Word Of The Week: Scrappage

Meanwhile, over on Facebook, my pal Brian Clegg opines that the word scrappage can't possibly be a real word. He refers of course, to the dodgy, and, moreover, desperate scheme whereby Moron McBroon and his fellow donkey-jacketed cronies want to bung us five big ones if we scrap our ol' bangers and buy new cars.

Brian, having indeed and heretofore written a book called Ecologic, is an expert on 'Greenwash' - the efforts by PR spivs to sell us things on the strength that they are 'green' when they really aren't. Therefore he'd probably agree with me that 'scrappage' is more about teaching crows how to fly under water saving the motor industry rather than the planet.

However, I digress. What irks Brian is the word itself - scrappage. I find to my amusement that it does exist, being delicately interposed in the Shorter Oxford between scrapie (a Scots dialect word for lard) and scrapple (colloquialism for the abrasion of the nipple suffered by professional female mud-wrestlers).

What's more, scrappage means what you suppose it to mean - the action of scrapping. This is rather fine, as one might propose, in the absence of the inducements offered by McBroon, that the definition of scrappage might be no more than a gnat's nadgers away from 'the action of estimating as worthless' which happens to be that of one of the longest known English words, floccinaucinihilipilification.

Scrappage - to use this fine word to refer to the decommissioning of superannuated Vauxhall Vectrae seems an awful waste. In an ideal world, I'd assume the powers of Humpty Dumpty (stop sniggering, at the back) and declare by fiat, if not Fiat, that scrappage must refer to some archaic right enshrined in the feudal system, for example, oh, I don't know, that of peasants to grummet their own cordwanglers' scrodes in the manorial demesne every second Wednesday in Lent (in the Town Hall if wet: restrictions may apply). One might think of similar words with faux-Medieval roots, such as

Verbiage - the right of those employed in the transportation of goods or the provision of services to make repeated announcements employing sentence structures, figures of speech and indeed words that are well beyond their educational attainment or indeed capability of utterance;

Foliage - the right of the seventh sons of sextons (try saying it while eating an apple) to hold noisy parties in graveyards between dusk and dawn, without let or hindrance. This right is often claimed in the defence of holders of illegal raves, witches' sabbaths and so on;

Mucilage - The right of the peasantry of Gloucestershire to catch hagfishes with their bare hands, usually a royal prerogative;

Cartilage - A levy or toll on the passage of goods across the land of butchers, tanners and glue-makers;

Spillage - the traditional right of transients and vagabonds to lick beer-stains off the tables of inns after closing-time;

Hillage - the right of thanes or reeves to insist on the immediate cessation of minstrelsy, usually by the striking of a ritual gong.

Stoppage - the right of serfs sent to battle on behalf of their overlords to cease fighting between the hours of one and two o'clock each weekday; to take five-minute breaks every hour; to take time off for sickness or industrial action whenever Norwich City is playing at home; and not to work before 9.30 am or beyond 5.30 pm or all day at weekends in the absence of separately negotiated separate overtime arrangements (see Umbrage);

and

Borage- the archaic practice in which receivers of alms are entitled to retrieve waterlogged palings, fence posts, gates, rusty gas cookers, brass bedsteads and firewood from mill ponds for drying and recycling, at any time between All Saints Day and Candlemas. This festival is still practiced in the remote Serbian village of Zivkovic along the river Bora, whence the custom gets its name.

Norfolk, Land of Pig and Poultry

What with the World Health Organization upgrading the Swine Flu Emergency to Level 5 - one notch below a full-on panic pandemic, I would draw your attention to this extremely interesting and informative post by Eric Michael Johnson. In his post, Johnson makes a persuasive and informed case that swine flu, and other forms of pathogenic flu, breed most strongly in the hothouse conditions of intensive pig or poultry installations. If you click over to the post (and I urge you to do so), don't forget to read the comments, in which Johnson adds crucial scientific references to support his case. Now, I'm not entirely convinced, but it's interesting to note that, as far as we know, the epicentre of the current outbreak coincides with one of the largest intensive pig units in the world.

Norfolk is well known for its pigs - the landscape is dotted with large fields in which pigs roam freely. Given that pigs are known for their sensitivity and intelligence, it seems cruel to pen them in, battery-style. Here is an entirely typical scene I took a while ago:

... and, ninthly ...

The fondness of East Anglians for pigs is so great that there is a covenant (local by-law) on my house specifically forbidding the keeping of pigs in the back garden. We have, naturally, found a way round this proscription:
We've been here before, of course. When bird flu was all the rage, quite a lot of attention was directed at the large intensive poultry installations run by Bernard Matthews, one of the region's biggest employers. We have our backyard poultry, too.

We started with two Pekin bantams,

housed in an eglu, manufactured by omlet, which is a kind of spaceship for chickens.

We added a pair of Polish bantams

and then a couple of wyandottes

so that the eglu is now full. Now it's spring, the chickens are laying eggs with great abandon. Trouble is, there is only one nesting space in the eglu, and the rows, tantrums and arguments as the chooks jostle for space is like teenagers queueing for the bathroom.

Happily the solution is at hand. We've ordered an upgrade, the eglu cube,

Which can hold up to ten full-sized chooks, three of which can be laying simultaneously...

The temptation would be to get another couple of bantams, but we're already overflowing with eggs. Just about anyone who comes to the Maison Des Girrafes these days goes away with a boxful. Roll up, roll up.

