Station

swarm

2011-12-03T12:41:00.007Z

How they circle up from the inside,

We marvel at their persistence.

From deep in the belly right up into the throat,

We can't help but notice

their determination

as they swarm higher into the mouth.

And from the other side of the window,

we nod in admiration.

How we gaze in wonder

as the window pane shifts in and out of sight

melts over the top of us and sticks in gluey mess

sucks through us and then leaves us alone

back in place.

We're not sure which side we're on.

Us on the inside and them on the outside.

Us on the inside and them on the inside.

And how to go on now.

How we marvel

at their persistence.

How we wait

for guidance.

Perhaps we'll let them in,

let them take over a while.

And we can rest down here,

away from all the activity

up there.

We can rest down here a while

push/release

2010-11-26T18:29:00.006Z

I'm not totally sure what this woman is doing, but she became like this gradually and it seemed clear that this was how she had to be.

Stretch

2010-11-24T20:45:00.004Z

I knew I was going to draw a figure in something like this position, but in my imagination it was a mournful female figure, head and shoulders slumped forward in a dejected way, out of in energy after feeling distraught. But somehow this man grew, stretching upwards. To me he seems relaxed but also purposeful, because he's present in his body as he stretches it out. Lisa says I drew someone reaching up to new heights of understanding and acceptance. I like this interpretation.

2010-01-16T11:53:00.004Z

Recently I've been watching shadows.
It's not that they were moving,
except when someone

out of my field of focus

moved around

or changed the lights.
But it wasn't so much that.

It's that the intricacy of the shapes,

the angles,

the repetitions,

the angles,

the echoes,
they all demand such close attention.
The people all seem so intent on each other.
On their faces, their bodies, the objects attached to them.
But in this field of focus,

inside the beauty of shifing light and dark and colours and lines,
the objects disappear into planes of patterns.
And the shadows
draw you in.

Rose

2009-03-26T12:54:00.006Z

I hadn't thought about the heaviness of soil before. It seemed that a big flower pot full of it was more awkward than I had made allowance for when planning to transport a rose to my mother's house. You could tuck it under one arm best, with both hands clasped underneath. I had it in a thick paper bag with cord handles, from a clothes shop, and just a few of the newly-sprouted leaves poked out of the top so that the passers-by on my walk to the train station took a furtive sideways look with an almost imperceptible raising of the head to get a better angle on whatever could be in there.

In a way, I wanted them to realise it was a plant inside. I do sometimes revel in being a little bit unconventional, and carrying a plant pot through the streets was therefore quite appealing. But then, I do also get a bit held back by self-consciousness; I could never be post-conventional. So I suppose I also wanted the plant to be seen because if there wasn't an unusual object inside the bag, then I was carrying it in what was almost certainly a socially abnormal way for no apparent reason. I was making absolutely no use of the handles. In fact, I also carry in this fashion when a bag is heavy on account of being full of books from the University Library, but then the bag is usually made of clear plastic to make sure that we don't try and steal any, which circumvents the visibility problem.

I had set off a little early in order to be able to sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee on the station's platform before getting on the train. I'm not sure why the platform was part of the coffee equation rather than my seat on the train, but the contrast between crisp-air-on-cheeks and hot-coffee-on-lips when I did drink seemed to congratulate me on the choice. The other people on my bench were early too, and so we all sat together in silence for about ten minutes, during which time the rush of people crossing in front of us to and from trains seemed like a pressure wave pushing us back into a little corner of intimacy. It seemed a bit like we were having a very personal conversation as we looked out at the people intently from our bench with our hot drinks. They all had the opposite idea about their drinks. They all held them in front of them as they marched ahead, leaning slightly forwards from the waist. I began to suspect the drinks were actually pulling them forwards, what with the way they clutched onto them so tightly, and how they seemed so very serious about their train-catching task. What a disaster it would be if they were to drop it. Undoubtedly they would stand entirely still and look at all the trains in total bemusement. Perhaps then they would notice the bench and decide it would be nice to have a little sit down.

As I put down the rose bag on the third train of my cross-country route, the bag broke. I folded it and placed it on the table top as a mat for the pot so as not to spread the soil everywhere. Now everyone was able to admire the rose, and when finally I arrived, I carried it out in front of me to my mother who was waiting on the platform.

down and up

2009-01-27T21:02:00.006Z

In a narrow street in Cambridge there is a hole in the tarmac in the shape of an elongated heart. Around the corner, when the light fades from the sky the sundial high up on the church wall tells the time of the orange lampposts' night. Sometimes I look down and sometimes up.

Recently I have been using my old inline rollerblades to get from A to a range of other letters, and so now the pavement has a new meaning. Now I feel the down. The pavement has more texture than it did when I was just shoe soles and bicycle wheels.

It is incredibly smooth and I weave between the walking people without ever needing air to come between my wheels and the ground, only elements of the figure eight. And then it is slightly less glass-like, it is the sandstone paving stones, and the sound comes out in a strange wavering tone that sounds like ghosts are underneath. But then there are older paving stones with the deep cracks between, and if the weight is too far forwards you will trip, so you must sink back a little. You will never flow here, and the precision of where the next pushing step must fall absorbs everything. At the special paving stones made of little bobbles that tell the pedestrians where they should line up to cross the road, if you hold your wheels in a very straight line for a while you can slip exactly between the bumps that otherwise would judder and jar through your legs and right up your back. Cobbled streets are obviously out of bounds. Then there is the road. Sometimes the road is so rough that the wheels cannot move with any pace and need constant, vigorous encouragement, even though your tremor-ridden legs ache for the glassy surface to come back.

Sometimes I look at my feet and sometimes at the sky. Now I feel with my feet. I want to feel the sky.

Run

2008-11-21T19:11:00.003Z

Mother moved house. She moved when I wasn't there, but I've seen it now. We had Christmas there last year and that was the point at which it became a family house. We all helped to keep the fire lit, and the complex procedure of Christmas dinner was kept in check by a thorough list detailing the time-before-take-off of each person's part.
Mother's house has hills and woods now. I tried running through them last time I was there. At first there was a stream making enough noise to keep the footfall on leaves into a delicate but slightly frantic pattern. But then there were only woods and fields and all the focus settled on the ups and downs of the hill path so that the head felt it was ploughing through the softly muddy ground. I let the feet tumble down and down till we reached the road. The carving had already been done there. But then there were the lorries passing from behind with their invisible drivers, passing at such regular intermittence that in the quiet spells you could feel in your skin the next one growing in the distance behind until it was big enough to take its place in the air it would push past you.
The next day I ran in the other direction. I ran alongside a canal, and although it didn't have the rush of the stream, its quiet, steady companionship was more than enough. Sometimes the land at the side rose up or fell away, and sometimes a bridge wanted everyone to cross to the other side, but the path and the water stayed at the same level the whole time so that the feet and the eyes could go their separate ways. At times they were miles apart. At a certain point there was a tunnel. It wasn't that anything about the path changed. It was just that the land closed overhead so that the water on the ground glistened black and the thin splashes they made shot back from the roof to accentuate the tentativity of the feet. Once I was through the tunnel there didn't seem to be any point in continuing further so, a little more confidently this time, I plunged back into the darkness and ran home.

Calculators for kids!

2007-08-29T09:15:00.000Z

At home now with my love of calculators, it is time to share them with the children. Yes, the children.
The Whipple Museum has a wonderful wealth of calculating tools from the past few centuries of the western world. There are slide rules (including groovy circular and cylindrical one which boost up the multiplication power), abacuses, tiny little Napier's bones, big clunky mechanical calculators from the early- to mid-twentieth century, little stylus slide adders and Curta calculators (exceptionally cool) from the 1950s. And of course, a bordering-on-incredible number of hand held electronic calculators from the 1970s and early 80s, some remarkable for being the first of some kind or other (scientific, programmable, touch sensitive, etc), some remarkable for being sensually either thrilling or distasteful to a high degree, some for visual flair, some utterly unremarkable apart from their adding to the general impression of the sheer quantity of these things that so flooded the markets, and some that from a great distance look like flies.
Via the medium of the video-conference, I am going to talk about these tools of calculation to classes of 12-14 year olds, from four different schools all at once. Magic. Then they are going to get together in little groups and do their own research project on them, including designing a mathematical game based on their tool, and in a second video-conference they can present the fruits of their labour to me and the other classes so that we can all discuss. Hopefully it will be fun and give them happy enthusiasm beans.

Silence of

2007-08-26T16:50:00.000Z

Silence of the children-thought
as blown on carriage train to nought,
with buckets from the mind-well slowly
brought to stretch the light of dusk where
shadows pierce a heart of sorts
and salt marks out the eyes.
Smite not now the over-pass,
where thundered air can breathe at last,
where distance flies us close enough for
bruised lips to return to laugh
and delight is compromise.

calculator central

2007-07-06T15:06:00.000Z

1st prize for style (purely visual): Sinclair, most particularly the Sinclair Sovereign. It doesn't get much better than that. Its keys, unfortunately, are sensually crap.

