Symbolic Forest

My rather cruel jibe at Fife the other day only seems to have invited a single complaint, from Greig, who pointed out that Fife was the birthplace of Sir Sandford Fleming. I’d never heard of Sir Sandford Fleming myself; but it turns out that he was rather important, particularly in Canada. He invented time zones, designed the first Canadian stamp, and surveyed the route of the first trans-Canadian railway line; more importantly, he was apparently the inventor of the in-line roller skate.

Now, I’m not being deliberately cruel to Fife again here; but it made me think: just how many famous people were born there but had to emigrate to do Great Things? Sir Sandford, clearly; Andrew Carnegie is another obvious one. Adam Smith is the exception – a lot of The Wealth Of Nations was written in Kirkcaldy. If you widen it to the rest of Scotland, you could add Thomas Carlyle,^* Daniel Wilson,^** and probably many more. Does it outnumber the people who stayed behind, though? No doubt this is something I’m going to be proved very wrong about.

My passport renewal application was sent off the other day – and, no, you’re not getting to see the photo. My current plan is for a trip around Bavaria and Austria, by train – I could apparently get the train from here to Munich in a single day without too much trouble. Big Dave thinks I’m mad.

More on bird flu: it’s all a bit over-hyped, isn’t it? The big news story this evening seemed to be: people are still buying chicken. The ever-helpful BBC has come up with a page of Useful Information, answering the questions on everyone’s lips. “Will my cat have to be put down?” “If I find a dead duck, who do I call?” DUCKBUSTERS, naturally.^***

In other news, I’ve found that people still do suffer from curvature of the spine, after all. Clearly, this week was my week for insulting random strangers. Roll on Monday!

* Moving to Chelsea counts as emigration if you ask me.

** The famous Scottish-Canadian archaeologist, not the other one.

*** “Symbolic Forest – for the freshest 20-year-old memes around!”

Keyword noise: Adam Smith, Andrew Carnegie, bird flu, Canada, curvature of the spine, Fife, flu, holiday, in-line skates, kyphosis, passport, philately, roller skates, Sandford Fleming, scoliosis, Scotland, stamps.

Driving to work this morning: the sun was warm, and the sky blue. Leaving the office at lunch time: the car was hot, and I zoomed along with the windows down.^* “Lovely,” I thought, “why not go to the beach?”

So, I popped down to the seafront, and sat down on the beach with my sandwiches.

And, as soon as I did, the heavens opened. It pissed down.

It’s not quite summer yet.

* and with a Herman Düne album on the stereo.

Keyword noise: beach, lunch, rain, sea, seaside, summer, weather.

Breaking news report: a bird has died of H5 bird flu, in Fife. The authorities are concerned, and have sealed off the area, for fear that it might spread to civilisation.

(I haven’t been there for about five years, I have to admit. Apparently it’s quite nice now – they even have electricity!)

Keyword noise: bird flu, cruel jokes, Fife, flu, news.

You might be wondering, having read yesterday’s post, how I know quite so much about the founders of the Salvation Army. The answer: my mother.

My mother would frequently buy me lots and lots of books, usually from the local library’s “for sale” stack.^* Every so often, though, she would pop down to our local Christian booksellers, housed in an old ice factory near the docks, and buy me something Moral and Improving.

Sometimes these would be factual books about the lives of great Christians, such as, for example, William Booth and Catherine Mumford. More often, though, it would be a children’s novel with a religious theme. They started off just like any other novel, but when it came to the crunch point, the characters would find that only God could save them.

One series I particularly remember was a series of science-fiction stories, set in a far-future solar system where Christianity had been long-banned, but was preserved by a group of secret space-age knights who had been very heavily influenced by the Star Wars movies. Their worlds were dark and gritty; but if the characters’ faith or energy-sword-waving skills didn’t save them, a deus ex machina surely would. Indeed, the whole point of these books was that God definitely is still about the place, and can pop into the story for the occasional bit of divine intervention when needed. The reader can see that God is real, even if only the “good” characters can.

* “Withdrawn from stock, 25p each”

Keyword noise: books, Christian fiction, Christian science fiction, Christianity, improving literature, religion, SF, science fiction.

Yesterday, I was idly wondering: does anybody suffer from “curvature of the spine” any more? Or was it just one of those Victorian diseases which you just don’t see nowadays?

You see, I remember reading, years and years ago, that Catherine Mumford, wife of anti-poverty campaigner and Salvation Army founder William Booth, suffered from it badly when she was a teenager. So much so, she was forced to spend a few years lying face-down in bed reading the Bible and writing letters about the evils of booze.^* Today, though, you don’t hear about it very often. Does it still exist?

I spent a while thinking about it yesterday, googling up things like kyphosis and scoliosis. It’s still around, then – but is it common? Do people still get problems like that, or was it just a result of bad nutrition and poor mattresses?

And then, this morning, I woke up in rather severe pain. I couldn’t move, because my back was in agony. It’s stayed rather painful all day, albeit not as bad as it was when I awoke. Clearly, my spine has a twisted sense of humour.

* Thinking about it, though, her life probably wouldn’t have been much different if she had been allowed to leave her bed. The entertainment options for teenage girls in 1840s Lincolnshire were rather limited, and she was rabidly religious from an early age.

Keyword noise: Catherine Booth, Catherine Mumford, curvature of the spine, irony, kyphosis, Salvation Army, scoliosis, William Booth.

As it’s April 1st, here is a post containing outright lies. Roughly half of the following statements^* are currently true. Others are completely made up. Guess which are which.

I know it’s already the afternoon, and by tradition April Fools should only be done in the morning. Nevertheless, I don’t care.

