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All lists of stuff to do today; lists at work, trying to do proper task lists at useful levels of granularity instead of writing the thing that really needs doing at the top of the list and then adding lots of small and manageable things so that I have something to procrastinate into from the big thing. There's always one big guilty project and then lots of small bits and bobs. I'm getting better at using things that are actually-useful-but-not-at-all-urgent as my procrastination-food, rather than things that are actually just timewasting, but some days it feels like an uphill struggle to do anything. I know all sorts of useful GTD theories, I have found the wisdom of

43folders invaluable, but at the end of the day a lot of the getting-things-done comes down to just actually, you know, getting things done. Ticking things off the list.

Lists of music, too; we've been going through the Guardian's '1000 albums to listen to before you die' series, which is a bit like looking through the record collection of somebody whom you really like but don't yet quite get, if you see what I mean. It's a bizarre collection of interesting recommendations, pretentiousness, obviousness, obscureness, coolness and craziness. I'm ticking off a fair number of them. At home, the aim is to tick off more records than Owen; at work, the game's played the other way round, and being able to tick off more than anybody else means a concomitant loss of credibility. 'Humiliation', as played in Changing Places: what's the most famous book you haven't read? (Music-wise, at work, an honourable draw was agreed when we established that none of us had ever deliberately listened to a record by Elvis Presley.) High Fidelity: Mornington Crescent.

Listlessness: the state of mind one finds oneself in when one doesn't have a list of things to do, places to go, books to read, albums to listen to. Wandering aimlessly; wandering freely.

Thanks to

martling's timely post we managed to catch the single showing of In The Shadow Of The Moon tonight. I can't add much to what M writes:

Hold up and think about it for a minute. This is one of the most amazing things that ever happened. There are people alive today who have been to the fucking MOON. Can you imagine what that experience was like? Or what it's like to live after that? Somewhere along the way we got so lost in the tedious detail of the technology that we forgot about those people and forgot about those stories.

The film doesn't tell stories; it shows stories. It lets ten of the men who have stood on the surface of something other than Earth talk about their experience, their thoughts, their feelings. They're not heroes or supermen; they are ageing men who were good at their job, who were chosen to execute a difficult task, and who have had time and space in which to reflect calmly and lucidly on the unique experience that they had as a result. The surprising thing is how unmediated (and un-media-ish) they appear: they don't shout, they don't emote, they don't 'bare all', they don't play to an audience; they talk with interest and enthusiasm and dignity about a mission accomplished, a journey made (and in the making). They've been changed by the experience; how could you not be? To know that you've visited a place -- not a 'country', not a 'world', not a 'planet', something that we can't encompass in our model of countries and states and borders (we can, tellingly, call it a 'satellite', a word for which the most common usage applies to a man-made thing) -- where only 12 living men have been, and where no human has stood for over 30 years. But in most cases they don't give the impression of having undergone some kind of Damascene conversion; rather, they've seen the sun rise, and they've seen the moon rise, and they've seen the Earth rise, and those slow growing lights have illuminated their vision.

Those men were born in 1930. Even granting them the best of good health, in another 40 years there will be no living human beings with that unique (literal and metaphorical) perspective on the world (unless the man from NASA was right about putting a man on Mars by 2037). I say 'perspective'; in the film, Jim Lovell sums it up: "Just from the distance of the moon, you can hide the Earth behind your thumb, everything that you have ever known; your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself, all behind your thumb. It makes you consider how insignificant we really are." You've heard it, or something like it (Kate Bush's 'Hello Earth', maybe) before. It's what we feel, perhaps, when seeing things we know from high places; it's the total perspective vortex. It can touch the mind (perhaps I should, in lunulae, nod to the etymology of 'lunatic') but it also touches the heart, and something else, something for which we struggle to find the language.

Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?

But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely, of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

I'm so glad I spotted this little advert in the Gazette a few weeks ago:

PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER RICKS will lecture at 5 p.m. on Monday, 19 November, in the Examination Schools.
Subject: 'Rhythms: 1. Trains (Dickens to Dylan).'