1st prize for visual and tactile finesse: Texas Instruments, particuarly the TI-1050. Not abundant with flair, but classy with the black cases and pale gold brushed aluminium key panels with plain black keys. It has a solid, trustworthy feel to it in the hand. Too many calculators had too many different coloured keys.

Parameters of touch: calculators are go.

2007-06-29T13:43:00.000Z

On seeing a clunky, quirky, sleek or sexy calculator from the 1970s in a museum or in a museum catalogue, surely you would be disappointed not to be able to reach out and touch its eminantly clickable keys. I know I would.
And yet here I am, in a museum workspace, with 436 such calculators at my fingertips, making our database ready to publish a catalogue of the collection. I could help you. I could give you vicarious calculator sensuality.
So, I am not merely recording dates and what type of battery these things took; I have devised a language system.
To try and make it clear, I made a few semi-artificial parameters of the act of pressing these little keys .
First is the length of travel: how far the keys can be depressed. This works out simply as short-, medium-, or long-travel. Texas Instruments are generally very short travel, for example.
Next is the process of depressing the keys. Just like the keys of a piano, those of a calculator can be differently weighted. Degrees of resistance. Thus the keys vary between being very light and very heavy to the touch. Some of them require serious finger power. Some are so light you hardly knew you pressed them, and then some, like the Sinclairs, seem so heavy that perhaps the calculators are only meant ot be viewed. Of course, Sinclair can get away with that: theirs are the only calculators that actually pass as sexy, especially the Sovereign.
During depression, the keys may also be 'squashy'. Casio keys are a typical example of this. Note that lightness to the touch is necessary but not sufficient for squashiness.
Then we come to the behaviour of the keys at the end-point of depression. It became fashionable to make calculators whose keys clicked upon depression in the 1970s (in the marketing blurb this was a 'positive click'... helping you have a positive calculator experience, of course). But there are all manner of types of click: it could be soft, muffled, loud or prominent; it could be dull, bright, flimsy, hollow, metallic, or could even give a faint rattle. Some manufacturers ignored clickiness entirely; their keys, in my language, have 'a soft manner of depression'. Decimo tend to be like this. The phrasing here is a little awkward I know, but it is better than my earlier solution, where the keys simply had 'soft depression'. Poor things.
Finally comes the behaviour of keys on their return. They can be increadibly springy and bouncy on some makes. Surprisingly, springiness seems to be almost entirely unrelated to squashiness. A key that squashes limply on depression can suddenly spring straight back out at you on release: a remarkable feat if ever I saw/felt one.
Shape comes into this as well, but only insofar as some are concavely shaped to the finger.
Throughout all of this I have tried to refrain from normative language. Some calculators have such utterly crap keys that quite frankly I'd prefer to take the calculator to bits and gawk at its groovy interior than actually use the damn thing. (Actually its getting to the point where I want to do this to most of the calculators, invalidating my attempt at abuse, but you get it, I'm trying to be emphatic here: some of their keys suck). And then some calculators, some calculators have dream keys. They really do. I want to use language like 'perfectly' weighted, and ridiculous things like a 'delightful click.' But I try not to talk in those kinds of terms. I'm trying to be objective about this. Ha!

2007-05-17T19:37:00.000Z

I would very much like to buy a little something.
One of those little somethings that a little peckish someone decides they can excuse to themselves in one way or another.
It will surely be some kind of pastry or chocloately thing of some sort. It is that time of day. It is going to be a treat. And I am going to revel in tastification station, lap upall the sensual glories of luxurious deliciousness that such a thing could offer. I must choose carefully.
I must take each one into my mind's eye, hold it up to the light, turn it over slowly, sink into it for a moment, and see where it would leave me were I to choose it in reality. Each one. If the decision is going to be a good one, I can't take anything for granted.
But there is a pressure squeezing from outside, a pair of eyes trained on me, trained yet devoid of expression, a pair eyebrows cocked expectantly yet hardly out of place, the frosty force of that inaudible, inner, impatient sigh. Like a clip around the ear, she wants to know if I have chosen yet. She is worried about the other people, because I came in before them and it would violate the rules of accurate and appropriate queue formation if she were to serve them before me. But I don't care about her queue; I have a much more important queue of imagined pastry samples to deal with before I can possibly even contemplate her human queue.
I am going to have to take a deep breath and hold in mind that this decision is far more enjoyable than she remembers.
And then I think I will find a bench and have a little contemplative sit-down in which to appreciate the end-product of such a momentous decision and subsequent purchase.
How super.

Light skin

2007-01-14T20:56:00.000Z

Pass her around they felt the air suspended
and light that bent its way from all directions
delved in pockets and flats and between the hairs of her arms so that nothing of her could slip them by.
Examined so she lay extended
felt the darts their eyes portended
and in this haze who knew what they saw.
For days on end not shamed to pry
for dazed and stunned what pain could shy her away from them?
But light there was too much to stand
and one by one, to take their rest, they slipped under the hairs that they'd undressed.
Now she who had been so adored
awoke weighed down by feathered claws.
Unaware so of the cause she dressed and washed her face.
She played her normal pace.
But lying watchers lined her core,
a thousand eyes with her absorbed,
and gone was all her grace.

The turning-in-snow diaries

2007-01-14T16:27:00.000Z

It turns out, the activity of skiing is centred most primarily around turning.
Going straight down the fall-line of a slope is a most distasteful practice, involving little in the way of skill and much in the way of uncontrollable speed. There is nothing wrong with speed. But it should always be controlled.
The way to do this is to turn.
The way to that, however, is tricky.

When you are slowing yourself down, your skiis are roughly perpendicular to the slope, parallel to one another; they are pointing across the slope. You want to make them point the other way. But how could you possibly acheive this, when the middle stage in the process surely necessarily involves pointing them straight down, picking up too much speed and no longer being able to shift them one way or the other at all?

The answer lies in your weight.
Your weight is on the downhill ski (the one of the two that is further down the slope) so that you can push right into the ground to slow down. What you are aiming to do, therefore, is gently to transfer your weight from one ski to another.
When you do this, what it feels like is that you become, for a magical moment, entirely weightless.
It is a piece of mental trickery. You lift your mind away from the ground and let your skiis slip neatly underneath you, until you make (mental) contact with the ground again. At this point you push them right out to the other side and dig them right into the ground again. Your body feels as though it has stayed in the middle. You're leaning totally inwards, facing right down the slope. It just your bent knees, locked together, that are pushing your feet and the skiis attached to them out to the side.
So then you can zoom, bouncing like this from side to side, down, down, down.

But this is only the case in a certain type of snow.
There are many types of snow.

Just now, here, the snow is prone to being rather icey. The above method of turning becomes untenable. You need to dig the edge of your ski in if you are going to control yourself. The very edge. The uphill edge of the downhill ski, to be precise. The uphill ski doesn't matter too much; just forget about it for now.
What we are doing now is called carving. They can be very wide, long turns when you're carving. In fact, right on the edge of that ski, knees bent, weight slightly further forward than in softer snow, you actually pick up speed. You feel it when you get it right. Normally turning slows you down, but when you get it just right, they suddenly start accelerating underneath you in a wonderful glide. You can use this if there's a gentle slope that normally slows people down; you can glide past them. But you can also use it in these icey conditions we're talking about, to carve out a graceful curve that lets you come down the piste in total control.
Of course, when you do the crucial point of the turn, you are still doing the weightless trick, but it's not nearly so pronounced as in the short, sharp turns above; it is much more gradual.

Steered into halves

2007-01-09T20:56:00.000Z

Steered into halves.
Follyed in time with the straightest of arrows until
greeted in parts.
Joining the crowd with the deepest of bows from the
toes to the heart.
Old rope assunder,
built with blunder,
shouldered asside,
and watched with wonder.
Seering frame by frame in this space of space with
mouths for all to hear
what we knew right from the start.

Seascape

2006-12-31T13:41:00.000Z

Mostly sent down to the waves.
Seemed to stay there longer each day,
covered in sand, buried in play.
Seaweed for hair
if we wanted that.
A fine mesh of hand-crafted water channels we built, avoiding the fray,
shells over ears,
eyes pointed away.
A fine game of jumping just when it was about to break,
of plunging underneath for as long as we could take,
of seeing what we could dredge from the bottom only to shake in each others' faces.
And in a way, we were quite happy playing like that,
as if it were only us and the sea.

