Riding the Waves to Eternity

I thought that I’d add another post before June ends, especially because I’m now on holiday and will be away next week.  Not that you’ll notice because I haven’t been here much in the past two or three weeks anyway.

I’ll be up north in Sutherland where the mobile phone signal fades in and out.  Of course I plan to have the phone switched off most of the time but it is a useful thing to have around.  As a precaution I unlocked an old phone and bought a SIM for a different network to my usual provider in the hope that at any one time at least one of them will have a signal in case of emergency.

dae as yer telt

One of the nice things about firing up the phone was coming across some old pictures lurking in the memory.  The one below is on the Shore at Leith where the water of Leith flows into the docks.  I can not remember where the one to the right was taken although the sign has a kind of “NHS” feel to it (something to do with the colour and the typeface rings bells).

The phone also contains a couple of pics from my last trip to Canada three years ago.  Of course the phone – an old Nokia 6131- still works perfectly so from the perspective of fitness for purpose there is no reason at all for me ever to have stopped using it – but of course I have, twice since then with contract renewals.

The phone which came immediately after it, a Sony-Ericsson, is another that I unlocked but then gave away to a friend who was in need of a new phone.  And currently I have an Android G1 (otherwise known as a HTC Dream) which I really like and onto which I am finally getting round to loading some apps 0 including the Vignette camera app about which I have written previously.

The sun shines on Leith

And come November it will be contract renewal time again and the opportunity will be there for yet another upgrade. There is an inherent wastefulness to this upgrade cycle but there is also a fascination in watching the capabilities of the  technology advance rapidly in such a short time.  Will I be tempted to upgrade? of course.  And probably to an HTC Desire unless, of course, something nicer comes along in the next 5 months.

On a gadget man theme, a colleague with whom I was traveling a couple of times in the last two weeks was using a Sony eReader.  I have largely avoided the delights of eReaders but this looked tempting (even though I have, inevitably, a kindle application on my phone which I haven’t used yet).

And so that was June, a month which seems to have passed in no time at all; a month so exciting that the only thing I can find to talk about is mobile phones!

boldly going

…where the time goes.

What can I say? Sometimes the time goes by and blogging isn’t on my mind.

The last three weeks have, though, been largely uneventful, which is no excuse for not even a paragraph or two but there you are. Today hasn’t been much better – I gloss painted the interior and exterior of the front door and the surround (primed and undercoated last week).

There has been the football of course, slow to start but picking up the pace a bit in the second set of group games – unless you happen to be following France or England who have been shockingly poor. I also picked up a copy of the last Bond flik – A Quantum of Solace – in a used bin for £3 and found it better than I remembered it as being when I saw it in the cinema.  And I have been enjoying the JJ Abrams Star Trek and old episodes of the brilliant Monkey Dust, although I have found these to be best savoured in short batches rather than gorged upon.

My Stew-Mac guitar has been played -a lot- in DADGAD as I tried to work up a version of The Drowned Lovers (Child 216) to my own satisfaction if no-one else’s.  I’m having some problems with it as the air temperature rises and the humidity varies though.

And, umm, that’s about it – not really a lot to report for three weeks absence is there?

is that a handkerchief I see before me?

I’m still on a snuffle come-down with a slightly thick head (nothing new there) and a tendency to cough explosively at random moments.

I have been passing my time in various ways.   I have the concentration to read again and am working my way through John Markoff’s What The Doormouse Said which looks at the roots of personal computing in the counter-culture of the late fifties and sixties.  This isn’t as dry as it sounds and is worth a dip if you’re interested.

I have also been listening to a wonderful internet radio station -Tight Like That Radio which broadcasts only pre-ww2 blues, hokum, swing and jazz tunes. It’s great and what’s more because all the tracks are limited by the time available on a 78rpm record you are never more than 3 minutes away from the next tune if the current one doesn’t grab your attention.

The current playlist is here.

I have also been messing further with Vignette (which I have now paid for) and have put quite a lot of shots in the gallery.  Here is a further short selection.

“I’m a chiropractic tenor: I sing in all the joints” – Sid Silvers

I mentioned yesterday that I have been playing with a photo. app for my Android phone called Vignette.  It is a neat application and probably capable of great subtlety.  I have, so far, not gone for subtlety but I will probably move to the paid app shortly.  Here are some examples of just messin’ around….

That particular setting could obviously be overused,  but I do quite like it in a strange way.  I should add that none of the above have had any processing but are exactly as they came out of the camera.  I’ll be adding more to the gallery (click link up at top right of page)

Mr Mysterioso

I’m taking a break from snuffling and snoozing for a short entry here.

Who would think that one stuffed up head could require so many paper hankies?  It is a truism but the problem with not being at work because of illness is that you can’t enjoy it: the best you can hope for is to sleep through the worst of it and not get too depressed by daytime TV.  I am old enough these days, though, to know when to take a day off and when not to.  I have in the past been caught out by forcing myself to go into work because it was “only a cold” and ended up being off for longer than if I’d just bowed to the inevitable in the first place.