What of the old eglu? We could sell it - these things hold their value - but it so happens that omlet manufactures a conversion kit allowing you to remodel your eglu for rabbits or guinea pigs, replacing the roosting bars with a flat base, feed bowl and so on. As chance would have it, we have eleven g-pigs, and are keen to move some into the eglu. As g-pigs are almost as filthy as the larger, non-guinea variety, we're keener to have them in the moulded plastic, easy-to-clean eglu than in their collection of wooden hutches, which is beginning to look like some kind of barrio. So everyone will be happy. And most of us will be thoroughly spoiled.

In A Nutshell

Now is probably not the time to be launching a new literary magazine, so hats off to two of my younger, brighter, shinier and more energetic colleagues (Ms F. F. of Italy and Ms. E. G. of somewhere near Dundee, possibly) for forging indomitably towards the apotheoses of their respective zeniths with Nutshell, which is out imminently, and is believed to be having a lunch lurch launch party this Sunday, somewhere far away from Cromer and therefore mythological. I know Nutshell's going to be good, if only because they turned down my fiction submission. Perhaps I'll try some of my poetry on them next time. I am also told that the magazine will be free, which means that the initial run of 500 issues is sure to disappear faster than a buttered ferret up a Teflon^(TM) trouser leg - so get it while you can.

They've Got It In For Dogs, Now

As regular readers will know, the Cromercroxi love taking Canis cromercroxorum for walks on Cromer beach. A small section of the beach around the Pier is closed to dogs between May and September, but that's fine - there's plenty of beach to go round.

Except, that is, if this dreadful government has its way. Not content with ruining our lives in all sorts of other ways, it has a bill going through Parliament that could, potentially, get dogs baned from every single inch of our coastline.

The Marine and Coastal Access Bill, introduced by Labour Peer Lord Hunt of King's Heath (which is about as far from the sea as it's possible to be in England) and currently going through parliament, has a provision to create a path that goes round the nation's entire coastline. Because the area and route for this would be quite specific, it opens the way for local councils to introduce Dog Control Orders for any or all parts of the route under their jurisdiction.

I for one intend to ignore this provision if it comes into law.

The Battle for Middle-earth

Last week I had occasion to visit the city of Hereford. Now, you'd think that a place like Hereford would be the zenithal apotheosis of all that was pleasant and clean and good about England. It was a dump. The cathedral was nice enough, but the rest of the city was marked by the usual city-centre rash of chain stores and fast-food joints, and the population consisted largely of spotty, obese young women pushing prams. Finding it hard to find a decent place for lunch, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that the populace subsisted by eating their own offspring. With chips.

As for Hereford, so for much of the rest of the country: a place where people such as myself no longer belong. For I am the kind of person that this government hates the most - white, male, middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class, middle-England - disenfranchised, yet expected to pay for everything, including the babies (and chips) of the fecund and indigent youth of Hereford. The time is coming when I shall have to make a choice - to put up with this, or go into battle, a battle for Middle-earth.

My opinion on this government will be abundantly clear to anyone who reads this blog. So I shall move quickly over Mr McBroon's raids on our pension funds, which has contributed, more than anything, to the probable penury of any in the workforce who has tried to be (in his words) 'prudent'. I shall also draw a veil over his many fiscal finaglings, such as his abolition of lower taxes on company dividends, ostensibly to claw in the 'fat cats', but which has strangled at birth the aspirations of small-time sole traders to form limited companies.

Likewise, I shall not discuss the proposal of his creature, Mr Darling, to introduce a higher tax band on those earning more than £150,000, which will drive high-earners abroad while netting less than £2bn for a government that's about to borrow £700bn. Neither shall I mention the hike in National Insurance that will affect lower-paid workers most and discourage those few people still minded to form limited companies from employing anyone.

I shall pause only briefly at the ambition of Mr McBroon's predecessor, Tony Bliar, to send all young people to University so they would come out with degrees that employers don't need, while racking up enormous debt. In the same way I shall pass quickly over the proposals of the Home Secretary, Dolores Umbridge, to monitor every last social interaction of everyone in the country in the name of security, while presiding over a police force that arrests opposition MPs on the flimsiest of charges; and the Minister for Women, Harridan Hitlerperson, who wants to make it legal for employers to discriminate against people for reasons of gender and ethnic background.

I shall come to rest, back in Hereford, where it is clear that the current government is promoting a society made of compliant, welfare-dependent proles, devoid of education and the ability even to ask questions of their situation, so long as there's chips and Britain's Got Talent on the telly. Panem, and, moreover, circenses. Of how social mobility in Britain is now at its lowest for generations, when good schools - even those provided by the state - are available only to the affluent, rather than to all.

This government's attitude to Middle England is like that of Sauron to Middle-earth - his desire is to reduce it to a bland uniformity over which it has absolute power and control, its inhabitants reduced to the status of mindless, uncouth orcs. Never mind that his empire is a polluted, blasted wasteland, his government inept, corrupt and moribund. Like Sauron, Mr Brown's government is motivated by envy, spite and hatred - of anything different, fresh, new or aspirational, and most of all, against anything which it cannot control. 'What can men do against such reckless hate?' asks King Theoden, gearing up for the possibly hopeless battle to save the last redoubt at Helm's Deep. We are entitled to ask the same questions.

Consider, if you will, the Shire, a place in which everyone is content despite the almost complete absence of government. People seem happy with their lots, and yet there is a place for talented people of humble origins to make something of themselves - Samwise started as a gardener but rose to become the Mayor. But consider then, the Shire when the hobbits return to it from their adventures and find it defiled by Saruman, explicitly as an expression of envy and rage, to cut the hobbits down to size - a society enslaved, with taxation levied by brutal militia, the poorest and the weakest coming off worst. The parallels with our own government are so close that they do not need me to spell them out.

Neither need I discuss what the hobbits did next. They realized that there was something they could do to restore their happier lot; that they didn't have to lie down and take it. But they had to fight for it.