The Cambridge Underworld

2006-12-10T21:56:00.000Z

It seems as though the time-old struggle between vampires and werewolves lives on in Cambridge. I found this on a door along the path next to Christ's Pieces. There was, of course, no sign around of what the wolves had done, but a disturbing candidate presented itself to me later that day.
I had a passport photograph taken.
Look at the eyes. Are eyes supposed to be black?
Recent exposure to a number of educational films on this topic, courtesy of Channel Five, has taught me that black eyes are a symptom of the success of the rare feat that is crossing vampires and werewolves together. The creation of such a cross-species is apparently not looked upon favorably in the vampire world.
All this leads me to believe that I am the unwitting subject of an experiment carried out by a renegade vampire in search of unconventional glories, who is now seeking to relocate responsibility onto the werewolves.
I am not sure what to do with this new knowledge and whether or not I shoule have included this information in my PhD application.

Ergo

2006-11-05T00:05:00.000Z

I went to a rowing competition.
It involved lycra but no water, and so was bound to be a mixed bag.
In one room were ten crews of eight women and one or two coach/shouting-figures, each of whose focal point was a long strip of metal with a movable but resistant section and an electronic display. We were going to be sprinting 500m, which takes around 2 minutes, one after another with a 20 second changeover time, and the teams to get the quickest total times were going to get a Big Gold Star. Mah. No, they were going to get pride and honour and blah.
We had allowed our captain to paint our faces in blue patterns so that our college, Darwin, was wholeheartedly represented.
There was loud music playing while we awaited the start, because then we would of course be at that happy medium between having fun and being psyched. Music with that sickeningly thin and hyperactive gloss of enjoyment of the present.
I was going first out of my team, so I did not want to be a happy medium; I wanted to be purely in the zone.
The zone, however, has certain rules of access - in fact goodness gracious me it's a heterotopia who would have believed - and the metal machine was proving slightly prohibitive. What a ridiculous contraption to slide up and down just for a gold star.
But I took myself through a subtlly shifting sequence of mental manoeuvres and landed safely in the zone anyway. The obvious strategies: a slow surveying of the rest of the room with just the right level of arrogance; a blocking out of the music entirely with a stiffening of body and facial expression; a phasing back into the music and allowing some hints of dancing to escape the hips and feet during a few steps back towards the team-mates - a move designed to coax the body slightly back towards relaxation; a second phasing out of the music, now with the benefits of aforementioned relaxation.... etc etc.
And so we arrive at the moment where I can step up and straddle the (now) oh-so-important machine,

and then take my place on the hard seat with the hands finding their way to the bar, and my captain's half-blue face close beside ready to spur, and holding that position just for a moment longer looking straight ahead waiting for any moment now when they're going to let us...

And so it was. I got a good time. The team did okay. Didn't get a gold star.

Jokes

2006-10-23T19:02:00.000Z

This is what it looks like if one such as me really really laughs.
And just the re-viewing of this photo is enough to make it happen all over again. That's what the last ten minutes have been occupied with:
Hah!

That kind of laughing happens mostly in the company of family, which fact I sometimes forget until I'm back with them, and then, what a relief.

It's simply that a lot of the people I chance to meet don't really know what jokes are. In my family, 'jokes' is the term to refer not to a set-piece of verbal performance with punch line and all, but rather to a much more generalised set of behaviours whose most defining common feature is a cheeky twinkle in the eye. To joke is to be quite willing, at any point, to play with, invert, subvert or entirely sidestep exactly the thing that was up until then being treated with utmost seriousness. The thing may or may not continue to be treated as if the prior seriousness is still intact.

Of course, a prior state of seriousness is not itself even necessary for the subsequent action to be jokes; the contrast was merely to make more clear the point.

To elaborate, jokes must be distinguished from mere fooling around, which may be done without any degree of actual engagement with the present situation and/or company. Jokes, in their true sense, are also never maliciously made. On this note, it cannot be overemphasised how important the cheeky-twinlkle-in-the-eye is.

A further feature is the relatively dead-pan proclamation of 'jokes' afterwards. This statement may be made by either the primary initiators or recipients, or by the observers; the identity of the utterence-maker is not of consequence, what is important is that it is made. This is regarded in some circles as a dispensable element, and indeed may be so in some cases and in the short-term, but it is crucial to the long-term survival of the practice of jokes, it being partly constitutive of the jocular status of the situation.

An example of jokes can be seen in the innovation in the wearing of ski goggles below: In this instance, the cheeky glint in the eye was managed to be kept at bay until completion of the act of causing those present to burst into muchos laughter.*

Without jokes, by which I refer both to a lack of engagement in jokes and to a mental state in which jokes are neither sought nor even perceived, without jokes everything becomes flat and heavy, and unfortunately a bit of a negative feedback loop slips into action. To get out of the loop one needs one of the following:
a) to be induced into relaxment. Without being relaxed, not even Wayne's World can be funny.**
b) to be #shocked#, and then to be amused straight-away

c) hmmm. that's bascially it I think. The thing is that under 'relaxment' I am including rather a lot, notably a lack of self-importance and self-consciousness.

d) Of course, one really needs to cultivate a certain zany-ness, but I'm not sure how to coach this.

* Actually, the application of the term 'jokes' to this event is somewhat anachronistic, the term not coming into regular use in its current form until more recently. I feel, however, that this does not damage the demonstrative effect of the example.***

** Okay maybe Wayne's World is an exception.

*** The content of the footnote, and perhaps even the very use of such a literary system, is also a bit of jokes, and thus still does very well for itself entirely apart from the validness of the point it so much wanted to make (I heard it telling all its friends about it; it was very excited).

Further croissant-related missions

2006-10-18T09:40:00.000Z

The other day, I went to Nottingham to chat with the guy who is the expert on what I was planning to do my Ph.D. on, and I was trying to be open-minded with regards the possibility of doing said Ph.D. in that very place. So, in the hour before our meeting, I took myself to his department's little cafe, purchased a coffee and a swirly danish pastry thing, and sat down with the only of his articles that I hadn't yet read. Now, I had intended to try out their croissant, as a pseudo-jocular-but-in-fact-very-serious method for evaluating the place's potential lurability. But there was no croissant. This left me in the awkward position of having to base a highly important evaluation procedure around a foodstuff in which I really do have no expertise. I was not particularly enamoured with the danish pastry - it was incredibly sweet, with outrageous amounts of icing and stickiness, and, unsurprisingly since it was not a croissant and was not aiming for this quality, had almost no fluffiness at all and could even have said to have been rather hard. I felt slightly unsettled.
There was, however, a sign in the cafe declaring the price of croissant.
So, I could make a judgement based upon the experience with the danish pastry, which is bound to produce a disproportionatley low score since such a thing is intrinsically inferiour to croissant.
Or I could make a withholding of judgement to some as-yet-undefined point in the future - on the grounds that the availability of croissant is usually dependable and I just happened to be there on a bad day - which future point may not even take place until the decision of the place of the Ph.D has been made, in which case the croissant really has been bypassed altogether leaving the decision entierely at the mercy of more conventional means.
I find this a most awkward and dissatisfying situation.

On a lighter note (oops, unintentional but harmless pun!), I have recently been surprised with a lovely croissant in B-Bar. On previous occasions, the B-Bar croissant has been quite dry and even a little tough, and has really presented no other option than to be submerged in coffee prior to consumption. Now, not one too make too hasty a judgement, and as one who works around the corner from B-Bar, I gave the place another chance. And the croissant was pretty much perfect. So B-Bar is unreliable but with great potential. I had not previously thought of factoring time into the croissant criteria.

The Croissant Diaries

2006-10-12T22:17:00.000Z

Surely the most satisfying start to the day involves croissant. This is how it is for me at least. But some croissants are more conducive to a state of morning tranquility than others, and sometimes it seems important to keep a precise mental log of where success in this quest has been found.

Of course, above and beyond the intrinsic properties of the thing, context also matters.
For instance, my most formative and thus highly prized croissant experiences involve a cluster of siblings curled, sprawled and draped around my mother's bed on a Sunday morning, as Bach's cello suites or perhaps Vivaldi's Nula in Mundo Pax Sincera floats up the stairs, and the gentle light of the expansive East Yorkshire skies dances on the wide river Humber before curving in through the window. Here, the croissant in fact functions, on one level, simply as a medium for the imbibement of coffee, through the operation known as 'dipping'; or rather, the croissant is so intimately bound up with the drinking of coffee that to consider either one alone would be an injustice to the other. On another level, the croissant is merely a semi-arbitrarily chosen obligatory passage point for the occurance of a vitally important ritual gathering and bonding within the family. So the croissant's status is in fact both historically contingent and a partial sideline to another consumable. But nevermind all this. What I have said is, the croissant has a special place of importance for me because of two interrelated factors (family plus coffee), whereas what I meant to say in this section was, that the setting in which the croissant is consumed plays an important role in the level of enjoyment the same may bring.

But I wanted to talk about real croissant.

Now, you'd think that the Bread Man in the market would sell lovely fresh croissant. Indeed, that is what I thought too, but in fact they are a little dry and slightly doughy. In order to make up for this, in which the bread stand very nearly succeeds, the croissants come with all manner of distractions: apricot or apple and sultana filling, chocolate and almond and a swirly shape, chocolate and a twisty shape... but these frills seem to accentuate the lack of the rare treasure of the plain croissant.