Meanwhile I haven’t the concentration to read anything complicated or the motivation to pick up a guitar.  Endless re-runs of Buffy on cable TV are my only hope.

Of course one can also fiddle around with applications on an Android phone – in the case of the photo here, using the demo version of Vignette and some post processing on the computer.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

A largely quiet week at Cosmic Mansions which ended well with the warmest weekend of the year so far which meant mowing the lawn and a certain amount of reading of newspapers on a lounger in the sun.

Friday saw the final episode of Ashes to Ashes on BBC.  I stuck with A2A through three series and enjoyed it, but the final series was the best of the three and the final episode was beautifully judged.  Although the show stood on its own feet, in some respects it reminded me of the best of Twin Peaks in that it was not afraid to get weird and especially it did not patronise its audience by trying to be too expository.  It told a story and, for the most part, left it to the audience’s intelligence and imagination to work out what was going on.

And A2A and its predecessor Life on Mars gave rise to some great characters, especially the iconic Gene Hunt about whom both series revolved.

On Saturday Mons Meg toured Rose Street.  Thanks to a tweak to my neck a couple of weeks ago which still hasn’t quite settled down I was Tommying rather than dancing.   It was a lovely night to be out too and as you might expect the place was heaving with nights out, Stag Nights and Hen Parties which all added to the jollity of the occasion.

It was a good night but not, for me, as good as other we have done even though we completed nine dances during the evening.  On a really good tour I have a feeling that we build a kind of momentum and the the tour takes on a life of its own in a strange bubble which describes an eccentric orbit around the real world (a bit life Ashes to Ashes now I come to think of it).  I didn’t get that feeling on Saturday. There are a number of reasons for that which need to be looked at, but the early part of the evening didn’t get into its stride because so many pubs had football on the telly (European Champions’ League final).

Has there ever, incidentally, been a worse notion than to have TVs in pubs showing continuous sports?  They completely kill atmosphere stone dead as conversation and relationships take a back seat to glassy eyed staring at the box of tricks on the wall.

Last night things took a turn for the worse: I left work feeling that I had a sore throat coming on but kept it together to cycle down to Trina’s where we were practicing last night.  Unfortunately, part way there I moved in towards the kerb to keep out of the way of cars and in the process the front wheel clipped the kerb, throwing me off the bike.   Aside from some bumps and bruises, I have a particularly unpleasant graze on my left side just above my waist band from which gravel had to be cleaned.  And by the time I got home later the sore throat had emerged as a really heavy cold – stinging eyes, stuffed up nose and general crappy feeling was the order of the night.

So this morning I was sore, stuffed up and very tired.   Oh Joy.

garden fox

I spent a pleasant hour yesterday morning watching this fellow relaxing in our back garden.  He must have felt pretty secure because he was quite content to stretch out and sleep, or at least snooze, in plain sight.

Algthough widely regarded as a nuisance I like the idea of this handsome creature thriving in the suburban wilds.  When I was young, even in the nineteen seventies, the fox was still a firmly rural creature and sightings in towns and cities would be cause for excited comment.  We have three, I think, which regularly wander through our garden.  They are still wild and keep their distance, but there is certainly peaceful co-existence between us.  And I admire their survival through a cold and long winter – other creatures have not been so lucky: there is a distinct shortage of the usual garden birds this year.

And so we have a new government: given the way that the final electoral arithmetic worked out we got the only one of the possible permutations which made arithmetical and political sense.  Quite how long lasting the arrangement will prove to be I do not know but as they have only been in office for 48 hours or so it would be churlish to snipe and rant.

interesting times

Not that such scruples have stopped others: the political blogs and the comments pages on the websites of the media are still in pre-election froth mode with a dearth of rationality and an over-abundance of venomous spite, reductionist claptrap, partisan points scoring and other nonspecific bullshit.  This is coming from all sides and is as tedious as, from a civility perspective, it is worrying.

The difficulty, once Parliament resumes, will be the lack of strong opposition in the House which is the hallmark if good Parliamentary democracy.  The Lib. Dems. are are now part of the governing coalition and Labour is rebuilding itself and facing a leadership contest.  This is common enough when an adminsitration falls, of course; it is ‘normal’ to have the defeated party in some disarray.  The importance this time is that, although the the coalition parties are clear that they are in this for the long haul, there remains a chance that it will crumble and require a further election to try and sort things out.  No party can afford not to be making contingency plans for that eventuality.

Even were that not so, given the ideological divisions within the parties (though not always between them) and in our society then a high quality of debate and decision making will be essential.  We seem to have a dearth -on all sides- of forensic minds coupled with strong debating skills.  The only ones who spring to mind are Ken Clarke, Vince Cable (now securely whipped, tethered and neutralised) and, maybe, Alastair Darling.  There may be more talent on the back benches and in the new intake but I sense that something important has been lost with the apparently inexorable rise of the professional party political apparatchik (witness the tautology uttered yesterday which I have used as the title for this post).