1. I have never driven a train.

2. I have had sex with everyone I’ve ever kissed, apart from relatives.

3. Recurring blog character Big Dave doesn’t actually exist – if I’ve done something I want to blog about, but don’t want to admit to it myself, I write a disguised version, gender-swap it as required, and attribute it to “him”.

4. This website is named after a real piece of woodland called “Symbolic Plantation”, a few miles from my house.

5. I have never worked in any field that I actually have qualifications in.

6. I was born in the Far East.

Go on, tell me which ones you think are lies.

* And all of the footnotes.

Keyword noise: April Fools Day, falsehoods, lies, misleading, truth.

There are many things I just don’t understand about people, but this is one I’ve been thinking about lately.

A month or more ago now, I wrote about Big Dave’s Dating Life. In particular, about one particular girl from his darts team, who was constantly tempted to go back to her ex-boyfriend even though he tended to beat her up whenever she visited him. Big Dave’s romantic contribution: a few vigilante-style threats to help persuade him to stop.

Anyway, Big Dave’s wooing proceeded according to plan, with a few dates which got more and more serious as time went on. Until last week, when he was cruelly dumped by text message, because she’d decided to go back to the abusive ex, with still no sign that he really was going to stop the beatings.

No sooner had this happened, then one of the worse gossip-mongers at our branch in Another Part Of The Forest starts telling us that one of her underlings – a woman who I’ll call Antivirus – is on a diet, because she wants to look good for her wedding. Which is, well, news.

I don’t know Antivirus very well, but we do chat to each other on the phone every week or so, and the last I’d heard about her relationship really didn’t sound promising. To put it bluntly, a few months ago it had broken down. Not only was she moving out, but she was moving out secretly. She’d planned to wait until she knew the boyfriend was securely at work, then she rushed in with some friends in a van, so that he’d come home to find her, her kids,^* all her possessions gone. Because she was terrified of how he’d react if she told him she was leaving.

If you ask me, that’s not a good relationship to be in. It’s not the sort of relationship you’re going to want to go back to. But, for some reason, she has. Not only that, but she’s agreed to marry him.

Obviously, I don’t know the details of either of these cases. Maybe there’s a good reason for everything here. Maybe both of these men have turned over a completely new leaf, and are going to be perfect partners from now on. That’s what they’ve probably promised, at any rate. If it was me, though, I wouldn’t be convinced. There are lots of aspects of relationships I don’t understand, but there are some people who really baffle me.

* not his, in case you were wondering.

Keyword noise: abuse, abusive relationships, Big Dave, dating, domestic violence, relationships, romance, violence.

On top of the timezone confusion, work is getting a little pressured this week. I’ve been driving about between branches carrying equipment backwards and forwards, because if you’ve got a large amount of data in the wrong place, the quickest way to sort things out is still to put your computer in the boot of your car and drive it down to Another Part Of The Forest’s branch office. Squeezing it down an internet pipeline takes all day; driving to the other side of the county only takes an hour.^*

The best part of that, of course, is that an hour of driving down the motorway is an hour of not having to answer the phone to be given more work.

* Well, the other middle of the county, at any rate.

Keyword noise: busy, commuting, data transfer, driving, Sneakernet, travel.

The changing of the clocks has left me feeling a little tired and disorientated. It’s not surprising that there are more car accidents in this week, as people adjust to the shift.

Driving home just now,^* in the dark and heavy blattering rain, I wanted to be warm and cosied up in bed. Driving in the rain at night always makes me wonder what it must have been like to live before electric heating and lights. It also makes me think of the Lyke Wake Dirge – for no apparent reason, because there’s nothing to connect the Dirge with bad weather. It’s a very evocative text, though.

This aye night, this aye night,
Every night and all,
Fire and fleet and candle-light
And Christ take up thy soul

* Not from work – it’s gone 10pm. I don’t work that late.

Keyword noise: British Summer Time, darkness, daylight savings time, dirge, funerals, Lyke Wake Dirge, rain, seasons, weather.

As it’s Sunday, let’s think about religion for a moment. More specifically, let’s think about Norman Kember, the peace activist rescued last week after spending several months as a hostage in Iraq.

The big news story since his release, of course, is that he didn’t seem particularly happy to be freed. His gratitude to the SAS seemed rather forced, and he repeated his anti-war position. And that, in itself, is an admirable thing – I’d respect him much less if he had switched to say: “actually, now, I think the SAS are doing a damn fine job out there.”

Whether he was right or wrong to go out there is something that can be debated for hours, but it isn’t what I want to talk about. I’m more interested in whether he wanted to be rescued or not, and how that might be down to his religion.

There’s no doubt that Kember was deeply religious.^* His behaviour, it seems, is classic for deeply religious people – it’s a case of self-martyrdom. Since the earliest days of Christianity – well, since the days of St Anthony, at least – the devout have flocked to non-deadly varients of martyrdom. St Anthony himself favoured hermeticism, but not all of us, particularly today, could cope with living on our own in the depths of the desert. So, people have found other ways to suffer in the name of Christ,^** particularly by self-denial and “mortification”. Kember accidentally found an excellent modern way to suffer and mortify himself, and serve his favourite political cause along the way: be a hostage. No wonder he didn’t particularly want to be rescued.

* And the two Canadians who were captives along with Kember look, in the pictures shown on the BBC site, to have a bit of a fanatical gleam in their eyes.

** The best-known being the Stylites, probably because they sound rather silly.

Keyword noise: captives, Christianity, fanaticism, freedom, hostage, Iraq, martyrdom, monasticism, Norman Kember, pacifism, peace, religion, war.