutdown options on the Start menu.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, false economy, house hunting, London, Microsoft, moving house, Windows, Windows Vista.

I haven’t read Ian McEwan‘s novel Atonement. It is fetching a lot of publicity at the moment, because McEwan has been accused of copying phrases from the biography of wartime nurse and romantic novelist Lucilla Andrews. He, of course, says the claims are ridiculous, and that all he did was normal research. Other people have said the same thing, noting that he has acknowledged his large debt to Andrews.

I haven’t read Atonement; nor have I read No Time For Romance, the book he is accused of cribbing from. This post, though, is about neither of them. It’s about another book they reminded me of, a book that I read some time ago, but was unable to finish, because I felt the author had gone rather closer to his source material than he should have. It’s not a book you’re likely to have heard of, either. It’s by a top lawyer and Oxford don^* called Francis Bennion, and it’s called Victorian Railway Days.

It’s an episodic novel about the social changes wrought by the arrival of the railways in the 19th century, owing quite a bit in its style to Charles Dickens’ Mugby Junction stories. I found it in my local public library when I was a teenager, and took it out. I didn’t get very far into it, though, before I found a passage that I recognised, about the importance of the railway station to rural village life. It’s quite long, and I’m not going to quote it. But I am going to quote something very very similar.

The Jones’s who don’t associate with the Robinsons, meet there. Mr Jones would not like the stationmaster to touch his cap to the Robinsons, and pass him without notice, so he sends the stationmaster a hare. The Rev Mr Silvertongue is always wanting to take a party somewhere at single fare for the double journey, or some other concession, so he honours the stationmaster by conversing with him, as an equivalent for concessions. The old lady with her dog would not, on any account, have the little dear put into that dreadful dungeon of a dog box when she travels, so she sends the stationmaster a basket of plums once in the year […] ‘My lord’ knows he has no right to bully at the railway station, so he brings a brace of pheasants, and thus adds Mr Station Master to the train of his servants.

That quote is from an obscure Victorian autobiography called Memoirs of a Station Master, by Ernest Simmons. Obscure, yes, but republished in the 1970s by Leicester University Press courtesy of the historian Jack Simmons.^*** It’s the sort of thing that would be vital research material for anyone writing a book set at a Victorian railway station. Moreover, the same passage was also quoted in a well-known book about railway history, The Country Railway by David St John Thomas;^**** and that book is definitely one I’d expect Bennion to have read when researching his own.

So, when I came across an extremely similar passage in his novel, I was rather disappointed in it. It was extremely similar indeed. I can’t remember, now, if it was indeed a word-for-word copy, but the basic structure was very clear, and it closed in a very similar way indeed. I wish I’d been able to find a copy of Victorian Railway Days to write this post, so I could put them side-by-side for a comparison.^***** I was so disappointed to read something which seemed to my teenage eyes to be such a blatant lift, that I stopped reading immediately, and put the book aside. I’m not going to accuse Professor Bennion of the P-word. For all I know, his echoing of Simmons’ words may have been entirely unconscious. It was enough, though, to make me stop reading. Victorian Railway Days remains another book I haven’t read.

* with a long list of personal achievements – drafted the constitution of Pakistan, formerly ran the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, drafted the Sex Discrimination Act, managed to put Peter Hain on trial for his anti-apartheid protests, and get him convicted, and chaired Oxford United FC, among other things.

** because I don’t actually have a copy of it to hand

*** no relation, as far as I know.

**** originally published in 1976 by St John Thomas’s own publishing company, David & Charles, although the copy I have is a Penguin paperback edition from 1979.

***** I suppose I could always buy one from Bennion’s website and revisit this post another day.

Update, August 27^th 2020: Francis Bennion died in January 2015. When I originally wrote this post, I was aware that Francis Bennion was still alive, and moreover was a significant Establishment figure with much greater resources and legal knowledge than I had. I was very careful, therefore, not to accuse him directly of cribbing, plagiarism, or anything along those lines, in case he found my post and dropped some sort of lawsuit upon me. And, indeed, he (or someone claiming to be him) did find this post. He left a comment on it:

If you had looked at the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS at the beginning of my book “Victorian Railway Days” you would have seen that I give “grateful thanks” to Ernest J. Simmons (among others) for “the sparking of ideas for this novel, or useful background material”.

Which is fair enough - except that as I said above, he had lifted an entire paragraph from Simmons, a very distinctive paragraph which has been quoted widely elsewhere. I replied it was unfortunate I didn’t have copies of both books to hand to see exactly how large the similarities were, and pointed out that as I’d already noted above, Ian McEwan had also acknowledged his sources of information. Not to be denied the last word, the grumpy old lawyer replied with a further answer:

Pathetic – not worth a further answer.