Onward [Insert Faith of Choice] Soldiers

My colleague Noah Gray told me of this great site called Google Fight in which you can pitch two adversaries against each other to see who has the most hits. Of some of the fights described as classics, the current results are

God 57,900,000 vs Satan 5,040,000
George W. Bush 19,500,000 vs Osama Bin Laden 410,000

and

Googlefight 50,000 vs Googlewhack 13,000

Among 'fights of the month' you can find

sex 704,000,000 vs money 124,000,000

You can of course make your own fights, such as

God 57,900,000 vs Dawkins 1,250,000

and

Gee 5,810,000 vs Dawkins 1,250,000

and even

Henry Gee 11,000 vs Richard P Grant 1,040

all of which results show that the program is working as it should, at least. This morning I read in Metro of a game called Faith Fighter which has achieved the impossible - it has brought all the world's faiths together.

Faith Fighter is the ultimate fighting game for these dark times

reads the blurb.

Choose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun.

The somewhat disingenuous disclaimer reads that the game isn't meant to be offensive to any religion in particular. It contains two depictions of Muhammad, one in which his face is blocked out, to cover Islamic sensibilities about showing the Prophet's face. I tried it and found that God made short work of Ganesh, but Ninja-style Muhammad soon k.o.'d God ... who was dispatched rather quickly by Buddha. I tried it - it's lots of fun and quite a stress-reliever. I can't find an iPhone app of it (yet).

Condemnation from representatives of the world's religions has been quick and predictable. Naturally, I'd like to weigh in with my own two penn'orth.

First, I am tired of people becoming offended by things. As I heard a comedian comment on the radio the other day (apologies - I can't remember where), the state of not being offended by anything has assumed the status, almost, of an enshrined human right.

Second, if you, as a person of faith, are offended by a rather silly computer game, then your faith is too fragile to be worth anything.

Third, I am - I admit - not offended, exactly, but mildly irked - that you couldn't have Jacob wrestling with an angel, a conflict that transcends the minds of gamers, and is actually scripted, in Genesis 32. Bloody internet. Anti-Semitic, I call it. Should be banned. Obviously.

St George's Day Rant

Down with that incompetent, meddling, deceitful, self-aggrandizing, micro-managing slack-jawed Caledonian fool Gordon McBroon and his Legions of the Undead Existentially Challenged stooges, toadies, newt-fanciers, diversity compliance officers, mendacious sleazebags, chisellers, chippies, apparatchiks, political-correctness czars, Guardianistas and elephants hierophants sycophants. Burn Balls, Crucify Darling. Poke Hazel Blears in the eye and roast Dolores Umbridge Jacqui Smith over a slow fire of her own rank incompetence. Devolve Scotland somewhere remote in the Atlantic Ocean where it can sink under the weight of Alex Salmond's self-importance. Down with them. Down with them all.

There. I feel better now.

Sexist Hypocrisy

Mrs Cromercrox, Canis cromercroxorum and I enjoy Wednesday evenings in front of the box watching Desperate Housewives, being the soap-tastic adventures of a group of women and their menfolk in American Suburbia. My enjoyment is spoiled by the adverts from the sponsor, Kinder Bueno, manufacturers of fattening synthetic crap confectionery, whose tag line is 'a little of what you fancy'. Superlative takes up the script very well:

Some women are out for lunch at a restaurant and are being served by an attractive male waiter. They wait for him to come near their table, and deliberately throw something on the floor. He bends over to get it, and they all scope out his tightly denimed ass together.

and then speculates what would have happened had the roles been reversed.

But switch the sexes and you get a group of men out for a meal, eyeing up the hot waitress. They chuck something on the floor and proceed to leer at her as she innocently picks it up for them, possibly nudging each other and licking their lips. 100,000 complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency for exploitation.

This advert has, in fact, been the subject of complaints in the UK and also in New Zealand, where the complainant wrote

I am complaining about the advert for Bueno Chocolate being shown on TV in NZ. The part of the ad I am complaining about is at the end of the advert the 3 ladies sitting in the Cafe and the male waiter is doing his job the ladies deliberately drop a spoon so the Male waiter has to pick it up. While he is doing that the 3 ladies are very deliberately and intentionally checking out his ass as if he was a piece of meat or a sex object with no feelings or emotions. I found this offensive and very sexist.It made the male waiter appear as if he was the play thing for the amusement of the women in the cafe. I just don’t see what a man’s ass has to do with selling chocolate. It is a very demeaning and offensive advert for males and I am sure if it was 3 males checking out the ass of a female waitress the ad wouldn't be shown on TV. I look forward to your response.

The complaint was not, apparently, isolated.

In response, the advertiser wrote that the advert had been shown in the UK and had also been subject to complaints, but the Advertising Standards Authority had chosen to take no action, noting further that

The advertisement was intended to be a light-hearted depiction of mischievous behaviour. The advertisement provides a sense that Bueno gives you confidence, allows you to be natural, makes a social moment more fun and is a little indulgence. There is nothing aggressive about the women's actions nor were they behaving in an intimidating manner. The male waiter is not subject to any humiliation or degradation, he is shown to be behaving in a normal, everyday manner and is completely unaware of the girls' attention.

So, next time I'm caught leering at some nice young lady's decolletage, I can always claim I'm being 'light-hearted' and 'mischievous', and people should be able to take a joke. Hmmm. I wonder how that would wash at the Guardian. Anyway, there is a lot more of that drivel, if you want it. The New Zealand Advertising Standard Authority's deliberation makes interesting reading.