Reluctance to go to one of the Nadia's (the reluctance being due to a long-held suspicion against this slightly-too prosperous local bakery - how are there quite so many of them?) was recently overcomeby the writer on the grounds of its ridiculously convenient proximity to last year's house, and in fact the results were surprisingly good. They microwave it for you if you like. A difficult decision; overall the warmth wins out, but the microwaving process does somewhat deflate the thing into a flat state of greasiness.

Of the supermarkets, it would appear that Marks and Spencer remain ahead, although the new Sainsbury's organic croissants are extremely close competitors. The freshly baked Sainsbury's croissant is pretty good also. The other packaged Sainsbury's efforts have much to be desired, and even the Waitrose croissant, though excitingly large, doesn't have the all-important degree of lightness.

I think we can safely say there are two important factors to croissant success: lightness and butteriness. And fluffiness. Fluffiness so as to prevent the flaking into coffee upon dippage. Three factors, then: lightness, butteriness and fluffiness. Although, having said that, it is highly likely that fluffiness is the product of both lightness and butteriness, and thus is the all important factor. So, one factor: fluffiness. (No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!)

Very recently, I tried the Presto croissant. This is really very impressive indeed. I can find little to fault in this croissant.

Funny side

2006-10-08T22:35:00.000Z

Small boy, aged 3, 4, 5, who knows, standing on the square stone steps that bottom an obelisk war memorial as Saturday-morning people busy past, small boy saying earnestly
Daddy, look, daddy, this is the funny side.
Boy almost hugging the stone wall of the sides of the step, moves around the corner to his left, boy has just realised that
Daddy, this is, daddy this side is also the funny side; both of these sides are funny sides.

I don't know what the other sides were, because slowing down as much as had enabled this sight so far was already taking me dangerously away from the Saturday-morning-person categories and there was no need to cause a scene.

But what a discovery. Now every time I go down that street I know that those two sides there are the funny sides.

Astro

2006-10-01T16:01:00.000Z

Today has suddenly switched into an astrology day. Sudden switches seem perfectly justifiable given the weather. So this is my birth chart.

It used to freak me out with that one line sticking straight through the middle. But secretly I quite like it. It says to me, focussed but with spurts of completely alternative input that maybe work to keep things balanced, but not too balanced that they're dispersed.
Actually when I did my own chart there were one or two more aspects (an aspect is an angle between two planets that is denoted particular importance, like 60 or 90 degrees say, and which is represented on the graphical chart with a line), but I think that was probably because I wanted a more exciting-looking picture. And it was exciting! On mine, there are two other lines coming from the moon (the only planet on the right-hand side of this chart), which join up to both ends of the purple line thus making a lovely isoceles triangle that the red line then bisects. The whole thing appears as a sail, and so looked rather nice. It also ended up being part of a larger configuration of aspects which basically works as a pointer to the planet on its own, in this case the moon, making that planet, its sign, its house etc particularly important in the interpretation of the chart as a whol. Alas, however, the computer program that churned this drawing one out thinks that the planets just weren't quite exactly where I had had them. I suppose it's no big loss. I am rather attached to that configuration actually. I must learn to move on. Such a pretty sail.

The Stone Bomb

2006-09-25T09:26:00.000Z

Patrick Wright - cultural historian - is seriously cool, and here is a recent article on the first Anti-Air War Memorial that confirms it. Really, do read it!

Pagoda

2006-09-25T07:52:00.000Z

In my room in May, in a gap from writing about a place far away from me, all I wanted to do was stop encircling it in academic tangles and pay homage to the intoxicating, strange, beautifulness of the place. I was tired and unimaginative in that moment and so this is all that came out of my hands, but a certain something still managed to creep onto the page, so cool is that place.

2006-09-25T07:44:00.000Z

A drawing from two and a half years ago. Obvious pyshcoanalytic conclusions can be taken from it, perhaps, but I am also experimenting with other things at the same time - some symbolic, some to do with page structure, some to do with colour combinations, with degree of realism expected in representation of bodies, with level of automaticness with which I am happy drawing, &c. - so don't pidgeon hole too early in the viewing.

Reservation-station

2006-09-23T18:49:00.000Z

I've thought I have healing powers for a while. Partly I simply sense that I do, partly I have been told this by various people, and that I was a healer in a past life. This has given me a certain fascination with the idea, and I had been thinking of doing courses in things like massage and reiki to cultivate it.
But a new friend of mine who is wise has explained to me a serious warning about this.
The thing is, when you're trying to heal somebody, you're coming into such close contact with them that if you are not careful, you will absorb their negative energies and what is more you may pass your own onto them. You have to be very grounded, very strong not to do this. Basically, it's not a game, it's not to be taken lightly, it's getting involved with energy/power that may do things you did not expect and are not in control of. And you need to have a lot of love to give. More was said too, but I am wanting to relate what followed.
What was said had all seemed to make so much sense to me that I was wondering why such a strong warning was being given to me, and was doubting the reasons for my being drawn towards all these healing/energy type activities in the first place. I voiced this, and then the most simple and stilling demonsration resolved my thoughts.
My friend rested his hand on my arm for a while and exclaimed upon opening his eyes that wow, you've never had anything wrong with your body, have you, how lucky. I said that no I hadn't and yes it was nice, but really, how did he know that from my arm? He told me that his body was not nearly so worry-free as mine and that I was perfectly capable of telling him exactly in what way if I wanted to.
Tentativeness, pride, anxiety (what if my mind were totally blankwhen I tried this, and then all my fancies of some healing power were fizzled away into the air?) were not useful here, so I let them splash at my feet and drain through the grass.
I placed my hand over my friend's right knee and closed my eyes. His left knee and left ankle immediately lodged themselves in my mind, the first as one or two upward spikes and the second as something fixed at an awkward and uncomfortable angle. Still somewhat unconfident, I was worried about why these particular things were occupying my mind and decided to reassert a bit of control by conducting an ordered tour around the body in my mind. But the only other thing that seemed to want to communicate with me was the stomach area, which seemed a bit swollen inside. The rest seemed smooth, seemed not to want to be noticed, seemed almost translucent, like something that if you were to try and grasp would evade you.
Well, I communicated my findings. My friend then told me he has had a fucked-up left knee for about two years and had aggravated it the preceding weekend at a tango festival, and that he twisted his left ankle badly at the same festival and it had been troubling him since. He has also been having two pains in his stomach recently: one just below the belly-button, and one just below the middle of the ribs. The only other thing wrong with his body, a wrist injury he had from ages ago, he had already told me about that day and so there had been no need for either of us to mention this.
I am rather amazed.
I didn't know I could do that.
He also said just in the time while I was doing this he could feel me healing him, which actually I had not even meant to do.
But this is why he was telling me what he did, and so I am not at all inclined to go doing this to here there and everyone just yet. It's a bit draining in a way.

Memories and hair

2006-09-23T15:45:00.000Z

I found this old picture of really long hair. It's taken when my dad's youngest sister was getting married. The story of that occasion is told in my part of the family in terms of my younger brother's accidental under-age over-drinking resulting in an outdoor break-away party of semi-amused care-taking cousins, and of my older brother's amazing late-night jazz improvisations on a wonderful grand piano with our cousin Chris. Other details seem to have been lost, but much has been made of these two, and indeed they have assumed an almost mythical character.
In a recent re-visitation of the event, for example, a new interpretation emerged; it became evident that our cousin Vicky, the same age as my younger brother Charlie, had earlier been subject to over-champagnisation-station by one of our older cousins, Matt, and so during the meal had developed a special arrangement with Charlie. This involved rotation of wine glasses whenever Charlie had finished his. Previously a wild, unaware, careless youth, and victim of much retrospective teasing accordingly, Charlie emerges as the protecter of Vicky and so gallant hero!
The piano playing, on the other hand, remains untouched, and has attained a dreamlike and ethereal quality in everyone's memories, I fancy.

St Gervais Mont Blanc

2006-09-17T16:19:00.000Z

I'm going to be here for four months starting in December!
Yesssssssssssss.

Bonus

2006-09-15T22:49:00.000Z

So when you put together an art portfolio to show to people that might want to show it to a larger number of people, it has really to be a body of work; it has to convey something in a consistent manner; it has to have a strong thread running through it. I think.
And I'm not sure what kind of a thread to run through mine, so I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about what kind of a style they think I should emphasise and work on, judging on the tit bits I've put up? Because they seem to be quite different in certain ways.
Sorry, that was a terribly selfish thing to post.

The other thing is that from where I am sitting there appear to be two rectangles of bright white light floating in absolute stillness in a most awkwardly high position in the sky. The problem is that the horizontal part of the crane, to the ends of which they belong, has disappeared into a stultifying combination of light-polluted night-time and a fine mist. What makes it more odd is that these rectangles are executing an ever-so striking symmetry about the vertical, glossy white wood of the window frame. In fact they seem rather like eyes.

