Symbolic Forest

As part of all the building work that’s been going on at the office, we’ve been getting the security systems upgraded. A new alarm system, new motorised front gates,^* and new electronic locks on most of the internal doors. All to be worked by RFID tags, kept on our keyrings and carried round all the time.

Now, being logical and sensible, we assumed that the company had specified either a single system, or compatible systems, so that we could use one single tag to unlock everything. Therefore we were pleased to spot, as the contractor^** started to install the hardware, that all the sensors we could see came from the same manufacturer. Very sensible.

We each get a tag the other week, and start using it to open and shut the front gates. Three days ago, the contractor pops his head round the door to say he’ll be issuing us with the rest of the tags, the ones for the indoor locks, soon.

“The rest of the tags? We’ve already got one.”

Apparently, we need separate ones for the outdoor locks, the indoor locks, and the alarm system itself. Because “the systems are from different manufacturers.”

“But they’re not from the same manufacturers! We’ve seen them, and they’re identical! If you hold an outdoor tag up to an indoor sensor, it recognises it!”

“No it doesn’t.”

I held my “outdoor tag” up to the newly-installed sensor by the office door. It bleeped, and flashed a little green light at me.

“Well, I can try to set it up so that that tag unlocks this door,” the contractor said. “But it won’t work.”

(to be continued, otherwise this post would get a bit long)

* This is a Good Thing, because guess who’s job it is to unlock and open the old front gates every morning.

** Our usual security contractor, a friendly chap, who is very anal about making sure his cabling is put in and terminated neatly, but isn’t very good at setting up the security systems themselves properly.

Keyword noise: alarm, building security, buildings, compatibility, defeatism, electronic locks, forward planning, incompatibility, locks, planning, RFID, RFID locks, security, systems.

There’s been an awful lot in the news lately about the drug trial whose guinea-pigs are dangerously ill.^* My own abnormal reaction is: they volunteered for this. They may well have come out of trials before with no problems, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be as lucky on the next trial they take. The chance of something like this happening is miniscule, but it’s still there.

Am I being too callous? It is, of course, still a horrible thing to happen to someone, and to their relatives. One of their relatives, a BBC producer called Myfanwy Marshall, has been on the news constantly since it happened, telling us all how horrible it is that her boyfriend is dangerously ill, and has lost his good looks. On an interview last night, she said how shocked she was that he suddenly looks middle-aged – “forty-five”, she said. I know people don’t always say what they mean when they’re under stress, but it certainly seemed to show a lot about her priorities in life.

* Well, three-quarters of them – the others were on the placebo.

Keyword noise: drug trial, medicine, Parexel, testing.

I was a little doubtful when I saw, on the front page of Friday’s Guardian, the tagline “Steam trains – the great aphrodisiac”. I do like trains, but I wouldn’t say that about them.

It turned out to be subeditor’s hyperbolae. The article, by a former director of British Rail, turned out to be about the radical romanticism of the steam engine. Eroticism was only briefly mentioned. I’m rather glad, to be honest. Train-into-tunnel might be a classic visual metaphor, but I don’t think very many people would say that the train itself is what gets them going. There are people out there who haven’t just had sex on the train, but can remember the numbers of the trains they’ve had sex on – but I somehow don’t think it was the train itself that was turning them on.^*

What I do like about trains is what that article calls “the rigmarole of trains”. The ritual surrounding the railway. The little bits of peculiar terminology that you don’t get anywhere else.^** The natural romanticism of rail travel, and the community feeling that can spring up around the line.

* but if it was – on balance, I think I’d rather not know!

** phrases like “not to be used outside possessions”, or “not to be loose or hump shunted”.

Keyword noise: culture, locomotive, railway, ritual, romantic, steam engine, steam train, The Guardian, Simon Jenkins, trains.

Went for a walk on the beach today, to try out a new camera lens.^* I’m told that brisk exertion can be good when you’re feeling down; and struggling through the biting wind across the dunes always seems to leave me more cheerful than I was before. When I was too tired for the sand, I moved down and walked along the firm mud at the edge of the saltmarsh instead.

Even at half a mile, the roar of the breaking waves was a loud, constant growl. I stood and watched ships lining up and waiting to be piloted upriver, and tried to take photos of the changing weather.

(as they are on film, you’ll have to wait)

* Nikkor AF 35-70mm 1:3.3-4.5, if you care – an early 90s model, I think. I can never understand Nikon lens ranges. I don’t normally go for zoom lenses either, but it was only £35.

Keyword noise: beach, cold, photography, Nikon, walking, weather, wind.

