Symbolic Forest

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.

Well, I’ve found out what he’s been up to recently.

Big Dave has resigned. After Christmas, until they find somebody else, I’m going to be working on my own.

He’s moving to London, too. This morning he handed in his resignation; this afternoon he went out to buy an A-Z.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, London, resignation.

I’ve noticed I’ve been a bit lax updating recently – if you look on the sidebar, you’ll notice these past few months have had far fewer posts than before. Back in January I said to myself that I was going to try to update every day. As you can see, I haven’t been managing it.

“Why do you have to update if you don’t have anything to say?” someone asked recently. I feel I should, though. Previous attempts at creating diaries have always faded away due to laziness; when I started this site, the intention was to try to stick to one post per day. No more, no less, and the rhythm would stop it fading away. I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening quite yet, but I am going to try to put more effort in.

Big Dave is still up to something – he’s been up to something all week, I’m sure, but he’s not saying what it is yet. Lots of phone calls that he won’t take in front of people.

We were both up to something the other day, to be honest – we found a rather good screensaver^* that simulates, very closely, a computer that has crashed so horribly that it won’t start up. Dave, of course, couldn’t resist installing it on the PC of someone who recently played a joke on him. He waited until we knew the chap was away from his desk, installed it remotely, then sat back and waited for the phone call.

The funny thing, though, is that he also installed it on his own PC, so he could see what it does. So now, every time he comes back to his desk,^*** he has a millisecond of “Shit! Aargh!” before remembering that it’s his screensaver. Our fear of blue screens is that ingrained, he can’t help it.

* It’s from Sysinternals, a very good site if you have to be a Windows geek, with all sorts of useful semi-official system tools. It used to be independent, but was absorbed^** by Microsoft this summer.

** or maybe “adsorbed” is a better word.

*** after answering one of those mysterious phone calls he keeps getting.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, blogging, Blue Screen Of Death, BSOD, jokes, laziness, practical jokes, schedule, Sysinternals, writing.

Back in July, my mother lost The Cat, accidentally releasing him on the way to the vet’s. She spent hours putting up posters in that part of town, searching round the neighbourhood, answering calls from people who thought they had seen him, but to nothing. After a month or so, the calls dried up, and we assumed he wasn’t coming back.

Yesterday, I got home from work. I went upstairs, changed out of my work clothes, and went to the bathroom. In there, I heard something squeak. A door, or something, squeaking once then twice, just like the cat used to miaow. Strange, I thought, opening the bathroom door to find him wandering on the landing, rubbing against the corners of the walls.

The mother had a phone call yesterday, from an elderly woman living maybe a quarter of a mile from where he had gone missing. She’d been feeding him for about a fortnight, and happened to go in a shop which still had his poster on the wall. She phoned us, dragged him out from underneath her sofa, and the cat came back. He’s lurking in the garden now, trying to re-establish his position in cat society.

Keyword noise: The Cat, feline, miaow, missing, pets, photography, The Mother.

Well, no, that’s not quite true. I was never a Farepak customer. My mother, on the other hand, was at one time, so I’ve been keeping an interested eye on the slow-burning news that has followed Farepak’s collapse.

It’s more than ten years now since my mother stopped buying a hamper from the Farepak catalogue, and she did it at my persuasion. Farepak’s method of business: hard-pushed home-makers send them a small sum every week, through the year. Just before Christmas they receive several boxes of food; what seems like an impressively large amount. Its value, though, was usually rather less than the total you’d contributed through the year. I pointed out that if she opened another savings account, and paid into it a similar amount every week, then by Christmas she’d have rather more money than she’d put in, instead of rather less.^* At the expense of going out and buying it herself, she could end up with a rather larger hamper.

That system relies on self-discipline, of course; my mother has rather more of it than I do, and rather more than most people. If you can afford to save at Farepak’s negative interest rate, though, you can afford to save with a bank. Much of the media commentary on Farepak’s bankruptcy seems to suggest that the company should have behaved more charitably to its customers because of their relative poverty; or that its bankers should have been more accommodating as the company was doing Good Deeds. This forgets, though, that the point of a company is usually to make money, and Farepak was no exception to that. It’s possibly unfair to say they were exploiting the poor – after all, a prepayment scheme like Farepak’s is far better for the customers than buying on credit. They were, though, making money out of the poor, by showing them how to afford something rather nicer than they thought. Moreover, they do seem to have been making money – all the news stories suggest that the collapse was due to losses elsewhere in the parent company.

Farepak, and its competitors, gave and give their customers one great benefit: they forced self-discipline onto them. If credit unions offered similar accounts – pay in an agreed amount all year, then get your balance paid out at Christmas – then it would be a great help. Never forget, though, that both Farepak and its bankers were out to make money. That’s how our system works.

* Admittedly only pence more – but still.

Keyword noise: budgeting, capitalism, credit unions, economics, Farepak, hampers, money, poverty, saving.

Overheard in a quiet corner of a pub recently: one side of a phone conversation.

“No, listen to me.”

“No mum, you’ve got to do it. Listen, she’s a psychopath. She was going to burn the house down.”

“No mum”

“No, no, you don’t understand. I can’t do it myself. I can’t face prison.”

“Please, mum, do it for me.”

“If I do it I’ll end up hitting her. I can’t do time for her, mum.”

“No, please. No, no. You’ve got to dump her. They’d send me to prison, you know they would.”

“You know what she’s like, mum, and I can’t do it. I’m not doing time again mum.”

I left, as quickly as I could, unsure whether to laugh or be afraid.

Keyword noise: arson, overheard, prison, psychopath.

Recovering from a bit of sickness. Fortunately, only a brief illness; I’m pretty much back to myself again.^* I was sick enough to take time off work, though, for the first time in a few years. Normally, however bad I am, I pull myself together enough to make it into the office. I’m not going to go into details about what was wrong, for the benefit of emetophobic readers. There’s at least one that I know of.

Talking of the office, Big Dave seems to be up to something. Lots of hushed calls on his own phone. I’m suspicious. He managed to pull a visiting consultant,^** but I don’t think this is related.

* “Only sick in the head”, as Big Dave helpfully said.

** Well, got her phone number on her last day with us.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, colleagues, exhaustion, sickness, tiredness.