When I was doing my A-Levels, enjoying being keenest of the keen at English (and not just because I had a crush on our inspirational English teacher), I started reading proper literary criticism. ("But that's cheating, reading books about it before writing the essay!" cried my classmates.) Loughborough Library isn't the best place to start when you're hunting for hot lit. crit., but I read pretty much everything they had, on the offchance that some of it would be useful. Most of it was just that -- useful, like York Notes for grownups, a help with the homework; but there were a few gems, and among them was a huge white book about poetry by a chap called Christopher Ricks. Looking at the years and the dates and the covers, I think it must have been The Force of Poetry; it would have been brand new then, so I should probably apologise to anybody else in Loughborough who was hoping to read it when it came out, because I hung on to it for weeks, devouring it. One of the things I'd enjoyed most about Eng. Lit. at school was the sort of close reading that came under the heading of "practical criticism", picking poems and prose to pieces, a kind of intense and hungry dissection that if I'd ever had the experience then I might have likened to picking the white meat from the convoluted shell of a crab. Reading Ricks, I realised that this was a man who could pick the meat from the bones of poetry with razor-edged chopsticks and stir it into the colourful, flavourful, meaningful salad in the large earthenware bowl which he held in one hand behind his back, all without appearing to break a sweat (much less the bowl, which I would have probably fumblingly dropped at some point halfway through such a tortuous metaphor). I was, like the crab or its fishier ocean-bedfellows, hooked.

Since then I've read a fair bit of Ricks, and Beckett's Dying Words remains one of the few works of non-fiction I've read several times, every time delighted anew by Ricks' delight in the language, laughing out loud at the ludic linguistics. You might not expect this sort of reaction to a detailed dissection of a famously despairing dramatist's dialectics of dying; but how many literary critics could include the line "Cryonics, and let loose the dogs of law" in a discussion of the rites/rights of death? But it's not all shameless punning -- a longer extract may extract more of the flavour, if you can bear it:
( mort? -- more -- )

After that derailment (which may have lost me all my listeners): today's talk was mostly about trains, quite a lot about Dylan, very little about Dickens. It is sheer joy to listen to a lively and erudite academic talking as confidently and eloquently about Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Elvis Presley and Meade Lux Lewis as he does about Whitman, Eliot, Larkin, Dickens, Johnson, Beckett ... and Leigh Mercer, the unsung genius (Ricks left looking up the author as an exercise for the listener) who crafted the palindrome (or poem) "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama". The lecture had the shape of a train journey, rattling along from one point to another (from birth to death? from damnation to salvation? every track goes both ways) but with neither the beginning nor the end of one's own travels necessarily being a terminus (funny how in railway terms it's an end even when it's a beginning -- I had thought they were different), and with so much to distract one inside and outside the carriage that time flies by as fast as the countryside.

A shorter review: this man helped to train my mind.

I'm running out of steam, and I won't try to revisit all Ricks' points (though one interesting one which survives as well without as within its context was that English has no words equivalent to 'visualisation' for the senses other than sight -- a thought for the day, if you like) but I will encourage you to look out for the next lecture in this series of three, in February 2008. Worth its weight in words.

Oysterband
The Zodiac @ the Carling Academy, Sunday 18th November

Taking a quick look at the Oysterband's website before the gig, I spotted a quote from a recent review:

"MEET YOU THERE, Oysterband's first full studio album in several years, may well be their best yet. They sound even more assured and confident, and although the folk influences are still discernible....... with this album they've achieved their fullest realization of a unique Oysterband sound..."

Oh noes, thought I. Oysterband already had a unique sound; but this review made it sound to me as though they were heading in the same direction as Fairport Convention, slowly turning down the volume on the folk-rock and replacing it with flabby MOR. But determined not to write them off as old men before hearing their new songs, I bought the latest Oysterband CD before the band came on; a vote of confidence, if you like.

My vote was not misplaced. They opened confidently with "Over the Water", which I hadn't heard before (it's the first track on the new album), but felt I knew by the second chorus. The first half of the gig concentrated more on the new material: all good, perhaps not quite as strong as the older stuff ... but then I felt that initally about some of the last album, and it's grown on me more and more over the last few years. Looking forward to listening again now I've got the CD. As the evening went on they did more and more of the old favourites; I bounced up and down until my legs ached for "Be My Luck", "When I'm up I can't get down", "Granite Years" and "20th of April"; and everybody sang along lustily with "Everywhere I Go", ending by singing the refrain again and again as the band improvised around it. You haven't heard folk rock till you've heard a rock cello solo, honestly.

