Symbolic Forest

No, I’m not a masochist.

I take a strange, geeky, masochistic pleasure, though, in making things hard for myself. In doing computer-based things the long way round. In solving the problems that are probably easy for some people, but hard for me. In learning new things just because it’s a new challenge.

Today, I was wrestling with a piece of Basic code in an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve not touched Basic since it had line numbers, which is a long long time ago, and I barely know any of it. I forced myself to work out, though, how to do what I wanted.^* It was mentally hard work, and meant a lot of looking back and forth to the help pages, but I got it done in the end. It might not be written in the best way, the most efficient way, or the most idiomatic way.^** But doing it was, strangely, fun.

* or, rather, what the consultant I was assisting wanted.

** for non-geeks: every computer language or system has its own programming idioms, which fit certain ways of programming particular problems. Someone used to language A will, on switching to language Z, often keep on programming in language A’s style even if this produces ugly and inefficient code in the other language.

Keyword noise: Basic, computing, Excel, geek, IT, language, learning, masochism, programming, software, development, VBA, Visual Basic.

I was thinking: really, I should post something newsworthy, or political, because there hasn’t been much of that on here lately. Nothing in the news has caught my eye, though – it’s all been football-related, and I really couldn’t care one way or the other about it. Then, though, I remembered that today is the summer solstice.^*

I’ve been wondering lately: what is the appropriate date for me to do an “end of the year” post. Is it January 1st? Probably not, to be honest. December 21st feels like a much better fit. Samhain would be appropriate, too; and, of course, I’ll have to post something on August 27th, just because that marks a year of blogging here. But today is also a good day to reflect on the changing seasons.

All of the yearly festivals are to some extent dual-faced. Today is a largely time to celebrate summer happiness, but it’s also a time to remember that winter is on its way. I can sit back and look around me, looking at how happy I am right now; but there’s still a long way to go. I’m in a good place at the moment, much happier than I was a year, two years, three years ago, but I’m still wary that something will happen to push me back where I once was.

On the other hand, it’s now High Summer, and I can see that reflected in my life. I am getting a social life once more. I am making friends, and I realise now that I’m a lot better at relating to people, and handling friendship. I’m learning how to avoid driving friends away, too. I’m finding myself. I’ve been learning a lot about my physical body, and learning to appreciate it a little more. I’m even getting better at taking compliments, rather than just stammering: “um … no … really, that’s not true.” Midsummer is a time to appreciate passion and feeling; and I’m even starting to understand that better too.^**

* Actually, I haven’t checked the ephemerides to see if it is today. Occasionally it can fall slightly to the side, and the official astronomical solstice is now a few days further on.^***

** even if it is in theory rather than practice.

*** Update, August 26^th 2020: I have finally looked this up, and the summer solstice in 2006 was indeed on June 21^st, at 12:26 UTC.

Keyword noise: annual, astronomy, End Of The Year, ephemeris, festival, midsummer, seasons, solstice, summer, summer solstice.

Writing about the things that the staff say over in Another Part Of The Forest has reminded me of an old folk tale I read once, in a book of English “village fool” stories. I can’t find the book right now, so I’ll do my best to retell it.

It’s specifically about Another Part Of The Forest, and it tells of three travellers who were one day walking along the High Street, to meet a crowd of locals shouting loudly at people to get to church.

“What’s going on?” one asked.

“Well,” said the local, “we’re the local bellringers. Only our church has no bells, so we walk around the town telling people to come to church instead.”

“Never fear,” said the first of the travellers. “Me and my companions are the finest of craftsmen, your town is clearly in need, so we will each make you a bell for your church tower.”

A year later the travellers returned, each with a bell for the town. They were installed in the belfry, and the bellringers started to ring a peal with joy – only to find out that the bells made a slightly odd noise. Their peal went tink, tock, pluff.

“I thought you were the finest craftsmen of your trade!” said the lead bellringer.