In making its determination the Complaints Board acknowledged that there were different levels of social acceptability for the portrayal of males and females in advertisements, and to portray men observing women in the manner shown in the advertisement may well have been deemed to cause serious and widespread offence in the light of currently prevailing community standards, breaching the Code for People in Advertising

So much for sexual equality. The board went on to note that

The Complaints Board then referred to the light-hearted theme of the advertisement and the behaviour of the women. It noted that the advertiser had conducted research which had indicated that the behaviour shown was understood by viewers, liked and accepted, and there was no evidence that it had caused offence.

... drawing a veil over the fact that some people had indeed complained, which is why the Complaints Board had met to begin with. So there you have it, Laydeez and Gennlemen - sexual discrimination, outlined in black and white.

Actually, even more irritating than the disgraceful, offensive and discriminatory advert is the voiceover, from some young female who obviously can't pronounce the English Language - the female version of Neanderthal workmen guying at passing women and urging them to (and I hesitate to say this on a family blog) 'get their tits out for the lads'.

The East Beach at Cromer

I meet them all the time, walking the dog on the East Beach. People who'd upped sticks from Luton, Leeds or London, two or ten or twenty years ago, and come to rest here, in Cromer. Some are retired. Others came when, after an idyllic summer holiday, they felt that here would be a healthier place, an easier place to raise their children. I'm just like them.

My sister and brother in-law came to Cromer from London a few years ago, when bro-in-law got a job in Norwich. My sister tells me she's possibly the only person who's moved to Cromer without having been there first on holiday. So, naturally, Cromer was a place where my own family would come for a few days. Predictably, we fell in love with it, and as holidaymakers will, we gazed longingly into the windows of Estate Agents, marveling at how much your £££ would get you. We fell in love with it on idyllic July days when sandcastles were made and the wind was light. But we fell in love with it, too, on freezing February days when, the children togged up like astronauts, they made sandcastles in howling, horizontal sleet.

The moment - the moment - came in August, 2006. We'd spent a fabulous week in Cromer that July, and, a few weeks later, were on our way to a caravan park in South Wales (the second part of a distributed, two-centre summer holiday, you see). As we left London, I looked round at Mrs Cromercrox, who had a very strange expression on her face.

"I know - you wish you were going back to Cromer instead, don't you?" I asked.

She nodded. We both knew that you only have one life, and, come what may, we'd move to Cromer as quickly as ever we could. We sold our dreary falling-down 1990s box in Ilford for what I considered an obscene amount of money (but which my neighbours thought too little) - and bought an ex-council house at the back end of Cromer for just over half my London sale price. We moved in that November.

Just down the end of the street, through some woods, across a playing field and down the cliffs, here it is - the East Beach. Now, if you want fun and games, the West Beach is the place to go - closer to the town and its amenities, closer to the ice-cream shop, the funfair and (let us be be practical here) the public loos. But just a few hundred yards to the east lies the East Beach, almost deserted, even in the peak of the summer holidays. On those jewel-like days when the sun shines and the wind drops (cherished because they are so few), you could be on some desert island.

I'm in the happy position of being able, if I choose, to come down here most days. In the summer I take off my crocs and paddle, or sit down and dig holes in the sand with my toes. I can have it all to myself - well, there'll be Canis cromercroxorum, too, chasing sticks, balls or gulls, racing in and out of the waves, and living the life that any dog would envy. We meet other dogs, and their owners, all of whom feel like they're the greyhounds who've woken up to the fact that the rabbit they've been chasing is only a worthless toy, and have chosen to come here instead. To hear the sea - to breathe the air.

When we announced we were moving to Cromer, many of our colleagues thought we were mad. But most looked at us and wished they could do it too - wished they could simply relocate to where they wanted, rather than live - or exist - where jobs and family obligations demanded. But then, in 2006, we felt that we'd look unblinkingly at ouir jobs and family situation and face down any objections that might have been raised. To take control of our lives. As I said, you only live once, and it is your duty and your right to make the best of it that you can.

Commutatis Maledictis

I've been brewing an essay for a while now on that outmoded custom known as commuting and the related commercial pastime known as meetings.

Before I go any further, some definitions are perhaps in order.

com'mu-ting: the activity of travelling from one's place of residence to a different place in order to do one's job, and then doing it in reverse in the evening, often when millions of other people are tring to do the same thing.

mee-ting: a gathering of work colleagues called to discuss matters of common interest, the gathering tending towards a metastable, self-organized-critical state such that, if temporary, it will become permanent, and may metastasize into subcommittees, until the gatherings take up almost all the time allotted for work, such that a great deal of work is planned but little is, in fact, achieved.

Yes, I had planned to discuss these twin curses of modern office life. I had intended to discuss

* why, if most jobs involve people sitting in front of a computer, that it is felt necessary to move physically from one computer to another, perhaps many miles away, to do more or less the same task;

* the fact that whereas commuting and physical meatspace meetings were once absolutely necessary, because there were no other options, broadband internet and video-conferencing is making them unnecessary for many purposes;

* how workers who are trusted to work flexibly might be in fact more productive, happier and more loyal than those that feel they have to commute to an office where they can be micromanaged;

* how it is that - whether through habit, inertia, or failure to 'think outside the box' - companies and their representative bodies (such as the Confederation of British Industry) have as yet failed to grasp the many benefits of remote and more flexible working, including improved worker loyalty and productivity, as well as reduced overheads on office space in expensive metropolitan locations;

* how it is that - whether through habit, inertia, or failure to 'think outside the box' - central governments haven't quite grasped that the flexible and remote working of a significant part of the workforce, for much of the time, might lead to significantly reduced strain on an already overburdened public transport network, as well as a marked reduction in road traffic and its associated environmental costs;

* how it is that - whether through habit, inertia, or failure to 'think outside the box' - local governments haven't quite grasped how the flexible and remote working of a significant part of the workforce, for much of the time, might lead to a redistribution of wealth from major cities, notably London, to the regions, refuelling often desperate local economies, creating jobs, energizing communities and producing far greater prosperity for all.