This window has been full of surprises. Only yesterday morning was I looking out of it, over the river Cam to the grass beyond, when I found that the window was really quite unconcerned with the object of my gaze. Of course, why should it be. But it had happened to chose as the object of its gaze the water itself, and so was busy reflecting a shimmer of delicately elongated ripples, right over the top of my patch of grass!
Well, as I found this rather exciting to look at, the natural course of action seemed augmentation of said excitement through the cupping of the hands around the eyes to cut out all else except for that patch. But no, alas, the result was simultaneously incomprehensible and dissappointingly mundane. I'm not sure my brain could process it properly. I think the reason is that when left without the contextual cues of the actaully rippling water surface and the actually solid stable spikey green grass, the naughtily contrived solid green ripples had no reference points against which to seem odd and consequently didn't. This and the fact that I really hadn't encountered such water/grass before put my poor brain at quite a loss as to how to give meaning to its seemingly full visual field, and it basically seemed to switch off. Some bits of the visual cortex said 'aha, floaty green spikes, yes, very good' and did not even attempt to send that message anywhere else, which areas might have said 'goodness gracious me let's make a new wave-particle duality theory.'

On the whole, there are lessons to be learnt by all: perhaps I should pay more attention to context; perhaps some parts of my visual cortex should take greater responsibility in conveying messages to other interested parties; perhaps the window should be more considerate of the wishes of those around it, unless of course it views its provocativeness as both playful, enjoyable and productive, in which case: bonus.

Tourmaline

2006-08-30T19:29:00.000Z

So this is what waiting was for.
This is the fine preambles knocked, flashing perimeters blocked, dart of flinching sheens unlocked, weight of future tracks dropped, keenest eyes fallen by the wayside, stripped from bare flesh into -
this is a dive through darkest molten haematite, this is a crawling swim, a rising tumble through -
these are my arms outstretched whilst feet on the ground, this is leaning forward onto a giant sphere,
this is rolling, this is flying on its top, this is sinking head-first into a softened surface spot.
This is a dance.
That is all I can remember.

Lines

2006-08-29T20:38:00.000Z

Oh, a trend of curving patitions.

2006-08-29T16:29:00.000Z

Rain falling in the distance; vale of Pickering (so so wide)

Admiralty Compass Observatory

2006-08-25T09:12:00.000Z

Below: 1917 picture of a workshop.
And now... some extracts from a 1932 article in a national newspaper about the (tremendous) ACO.
Note the tensionous jostling of rustic and high-tech imagery in the mens' room, and the (when seen detachedly) hilarious separation of gender, both literally (different rooms) and by association (painting, faces, gardens etc).
So, the journalist is being taken on a tour of the buildings....

“Then the workshops – the faint murmur of machinery and the rustling tick-tick-tick of lathe-belts passing round their pulleys. Men manipulating queer metal shapes from the complicated internals of gyros, men peering through magnifying glasses, men gently waving magnets near hesitating compass cards, each man with the blank, abstracted face of concentration.”

Next...
“Three girls in a room apart, touching the small cylindrical faces of aero compass cards with fine paint brushes tipped with radium paint.”

And then, in the Magnetic Test Room...
“high French windows looking out upon the garden. Two women were bending over compasses on turn-tables, one a boat’s compass, one an aero compass. Had they been busied with embroidery the scene would scarcely have been more peaceful.”

Ha!

1925 was a good year.

2006-08-23T13:22:00.000Z

Isn't this beautiful?

2006-08-22T21:29:00.000Z

To sign your own fire,
without which way there wouldn't have strayed a lone spiral
down
which path did bend out of sight ahead and mind behind,
where a small jump with both feet at the same time landed you at
a white-laced stretch of under-space,
an upward glow of sunken shrine,
and pale vein of choice did blemish beneath
the backwards force of repeated times.

Photo-history of the aerocompass

2006-08-22T13:35:00.000Z

This is the first decent aerocompass.

On hearing of pilots' compass-troubles Captain Creagh-Osborne, of the Compass Department, put a submarine compass in a bedding of horsehair to counter the effects of the aeroplane's vibration and took it up in Colonal Cody's plane. This was only a year after Cody's first powered flight and made Creagh-Osborne the first Naval Officer to fly. Yippee.

This little beauty is from 1915, when Creagh-Osborne was working in close communication with a few manufacturing firms. Their joint design has fancy new ways of dealing with vibration (rubber, springs, blah), a vertical and simplified reading card to make things easier for those pressured pilots, and an inverted pivot to make the card spin in a more groovy way.

Of course, the RAE (precursor to RAF) over at Farnborough wanted to have a go too, and came up with this rather inelegant effort, also in 1915. It has a much slower period (i.e. the needle oscillates much more slowly) than those of the Admiralty Compass Observatory; this was the RAE's solution to the wild behaviour of the needle when the aeroplane turns. Known as 'northerly turning error' this problem was due to the fact that when the aeroplane banks, the needle begins responding to the vertical component of the earth's magnetic field. We're not interested in that component. It really sucks. It means that when you turn towards the north the compass under-indicates the turn, so that you turn too far and may even enter a spin, and when you turn towards the south it over-indicates it so that you don't turn enough. The idea of the slow period compass is that it registers turns so slowly that these problems don't have time to take effect, and the pilot doesn't end up constantly over-correcting his course.

The ACO, however, began employing two Proper Scientists in about 1918. With a military-industrial-academic complex under full swing, what should appear but an aperiodic compass! This was really very cool. The needle didn't oscillate in a silly way when the plane had finished a turn, and yet responded quickly. By now the compasses also has a better way of dealing with the problems caused by flying at high altitudes. There the low pressure and temperature would cause the liquid to contract, and so result in the formation of bubbles, which screw up the movement of the needle system. At first they used expansion chambers; then Creagh-Osborne asked his manufacturing buddies to put in an airtrap, which was a little better. Really what they wanted to do was make the liquid out of pure alcohol, but then this would cause the paint inside to dissolve, so that a) the markings couldn't be read so well and b) little bits would get into the liquid. It really was tricky business.

From 1922, separate compasses for the plane's observer/navigator and its pilot were designed by the ACO. Above is a rather lovely observer's compass, complete with azimuth for taking bearings and serving as a bombsight, and the picture before was a pilot's compass. This 'observer' entity existed for a short, 50 year period and then dissappeared again, poor chap.

Then they had the Second World War, and all sorts of other stuff happened.

colour

2006-08-22T06:36:00.000Z

Life Drawing 4

2006-08-18T22:29:00.000Z

So this was the last of my sessions at the Prince's Trust Drawing School, and who should be the model but the woman who was there at my first! That was nice, since I felt like I already knew her quite well, even intimately, from the earlier time. Also rather unsettling, for precisely the same reason.

Top: rather careful and restrained and seems to be lacking something, but oh, what wonderfully soft colours!

Middle: there seems to be some energy and character about this... it makes my eyes move around it in a particular, repeating cycle.

Bottom: now what happened here was partly inside and partly outside of the room. You see, the room is up on the fourth floor and has great big windows that I like to lean up against when closed or drape myself out of when open, and gaze at the sky over London. That evening, the way that some of those delicate, high clouds were so glowingly full in one of those palely thin skies was so indisputably magical and beautiful that those colours out there wanted to make their way onto my page. And at first they did. But as the evening progressed and still we did not turn on the lights, the shadows on her, the model, became more and more severe, and the parts of her that weren't in this consuming darkness really seemed to be catching fire. So that made its way into my hands and the page. She seems a little awkward though.

bombs <-> aeroplanes <-> people/mail

2006-08-18T14:30:00.000Z

1919, Jan 16th:

"It is perfectly certain that we are on the eve of a tremendous development in commercial aviation... It is true that the machine designed for war is not the best type for commercial purposes, but it is equally true that the one designed to carry a large number of passengers or a heavy weight of mail or goods is quite capable of carrying a corresponding weight of bombs"

- Editor's comment, Flight magazine, the first journal of the aircraft community (hooray!)

It turns out,

2006-08-16T21:20:00.000Z

sometimes I look like a French chick or something, yo.

Life Drawing 3

2006-08-16T19:57:00.000Z

Top: Let me introduce you to the chap I drew for two and a half hours a couple of weeks ago. In one of the breaks, I overheard the word Sizewell escape from his lips in conversation with someone he was talking to at the side, and so I joined in and subtly brought them around to Orford Ness. The model had lived near there until recently. I let them talk about it for a while; joined in here and there, but mainly basked in whatever they happened to say about that place.

Second: The teacher this week was different. He gave exactly the same advice to every person he spoke to, which was that they should really try to imagine a scaffolding holding the model up, and try to construct a wire frame on their page before filling it in. This resulted in even more of that holding-the-pencil-up-to-the-eye-and-measuring-each-portion-to-make-sure-it-all-works business that I really don't go for. He tried this on me too, but I explained I wasn't interesed in that and he went away. So here he has got the model to hold onto a pole in order to create an 'interesting' study. I haven't drawn the pole.