As well as the old favourites there were a few surprises: an excellent version of "John Barleycorn"; a cover of "World Turned Upside Down" (ending with a chorus of "Give Peace a Chance", or -- the last time they sang it -- "come home from Iraq"); and a completely acoustic (not even amplified!) rendition of "All That Way For This". They ended with "Put Out The Lights" (since everybody put out one sort of 'lights' in June, thank goodness, people haven't had as many lighters to wave at gigs; but if they had had, this would have been a lighter-waving moment) and the rest of the audience was clearly as rapt as I was. I'll leave you with the band's words instead of mine.

( Put out the lights )

I lent somebody a copy of Alan Garner's Red Shift recently. It's one of my favourite books, though that's probably a lot to do with when I first read it -- reactions and memories are overlaid like graffiti names on ancient stones. I own several copies of it, so that I always have one spare to lend or even give, while still guarding my own copy (my parents' copy, in fact) jealously.

I re-read some of it before lending it, and found that it felt strange, less familiar, and consequently weaker. It took me a while to realise why: I was reading it in the light of someone else's reaction. It's hard to view something familiar in a purely objective way, to remove your own personal bias and leave nothing in its place; replacing that bias with a specific person's (known, imagined or expected) point of view, though, seems more manageable -- and just as disorientating. I nearly backed out of lending this person the book at all; in the end I just left it on their desk (I'd mentioned it before and promised to lend it), knowing that if I had to hand it over face-to-face and say anything about it, introduce it in any way, justify it, then I'd never do it.

Why all this angst over the simple act of lending a book? I mean, do libraries have hangups like this?

To lend books at all is to be vulnerable. To lend (or even merely recommend) the books you love, to people whose opinions you value, is to lay yourself open to a wealth of wounds. It's like inviting people into your home; whatever they say about what they see -- even if they say nothing (or perhaps especially if they say nothing) -- will be felt, not by the house (ostensible object of their objections) but, metonymically, by the owner. A word of approval may make the heart glow like the hearth of a happy home; but conversely the smallest slight may be felt as a physical blow. It's magnified, of course, by the level of regard in which the visitor is held.

To invite people into your best-loved books, though, is to invite them into your mind. It's asking them to share a piece of your past and your present, to stand for a moment in the place where you are and share your point of view. It's like letting someone lean in close to look through the viewfinder of your camera, or peer through your window. "No, here, look, come here, you have to see it from right here. There! Isn't it amazing?" And if (as so rarely happens) they respond with wide-eyed wonder, if they will look longingly for a moment through your eyes -- or as near as we can manage given the limitations of mind and body, time and space -- it's simply indescribable. It's like the 'ecstacy' of love that Donne describes:

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string

Except that by reading the same words, sharing the same mental landscape for a moment, you're not gazing into each other's eyes; you're not just looking inwards, limiting yourselves to less than one person's field of view; instead you're looking outwards, with the vision and strength of two minds, into the pages of a book -- and thereby into the whole world, into all possible worlds, into infinity.

While Owen went to a talk by Oliver Sacks on why some people hear music as mere clanging noises, I took the opportunity to hide at home and play piano for the first time in ages. It's not quite clanging noises, but I do feel self-conscious about playing while anybody else is listening; if I practise then I'm subjecting other people to endlessly repeated phrases and fragments of phrases, which can't be much fun, and if I just play for fun then I'm subjecting people to a) erratic playing (the result of not practising enough) and b) a somewhat random selection of music...

( a somewhat random selection of music )

I keep resolving to play more often, because I always enjoy it when I do, but ... time, and awkwardness, and clanging noises in my head.

I can't remember now if I wrote about this at the time (I suspect not) but last month I was on the interview panel for my replacement at my previous job. Yes, I know, that's unorthodox; but a) they decided they'd changed the job description enough that it didn't matter, b) this was the third round of interviews to try to get someone to fill the post and I think they were getting desperate, and c) I'm female. The third point wasn't explicitly stated, but it was almost certainly a factor, just as it was in the composition of the panel that interviewed me for the current job. (For that, I got the inside word on the people I'd be facing in the interview from a friend in the department. "A and B are the real geeks, the ones you'd be actually working with. C's a project manager. And D's a woman.")

