shadows of echoes of memories of songs

A bit of excitement on the towpath this morning: as I was cycling along I saw what I thought was a low branch ahead, but as I got nearer I realised that in fact an entire tree was blocking the path:



I was surprised that addedentry hadn't texted to warn me, as he'd left about ten minutes before me, but in fact the tree must have fallen at some point in the ten minutes between us passing that point — so, a lucky escape for both of us.

The towpath: a digression

When we first bought this house we cycled along the towpath to get to and from it several times; it was the middle of summer, and it was wonderful to cycle along beside the river in the sun looking at the flowers and the ducks — hello trees hello sky sa Fotherington-Thomas — but if I'm honest, I thought that the towpath would be a summer treat, and the rest of the time it'd be a boring road commute up and down the Abingdon/Iffley Roads. In fact, I've only taken the road once since we've lived here, and that was because I turned left out of Holy Rood Church down the Abingdon Road in a moment of confusion about where I was in relation to the turning for the towpath, and then couldn't be bothered to turn round (I really am that lazy). In the sun, the towpath is still marvellous; in the rain, you're no wetter there than you would be on the roads, and you're not constantly being bullied by cars and buses: you're negotiating with cyclists and pedestrians (plus joggers, anglers, dogs, and people on bikes shouting through megaphones at boaties) on some kind of equal footing. There's some kind of social interaction: a nod, a smile, a mutual giving-way, a quick "thanks" or "sorry". Cycling on the roads makes me feel like an insect; cycling on the towpath restores my humanity.

Throughout the summer the path was edged with cornflower-blue chicory flowers and purple-headed clover; as autumn drew in the leaves turned to red and brown (though the hedges and weeds remained lush and green), and the air was thick with woodsmoke from the houseboats; and now enough of the trees are bare-branched that you can see Corpus Christi Barge from the path. By night it's dark and quiet; sleeping geese stand on the banks by the boathouses, ghostly white and still like miniature menhirs. On a moonlit night, the reflections light every ripple on the river. On Bonfire Night we watched fireworks exploding over the water.

I'm starting to feel I know every curve of the path between Donnington Bridge and Folly Bridge; I notice when a branch is hanging slightly lower or when a lifebelt is missing, when there are particularly big puddles or emerging potholes. So to find a tree in the middle of it was something of a surprise... but at the same time, it was part of the patchwork. The towpath is a lot like the estate where we live — there are no neat edges, everything leaks into everything else. Houseboats have half of their contents on the outside; weeds tumble into the path, the path slopes into the river, bikes lean drunkenly into the hedges, and occasionally wildlife finds its way out of the river on to the path. So a tree had wandered across the path; fair enough. It didn't even occur to me to turn around, go back, and take the road instead: the digression had long since become the normal path. I arrived at the obstruction at around the same time as a couple of other cyclists from the other direction, and was quickly followed by another behind me; we leaned our bikes against trees and fences and started clearing branches to the side of the path, snapping off the dry wood and piling it out of the way until there was a roughly bike-sized clear way through.

Then we all went on our way.

Another post over there. Not pleased with this one, to be honest; I was rushing to finish it and I don't feel like I said what I was trying to say.

ETA: link fixed -- of course, the date part of it changed because I didn't actually post it till after midnight (FAIL!).

Another mildly dull post over there, this time about selling phones and CDs. Sorry if the Serious Blogging is getting boring!

Actually, it's been a while, so how about a poll:

[Poll #1486425]

Further to yesterday's post on the other blog: of course, a lot of my problems with email are problems with me. (I'm keeping this here because it's more about me and my fail and my angst, and as such it definitely belongs on LiveJournal!) So, some bad email behaviours:

If it's still in my inbox, I haven't failed at it yet

All those awkward emails I never replied to; emails I don't want to reply to, but want to remember that I haven't replied to yet; information emails where I still think I'll do something with the information -- blog about it, post it to another mailing list, complain to someone about it, sign up for something, buy something, sell something... Failing to do something may be bad, but failing to commit to not doing it is in some ways worse: the thing still doesn't get done, but the brain's request tracker keeps the ticket open forever. It's like a big guilty memory-leak. And the inbox slowly fills up with things that aren't really in my 'in' tray any more, they're in my 'fail' tray; so the inbox becomes nothing but a screenful of fail. Some of the mails in my inbox have been there for six months.