In case you were wondering: last week, I was away in Wales. I was staying in the small, snowy town of Penrhyndeudraeth, Meirionydd, doing some volunteer work.^* Of course, I came back from my holiday needing another one to recover from it.

I managed to come across as a bit of a mad English tourist, whilst I was there, whilst I was in the local post office. The post office’s Lottery machine, you see, had a cardboard advertising hoarding on top of it. “Do you have a spare one?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said the shopkeeper. She started to hunt around. “I’m sure we have one somewhere.”

“I don’t mean to be any trouble,” I said, “but if you had one handy – I’ve been looking for one of those.”

“I’m sure we did have another,” she said, wondering what the hell this mad English tourist wanted with a cardboard Lottery advert. “I’ll have a look for it and put it to one side for you.”

“Oh no no I don’t want to be a nuisance,” I said, feeling slightly embarrassed. “I just wanted one because that” – I pointed at the picture on the advert – “is my friend W, and it would be nice to have one. Well, um, thank you anyway. I really don’t want to put you to any bother.” And I left the shop, leaving me feeling embarrassed for causing a fuss, and her baffled at these strange tourists with friends off the adverts.

* “…with the mentally ill,” as one of the other people there said. I think it was The Goon, who may well be reading.

Keyword noise: advertising, celebrities, Meirionydd, tourists, travel, Cymru, Wales.

I always enjoy W’s parties, even the ones I can’t remember afterwards.^* And, because it was their wedding, this one seemed extra-special.

I’d been given the job of semi-official photographer, so I tried to stay more or less sober. It also gave me an excuse to constantly rush around the building shoving my camera into people’s faces. I would probably have done this regardless, but it was nice to have an excuse for it.

Eventually, people started dancing, so there was nothing for it but to put the camera down and bounce around like a mad thing. I don’t think I did anyone any serious injuries, but equally I’m not going to be winning any dancing prizes in the near future. Then, when I was exhausted, I’d flop down on the sofa for five minutes before picking up the camera again and repeating the cycle. If I saw someone posing for someone else’s camera, I’d try to quickly grab a sneaky shot from the side. Hopefully all the other party guests think they look good in profile. The main room was lit by beautiful blue fairy lights: it looked wonderful, but it was so dark that half the time I had no idea what I was photographing.^**

I was still emotional by the end of the evening. I hugged W before I left, and wanted to tell him: have a wonderful life together. W and P make an amazing couple, and everyone who knows them wants them to be happy forever after.

If you want to see the rest of the wedding photos – not that they will be of much interest unless you know P and W yourself, of course – most of them are here.

* such as the one where I got so drunk I collapsed in a flowerbed. There are quite a lot of people in London who have no clue what my name is, but if you say “you know, the one who collapsed in the flowerbed at W’s party” will know exactly who you mean.

** One technical photo tip: I was lucky that the house has very light, almost-white walls and ceilings throughout. This means that – if you have a swivel-head flashgun with good automatic metering – you can point your flash directly up at the ceiling to get nice, even, flattering lighting. It does mean, though, that the photo lighting is nothing like the original scene. This photo was taken in a room barely light enough to not walk into other people, and all the light comes from the flashgun attached to the camera.

Keyword noise: bounce flash, celebration, Civil Partnership, London, marriage, party, photography, travel, wedding.

I had no idea what to expect at the wedding. I’ve, unsurprisingly, never been to a Civil Partnership Ceremony before; but equally, I’ve never been to any sort of civil wedding before.

The wedding started late, and the registrar seemed a little stressed. “Sorry for the delay,” she said, “but the couple at the previous wedding weren’t sure it was going ahead.” You could sense a long, long backstory behind that sentence.

The ceremony was short. W and P strode up the aisle together, and the registrar explained what they were getting into. They faced each other, and looked into each other’s eyes as they gave their declarations and vows. My eyes were slightly damp, and they received a long, long round of applause, which seemed to surprise the registrar. “You are a popular couple,” she said. And, bar the posing for photos, it was already over. W and P are Registered Partners. We all rolled out into the garden for champagne.

Keyword noise: celebration, Civil Partnership, friends, London, marriage, photography, wedding.

Well, I had planned to go shopping. I didn’t want to go to any record shops, because that always leads to me spending much more money that I’d intended. So, I was going to go to one of my favourite London shopping streets, Lower Marsh.