“Indeed I am,” said the first craftsman. “I am the finest tinsmith in the county, and you have an exquisite tin bell.”

“So am I also,” said the second. “I am the finest carpenter in the county, and you have a perfect wooden bell.”

“I am but modest,” said the third, “and I can only claim to be the second-best leatherworker in the county. I have given you a top-quality leather bell.”

So that’s why, if you listen to the church bells in Another Part Of The Forest, you’ll still hear them going tink, tock, pluff.

(or at least that’s what the story says. I’ve never heard the bells ringing myself, so I can’t confirm that it’s true. Somehow I suspect not.)

Keyword noise: bells, folk, folk tales, Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Messingham, Scunthorpe, storytelling.

We had a computer that was working fine. We switch it off. We move it. We plug it in. And it doesn’t work. At all. So dead, there’s nowhere to start looking for what to fix. God knows how we killed it.

Things I meant to do and didn’t this week:

• buy clarinet reeds
• write more blog posts
• finish designing Symbolic Forest tshirts
• book my upcoming holiday
• do more on my secret DIY project

Things I did do:

• buy a new bag.

So, at least I’ve done something.

Keyword noise: computing, IT, projects, shopping, todo list.

I’ve been surprised before by things I’ve overheard people say at work. I’ve even posted about it: suddenly, someone who looks normal, says something horribly bigoted. The staff over in Another Part Of The Forest still manage to amaze me, though, not just with what they think, but with what they’ll say out loud.

Over there this afternoon, I got chatting to the current office temp. He’s just taken his university finals, and is temping over the summer before he gets a proper job. He was telling me how great his time at university was:

I made some great friends there. One of them’s going into professional sport – he’s going to be right at the top of his sport in a couple of years’ time. I’m glad I met him – he’s going to be a millionaire soon, exactly the sort of person you want to stay friends with!

“Erm … yes,” I said, wondering if he was being as serious as his eyes said. That’s really not why I have friends, and I hope it’s not why my friends have friends; but if that’s the sort of person you are, fine. Later on, though, one of the other co-workers^* managed to beat him. The temp was complaining about the number of Lithuanians and Poles living in the area, and she replied with:

Ooh, I know, there’s loads of foreign people living round here. Still, we’re not as bad as some places – at least they’re all white round here. I don’t like this town though. I don’t like living here at all – if I could, I’d move abroad somewhere.

Again, she seemed completely serious. No idea of the big hole in what she’d just told me. I stopped talking and got on with work; it was easier than trying to explain what she’d said.

* A girl of about 19 or 20, hoping to go to university herself soon if she can raise enough cash.

Keyword noise: bigotry, colleagues, emigration, foreigners, friendship, hypocrisy, idiots, racism, xenophobia.

Political campaigner Julie Bindel has been writing in The Guardian again, this time about changing lesbian stereotypes on the telly. Ostensibly her line is: lesbians on the telly now might be shown as happy, sex-loving people, but that’s still a stereotype. Her main concern, though, seems to be: there aren’t enough people like her, or her friends, on the screen:

Finn Mackay, a lesbian feminist in her 20s, is not enamoured by all the “designer” lesbians who have sprung up on TV. “They don’t represent me,” says MacKay, “because they are never political and look straight. They never look like any lesbians I know.”

Or, in other words, “all of the lesbians I know are politically active and could never be mistaken for straight people.”

Finn Mackay’s view of sexuality is just as narrow-minded, in its own way, as your average unreconstructed homophobe who can’t understand how two women can have sex together. I’m not objecting to people who want to support their sexuality politically,^* but to suggest that you have an obligation to be political is a very exclusive and restrictive view. As is, indeed, the suggestion that if you’re gay you have to look gay. Coincidentally enough, I’ve just come back from a weekend away visiting a lesbian couple I know; and they don’t look particularly gay, or particularly straight. They just look like people. In fact, I don’t think any of the gay women I know are obviously gay at immediate sight.^**

But then again, we’re talking about the telly here. None of the straight people I know could be mistaken for characters from a TV show either. To say: “the telly is stereotyping my own pet subgroup! None of them look real!” is slightly misleading. It’s not real. Nobody on the telly looks like me, either, strangely enough, and we all know^*** that any sort of sex on screen is never like the real thing.