(I have a similar problem with food that's probably gone off: I don't want to eat it, but I don't want to throw it away, because that's a waste -- and then I will have 'failed'. So I put it back in the cupboard, as if it was somehow going to recover from having gone off, or as if I was going to be more likely to want to eat it when it's gone even further past its best.)

I read email when I know I don't have time to reply to it

This always seems like a good idea -- it seems as though it should give me more warning of tasks coming up, more time to start thinking about a reply. In practice, it just means that I've mentally moved the email to the queue of "things I haven't replied to" (i.e., things which I feel faintly guilty about) before I've even had a chance to act on it. It's like having a "select all > mark as FAIL" option in my inbox.

I agonise about the wording of even the most trivial emails

I think part of the problem here is that I get so irritated by emails where the sender clearly hasn't thought about them at all, and I can't bear the thought that I might end up looking like that sort of person. This would be fine if it just encouraged me to write clearly, but in practice it means that even a simple request-for-information email (the sort of thing that should be one line long and take about 30 seconds) takes a ridiculously long time to write. Emails to friends are far harder. I can draft and redraft and even 'finish' writing an email -- but increasingly it feels impossible to commit to pressing 'send', and I'll hit 'cancel' instead. It's not the emotional/informational content of the email that's the problem, it's just the wording; nothing ever sounds right. There are really alarmingly few people I can talk to in email without worrying too much about my wording (I'm married to one of them).

Perhaps I should have had a 'reply to all emails on the day they arrive' month instead of wittering away on LiveJournal.

I still believe that email is something that doesn't take any time

I don't intellectually believe this, of course, but some bit of my brain obviously reckons that email is something that doesn't need any time allocated to it, something I can just fit in between other things. The more I wrestle with time-management, the more I think that the most important things to remember are that time is finite and everything takes time. (Arnold Bennett writes more effectively about this than I do in How to live on 24 hours a day.) I have tried estimating and then recording how much time I spend "checking email"; the results are frightening. At work, I've recently been trying to set time-slots for "dealing with email" and actually stick to them; I usually massively overrun (or under-allocate time, depending on how you look at it).

To be fair, actually, it's not just email that I seem to think shouldn't take any time; most of the things which never get done (or which I struggle to get done) are things to which I don't consciously allocate any time. I think the myth of multitasking is partly to blame for this.

Stopping here because a) I didn't have much more to say anyway, b) I want to allocate some time to actually getting some sleep, and to do that I need to get away from the computer, and c) it's probably good for me to just post the damn thing and stop agonising.

There are a lot of rants going round my head at the moment on the theme of science, knowledge, ignorance, learning, information literacy, and what makes a thing worth knowing. I am emphatically not claiming any expertise in any of these things. At the moment I'm just writing around things I observe and trying to draw lines between them.

Today's irritation (I wish these things were the bit of oyster-grit around which a pearl forms, but I fear they're actually just the bits of shoe-grit around which a hole in your sock forms) was this popup 'poll' (advert) from Shell which pasted itself like Bill Stickers over the article about cycling which I was trying to read:



"Biofuels Can Be Produced From A Wide Variety Of Biomass Sources. Which Of The Following Do You Think Is Most Viable?"

Now, there are questions where people's opinions are the most important data you can gather, assuming you want to know the answer to the question in the first place (for example, "What's your favourite colour?"); and there are issues where people's opinions are a useful part of the picture even if there are other things which can be measured or taken into account (for example, "What do you think of our new website?"); and there are issues where there are actual facts which can be brought to bear on the question, and people's opinions aren't actually very useful or interesting except maybe as part of a general knowledge guessing-game (for example, "Which do you think is taller, the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Eiffel Tower?").

Then there are poorly-defined questions where people's opinions are utterly useless, like this one. Look, if you want to know which biofuels are more efficient (in terms of, say, energy generated per weight), this is something you can measure. If you want to know which biofuels can be grown most efficiently (in terms of, say, yield per area), or are the most hardy (most likely to grow in adverse conditions), or are the least polluting when used as fuels (in terms of ppm of pollutants), these are things you can measure. If none of these are what you mean when you say "most viable", you're going to have to define the terms of your question a bit better. The only context I can think of in which people's opinion would be the most important factor here is if you were trying to measure which biofuels would meet with the least public resistance; for instance, whether people would feel happier about running their cars on palm oil, or human bones, or rabbits.