Lower Marsh is quite an obscure place, near the Old Vic theatre, and running down the side of Waterloo Station. For an obscure street, though, it has a bizarre and fascinating variety of shops. There’s rather geeky bookstore Ian Allan, top fetish clothing store Honour [link not really SFW], and blogging bookshop Crockatt & Powell.^*

The plan I had, you see, was to stroll into Crockett & Powell, spend too much money on interesting-looking books, and try to casually slip blogging into the conversation. “This is a fascinating shop – I only found out about it because I read your blog,” or something along those lines. Unfortunately, as I’d spent rather too long scurrying around Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture in the Tate Modern, I was running a bit late and didn’t have time to get there. Meeting people for dinner, by the time I reached Waterloo I barely had time to catch the tube and get where I was meant to be going. No time to buy any books,^** or do any blog-stalking. Disappointing.

* Update, August 25^th 2020: Sadly, Crockatt & Powell closed in 2009.

** or fetish gear, for that matter.

Keyword noise: books, bookshops, Ian Allan, London, Lower Marsh, shopping, Waterloo.

Deciding to do something cultural whilst in the Big City, I visited Tate Modern to see Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, her Turbine Hall installation made up of thousands of plastic casts of cardboard boxes.

As I’d visited the work warehouse earlier in the day, my first reaction was: “this isn’t a very neat warehouse”. My second reaction was “ooh, I could just do with a cup of tea”, because the stacks and stacks of white boxes make me think of a giant pile of sugar lumps.^* One leak in the roof, and the whole thing would just dissolve.

It was good to see, though, that kids love Embankment. They were all over it, playing hide and seek, darting in and out between piles of boxes. It’s good to have art that you can get inside and move around in, and use for your own purposes like that. The kids might not be thinking about the plight of London’s homeless, but Art^** isn’t just for the artist’s purposes. It’s what you make of it that counts.

* In fact, I’m tempted to make a model replica of Embankment entirely out of sugar cubes and starch paste.

** With a capital A, of course.

Keyword noise: art, children, Embankment, gallery, holiday, London, playing, Rachel Whiteread, sculpture, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall.

(read part one here)

I thought I’d better get around to finishing this post off, because the Tower Of London ravens are in the news again. Now that bird flu has started to make its way into Western Europe, the Ravenmaster is getting ready to move his birds into the top-quality indoor aviary mentioned previously, and the story is making its way into all the papers.^* We can’t have the ravens dying on us; the fate of the country isn’t at stake.

Except, though, that the idea that the fate of the nation depends on the Tower’s ravens is all a big misunderstanding. The myth isn’t about living ravens at all. The real myth is that the fate of the nation depends on the raven god staying at the Tower. Furthermore, according to some, he already left.

The closest we have to the original superstition is in medieval Welsh myth. In Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, part of the Mabinogion, the hero Bran – “Raven” – is mortally wounded in a battle with the Irish. He tells his companions to cut off his head, and bury it on Tower Hill. The head stays alive for 87 years, but eventually the spell is broken, and they do as they were told:

[The followers of Bran] could not rest but journeyed forth with the head towards London. And they buried the head in the White Mount, and when it was buried, this was the third goodly concealment; and it was the third ill-fated disclosure when it was disinterred, insamuch as no invasion from across the sea came to this island while the head was in that concealment.^**

The Iron Age people of Western Europe were big on heads and head cults. Stone heads have been found buried at various archaeological sites, and this passage is the best evidence we have as to why they were buried: they were protective talismans. Clearly, the writers of the Mabinogion believed in their power, too. They have to explain why the Welsh lost control of south-eastern Britain, when the raven god’s head was protecting them from invasion. Answer: the English only managed to invade after the head was removed. The blame for this is placed on King Arthur, who, not being superstitious himself, deliberately dug the head up in the hope of making his armies try harder. It worked, whilst Arthur himself was around; but after his death, Britain fell to the English.^***

So, in short, the Tower Ravens might be a twisted survival of an ancient Welsh myth. The modern version of the story doesn’t appear in print, though, until the late 19th century, well after the Celtic Revival, and well after the Mabinogion had been published in English. Furthermore, the original story is that the promised fall of the nation has already happened; and England is the country that replaced it. If the Tower’s ravens do all leave one day, we English don’t have much to worry about; we are the people they were meant to be protecting the country from in the first place.

* and a lot of people are searching the web and coming here for more information.

** From the Charlotte Guest translation of the Mabinogion available from Project Gutenberg.

*** This part of the story isn’t in the Mabinogion; I’m taking it from Mythology Of The British Isles by Geoffrey Ashe. It’s mentioned in at least one set of Welsh Triads.

Keyword noise: archaeology, castles, Iron Age, King Arthur, London, Mabinogion, mythology, raven god, ravens, Tower Of London, Welsh myth.