Yes, I had meant to talk about all these things, as well as the fact that my company allows me to work from home, at least some of the time, for which I am grateful.

But I won't. Why not? Because pictures are so much more evocative. Here is a picture of my workspace early this morning, when, kids at school, I set up shop on the patio with my laptop;

And here is the view of my lunch-hour walk.


See what I mean?

You'll See Less Of Me In Future

This Friday I shall be in my prime. Hmmm. The Prime of Mr Cromercrox Of Cromer. That is to say, I shall be 47, which is a prime number. QED. But far from espousing hopless fascist causes - or, at any rate, any more hopeless fascist causes than those to which I already subscribe, which consists of a devotion to the writings of Mr Boris Johnson, whom history will show to have been the greatest statesman of this or any other age - I have decided that from my mighty frame a smaller man is struggling to be released.

So, about two weeks ago, I weighed myself on Mrs Cromercrox's special Weight-Watcher's Scales and found I weighed 19st 12lbs, or 126 kilos in old money.

I then instituted a diet which consist of avoiding snacks in between meals, and adding lots more fruit and vegetables to my diet. Given that exercise regimes any more formal than walking Canis cromercroxorum are, in my opinion, for the smug, the deluded or the certifiably insane, I don't plan to gad around in a yellow lycra mankini gym suit with matching sweatband and a weight in each hand. Diet is the way it's gonna be.

I've now stuck to this regime for two weeks, and have actually lost weight. I appear be down to 19s 7lbs, or 124 kilos. But there's a catch - the day after I recorded this measurement on Mrs Cromercrox's scales, the same device optimistically and repeatedly said I was 18st 3lbs. Despite the fact that the marked increase in fibre intake has resulted in a net contribution to the greenhouse effect, I didn't think I could have had lost that much weight in 24 hours.

That's when drastic mensuration was called for.

Yesterday I took the junior Cromercroxae to a local swimming pool, where I had the chance to weigh myself on a good old-fashioned weighing machine. You know, the sort with a footplate and a huge dial at eye level.

 I stood on the footplate and put my 20p in the slot. Through the glass I could see reassuringly robust steel counterweights (none of yer digital malarkey here) slide smoothly into action, taking up the sudden load. The dial swung round, clockwise from zero, in a dreadful and incriminating arc of doom, almost a full circle - pointing soundly and surely at 19st 7lbs. At least it didn't go all the way round, or speak to me in starchy tones, saying things like

No coach parties

or

One at a time, please

or (because I was dripping wet and in my trunks)
So now I know where I stand. No, not dripping wet in my trunks, but at least I have a decent baseline. My target is to lose 20 kg by Christmas - the weight of a standard sack of chicken feed. I know how heavy these are to heft, so it's no surprise that I feel tired and my knees are knackered, if I am carting that extra tonnage around with me all the time. So by the time Santa hoves into view I should be down to a svelte 104 kilos or about 16 st 5lbs.

Help! Help! Call the Sea Mammal Research Unit!

There. I've said it. Your task, dear reader, is to hold me to this, and stop sending me bacon sandwiches in the mail. The postman hates this, anyway, especially when the grease starts dribbling out through the corners.

Heidi and Me

I'm a fan of Now Appearing, the online scratching post of my friend Brian Clegg, from whom I've gleaned a lot of useful advice recently, such as the possibility that one can get Skype as an iPhone application, as well as all sorts of technical tips.

Brian is a full-time writer in the blessed state of being able to work from home. One of my favourite posts on Now Appearing is the one in which Brian suggests that the number-one, most important tool for any stay-at-home writer is not a computer, not a quiet place one can dignify with the term 'office', not even any original ideas - but a dog. Of course, Brian, being the technically minded person that he is, sees a dog (quite rightly) as a product of human technology, a point he makes amply in his excellent book Upgrade Me. In fact, the domestication of the dog happened perhaps 100,000 years ago, which means that the symbiotic system of Man and Dog has gone much further than Man and MS Vista, for example.

Brian sees distinct benefits in dog ownership for the full-time writer. Writing, especially at home, is a solitary activity - a dog provides the necessary feeling of companionship without being intrusive. Second, dogs force the sedentary home-worker to get up from that computer and take some necessary exercise, during which the writer can turn over ideas in his or her mind and get inspiration.

A while ago Mrs Cromercrox - who edits an online magazine for a charity, almost entirely at home, persuaded me, using the same reasoning as Brian's, that we really should get a dog. A short time later Heidi the Golden Retriever arrived in our lives. This is what she looked like then:
and this is her more recently, doing her Ursula Andress impression.
She's now a year and a half old (Heidi, not Ursula Andress) and, predictably, I'm completely dotty about her.

Yesterday me and Cromercrox Minor (aged 11) went to the Cromer Enormoplex to see a film called Marley and Me, which is all about a writer and his dog. It's based on a true story, of a writer, John Grogan, and how his developing family life was moulded by the presence of his large and unruly Labrador. Grogan made is name as a columnist, firstly on a paper in south Florida and later on the Philadelphia Inquirer. Many of his popular columns were about his dog, and it was the public reaction to his column about his dog's death that spurred him to write Marley and Me (the book). When I saw that the film would star Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, I dismissed it as a piece of romcom fluff. It isn't - it is, unexpectedly, a rather good film, and Wilson and Aniston can do Subtle and Serious.