Now I know this is an advert, and adverts want to provoke a reaction, because no publicity is bad publicity. But the advertisers know that this sort of thing makes people want to click on it, want to record their opinion. And, on the other side of the screen, there seems to be no shortage of people who want to hear the opinions of ignorant people -- often in preference to hearing the opinions of experts. "Let's find out what the man on the street thinks," we say. When it comes to something which is manifestly measurable and testable, I don't actually give an atom of biomass what the man on the street thinks; I want to know what the person with the tools to measure it, the expertise to interpret the measurements, and the eloquence to explain it thinks. In my examples above I've doubtless missed a lot of sensible scientific questions that could be asked about biofuels; the point is, I can pick half a dozen more meaningful questions to ask (assuming you want to get a meaningful answer -- and then we're back to begging the question again) than the one in the poll, but I wouldn't be asking the internet. This is more like the sort of questions that get asked on the BBC website's Have Your Say (which, as you probably all already know, is best viewed through the hilarious bile-coloured glasses of Speak You're Branes): none of which are actually questions, even if they're phrased as such. They're not looking for an answer; the point is quite simply to let people Have Their Say. The content of what they're saying is irrelevant; they might as well just say "Please type in the idiot box" or just "Your bile here".

I think there's a kind of amateurism and maybe even primitivism at work here: a sense that the opinion of "the people" is somehow more real, more authentic, and hence more important than the opinions of "the so-called experts" (who are, of course, still people, but are somehow cheating by actually knowing stuff about stuff). addedentry says (my armchair research assistant!) that it's the ideal of democracy taken to its extreme; he may have a point. I don't know where it comes from (and I'm not trying to answer all the questions here) but I want it to go back there. I think there's also a sense that Being Heard is vitally important -- which in many contexts it is -- whether or not you have anything to say.

In a sense, I guess that's the human condition: shouting into the void to try to prove to yourself that you exist. Thank Dawkins it's Friday!

Stopping here because this already overlaps slightly too much with the second half of the post about ignorance (which is still only in draft form mostly IN MY HEAD). Maybe one day I will marshall all this content into something more sustained and structured.

Why do people display apparent pleasure -- and even pride -- in their ignorance?

(Like so many of my posts, this one's powered by irritation; and like many irritations, they were all on Radio 2.)

The first of these was perpetrated by Sarah 'TBW' Kennedy. Following a news item which mentioned the Taliban, she moaned, in her (thankfully) inimitable gin-sodden gurgle, "Why won't somebody tell me what the Taliban really want?" ... Well, let's see. Could it be because you work for the UK's flagship news and media organisation, and thus have access to current affairs reference resources that most people can only dream of? Could it be because they think that, even without all the BBC's resources at your fingertips, you could probably manage to type 'taleban' (spell it how you like, Google will figure it out) into the idiotbox and read (maybe even comprehend) some of the results? Could it be because, in short, you're an adult living in an age of unprecedented access to information, and "nobody told me" is absolutely no excuse for your continued ignorance on issues which involve actual factual content and where you have a desire for more knowledge? (This is, of course, begging the question. We'll come back to that.)

The second incident was perpetrated by Terry Wogan (yes, I suppose I do bring this irritation upon myself). Following a news article about a predicted increase in flooding in Wales brought about by climate change, Wogan cheerily chuntered "Why would it flood in Wales? Is there a scientific reason for it?" Well, I suspect that even the most green-crayon-fingered of climate change deniers would probably agree that there's a "scientific reason" for flooding: lots of water comes out of the sky, and doesn't drain away fast enough. Oh, you want to know why that happens? Well, my extremely dim memory of GCSE Science (I'm doing this without research, you know) is that the sun heats the ground, which heats the gases in the air, and then at higher altitudes they cool down, turn back into water, and fall to the ground. Or something. ... Oh, you want to know why that happens? Er, dunno. Physics. Most things are Physics, when you come down to it. Go and look it up. Eventually I guess you get back to the primum movens, and (I'm really handwaving now) you either say "God done it" or you say that it's Physics all the way down. Now, I suppose it's possible that Wogan a) is such a fundamentalist Christian that he believes that the only relevant cause for any occurrence is God -- that not a single sparrow (or raindrop in Wales) falls but that God wills it to be so, and/or b) is a less fundamentalist Christian who believes in chemical/physical cause and effect but believes that it is set in motion by God, and that by calling the 'scientific reasons' into question he's subtly challenging the atheistic orthodoxy of the age. (We'll come back to that, too.) Frankly, I just don't think he's that clever. (Maybe part of the problem here is that I'd rather believe that stupid people don't believe in climate change than that clever people are using their cleverness -- not to mention their mass-media platform -- to undermine the general public's understanding of climate change. But that's a digression, and not one that I want to follow up in a comments flamewar, thanks.)