( on breasts, the command line, interdisciplinary knob jokes, and no-man's-land )

I've been baking cake for tomorrow's team meeting. It's sort of a tradition in the making... well, what happened was that S, my boss, brought apple tart in for the team meeting two months ago, as a sort of substitute for tarte tatin, which he was keen to learn to make because of the association with the Sologne, where Le Grand Meaulnes, which is one of his favourite books, is set. (Still following?) Anyway, for the last meeting I decided it was my turn to bake, and produced some slightly underwhelming honey and yoghurt and walnut muffins which to the best of my knowledge had no geographical or literary associations (though I suppose they were 'American muffins', which the Americans call English muffins -- divided by a common snackage!). My colleagues were nice about the muffins, but really they weren't very exciting. Muffins are hard to get right, and these were quite doughy (which I don't mind, but it's not how they should be) and practically savoury (which I don't mind but is a bit disappointing when you've put lots of sweet things in).

Really, I just like saying the word "muffins".

So anyway, this month I asked S if it was his turn to bake this time, and he was apologetic but said he just didn't have time because he was going to be out all evening; so I said I'd do it again. (No, I don't leave an apple on his desk every morning or anything. Stop it. I just like baking. And team meetings go so much more smoothly with cake and coffee.) But this time I wanted to go for something more 'safe', something guaranteed to work better than those damn muffins. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this is one of my favourite recipes and it works perfectly every time:

( Marmalade gingerbread )

The whole house smells of cake now, and a house that smells of cake is a happy house.

There hasn't been much continuity from day to day so far in this post-a-day experiment, but yesterday's readers may be amused to note that a) today somebody about whom I had kind of sort of written poetry in a way kind of mentioned the subject of poetry quite disparagingly in a way that I'm not wholly convinced was coincidental, but b) I did get to sing with a band!

( how? )

My legs are still aching from Saturday's attempt at running, and my brain is starting to feel a bit weary from trying to come up with things to say every day. I find there's a point with everything like this where I catch myself thinking "hold on a minute... this is hard work, why am I doing this?" and I either have to come up with some kind of rationalisation for it, carry on regardless, or stop. Same with the photography: part of the reason I decided to pay actual money, for what (as my glassware-wielding colleagues were quick to point out) I could have done socially and informally via flickr and Wikipedia, was to pre-emptively come up with some rationalisation. Trick the brain: "You paid money for this, so you should finish it." "Oh, okay," says brain, not really stopping to ask "so whose damnfool idea was it to pay that money?"

None of which, as the alert reader will have noticed, is an answer to the question "why am I doing this?"

( why AM I doing this? )

I actually slept through 11am, which probably doesn't count as 'silence'.

( red, white and black )

What am I trying to say?

It is impossible to say just what I mean.

Perhaps that's what silence is for.

Last Saturday I bought running shoes. Today I actually got as far as using them (some extra motivation being generated, as I'd hoped, by the guilt of having spent money on them).

( in which our heroine recalls her school days and sporting prowess enjoyed therein )

I can't actually remember how many laps made a mile. I also have only the haziest idea of what "a mile" looks like on the ground or on a map, let alone whether I can "run a mile" (except when confronted by crocodiles, stalkers, thongs, crap web design, etc). So I decided to forget all about school running and Miss Pearson's minimal expectations of my sporting competence, & I just picked a route that looked like it might not be too impossible and figured that if it got too bad I could just stop.

If the Google Maps thing worked, you should be able to see my route here. (I didn't in fact have to ford the river twice, or swim; there are a couple of bridges that aren't marked on Google Maps.) I stopped when I got to one of the bridges (map-and-a-bit-of-string reckons I'd done 1500m by that point) and stretched my legs a bit and went "ooof" and looked at the river, and then ran on to Botley Road, and then there were loads of people in the way and I ended up just walking from Ferry Hinksey Road to the Seacourt Park & Ride, and then ran the last little bit. All of which took just under half an hour.

My thighs ache a lot. I am trying to keep them moving and stretching (oh do behave). I also discovered the other problem with running, or rather two other problems, which probably need propping up in some way or other, ahem. But I didn't feel like I was going to die (and have also subsequently not died yet, which is doubly reassuring). And I didn't feel too embarrassed, at least not as embarrassed as I'll feel when I have to go and ask the orange-faced ladies in M&S about sports bras. (I mean, honestly, you'd think I might have got over being a character in a Judy Blume novel by the age of nearly 30, but, ugh.)

I still reckon going clubbing is better exercise though. Anyone for indie disco?