* it’s a very good thing indeed, and particularly important for other sexual subcultures such as BDSM, nowadays in a much more shaky legal situation than vanilla gay couples.

** unless they happen to be snogging their partner at the time, of course.

*** assuming we’re old enough

Keyword noise: activism, bias, designer lesbian, feminism, Finn Mackay, gay, homophobia, Julie Bindel, lesbian, stereotyping, television.

Apparently there’s some sort of international football competition coming around again. I’m going to do my best, after this post, not to mention it. As I might have said in the past, I don’t care about football at all. Neither does Big Dave, even though if you met him you’d probably expect him to be a supporter.^* If there’s one thing both me and Big Dave dislike more than football, though, it’s the assumption that even though we don’t like football we must be interested in the World Cup. We get funny looks just because we don’t give a toss whether England win or lose.

People do seem really surprised if you tell them you don’t care at all about it. Even people who aren’t football supporters, and who would never normally watch football. They say things like: “But it’s the World Cup!”

“Yes, I know! It’s football! I hate football!”

“But England are playing! You’re English! You have to support England! You have to at least watch the England matches.”^**

“Um … no, I don’t. It’s football. I hate football. Just because I don’t want to watch football on the telly doesn’t mean I’m suddenly Not Really English.” And at that point they usually give up, and look at me a bit oddly for the rest of the day. They don’t seem to get that I just don’t care about football, any football.

So, I’m not going to watch it, or write about it. The only thing that will get me to watch England playing in it, is if somebody ties me up in front of the telly so I can’t get away from it. A cruel torture indeed.

* he would fit right into the traditional football-supporting demographic without too much trouble – especially if, like me, you only saw him in a shirt and tie at work, so didn’t realise that he doesn’t wear sportswear at home.

** all, ooh, three of them.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, England, Englishness, football, television, World Cup.

Books I Haven’t Read was supposed to be a regular sequence of articles, but has been on pause since – ooh, last November, by the look of things. It fell by the wayside because of a post I never wrote, about a book I couldn’t finish because I came across a passage in it which seemed to have been blatantly lifted from an obscure Victorian memoir. I’ll manage to write about it, one day. In the meantime, here’s another book I haven’t read. *Iron Sunrise* by Charlie Charles Stross.

I’m not someone who reads much SF, but I do read some selected things. Iain M Banks, for example, because I liked his Iain Banks books^* and wanted to expand. Neal Stephenson, because I liked his historical novels and, well, ditto. And Charlie Stross, because – although I don’t know him – we used to drink in the same pubs.

So, last July, I was heading down to London for work, for a week. Planning it all in advance, I bought an unread Stross book – Iron Sunrise – to read on the train. I was catching the train down to Kings Cross on Sunday, July 10th.

I got onboard my train at Doncaster and opened the book, hoping that it would distract me from worry. Unfortunately, it opens with a mass terrorism attack, one which destroys an entire planet. I struggled to read it until Peterborough, and gave up. I haven’t looked at it since then.

At the time, I didn’t even make the connection as to why I couldn’t read it. The planet-destroying opening was distressing for me to read, with characters in the midst of planning their lives, suddenly realising that their world is being completely destroyed. I didn’t draw the parallel, though, between the characters in the book, and the friend I was worried about.^*** The thought would have been too raw at the time. Looking back, though, the connection is obvious.

I’m planning to go down to London again in a few weeks, and I’ve bought a different Stross book to read this time. Hopefully, I’ll be able to. Hopefully, too, I’ll be able to finish Iron Sunrise one day. I’m not sure I’m ready to try reading it again, though.

* in case you’ve never heard of him: he writes his SF books with his middle initial,^** and his “literary” ones without.