The third incident was, surprise surprise, Wogan again (the reader's sympathy with my irritation will by now have long since expired!). Following a news item (do you see a pattern here?) about the Lisbon Treaty, he burbled (and I paraphrase because I can't remember the exact wording) "Everybody is getting in a state about the Lisbon Treaty but nobody knows what it is -- you don't know, I don't know, the people who are talking about it don't know." Well, sorry, Terry, but you're wrong: lots of people know. Some of them are paid to know a great deal about the Lisbon Treaty. Others know because they're interested: in politics, in law, in current affairs, in things which affect the world and society in which they live. Even I, with my relative ignorance about (and lack of interest in) European politics, know that it's something to do with reforms to European politics... a bit like the Maastricht Treaty? ... and is a Good Thing for human rights. Bleh, I'm embarrassed at how little I can articulate about it. But, like I said, I'm doing this without research, and I don't work for the BBC; I'm not surrounded by newsmakers and broadcasters, political knowledge resources, expertise. (Okay, I'm surrounded by expertise; but I still don't work for the BBC, and I'm neither asked nor expected to comment on the news.) I don't think I've even read any news articles on the Lisbon Treaty. I fail at current affairs. But if I wanted to know (and we'll come back to that, too) I could look it up. I could read the Wikipedia article to get a kind of overview; I could read (or at least skim) a couple of news articles and figure out the basic outline of what had just happened; I could read a couple of more in-depth news articles (preferably from different viewpoints -- the Economist and the Guardian would do here, no need to check out whether the Daily Mail thinks Lisbon causes cancer) and learn a lot more. But either way, I wouldn't cheerily proclaim my ignorance to my colleagues, and certainly not on national radio. I would admit that I find it hard to feel really engaged with politics at any level other than the local (which is not to say I have no interest in national and international politics, just that I find it big and confusing and everything you read about it is either very dry and academic or very partisan in ways which are not always obvious). I would also sheepishly admit that, for an educated person with access to all the information in the world (or at least the world wide web) I know embarrassingly little about Lisbon, Maastricht, the EU... oh wait, I did admit all that, back there. The embarrassment doesn't make the ignorance any 'better'; I feel (though would struggle to defend it) that the pride makes the ignorance worse; but rather than exercising moral judgements, I want to look at why people wear their ignorance so proudly and shout about it so loudly...

... but I don't have time to do that tonight. (To be continued in a few days' time, probably, as I may not have time to finish writing/keying the rest tomorrow or Saturday.)

Technically I think I'm one post behind, because instead of blogging last night I was at khalinche, ewtikins and hairyears's housewarming party, where there were lots and lots of lovely people (whom I'm not going to attempt to list in case I upset anybody by missing them out, but everybody I talked to was lovely!), a very cute ferret, and a mightily impressive serpent ... plus a piano, an oboe, a tenor recorder, several voices, and more lovely people enthusiastically playing (with) all of the above. There was also, as promised, a scale model of the Standing Stones of Calanais made of gingerbread -- I didn't get a photo, sadly (though I did get several pieces of gingerbread OM NOM NOM) but it certainly knocked my gingerbread pyramid into a cocked hat.

addedentry and I should really actually get round to organising a housewarming party, but it probably won't happen until we've got a kitchen (because otherwise I can't make cake, and it's not a proper party if I don't make cake). Which I should also get round to organising. Yes.

Does this count as the missing post? :-}

I'm slowly working my way through the comments on TGTGGDD, so apologies if I haven't got to yours yet. But it occurred to me belatedly that while it may be true that in religious debates there's a tendency for everybody to think they have a monopoly on being right, with TGGD it's more like Harry Hill's "Never-get-started-Monopoly", where both sides spend so long saying "I'll be the boot" "No, I'll be the boot" "No, I'LL be the boot" that the game never actually happens.

Having said that, Monopoly is a rubbish game at the best of times, so don't get too carried away with the analogy, will you?

Right, that's it, time to sleep.