Well, it's Friday night, so I'm ... sitting on the floor in the living room, trying to post to LiveJournal on the clunkiest keyboard I've owned since the AT died, and the slowest internet connection that I've had to contend with since my parents got broadband. (The original plan for Friday night was to go to the pub, but I wussed out because the pub in question was in Hinksey and I was feeling too dog-tired to contemplate the cycling.)

This is not going to be an exciting post. I'm just rambling to myself in order to keep my resolution to post every day.

( my boring life )

Told you this one wouldn't be exciting.

Early days of summer, sharp and bright
and sudden. I am startled by his skin:
sandalled foot and slender ankle. In
the flesh, too real. Sun-stroked in the light,

caressed... my mind is softening the blow,
smoothing the lines, stroking, making folds
from edges, turning inward. Memory holds
two versions of the picture; this I know:

both are right.

(for SR)

Current Music: Belly, "White Belly"

I had to change my password last week; the one I type several times in the course of the working day. I hate password changes, particularly when the system's intelligent enough to know when you're just swapping the order of the component parts of the passphrase. The thing is, when you've had the same password for a year or so, it starts to fall so neatly under your fingers that you can type it without even having to think about it. (You can even type it while drunk... possibly less of a good thing, when it gives you super-user privileges on the machine you use for work. I look forward to the first USB breathalyser.) Changing that is like changing your route to work, or your haircut; there's a glitch every time you follow the new routine, a moment when you have to switch from autopilot to manual, jolting you out of the daily daydream.

The advantage, though, is a chance to pick a new secret. I don't have many secrets; a combination of a philosophical tendency towards transparency and too much laziness to maintain lies means that I'm usually keen (sometimes too keen) to be as frank as the situation allows. But a password (usually more like a phrase than a word) is a chance to have a secret from everybody, and simultaneously a chance to write something anonymously on a wall (or rather to be identified as the writer while the wall and the writing remain unseen). To scrawl the same declaration of unrequited love in the margin of one's rough book every day, to etch the same lyrics on to one's pencil-case, without ever running out of space or biro ink.

In the early days of a new password it feels as though everybody in the room must be able to see what I'm typing, as though I'm going to be caught with the spray-can in my hand. It's a blush spreading across the wall of my face, brick-red. After a while it becomes a worry-stone smoothed by the fretting of my fingers and the sweating of my palm; a token, a talisman. It's a key, turning in my fingers, opening up, letting me in.

I suppose I should come clean: I'm trying to write a post every day of this month. Not NaNoWriMo but JaJoWriMo. There's no wordcount -- it's just an exercise (bend down and touch pen to paper) to try to kickstart me into writing something again. I won't mind if nobody reads it.

I've never written a novel. I don't think I've ever got beyond 6 pages of a "novel"; that's barely even a short story. In the sixth form at school I was the one who wrote poetry (there's always one); everybody always assumed I'd Write My Novel eventually. After I left school, a couple of people even asked me "have you written your novel yet?" Unfortunately, most of them chose to ask that during the years when I thought I'd spend the rest of my life marking up photocopies with SGML in red pen; I'd stopped writing poetry, basically stopped writing anything except LiveJournal. Not a good time to ask.

I'm not sure why people should think that writing poetry should naturally lead to writing a novel; it's like asking Linford Christie why he hasn't got as far as running a marathon yet. (Okay, he probably has/does/did/will just to spite me now.) I guess people assume that it's all to do with endurance (and like most lies, there's probably truth in it: some of it is doubtless about "applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair"). The idea, I suppose, would be that you start with a couple of haiku every morning before work, you build up to limericks, sonnets, villanelles; eventually you're ready to start tackling blank verse and epic poetry, and only when you've mastered that can you really start pushing the envelope and writing all the way to the end of each line. I've found it's more like the other way round; you start by writing "stories" where stuff happens to other people or to oneself in the relentless way that stuff has of happening in life: "one damned thing after another," she said and he said and then they, yes, and after a while it all seems so repetitive that you start distilling, cramming more meaning into words, into the spaces between words, bursting at the caesuras, and before you know it, all is logos, singular singularity.

Maybe that's not how it's meant to work.

The poetry never really recovered from the shock of leaving puberty; a brief flare and a long slow fade to black. Eventually it grew up (or what passes for growing up these days) and moved away, drifted around, tried a few different things, never quite settled. I cycled past it -- I'm sure it was the same poem, it had that look, ragged at the line-endings -- the other day and I don't think it even recognised me; I thought I'd look it up again some time but somewhere between the crossroads and the coffee cup, the thought slid away. I don't know what I'd have said to it anyway. Maybe next time.