In the meantime I am on day two of a new regime of BP meds.  So far so good although I will know better in a couple of weeks.  I do not appear to have a bilocated brain today and that can only be a good thing.

I composed the following blog entry shortly before Mr. Brown’s political coup du theatre.  I’ll post it anyway and ponder Brown some more for tomorrow.

=====

Gary Younge, commenting in this morning’s Guardian about the widely reported demands of the financial markets regarding the outcome of the election, wrote as follows:

The very sector we bailed out with public money, run by incompetent people who are once again paying themselves bonuses, is now threatening to destabilise the next government unless it fires thousands of low-paid workers, cuts their wages and withdraws the services to millions of mostly poor people.

It’s as though you borrowed money against your home to save a wayward relative from penury only to have them roll up a week later in a brand new Porsche and tell you to cut your food bill or they’ll repossess the property.

I couldn’t say it any better.

I was at the doctor this morning and my meds are being changed again – we are looking for a combination which works as well as the first one did (except that it also gave me awkwardly swollen ankles and triggered a recurrence of old aches and pains as a side effect).  The change is because my current meds aren’t making any particular difference despite, as I wrote to The Big Canadian earlier this week, my shuffling through the Edinburgh sands with my head in Mississippi for the past few weeks.    Hopefully the latest change will get me back on track. Despite my best efforts to stay chipper, this ongoing issue with the BP has been quite dis-spiriting and my self-image has taken somethingof a knock, as has my motivation to keep running.  I need to find a way to reset my self-image and I’m pondering this a lot recently.  I really need now also to start some light jogging again, particularly as I can feel my waist band tightening. I’m still wearing 34″ waistband jeans but would be wearing 35″ if such things existed.

Great news is that I did finally get out on my new bicycle for an extended run yesterday – down along the seafront at Crammond/Silverknowes/Granton.  It was only for an hour but it was good fun and great to be in the open air doing something again.  I would have enjoyed doing more but, putting this delicately, I require to build some tolerance to the effects of a saddle on middle aged buttocks.

If, when I was a student thirty years ago, it had been suggested to me that I might read with real interest an article by Norman Tebbit in the Guardian, I should have been in despair, unable to comprehend what unlikely chain of circumstance might have brought such a thing to happen.

Yet here we are.  In a thoughtful article Mr. Tebbit muses upon the electoral circumstance in which we now find ourselves (a more brutal version is in his Telegraph Blog). To be sure, he does so from the perspective of a veteran of Tory cabinets of old but it is no less interesting for that.  In part the article is a not-so-coded assault on Mr. Cameron which invites the reader to query Mr Cameron’s competence and judgement.  More interesting -to me- is Mr Tebbit’s articulation of his notion of “electoral swarm intelligence”.

By “electoral swarm intelligence” Mr Tebbit means that the collective, or swarm, decision of the electorate is better than the individual judgement of the individual electors. Mr Tebbit floats this hesitantly, more, perhaps, as an explanatory metaphor than as a hypothesis in social scientific theory.  Mr Tebbit writes:

this election, like those in 1964 and 1966 and the two in 1974, suggests that the electorate, in an election in which the issues have been dodged by politicians, or where there is a mood for change but uncertainty about its nature, is well capable of delivering a temporising decision

In my last post I said that I was not happy with talk of decisions by “the electorate” because that begs the question of whether there is some entity identifiable as the electorate as distinct from the sum of a set of individual decisions by the people in whom it consists: one is querying the reification of an abstract noun.  This, I think, is also the root of Mr. Tebbit’s hesitancy in advancing the notion.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

I think that there is a ring of truth about Mr. Tebbit’s metaphor although I would articulate it differently.  I think I would say that the unclear outcome may be a function of the number of different motivations in play for the decision making.  By this I mean to suggest that there was a lack of coherent and distinct over-riding arguments put forward by the main parties around which opinion could polarise into simplified decision making.

Mr. Brown seems to me to be at heart a 19th century presbyterian social reformer with “top-down” management tendencies.  Mr Clegg is the walking incarnation of the Lib Dem’s instinctive tendency towards politics as process.  Mr Cameron seems to me to be well described by his stereotype, a PR man who rarely displays any depth beneath his surface charm – politics as presentation.  This is a combined failure of Leadership.

While Mr Brown may have lost this election Mr Cameron has not won it. Neither are obvious poles attracting or repelling ideological commitment around clear world views – and this weekend’s Financial Times carries an intriguing analysis of the party fault lines opening up beneath all three of the “leaders”.

Incidentally, while much has been made of the “failures” of Mr Brown and Mr Cameron: Mr Clegg delivered a 1% increase on the share of the vote achieved under the leadership of Charles Kennedy while delivering 5 fewer seats.  Given the brutality of Mr Kennedy’s removal from office one has to wonder whether it was worth it.  Mr Kennedy would be entitled to his moment of schadenfreude should he feel so inclined.

There is, incidentally, a killer Steve Bell cartoon in Saturday’s Guardian which you will find on Steve Bell’s website.