One thing Brian doesn't say is how good dogs are at letting in some much-needed perspective on our over-complicated lives. No matter how miserable you are, or how knotty is that problem you can't solve, or how deep is the shit in which you find yourself, the dog will always be there to love you, no matter what. (And if the shit is smelly enough, the dog will want to share it with you.)

Ogden Nash perhaps put it best in his poem An Introduction To Dogs

They cheer up people who are frowning.
And rescue people who are drowning.
They also track mud on beds.
And chew people's clothes to shreds.

At the end of Marley and Me Grogan writes (and this is quoted in the film):

A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine.

Perhaps Ogden Nash should have the last word:

Dogs are upright as a steeple
And much more loyal than people.

From the Bosom(s) of the Waters

The picture of beautiful blondes with no clothes on emerging from the waves is a powerful image from classical mythology

which, not surprisingly, pops up repeatedly in the context of modern culture...

And has been reprised recently in Cromer, with this stunning and scarcely-clad blonde bombshell, caught on film recently emerging from the ocean.

There's a Corner of Crappy Camden ...

... that's forever paradise.

New Nukes

The Government has announced the possible sites for a new generation of nuclear power stations in England. There is (predictably) opposition from the knit-your-own birkenstocks brigade, which fails to realize that renewables won't be able to meet UK's energy needs without significant fossil-fuel back-up - a point amply demonstrated by Gaia-Guru James Lovelock in his latest book The Vanishing Face of Gaia.

Lovelock goes on to say that the risks of atomic energy have been vastly overplayed. Nobody died at Three-Mile Island, and the only people who died at Chernobyl were those workers who went unprotected into the open core: Given that the area around Chernobyl is far from being a blasted dystopia full of three-headed ogres, twelve-legged carnivorous chickens and giant sentient mushrooms, but instead is burgeoning with wildlife of a more normal cast, Lovelock even says that he'd happily have the entire waste produced by a single reactor in a year - about the volume of a medium-sized car -- buried under his garden, as the warmth would benefit his plants, and the residual radioactivity would be no greater than that produced naturally by the Earth's rocks.

Interestingly, the report notes that the proposals do not concern Scotland or Northern Ireland, because planning in these areas is devolved, and that 'the Scottish government opposes building new nuclear power stations'. Ho hum. When England has saved itself with clean, green, nuclear energy, and the Scots have finished consuming carbon-rich, wasteful and hazardous oil, will they sacrifice their principles to the extent that they'll tap into England's grid, or will the English remind them of their high moral tone and suggest they return to the Stone Age instead?

Perhaps wisely, all the sites mentioned in the proposals are close to existing nuclear installations - given that nimbyist opposition to any new sites could hold up construction for years.

Item: the town of Sheringham (average age, 106) is very poorly served by supermarkets, and at the weekends the becrumbled residents flock to Cromer in their Davros-o-Matics^TM to clog up the aisles in Morrisons. Tesco has tried to get approval to build a store in Sheringham for ages, but the opposition from some quarters has been so vocal that they have yet to be successful (opposition which has been strangely muted since the beginning of the current recession, for some reason). And if Tesco can't manage to put up a modest store, just imagine the opposition to a nuclear power plant ...

On The Road Again, Again

If you are up for three hours of stomping blues and rock, I'll be guesting on my Hammond organ

with Stone Pony at the Wildfowler in Gaywood, near Kings Lynn, this Saturday 18 April, from 9 pm until midnight. Come down for lots and lots of Van Morrison, Stones, Chuck Berry, the best of the 60s and 70s, and, if you are lucky, the weirdest version of Car Wash you'll ever hear.

The Landscaping At The Jardin Des Girrafes

Meanwhile, over at The Gulf Stream, Kristi Vogel talks about re-planting a Lantana horrida in her garden in San Antonio, Texas, the more to achieve a native 'xeriscape' - in keeping with the environs and, hopefully, easier to maintain than an array of carefully nurtured plants from alien shores. Kristi's gardening is scrutinized at every stage by her horse, with an intense scrute.

We're trying to do something similar, or at least analogous, at the Jardin Des Girrafes - that is, landscaping our garden for a specific purpose. When we arrived here three winters since, the J. des Gs was a pleasant lawn with an apple tree in the middle and a dilapidated shed at the end. The first thing we did was demolish and replace the shed. Then we had built a conservatory and a nice brick-weave patio.

And then came the chickens, the G-pigs, Canis cromercroxorum and Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM. It is now clear that the lawn in our garden, which doesn't get too much sunshine (the south elevation being largely obscured by buildings), was fine provided that people rarely walked on it, let alone ate it or tried to dig holes in it... the result being that it now looks more like Flanders c. 1916 than a garden anyone might wish to enjoy.

Our task, from here on in, is to create a garden that looks good all year round even though populated by G-pigs, Canis cromercroxorum and Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM. The first thing we did was powerhose the chickenshit off the patio.

Then, one of my neighbours, who happens to be a super builder (who'd built the conservatory and the patio) has started to lay a brickweave path down the garden, following the muddy ruts made by our regular passage to the chicken run, the shed, the compost heap and so on.

My next task, when the builder has finished, will be to replace most of the lawn with shrubs. Chickens, being descendants of Asian jungle fowl, love hiding under shrubs, and if the shrubs are big and robust enough, nobody can see all the holes and junk and stuff that accumulate beneath them. Apart from the shade issue, getting things to grow here won't be a problem: in the course of digging out the soil to make the path, the builder has found it to be packed full of worms. All that chickenshit (and G-pig shit) has done wonders for the soil's fertility.