My dad offered me his spare set-top box today; my parents have bought some kind of new all-in-one thing that does... whatever a set-top box does, and also records TV. So it's like a video-recorder, but more so...

Hi. My name's

j4, I'm nearly 30 years old, and I don't know what a set-top box does. I think it's a thing that lets you get lots of channels, like a satellite dish but not as ugly. I thought you had to pay for the lots-of-channels, but apparently you don't any more...

No, enough. It isn't funny, it isn't big, and it isn't clever. I don't feel proud of not knowing; I just don't know, and (I may not be proud, but I'm not ashamed either) I haven't been interested enough to find out. I'm not the Onion's area man about this, you know; I just don't watch TV. ( navel-gazing about why [and how] not ) It's not a question of "why should I watch TV, given the nature of TV" but "why should I watch TV, when there are so many other things on my list of things to do/see/try/taste". I could say the same of, well, golf.

(I have tried playing golf, once, very briefly. It wasn't much fun, but then I have all the aptitude for ball-games that a dolphin has for cycling. At least TV-watching generally takes place indoors.)

Since the beginning of this term I've been singing with Pembroke College choir, where I sang for (most of) four years as an undergraduate. I hadn't planned to go back to my alma mater, partly because I've never really felt that way about the place, and partly because I thought it would seem a bit odd -- trying to turn back the clock, if you like, and relive my student days. But when I came to look through all the colleges' websites to find information about their choirs, Pembroke's seemed to be one of the most welcoming to 'outsiders' like myself. I decided it would be just as silly to avoid the old place as it would have been to have had my heart set on going back there, so I decided to go for it.

It has been odd, being somewhere familiar (my feet still know their way around the college) and yet strange (so many things have changed just a little, just enough). I try to avoid saying "when I was here" and "in my day" and all the other things that would make me feel older than I already do, confronted with wide-eyed freshers, world-weary second-years, and nervous finalists (though I do still get asked what year I'm in and whether I'm a fresher); but I can't help spotting the trivial differences, wondering when the choir started being allowed to use Broadgates Hall for its mid-rehearsal coffee and cake, wondering when the wheelchair ramp was put in by Staircase 8, wondering when those ugly statues were moved from the back quad to the second quad.

It's not that I feel that nothing should have changed, it's just... differences. It's like going back to my parents' house and finding, each time, that they've changed one more thing. That they've bought a new bed, or redecorated the dining room, or moved that bookcase from the hall to the computer room, which isn't really the computer room any more anyway now that we all have laptops and the oversized Mac G3 is now in our house, by which I mean "mine and Owen's", not "my family's"... and eventually "me and Owen" will become "my family", my immediate family, and "our parents" will become a separate thing from that. It's hard, sometimes, to remember what "we" and "our" mean. What I mean when I say "I've left it at home". I've left a lot of things at home, and carried a lot of other things with me from house to house, city to city.

It's been strange being back in OUCS, too, where again, things have changed and remained the same; it's odd to find myself standing in the office which used to be the late-access computer room, talking as one member of staff to another, knowing that at some point 10 years ago or thereabouts a younger version of myself was sitting at a computer in this room, not really feeling as though I was in the room at all but rather in an IRC channel, a place where I could hide from people and college and essays and stress. They've -- we've? -- recently refurbished the help centre; it looks so utterly different that I'd have barely recognised the place, but the structure of the building is the same. I've said goodbye to teenage skin (both its acne and its elasticity) but it's the same bones underneath.

(The confusion doubled back on itself, another layer of reference back, when I bumped into

anat0010 in the help centre the other day. I'm always baffled when people object to the "meaningless" user IDs. These user IDs were -- and are -- my friends: scat0173, hert0145,

scat0324, univ0555 and univ0556,

anat0010, 'famous' people like mert0034 and mert0108 and math0001. They're as meaningful to me as ordinary names. Though I might draw the line at giving my children sable/herald user IDs as middle names. But I digress.)

I knew that coming back to Oxford would have this effect, but I said (and you're probably tired of hearing me say it) that I'd got over my relationship with Oxford enough now that I felt I could be friends with the place again. I think that was -- and is -- true; I know this city too well in too many different ways for it to have the same old hold on me now. I don't feel lost each time its seasons change; the new terms roll in and out like the mists across Marston cyclepath. I'm still attached to the place, but it can't wrap me round its spires any more. A quad is just a quad; a bridge is just a sigh.