Third: Yes, he also made the model sit in the Thinker pose... so I did crazy colours.

Fourth: After spending too long getting bogged-down with particular little bits of the colour drawing, I encountered sudden frustration and restlessness, and so, as in the first week, submerged myself in a ten-minute flurry of free-flow intensity, re-emerging from which was rather like waking from a dream. But then, I do like to romanticise/mystify the drawing thing, so possibly that was planned in advance and/or created in retrospection. Just look at his right foot though! And there's something more slouched and glum about this one than the colour one.

Bottom: This is just one of the five minute 'warm up' sketches, but I think it turned out alright.

Life Drawing 2

2006-08-15T19:58:00.000Z

Top: man sinking into sofa; quite heavily worked into

Middle: barest outline of the knee

Bottom: with 10 minutes to go before the end, she leaned across - the teacher - and told me I could do another one in that time. Quite like it, especially the hands.

Life Drawing 1

2006-08-15T19:40:00.000Z

Top: cascade; free flow
Bottom: attempted integration of free flow and careful attention

aero compasses again

2006-08-14T13:19:00.000Z

a) Captain Creagh-Osborne of the Admiralty Compass Observatory (ACO), describing in 1911 the kind of swinging base that aerocompasses require:
“a fairly secluded and level spot should be chosen, far from sheds, iron drain pipes, or other magnetic materials, and of a sufficient size to allow machines to manoeuvre into position.”

b) Superintendent of ACO in 1932, describing the place in which it was housed, Ditton Park:
“We must be isolated for our work, of course. The nearness of electric railways was one of the things that made us move here from Deptford in 1917; they were close enough to disturb the magnetic field and disturb the compasses”

Who would ever doubt the authority of an instrument derived in such a world of perfect purity, protected sanctity? I.e. come on... they're not just talking about the magnetic field!

Aero-land-art

2006-08-02T16:33:00.000Z

Swinging the compass:
phase one - place plane on floor; angle it in flying position not horizontal; leave all metallic objects stowed as they would be in flight, including guns, ammunition, etc.;
phase two - align plane with magnetic north, as indicated by pattern of blue and white paint on floor, or by observation of heavenly body; adjust compass reading to zero using cunning positioning of small magnets above and below the plane of the compass; swing plane to east and adjust reading to 90; swing to south and adjust reading to half its current error (in order for north and south readings to be in error by the same degree, if at all); repeat for west;
phase three - record resulting compass reading at all headings in what we like to call its 'devation table'
phase four - foster belief that a compass reading taken during flight, when corrected according to deviation table, refers to magnetic (not true) north, but only if sharp acceleration or the act of turning towards north has not caused compass to respond to vertical (approx. 67 degrees in England) rather than merely horizontal component of earth's magnetic field
phase five - profit.

Park bench

2006-07-31T22:22:00.000Z

Park bench, silent pew, stifled wrench.
Whirling at four rates per second in over-stated oscillation flown in face of high frustration, steeple-chasing bold evasion when
Half-edged martyr trades with knee-deep headway,
and salt spray covers both feet.
Slackened musing dries to frozen choosing ,
and patterns into sweet sleep.
Half bent, prayed through, secret vent:
Now is the time to sit back and stare.

Twist

2006-07-30T21:57:00.000Z

- from when this hair of mine was rather short and life drawing class had not yet been attended.

Life drawing class

2006-07-28T16:08:00.000Z

First to look around in furtive discovery: 80 degrees to the left, model the central pivot, a limply suspended woman emerges draped on the paper of someone who could not bring themselves to include the chair on which the model sat; 60 degrees to the right someone else draws four or five of the others in the class as they draw, cluster of people surrounding and nearly drowning out the model, and it's like the fascinated gaze at distant bird hides facing you from the darkness inside your own, looking out and in at the same time, stopping the slip into imagined invisibility. Determined denial of the situation's artificiality on my left and frenzied over-preoccupation with it on the right: ever-so-slightly closer to the latter.

Second to look at the model herself from my place, from behind and to the side of her, paper still blank, soft curve of cheek and glimpse of pleasantly perked-up nose but all blankly fading into unexpressive mouth and petering-away chin, charcoal in hand has no response, a whole body, tumbling down from the face, overwhelmingly present, sinking into chair, landing in solid flat confidence where the lower of her crossed legs settles on the floor and she had been told to leave on her shoes.

Absent minded drift of charcoal here and there around that body before settling into a close-up focus on the strong back of that lower leg and the flat of that sandal shoe.

Then a long gaze in and out of focus right at the model gradually to realise that what is being seen could only be described by cascade. The eye pours and falls in downward-curved jumps and leaps: tumbles from a hold on top of the shoulder down the loose arm, tracks back up to beautiful ray of shadow following path of arm down back, stop-gap switches to her hand on the arm of her chair where arcs of fingers point gently to the floor even while gripping tightly, and crash-culminates in up-and-down splash over three floorbound slashes where narrow leg of chair stands between shapely, crossed legs of model, and so much momentum by now that it - the gaze - springs right up to the hook on the shoulder again. And all the while the face doesn't seem to enter into it.

So now I have fixed upon this idea, this waterfall of body and chair, but the next drawing still gets caught up with areas where too much working-in pull the eye to a static, over-informed rest. I am told this by she who wanders around quietly and engages with us intensely, and instructed sternly to let go of representation, to draw the raw idea not all of this stopping and starting. There follow a couple of hesitant attempts, forehead frowning, each time absorption and frustration both growing, but then flying charcoal flowing leaves me with a piece that seems too strident and aggressive to me, but seems actually to startle this teacher of ours.

A pulse of muted exitement: she seemed held up on a string for a moment, briefly lost in the drawing, as if feeling the faint connection with a sliver of magic that means something has been captured. Well, after that response, it seemed time to leave the A2 paper and embark upon a last half hour basking in the freedom of A1. The light outside had become dimmer, but even so, the way each subtle shift of shade was standing out so strongly on that body was partly that by now I had slightly become it. Drawing some-thing/one you have entered into like that can no longer be frustrating: there is only a contented dream-state. And so ended my first experience of life drawing.

Disbelief

2006-07-20T14:16:00.000Z

There can't possibly have been a gap there, can there?
But it looks so nice!
Lacking: the defensive mindset.

Southwold's Cathedral

2006-07-19T11:56:00.000Z

Character directionally variable, through a slow circling process.

And it looks better in watercolour...

Navigation by the stars

2006-07-19T11:26:00.000Z

Just as twentieth century compasses had almost completely taken my world by storm, I found that sextants, more specifically bubble sextants, were being used for celestial navigation of aircraft right until the middle of the Cold War! Yes, that's correct: navigation in aeroplanes by heavenly bodies. Here is Commander Weems demonstrating, and here also is an early 1920s example of such a device. A skilled pilot was required to keep the plane steady whilst measurements were being taken, and on early commercial flights, the pilot would turn on a special light to convey to customers his wish for them to cease their centre-of-gravity-upsetting meandering and be still for a while. This system was mainly used over sea; pre-Second World War air navigation over land involved pilots trying to follow roads and railways, looking out for the occasional inscription of a placename on a roof, and occasionally taking a brief stop at a farm to ask the way. Of course, it all got a lot more high-tech during the war when black-outs made things somewhat tricky, and an innovative fervour produced rather more swish-looking sextants, a modification of sun-compasses termed an astrocompass, gyro-stabilised distant reading repeater magnetic compasses, compasses with bomb-sights attached...

2006-07-02T14:17:00.000Z

It's those creepy chairlifts again... just look at them!

2006-06-25T10:42:00.000Z

But sometimes all that is needed is a bit of pure physicality...

Silky skills in the D, surrounded by four members of the opposition, and a nice shot on goal that the girl in the yellow socks did well to get out of the way of... mwah ha ha!

Looking a little scary prior to extra time, penalties and the subsequent winning of the cup: hurrah!

Okay okay, so cricket isn't pure physicality at all, but actually much more challenging in its capacity as long, drawn out psychological warfare: when batting, a ridiculous amount of self-imposed concentration, patience, and enforced forgetting of all balls that came before in order to be immersed purely in exactly what is coming down the pitch at you NOW (and for me, the difficulty of not flashing hockey shots around to balls pitching on middle stump...); and when fielding, the constant, collective regeneration of maximum conentration from every single team member for every single ball in order to subject the batsmen to that all-important, intangible force of cricket, pressure. And at the heart of all of this, is the manner in which the fielding team goes about performing what is known as 'banter.'

2006-06-25T10:30:00.000Z

Lisa, sister, on a tired day.

2006-06-14T15:12:00.000Z

2006-06-14T15:04:00.000Z

A few drawings.