We had a lovely low-key bonfire night at the Isis Farmhouse: a decent-sized bonfire in the corner of the Meadowside garden, delicious lentil and chestnut soup in a mug, equally delicious (and powerfully brandy-ish) mulled wine in another mug, and free sparklers from the bar. No fireworks of their own; their events email promised "a view across the Meadows of Oxford's fireworks", but we didn't see any at the time and in fact we were content to stand in the warmth of the bonfire for a while drinking our mulled wine, and waving our sparklers for a few moments of electric crackle in the woody darkness. On the way back along the moonlit towpath we heard fireworks, and ended up standing on Donnington Bridge watching some quite impressive fireworks far across the fields and beyond the ring road (Kennington, maybe?), all huge blossoming reds and greens. Then came home and were treated to another brief but no less impressive fireworks display from the house nearly opposite, tweetly crackly doodlebugs and rockets exploding into massive chrysanthemums of fire across the street, leaving charred spiderwebs across the cloudy sky.

The Isis is our nearest pub now; I'd always thought of it (insofar as I'd thought of it at all) as a summer pub -- a riverside tavern for punting to, or for sitting outside in the sun with a cool beer and a view of the boats going past -- but at the moment it's a wonderful warm autumnal hearth-from-home, hidden among the wet leaves, its flickering lights reflecting on the dark water. The flickering lights aren't just poetic licence: it's heated by a wood-burning stove, with incredibly low lighting (just the stove, candles, a couple of lamps, some red fairy lights across one wall). It's also only barely decorated, raw plaster showing through in places, but the overall feeling is not so much "building site" as "I know we haven't finished decorating but we couldn't wait to start inviting people round, come in, sit down, have some nice warm soup" -- a lovely homely feel. And talking of soup... we've been there a few times for food now and it has always been delicious: meals I recall have included a tasty and filling chickpea curry; a big bowl of borscht with slabs of warm crusty bread; tonight's lentil and chestnut soup; and (not strictly speaking a meal, but still very welcome) big slices of home-made cake. The food menu usually only has two or three choices (one of which is always beans on toast, but it's a good-sized portion of beans on a doorstep of crusty toast, with cheese on top), and it tends towards the one-pot style (soup, curry, stew), but I've still always struggled to choose because everything on offer looks tasty! The beer is mostly Cotswold lagers (plus a couple of guest beers in casks); there's a choice of proper bottled cider (Henney's, Weston's, and something else I can't remember); it's also the sort of pub where I wouldn't feel self-conscious just ordering a coffee.

At the moment the Isis seems to be trying lots of different things (as the Jam Factory did in the early days of its current incarnation -- and it seems to have been a successful tactic there!): a Stornoway gig earlier this year, a free mini-festival at the end of the summer featuring local-ish indie bands, and other music nights coming up soon ('Mongrel English folk' session on Friday 12th, trad English folk session on Sunday 14th); films showing in the converted barn at the side of the pub (which was also the main stage at the festival); bonfire night tonight; open for Christmas and New Year. It'll be interesting to see whether this will mean they start to open on more nights of the week -- if I had to think of something to complain about (and I'd be struggling) it'd be that they're only open Wednesday to Sunday (don't worry, addedentry has added their opening hours to the excellent new opening-times.co.uk wiki, so you don't have to remember that).

As well as being cosy and welcoming, the Isis seems to be doing well on the environmental front -- not just because you can't get there in a car but in a far more focused way than I'd realised until reading the owners' latest mailshot:

"When we arrived at the Isis, it was an ecological mini-disaster area. Having sorted out the piles of rotting rubbish, and got the sewage treatment plant working (it does discharge straight into the Thames, after all), and cut down some dominant and alien conifers, and taken the 500 litres of used vegetable oil to the biofuel manufacturer, and removed the three skip fulls of scrap metal on site, we could start to think about our carbon footprint. Now, we burn only wood on our stove, so most of our space heating is carbon neutral. And our new air-conditioning is via an air-to-air heat pump, providing about 3kW of heat for every kW of electricity. And we're about to insulate the roof of The Barn, our film / party / meeting space, so that it's warmer, uses less energy to heat, and is better sound-insulated."

(I hope they don't mind me quoting them so extensively. It's just because I'm impressed.)

Far too many riverside pubs seem to default to either beefeaterish blandness (people will visit for the view and a cold beer, why bother trying beyond that?) or leather-armchair gastro blandness (I'm looking at you, The Perch) -- the Isis has managed to be completely different without being gimmicky. The food and drink is great, the atmosphere is warm and welcoming, and it's near enough to us that we can run and hide there when our central heating breaks down.