I was tempted to say “but you just did…”, but resisted it. If you are into Victorian history, and can find a copy, Memoirs of a Station Master is very much worth your time. Victorian Railway Days is very much not.

Keyword noise: Atonement, books, Books I Haven't Read, David St John Thomas, Ernest Simmons, fiction, Francis Bennion, historical fiction, history, Ian McEwan, Jack Simmons, literature, Lucilla Andrews, Memoirs Of A Station Master, reading, research, source material, The Country Railway, Victorian Railway Days.

If you need to catch up, part one is here.

The carpenter was asked to build a bookshelf for the mayor of the nearest town. He built the best bookshelf anyone in the area had ever seen. It had strong, firm shelves, yet such fine carving that anybody who saw it was amazed. Other carpenters from around the county came to see it, and all came away disappointed that they would never be able to create such a bookshelf themselves.

The mayor said: “Plain wood will not match the furniture I already have. Would you paint it for me?”

The carpenter replied: “I have created some of my finest carvings for this bookshelf. Painting them would ruin the sharpness and the definition. In any case, I am a carpenter. My craft is wood, not paint. I will not paint the bookshelves for you.”

The mayor went away disappointed, despite now having the finest bookshelves anyone had ever seen. All the visitors to his home wanted to see them and admire them, and the carpenter’s fame grew further.

The bishop of the diocese travelled to the carpenter’s village to see him. “My palace needs a new dining suite,” he said. “Will you be able to build me one?”

It was the carpenter’s largest commission yet, but he took it up with confidence, even though so many people were giving him work that he was having to turn people away. After several months, he had completed the finest dining suite yet seen, with intricate seat-backs and delicate table legs, so finely-carved you would barely believe it was made of wood.

“Will you paint it for me?” said the Bishop.

“I am not a painter!” said the carpenter. “I am the finest carpenter this country has known, but people keep asking me to paint my work! Slapping thick, sticky paint on such delicate chairs would ruin them! And besides, I am not a painter. I am a carpenter. I work with wood. I am the finest woodworker anybody knows, but I cannot paint. I will not paint these chairs, because that is not my craft.”

The bishop went away, disappointed, even though he had the finest dining suite in the land.

*To be concluded…*

Keyword noise: carpenter, shaggy dog, story, storytelling.

This is a slightly faded memory, from a few years ago now, from the last time I was in the Outer Hebrides. It’s a late night, two in the morning or so, in August. You can hardly make out a thing in the darkness. There’s a crowd of us sat around in deckchairs, in the front yard of the University farmhouse, heads leaning back. We’ve all just returned from the “local” pub, about six miles away, and we’re sitting outside to watch for the Perseids. Out there on the Atlantic coast, the sky seems, strangely, lighter than elsewhere, because of the number of stars scattered across it. The sky is filled with patterns of light, coming from millions of years ago; and leaning back in a deckchair, the age, complexity and size of it all fills me with a slightly dizzy awe.^* Every thirty seconds or so, a meteor flashes across the dark sky, and everybody watching smiles.

* Not to mention that the rocks beneath us, the Lewisian Gneiss Complex, were themselves nearly three billion years old, older than the light from some of the stars.

Keyword noise: astronomy, Callanish, ink polaroids, Lewis, memories, meteors, Outer Hebrides, Perseids, Scotland.

A follow-up’s due on this post from June: “JCB Maniac Demolishes House”. Said JCB maniac has now been sent down for six years. It turns out, too, that he was previously responsible for driving someone off the road (using a tractor – there’s nothing like overkill) and threatening people with a pickaxe. If you ask me, he has issues.

Keyword noise: Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex, JCB, Robert Taylor.

There was once a man, who was a talented carpenter. He just had to touch a piece of wood to know how it could be worked, how it might split, how it would behave under his tools. He started off as a little village carpenter, making furniture and doors for the people of his village.

One day, he built a chair for a local dignitary. The dignitary asked if he could paint it, too.

“Oh no,” said the carpenter. “I’m not a painter. I only work with wood. I have built you the best chair I can, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it. If you want it painting, find a painter to do it.”

The dignitary took his chair away, unhappy. Many visitors to his home saw the chair, though, and were very impressed. Some of them came back to the village to visit the carpenter themselves, when they wanted furniture making.

*To be continued…*

Keyword noise: carpenter, shaggy dog, story, storytelling.