** although you might think it would be easier to write them with a word-processor.

*** The characters in the book – at least, the ones who were worth writing about – realised exactly what was happening to them. I still hope, whenever I think about her, that the friend I’m talking about here didn’t know what was happening to her. Back on that train, it seemed certain that she must be still alive and in hospital unidentified somewhere.

Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Charles Stross, Charlie Stross, Iron Sunrise, July 7th, literature, reading, sci fi, science fiction, terrorism.

When I write things here, I don’t think about who might be reading them. Most of the time, I write posts to entertain an itch in my head. I get it down in words, and then I forget about it. The readers, if I do think about them, are the crowd of maybe 20 people who I know personally, who I know read this site fairly regularly.^*

It’s a bit of a surprise to realise that other people do read and follow what I write. The other day, for example. I was sitting around in a club, one of those places where there are lots of people whose faces look somewhat familiar, but you don’t actually know them. One of those people – I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before, but it would take me a few minutes to remember where – joined in the conversation. Before long, he said, to me: “I remember you blogged about that.”

All I could do was nod, in a slightly surprised way. But, really, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. These words are out in public, after all. There are a couple of sites on the net that have both a photo of me^** and a link to this blog; and nearly all the customers of the club we were in have an account on one of them. Nevertheless, I was rather surprised, because I’d never have dreamed that some random stranger who I’d barely talked to before would have seen my photo online, read the blog, and remembered it well enough to then recognise me in a dark nightclub.

This is all extra-silly, though, because I do the same thing myself. So I shouldn’t be surprised when it happens to me. In fact, that same night, I had a conversation with someone else I barely know, where I was the one saying “oh, I read that on your blog.” That story, though, can wait for another day.

* either because they have linked to me, or because they know me in real life, or because I know they follow the links to this site from other places I’m active online.

** although I am very used to people saying “ooh, you don’t look like your photo at all!” There is even a photo I’m in somewhere on this site, but it’s not captioned.

Keyword noise: audience, blogging, readership.

I like to think that I’m a sensible, rational, clear-thinking person.

It’s not always the case, though. For example, I’m the sort of person who likes to watch their car mileometer trip over to a nice round number. I’ll spend half a mile looking from the road to the clock and back again so I can watch it change from 15,999 to 16,000. And, similarly, there’s a nice symmetry about today’s date: 06/06/06.^*

That’s all it is, though. Symmetry. I don’t believe that there’s anything inherently bad about today’s date, just because if you take out the zeros it looks rather like a number mentioned in one of the stranger parts of the Bible. In the news, there are reports of superstitious mothers desperate not to give birth today, just in case they give their child bad luck – or, even worse, if he turns out to be the Antichrist. If they believe in all that, they should probably avoid watching the remake of The Omen that comes out today too.^**

The apocalyptic parts of the Bible – particularly, Daniel and the Revelation – are cryptic to read. They were written for two very specific audiences, who would have understood the references and the context. They weren’t written for believers of a radically different religion, a couple of thousand years later. Naïeve, literal readings are always going to be misreadings, because they are impossible to do sensibly – a literal reading of apocalyptic literature cannot be done unless you believe that the world will suddenly change into one of magical fantasy. I wonder if, in a couple of thousand years’ time, C S Lewis’s The Last Battle will in the same way become misunderstood religious doctrine, because it, too, is an apocalypse, in both senses of the word.^***

* If nothing else, it means Americans can’t get it the wrong way round. I’m still wondering why they keep going on about November 9th, because I don’t remember anything interesting happening then.

** Not just because they’ll believe it all, but because it’s probably not as good as the original anyway.

*** Plus, it’s got a better plot.

Keyword noise: Antichrist, apocalypse, C S Lewis, Christianity, Daniel, devil, End Times, Narnia, number of the beast, numerology, religion, Revelation, round numbers, Satan, superstition, symmetry, The Last Battle, The Omen.