On the tube on the way back from the Lumiere display in the centre of London – a cosmic acid trip without the drugs that transforms space and shape by shining different coloured lights on them – and we were sitting opposite a middle aged man with a five o clock shadow, wearing dark green camouflage trousers tucked into lace up cherry red jackboots, a purple bomber jacket and black baseball cap. He was intently reading a history of electric railways in Manchester and Liverpool. I hadn’t realised that trainspotters could be so paramilitary.

Waiting at the bus stop with the shopping and a kid with a manic look on his face zooms past on an electric powered scooter. It is making a noise like a TIE fighter.

Last week one of the children I work with dropped one of those tiny 5p pieces and without thinking about it I asked him to put “the sixpence” away. And we haven’t even had Brexit yet.

 

 

 

Reading this  – “The Hebrew word for fly, zvuv, is surely one of the most magically exact onomatopoeias in any language” – I thought at first that this was referring to the zip, not the insect.

Because I was reading without my glasses, the blurring of the letters creates creative miscues. I read “thankfully a time honoured solution lies close to hand, Cheers! let’s pour another cup” as “CHEESE! let’s pour another cup.”

Leafleting the Bush Grove estate for the first time since the general election and approach the house where my finger was sliced open by the hound of the Baskervilles, as I shoved Barry Gardiner’s smiling face through the letterbox, with some trepidation.

The “What part of woof don’t you understand?” sign had been taken down, but I size up the door with caution; reflecting that last time there had been no warning. The dog had been waiting silently on the other side waiting to sink its fang into the first bit of flesh that it could sense. This time I use the safe leafleting technique of folding it so it was stiff enough to go through without requiring any fingers alongside it. The dog can’t have been lurking in wait this time because there was a furious scrabbling of onrushing paws on lino, an enraged growl and the leaflets disappeared through the door with some rapidity, and in some distress, as the jaws of the beast tore them apart.

Around the corner in Old Kenton Lane there was a semi detached house; owner occupied on one side, buy to let and turned into flats on the other. The buy to let side was scruffy, the paint peeling, roof sagging a bit, amazon cardboard box in the window, front garden mostly mud. The owner occupied side was prosperous, tidy gardened, solar paneled, with its paintwork in good nick and roof clear of moss. The owner is probably worried about what next door is doing to his market value, but that’s the price of a market society and the failure to build enough decent social housing. The previous week on The Ridgeway we had passed a mattress and a load of building rubble just dumped on the pavement. One of the neighbours told us that it was put there by the landlord of the house – unwilling to pay the council the charge for taking it away, so they just dumped it and waited for the clean up crew to pick it up anyway.

The drift in this area is for more and more buy to let, turning “invincible suburbs” into a less sniffy, but rougher, places to live. The regulation (or suppression) of private landlords could very well appeal far more widely than people think.

The solar panels are also a clue to the way climate change is being mismanaged. People who can afford it have invested in solar panels or home insulation – are saving CO2 and making personal financial savings subsidised by everyone else. But this is done on a pepperpot basis. On my road, about three houses have been insulated. You look at them and they are fatter than the others. To make a difference we need ALL the houses to be insulated, starting with the people who can afford it least.

Last week I had to have a tooth out. On the way in, all the slender gun metal implements were laid out on a tray like a futurist fruit bowl: or a miniaturised set of exhibits from the London dungeon. “For what we are about to recieve…”

Jamie (my son) told me that he was relatively relaxed about having five teeth out at a sitting when he was 13 because he hadn’t seen the size of the needle until afterwards. I use his stoicism then as a model now.

I suppose its helpful to be told that “we’re just going to twist this round”; as having a rough idea of what’s going on, without being overburdened by detail, approximates to Buddha’s middle way.

It was all over quicker than I expected. they showed me the tooth, like a hard little birth, big, cracked, solid and bloodied. Red Molar.

There’s now an odd sensory battle going on between minding the gap – which feels much bigger than it looks – and a startling awareness of the remaining teeth, which are so much more present than they were; like the remaining relatives in a generation being lost.

Currently reading Extreme Cities by Ashley Dawson. The projection for sea level rise under the impact of climate change is currently set by the IPCC as a maximum of 1.4 metres above current levels by 2100, assuming a smooth and continuous expansion on existing trends.

The problem is that past rises and falls in sea levels as climate has changed have not been smooth and continuous, but more like earthquakes – long periods of little change punctuated by rapid, potentially catastrophic shifts.

The relevance of this is that the last time there was the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, sea levels were about 20 metres above what they are now. If you want to scare yourself, have a look at this interactive map, which shows what happens as sea levels rise.

http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=52.1335,1.0108&zoom=8&m=20

If you go up to the 20 metre mark it shows that the Thames estuary will start at Windsor and central London will be inundated, taking out most of the systems that the rest of the city needs to function, Cambridge and Peterborough will be North Sea ports, what’s left of Lincolnshire will be an island, York will be like Atlantis and there will be virtually nothing left of Holland.

If we have 20 metres of sea level rise already “baked in” to what we’ve already done, the only question is not what that will look like (we have the map and can see it) but how long it will take.

We tend to think of geological time as slow – moving at the pace of a glacier. But when you think of how rapidly the glaciers are melting it seems that the impact of the Anthropocene could be accelerating in a way that will become unmanageable unless tackled with greater urgency.

 

Radio 3 on Christmas Eve. Terrific programme about Bach’s music as the inspiration for dance performance. Having grown up thinking of Bach as essentially cerebral, something to revise to, logical, mathematical; being invited to hear it as music you can move to was a revelation. Odd how mental categories can get in the way of a perception that should be obvious. Some of the movements are written as forms of dance in the first place (passacaglia) but why did it take someone to point that out to be able to hear it as such? The weird discipline of classical concerts, where everyone sits still (or twitches a bit) until vast stretches of music have wound their way to an eventual end; when all the pent up emotion comes out in a ritualised prolonged applause (and some cheers) may be part of that. A concert of classical music explicitly put on as something to bop to might be an interesting, liberating experience for all concerned.

The following programme, about Jazz reinterpretations was a gem too. The double concerto played by the Hot Club of Paris (in the style of the Hot Club of Paris) reinforced a thought that I have had for some time that any piece of music has much more potential than its habitual form. Inside (for example) the Glory of Prussia march, usually played as intended as a piece of goosestepping Teutonic swank, there is a tremendous swing number trying to get out. Imagine it played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it. The cols theme looks better with longer posts, so we’ll fill this one out with some filler text. ‘I’ll fetch the executioner myself,’ said the King eagerly, and he hurried off.

Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.

The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up into a tree.

By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: ‘but it doesn’t matter much,’ thought Alice, ‘as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.’ So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend.

When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.

The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.

The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at HIS time of life.