Therefore, at the moment, while taking Canis cromercroxorum for walks round the 'hood, I'm checking out those plants that grow in local gardens that might also thrive in the demanding environment of the Jardin des Girrafes. We already have Forsythia and flowering currants growing like anything. But what we need are the kinds of plants that local authorities put in parks, requiring little maintenance and are proof against abuse and neglect - things like Hebe, Cotoneaster, winter jasmine, Eleagnus (very good near the coast, apparently) laurels, Pyracantha, prostate prostrate conifers and so on. By the end of the year I should have a garden that should please the eyes of all the species that live in it: the sorry remains of the lawn will be largely replaced by hard landscaping and shrubs.

As Kristi's gardening is supervised by her horse, so ours is by the chickens and Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM. The builder works alongside a retinue of small furry and feathery creatures: Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM appears to enjoy their company and has become quite tame, though I really shouldn't talk about it, as she has a reputation to maintain.

Come In Godot, Your Time Is Up

Patronized as we are by the metropolitan chatterati as a bunch of pig-ignorant turkey-defenestrators, I am pleased to say that we in God's Nelson's Own County can occasionally put one up on those silly running-about knees-bend donkey-bottom-biters of the Capital. Yes, we get to see the best theatre shows before they do.

So as it was, which is notwithstanding untowards, if obliquely, Mrs Cromercrox took me last night, inasmuch as which, for an early birthday treat (I am 105 on the Feast of St Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM) to the Theatre Royal in Norwich for a showing of a new production of that entertaining play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray Waiting for Godot, as it tours before we rude mechanicals before coming gracefully to rest in London.

Now, there's something a little special about this production.

Mrs Cromercrox and I were riveted to our seats (in the Dress Circle, naturally) for the whole two and a half hours, enthralled by the joyous interplay between the two tramps, Estragon (played by Gandalf) and Vladimir (Jean-Luc Picard). McKellen and Stewart are, of course, both distinguished Shakespeareans; both come from Oop North; differ in age by less than eighteen months (they are both approaching 70, though from different directions) - on stage together in this almost-two-hander they are cast perfectly as two weatherworn old boys who've known each other for half a century - because, they have. They come across as a comedy double-act (with microsecond timing, consciously aping Flanagan and Allen) and an old married couple (McKellen admits that he was almost the only one of Stewart's friends to advise him not to accept the role in Star Trek: The Chicken of Depression).

But if that wasn't all, there is again and also a superfluidity of helium: Simon Callow appears as the pompous Pozzo, and Ronald Pickup as his wretched slave, Lucky.

Now is not the place for an analytical exegesis of Waiting for Godot. I had never seen the play before, and on last night's evidence, I reckon I'd be spoiled for any other production, for I have a feeling that the play's reputation for obscurantism and difficulty stems from the fact that it requires actors of rare talent to carry it off. I had always assumed that Vladimir and Estragon spent the whole play effectively in stasis: I was wrong. Beckett's own stage directions demand a great deal of movement, and McKellen and Stewart were in a state of perpetual kinesis, singing, moaning, yelling, dancing madly, standing still.

But what's it all about? What happens? The answer is (a) I have very little idea, and (b) almost nothing. The play is about nothing. It is plotless and directionless, and at the same time has a heart's warmth and the cold terror of an empty cosmos. It's hard to imagine how baffling it must have been when it first played, in 1955. The world since has been changed by Godot, so we now see it with eyes already sensitised by Borges' fictions, the Goons, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. To a naive theatre-goer in 2009, Waiting For Godot might seem like a timely welcome from an old friend rather than the alien and confrontational piece it must have seemed when it was new.

So what is it about? Who is Godot, and why do the two old men continue to wait for him? At the simplest, Godot is God, and the tramps wait for him, forever disappointed, forever hopeful. But this could be just the aleph-null interpretation. McKellen prefers interpretations that are more concrete: Vladimir and Estragon are less ciphers than real people. Who, then, are Pozzo and his ill-treated slave Lucky, whose only interjection is a terrific tongue-twisting panegyric as if from a deranged theologian? Pozzo is an arbitrary divinity, eventually sick of his own responsibility; Lucky the worshipper, who despite the cruelties and restrictions of his faith cannot willingly be freed, because it is all he knows. Well, yes, longingly and possibly and yet, and yet. The end, Vladimir's crushing and solitary realization of the nature of the Universe and his place in it, is something that would be familiar to anyone who has read Borges.

Waiting for Godot is not about faith. Well, not just about faith. It is about the nature of truth, of time, of memory, of thought, of the pain of sentience. It is a play, the play, sine qua non, of the human condition. Mrs Cromercrox and I were spellbound. It was the best straight play we have, either of us, ever seen. We have been spoiled forever, and nothing will be the same again.

The Simulated Evolution at the Maison Des Girrafes

Cromercrox Minor, she of the Unicycling Girrafes and rebellious Daleks, made a reasonable request for her birthday stocking, now some weeks ago - she wanted a PC version of a computer game called Spore. This is a game of evolution in action - you find a planet, crash asteroids in it, and from the star stuff create and evolve creatures from the Urschleim up to Civilization, and beyond. If any game were designed with Cromercrox Minor's peculiarities proclivities in mind, this is it. A copy was duly purchased.

Then the trouble started. Spore has the most demanding system requirements of any computer program I have ever seen. I installed it on Cromercrox Minor's Dell Dimension 2300 desktop - not too long ago, the family's sole computer. Although 7 years old, the 512Mb of RAM have proven up to all tasks I've thrown at it. Spore, though, once installed, wouldn't play - in the (very) small print I read that it required a minimum of 2 Gb of RAM and would support only a small range of apocalyptically powerful graphics drivers. I have need of such things less frequently than a turbot needs a tricycle.