2006-06-14T10:31:00.000Z

These are my wonderful sibs. We're in the Yorkshire Moors near my dad and step mum's house. In a little while, the sun will set and light the heather in a blaze of gorgeousness while we ramble and joke and play in our special sibling way. For now, we're posing, which we don't all do naturally, but which we most definately tolerate once in a while for such a nice keepsake.
Note: isn't sib such a lovely word? It seems quite cuddly, like cub; quite playful, not formal. I like it.

Parade

2006-06-14T01:17:00.000Z

The time is not quite past for the
Bring that over here I can't quite see it in this
The last of them sleeping off their prime on the
Put that down and go back to
The same looks stare, imagined flair blank burns through the
Can't you walk a little slower; I don't want to miss the spectacle of
writhing pride, lost in the sheer dark, snide
stark waste parade, jostled
when you steer past attempted marks
floundering if not displayed,
ecstatic movements if you were only a mirror for;
otherwise dismayed.

2006-06-10T21:55:00.000Z

It seems to me that this is the way to travel. There's definately something to be said for being upside down for a start, and the particular angle achieved by the head just here means the sight of people-filled, upwards-bound lifts is cut out, leaving only the downhill procession of empty carts. Empty carts making a steady, purposeful march amid the forest and sky really freaked me out actually. They seemed to fit in with their surroundings much better than anyone else.

Read

2006-06-09T21:17:00.000Z

Perhaps in a little light,
not sleep,
but focused,
but so and so and so focused,
and this is indeed the way to dine they say, as they
read
the menu so intently focused,
and standing around still from side to side and just in
between
the sips of high quality, such high quality they say,
as the edge of the pool gleams gently at
the
dipped toes leaving traces to be followed if anyone is watching
with quite as much focus, they could prepare to plunge and dance slide over across the
lines
accruing with each gentle placing of the glass back in almost the same place, with each slight skewing
and
people should come here more often they say, with each slight, with the angles reflecting just a little bit more of, and it really is a fine selection they have here they say, each time turning
just
a bit further towards, and building up until reams line the ground softly cushioned fall splayed useless as still they stand around with
just
so much focus.

2006-06-09T21:13:00.000Z

Dennis Creffield

understands Orford Ness.

John Wonnacott

just hasn't quite grasped it.

2006-06-09T09:02:00.000Z

Shower:
private stream;
nature in a small tiled room, purified glow from white reflecting walls, imagined extended scope from resonant echo;
ultimately dissatisfying.

Broken party

2006-06-04T19:40:00.000Z

stands up.
broken party still voice plays on the curtains.
slightly parted curt tone reflects in the window.
hardly heard it deft drone stays next to the chair.
foot shifts.
gaze drifts.
up.
and past.
leaves it aside for a moment where the ceiling meets the wall.
keeps it back for a moment at the shadow of the light-switch.
holds the pause just long enough on the return to the eyes meet.
reflection faded, window receded, ceiling lifted.
sits down.
different chair.
window back, and between the lines still there the world outside.
reads both at once.

2006-06-04T15:47:00.000Z

Leon's laptop in Heidelberg:
vacillating but stationary!

Fling back

2006-06-02T23:18:00.000Z

Fling back water spring
so drearily moves over the proud long
ever-so thin
too narrow to notice it seeping in.

/She walks in a straight line and doesn't look from side to side./

Spun flat incredible seam
so silently creeping through drawn-out
nascent dream
wades in treacle shadow streams.

/She is aware of a flicker of movement, but her thoughts are elsewhere./

Sting merges fills the spot
beaten shards reflect the lot
crowds down crouches here
doesn't know quite how to stop
stumbles one step
flings back
stumbles one step
spins flat
and in stunned onset the present appears.

/She finally notices./

Last time we looked it was thin sheen of vibrant strong single choice,
Now, stamp of approval is redolent with mixed intent and smothered still in private stench.

2006-05-19T18:38:00.000Z

The country's keys, bowl, ladder up the side, pile in, weigh up, publish privacy, bowl over-turned, keys returned with caution, restored with warning: 'country in shock as privacy up 20.46% in last ten years!', event forgotten.

Muse

2006-05-18T19:23:00.000Z

Muse me away with those frills and that frown.
Lose me today and I'll plinth that plaque with a hideous crown.
Choose which way or I'll wipe off the whole track, screen off the over-slack, slip into corner stream, throw my head right back, happy here unseen, thank god the moment passed, calmed so far down that don't even try to ask.

Concrete

2006-05-07T22:35:00.000Z

Carpet of concrete carelessly strewn: stand dead still and wait.
Don't bother moving unless edge -
unless peel back notched holds, scrape for scrunched flat folds, street sack paper-thin, reach to put pavement in your pockets heavy feet steady -
at the edge, the only point of escape.

Blossom

2006-05-07T22:30:00.000Z

Comes in through the mouth, startling sun finds hooks, holds onto.
Comes down on bare skin, heavy heat glares as you wade through.

But these flecks under here in partial white, these drops of dappled this splitting light, the almost the gaps this fallen not quite, in this touch and go thrown fluttering flights,

so brief is your glimpse:
true sight.

Words fall

2006-04-29T21:04:00.000Z

Words fall flat on forgetting face, peel quietly away from fleeting embrace, drop in surprise from just the place -
remembered meeting, had melted briefly, hadn't known of this slow disgrace.

Now, as you smile on water one more pin drops. Door sits propped. Floor hits hard and stops.
Stops and then mist flying, swift rising drifts on top.
On top and your hands grip the flat round smooth sound, you lower yourself down, you couldn't have known but you've found:
diagonalism of sunlight.

2006-04-23T08:15:00.000Z

Orford Ness: gosh.

From the village of Orford, which stretches right down to the quay, the clustered military buildings on the other side of the River Ore seemed much closer than I had expected. How could it have been possible to keep the AWRE activities secret, especially given the far-reaching view from Orford’s medieval castle up on the hill? No wonder the locals have smothered the site in speculation for the past half-century. A quiet buzz of excitement filled our twelve-person boat on the first of day’s eight rides across to ‘the Island.’ The Trust’s booklet had primed us for “a landscape of unusual character with its sheer scale perhaps its most memorable feature” a landscape that “can be exposed, lonely, hostile and wild,” which held the promise of ornithological delights, and yet which housed all manner of military experiments, “some of which affected the course of world history” (16-7). In the flurry of local and national newspaper articles that appeared around the time of its opening to the public, Orford Ness was “weird, unsettling,” “sinister” (The Times 8/6/95; Guardian Weekend 24/6/95), and a place where “visitors will reflect on the incredible history of Orford Ness” and “will be fascinated but tantalised” by the sight of those AWRE laboratories nick-named the Pagodas (EADT 6/6/95). The site comes with high assurances and dramatic claims.

Before being released from the National Trust volunteers’ stewardship on stepping off the boat, we were told which birds we might see, where the trail marked out by the Trust would lead us and that we must not leave this trail. The first stretch of the path was banked high on the river side – flood protection – and opened out to marshland and the First World War airfield on the other. This bank cuts off the view back to the mainland, seeming to accentuate the effect of boat journey in transporting us to a different world entirely. We approached a cluster of low-lying, standardised, prefabricated buildings from the two world wars, mundane in appearance, but jostled by their incongruous companions: discarded, decaying metal and concrete structures.

Inside the buildings here on ‘The Street,’ museum displays ran through Orford Ness’ geomorphological and ornithological features, and the military uses of the site up until the early Cold War years. I found out that the shingle spit has been slowly growing southwards over the past five hundred years, obscuring more and more the once-thriving port of Orford. I found that the site has many different types of habitat – salt marsh, mudflats, brackish lagoons, reed beds, natural grassland and shingle – supporting many migratory birds from year to year. I saw a montage of aerial photographs of the site from the 1950s, learnt that during the First World War important early developments of aerial photography were made here, and felt the montage jumping backwards and forwards across that thirty-year gap as I watched. I read about the investigations into ballistics of bombs dropped from the Ness out towards the sea, about trials into self-sealing aeroplane fuselage tanks, about the simulated attacks on plane parts with various projectiles, and about the research and development of the aerial defence system which was to become known as radar. The site seemed to be a focal point for the country’s connectivity and mobility in war.

Back outside, walking away from The Street and over Stony Ditch onto the more seaward, shingle part of the Ness, all of this movement – the spit, the birds, the planes, the radar signals – seemed to drift uneasily in and out of the still silence as the landscape became increasingly barren. Either side of the Trust’s designated track, the flatness of the open expanse of shingle made a seemless transition to it, and the strangeness of the scattered concrete and metal forms were inviting me away from it. But the secrecy of the site’s military past works as fence posts from which the Trust hang barrier lines along the sides of the path, lines fed to the visitors as they step off the boat – lines about the danger of unexploeded ordnance, the protection of bird sancturaries – and the path becomes a tightrope.