Think how many pages have been written in and about Oxford, word upon word, covering the city in leaves like an eternal autumn. If a city could think, would it know that it was the same place underneath, would it see the paper beneath the palimpsest? If a city could speak, perhaps Oxford would look at me and say "how you've grown".

Carter USM + The Sultans of Ping
Brixton Academy, November 2nd

Carter USM split up in 1998. The Sultans of Ping split up in 1996. So you might be forgiven, on seeing the above billing, for having a moment's confusion over what decade we're actually in these days. (You might have been similarly confused if you'd seen me on my way to the gig, in faded black jeans, stripy tights showing through at the ripped knees, black DMs with rainbow laces... only the Dieselsweeties t-shirt ("I liked you better before you sold out") would have given me away as a time-traveller.

The thing is, those of us who were teens and twentysomethings in the nineties are now twentysomethingelses and thirtysomethings with nearly as much money as nostalgia. It's no longer the music that nobody likes; it's the music that everybody with a disposable income liked, and still likes, whether genuinely or just because it's forever associated with the hair they're sorry to be losing. A cynic might claim that it's all just a big cash-in... the fans, fortunately, don't care. There are those who would argue that it's somehow cheating to go to the reunion gig; a certain type of rockism would claim that if you weren't really there, then, well, you weren't really there...

Well, I wasn't 'really there' in the 1990s. I was a spotty teenager with very little money who wasn't allowed to go out very much; there's certainly no way I'd've been allowed to go to Brixton to see a band. (Loughborough Students' Union, Nottingham Poly -- those were just about within reach.) My main experience of most of the bands I liked -- Carter and the Sultans among them -- was home-copied cassettes of tapes from the library or tapes that my cooler friends already had. (Just as well, or I might have been disappointed by the sound quality at the Academy.) So I'm inordinately grateful to the bands who are giving me a chance to see them now. Particularly when -- as both last night's bands did -- they give the audience what they want: all hits, all the time.

And Jim Bob (still cute) and Fruitbat (still not) really did provide all the hits, the full-on Carter experience: complete with videos, strobes, terrifying moshpit of death (which I watched in part-fear and part-envy from the safety of the circle), a brief appearance in shorts and baseball cap from Fruitbat, and even some opening and closing words from the legendary Jon "Fat" Beast. A cheerful (and beerful) crowd chanted "YOU FAT BASTARD" at every available opportunity, and shouted along with every shoutable chorus (and there were lots of them -- if you can remember it, they played it).

I wonder how it feels to sum up your band's entire career in 2 hours of hits before calling it quits for ever. Jim Bob looked sad to be leaving, but to their credit, the band didn't milk the closing moments: one last song, one last storming standing ovation, and then it was left to the Beast to come back onstage and tell us "now fuck off". The video screen showed the closing scene from "The Life of Brian" as the audience filed out. That combination of shoutiness and sentimentalism, blokeyness and bounciness, obscenity and optimism: that's Carter USM.

All in all? It was fun. Silly, bouncy, shouty, fun. I'd've loved it as a teenager; I could still love it as a -- nearly -- 30 Something.

There have been loose tiles around the bath for months. I've fixed a couple; not too hard, apart from sticking a screwdriver in my hand while trying to use it to scrape old tile-glue off the back of a tile.

This time six tiles in a row were coming loose. I thought it would be a simple matter of letting the tiles fall off gracefully, scraping off the old sticky, applying some new sticky, and repositioning the tiles. Same as last time but a bit more comprehensive (and hopefully without sticking screwdrivers in my hands -- never let it be said that I don't learn from my stupid mistakes).

All seemed to be going fine until the last tile in the row, behind which lurked Screaming Horrors. I mean, seriously, what on earth is going on behind that last tile? There's a sort of open box (the white bit) at the back of the space; the two dark struts appear to be made of wood, and when poked slightly with a screwdriver the left one wobbles like a loose tooth. Why would you have that behind some bathroom tiles? Is our house actually made of bits of cardboard held together with duct tape?

Should I hide something interesting in there so that the next person who does this gets a more pleasant surprise?

[ETA: don't know why the flickr tags link isn't working for anybody except me, but this should give the idea...]

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shadows of echoes of memories of songs

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