Reaching the Bomb Ballistics Building, I encountered the strange experience of being in a museum about itself. Up on the top of this building, the telescope from WWII testing days is the only approachable object in the flat concrete square (there was another, a large green hulk of metal, whose purpose you can read about on the floor below, inside the building, but this hulk remains bolted closed). Earlier on, the white body of a low-flying plane had skimmed overhead, cracking open the present-day sky, pushing through it images of the site-in-action more firmly than had any of the still and silent buildings back in The Street. And now, as I bent to look through the abandoned telescope, its cross-hair slid uninterested over the castle, over the green pastures of the mainland, over the quaint boats in Orford Quay, longing instead to hook onto the plane that had passed out of sight.

Crossing from the Bomb Ballistics Building to the lighthouse, the shingle shifted and slipped underneath me, and crunching and ripping through the silence it locked my attention into the space around my feet. I could easily have trudged all the way to the lighthouse like this, the shingle pulling me downwards and the Trust’s path pulling me forwards. But up on top of the Bomb Ballistics Building I’d seen the gentle shapes of the ‘Pagodas’ in the South, the delicately translucent aerials rising from the Cobra Mist site in the North, the rectangular buildings on the far side of Stony Ditch, the stark and pointed Black Beacon, the awkward protrusions of decaying AWRE laboratories from behind the shingle banked up beside them, the concrete scattered and rusted metal splayed on the shingle, the vastness of this shingle, and finally, the sea. Remembering all of this, I pulled my eyes up from my feet to try and take it in from ground level. But this was hard! The parallel lines of ridges in the shingle, ridges that converge on each other all too soon in seductive vanishing points, sucked my gaze along them instead. My feet were stuck to the Trust’s path and my eyes flung up and down the shingle.

Past the lighthouse, the shingle drops steeply towards the sea. Down here, none of what I had been trying to stare at up there is any longer visible. Down here, the sea roars; the silence on the flat shingle above a distant past, the crunching underfoot expanding outwards to meet the roar rushing inwards. Down here, the sea broods in grey-yellow-blue; the buildings on the flat shingle above a distant past, the glistening swells drifting upwards and downwards. This is where the National Trust volunteers recommend the visitors sit for lunch. Then, back on top of the bank, the Trust’s path to the Black Beacon leads you along the high tide line, demarcated by scraps of black seaweed, a lighter, a sandal, the obligatory piece of blue rope, half of a small blue ball. I got the impression that the debris from the sea and the debris of military-scientific research were calling to one another above my head, playing a game I wanted to join, but trudging through the shingle, I was too slow to keep up.

By now, I was reaching the old Police Watch Tower on the perimeter of the AWRE site, from which intruders would have been identified, and discrete red arrows pointed along its edge towards the Black Beacon. The Trust recommends the view of the inaccessible AWRE laboratories that can be had from the Black Beacon, and so I climbed to the third floor of this octagonal building and gazed through the narrow window on each of its sides in turn. Each window is flanked by a labelled line drawing of the view, so I know that this structure over here is laboratory 3, that the water there is the North Sea, and that that unlabelled heap of metal over there is to be ignored as irrelevant. After having felt so immersed in the shingle and the flatness, the height of this building and the apparent clarity of the diagram give me a relieving sense of distance from the landscape. Framed, the landscape seemed now to conform to an order, and from this distance, I even felt a sense of power over it. How is it possible to feel in control of a site that is essentially a collection of decaying rubbish?

Outside again, it was a hot day, and rushing swirls of heat haze seemed to prize the Pagodas away from the ground, to sever their connection to the shingle on which I stood, making them distant, untouchable, unreachable. Approaching further, I saw closer the banks of shingle piled against the other AWRE laboratories, saw the laboratories nestling into the shingle, crouching behind it in comfort from my intruding eyes, and I remembered that this is a Nature Reserve, that certain things are not to be disturbed. Approaching closer, I saw the banks further as burial grounds, as solemn memorials to the suffering of the Ness at the blasting hands of military science. One step further and the shingle shifted again, inviting me to climb up and roll down like a sand dune in a purpose-built playground.

Not all of the AWRE laboratories are off-limits: laboratory 1, the closest, invites the visitors in through a damp, quiet hallway with a glow of green at the far end. Putting off the moment when the green glow could come to life, I drifted into first one dark side room (and stood still, my adjusting eyes finding only emptiness) and then another (rubble on the floor, switches on the wall). Finally, nose against the fence, I met the outside inside as it came streaming between the roof’s bare beams, flooded past fluorescent lights limply floating, streaked down the walls in swathes of algae, fell onto fresh leaves freely sprouting, and slipped away into the pit on the right where bombs used to be subjected to a hydraulic ram.

2006-04-22T19:51:00.000Z

A group adventure walking through the Yorkshire Wolds, soft chalk hills unobtrusive to sky, nation.

The theme of the first day was unity and disunity.
The group met a large road; a road too large to cross, cars running East and West all at once. There were those who thought the bridge over the road far in the distance was the obvious solution, even though our path was due to continue North wihtout any such detours.
And there were those who were impatient. Impetulently, in a lull in traffic, they crossed the road; they found it easy to cross, they revelled in how easy it had been.
They thought the others would follow, they thought this was the best method of persuasion. The others walked to the bridge.
A flashback to childhood arguments flared up five seconds into a fleeting phone call between me and my bridge-headed brother. Enraged frustration flared so fiercly that the phone call no longer seemed possible, did not last long enough to allow communication of the others' plan, a plan for a short-cut from the other side of the far-away bridge to a later point in the path we had been following, following in unity.
Disunity followed; followed both forks at once, followed us waiting for their return from the bridge to the true path, followed them not returning to us from the bridge on their new path. The true impass the first phone call, fixed assertions, fuming siblings; the true bridge the second phone call, the gentle malleability of the new mediators, with their mutable meandering towards a new and mutually reached meeting point.
Now we all meander.

The theme of the second day was balance.
The group was in harmony. It rejoiced in its unity because it was no longer innocent . It sought to further characterise itself, allotting roles to its members and themes to its days. Nick became the shepherd of the group, and cheif in charge of optimism. Dick, the risk and safety officer, from whom permission for any proposed venture must be obtained. Saffron, the magical elf, in charge of stamping Dick's documents. Charlie, the philosopher king, ready to balance the pragmatism of the safety officer. Anne, chief in charge of maintaining diversity within unity. Sophia, the reader of maps. Lisa, the writer of speeches for Anne, was chief in charge of public relations for all members of the group. And finally, Rich, the planner, became known as god.
The group had joked of making a social contract. This seemed to be it.

The themes of the third day were ups-and-downs, formlessness and death.
Heavy sky fell on trudging feet.
As the group rolled on, flat to the ground, thick clouds pressed down, and rolling hills pushed them up towards and wrenched them away again, they found a dizzy cycle.
Death on the sides of the roads.
As they all saw it, crowded round it, peered down on it, the philosopher king diagnosed: death on the ground.
A special detour to a village with a highly spoken-of tearoom, the group peered through the gap between the sky and the ground towards the village, the stop, the coffee, the rest, the warm aroma. But the tearoom was closed, the village useless. Only a damp bench and a lovesick cockeral. Instead of a triumphant 'cock-a-doodle-doo', the dying note of 'cock-a-uhhhhh' expressed: "Without you, I am... no. To me, you are... no. I compare thee to a summer's... no, no good. I wish... no. You... oh god," and so on. But after the village had passed, a released trigger propelled clouds into receding sky!
After the village, new vigour expelled mud clogged in throat and eyes!
After, light voices pattered on the ground, dipped in and out of dappled sounds.
They rushed ahead; we called them back.
They stopped at a gate to see who would go first, watched and waited and on they burst.
They tripped over each other; we let them.
After, light voices at our feet lay scattered around, slid over each other to rest and
meander.
This was the first day that Lisa fell over with laughter. The fall was not dramatic; it was a topple. Lisa toppled over with laughter.
The grass didn't mind; it had never seen anything quite like it. It replayed it to itself: the voice and the words and the way they had weaved their way into her walking path; the stop and the pause and the slow, gentle; the loss of control and the long, drawn out; the others turning around and still she hadn't quite; and then there she was.

The themes of the fourth day were repetition, crossing boundaries, aches and cakes, grumpiness

The theme of the fifth day was reevaluation, life and ways of being.
The group reached its collective climax. The themes from the previous days were seen in new lights, and a set of maxims were made: sleep in squalour, dine in company, walk slowly, sit quietly, and die alone like a dog.
This was the day that Sophia fell over. It was dramatic; a collapse. Earlier in the day, she had found how to walk in the land rather than on flat gridded paper, had become indifferent to the map she had clutched, had pretended not to hear when they asked who would be taking it, had watched how the others approached the role, had let it go. But now, walking with the chalk grass hedge soil: the sudden sight of a blank hole, a swift silent seeping into no role. The group pored over this stillness on the ground, poured into it a new role, and when she was convinced, she got up.

The theme of the last day was fine, final.