After wondering whether I could stump up the several hundreds required for a new machine, (and, a Mac beyond my means, wondering whether I'd have to succumb to Vista, which I have heard, is something of a chocolate teapot amongst operating systems) just so Cromercrox Minor could play Spore, I had a brainwave. I loaded it into my 2-year-old, 2Gb Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. This has just enough oomph - but only just enough - to support Spore. And only if you don't run anything else at all at the same time, and restart the machine before loading the game.

So I traded my laptop for my trusty old old desktop (of which I was always very fond) -- and now everyone is happy.

But is Spore any good? Was it worth all that trouble? Let me tell you, brothers and sisters, it's bloody marvellous. I can see me sneaking up to Cromercrox Minor's room when she's not around for a good old-fashioned session of descent with modification.

Good Friday, East Beach, Cromer

Today made it all worthwhile.

The move to Cromer from London, now three winters ago; the scholastic upheavals; the distance; the seemingly endless commutes that make winter seem like a long, dark tunnel.

Today dawned bright and clear, and as Mrs Cromercrox was throwing a few things together for lunch, and wondering when we were going to walk Canis cromercroxorum, and hearing on BBC Radio Norfolk that East Anglia would bask in the UK's best weather, she had one of those great ideas for which she has become famous - let's take the lunch to the beach and have a picnic.

Fifteen minutes later and we were there.

We are lucky enough to have the long-term rental of a hut on Cromer's unfashionably idyllic East Beach. Here is the path down the cliffs to the beach. Our beach hut is just out of shot to the left of the row you can just see, obscured by vegetation.


This should give you some idea of the surging crowds to be found on Cromer East Beach, at lunchtime on a sunny public holiday, during a recession in which we're told lots of people are holidaying at home. As you can see, we had a hard time amid all the oiled bronzage finding a small square to call our own.


Most holidaymakers hang about nearer the pier, or on the West Beach, with the ice-cream shop and the public toilets. A few hundred yards to the east, though, it's practically deserted - even during the tourist season.



We spent four hours like this, paddling in the sea, throwing balls for Canis cromercroxorum, and having our picnic in our beach hut. Yes, people did appear, but mainly just walking past.


Canis cromercroxorum had more exercise than she's had in ages.

Yes, I remember now. That's why we moved to Cromer.

Another Dimension

I am a Husband and Father. As such I have to be able to turn my hand to all sorts of activities. In recent years I have learned how to change diapers, assemble self-assembly furniture, become a chauffeur, impersonate a climbing frame, become passably expert at many sorts of simple household repairs and many other tasks. Recently, however I have added a new capacity to my arsenal:

Dog-chew.

Five Questions

Tonight we're off to our Community Seder. As far as I recall from last year, Passover is all about the Four Questions. I've never been entirely clear what these are, but in case anyone forgets, I have these ready substitutes:

1. How do I work this?
2. How much is that doggie in the window?
3. Who put the benzedrine in Mrs Murphy's Ovaltine?

and

4. Does this bus go to the station?

I do have a fifth question, which goes like this:

5. When will our water be reconnected?

You see, for the past hour or two, this part of Cromer has been cut off from the mains supply. Ferrets moles engineers are busy looking into the matter.

In the meantime we'll just have to bathe in vodka.

BlogNor09: Norfolk to Dominate Blogosphere!

What's all this then? Before you say 'Bugger Blognor' and twitter off to more fragrant climes, I came across this useful link in which it is explained how my fellow Norfolk residents are at last being exhorted to catch up with me and write about God's Own County, the Land of Pig and Turkey. St Georges' Day - April 23rd - is being promoted as Blogging Norfolk Day, and blog posts from all over the county can plotted on an interactive map from which you can see that Cromer is appallingly unrepresented. We'll have to see what we can do about that. Won't we?

Lunchtime O'Beach

Cromer has its own private weather. Despite the fact that the smiling weatherperson (never trust a smiling weatherperson) forecast apocalyptic downpours, freak typhoons and hailstones as big as footballs, we got a light shower of frogs locusts lawnmowers rain before dawn, and then the Sun shone brightly and hot.

It was still doing it at lunchtime so I took the opportunity of buying what will be the first of several pairs of crocs this year and trying them out on the beach. I also managed my first unshod paddle of the year
.
Some of us actually went for a swim...
The water was cool and refreshing rather than painfully icy. It was good to liberate the lower digits once again. There were, however, strange and mysterious manifestations about, such as this peculiar effigy...

And this quasi-druidic stone circle.

Could it be that people have been reading my book By The Sea? I wonder...

Bad Mobo Scooter

Cromer has a large population of elderly people, who enjoy whizzing around on their daleks mobility scooters as if they own the place. The other day I was walking along the pavement (that's 'sidewalk' for colonial readers), minding my own business, and a woman on her metallic red dalek-o-matic was whirring along behind me, ringing her bell loudly, rudely demanding that I should get out of the way. I think mobility scooters are dangerous - you might as well put pensioners on quad bikes and let them get on with it.

I have left instructions to Mrs Cromercrox that should I be in such a state that I require a mobility dalek, she is to let me buy one, point me to the end of Cromer Pier, glue my foot to the accelerator and let rip.

It Has To Be Said

When New Labour has finally been forced kicking and screaming out of office, we can look forward to the feature film, according to this amusing sidebar in today's Torygraph.

I Know What I Did This Summer

This weekend just gone was idyllic, with wonderfully warm summery weather. Given that this is all the summer we're likely to get this year, I thought I should write about it before the memory fades, and in the damp and chilly months to come I can drag out this post and read it to the family while we sling another mammoth leg on the fire.

On Saturday I announced that as Spring had Sprung it was time to clean out my shed. This declaration was greeted with hoots and guffaws from Mrs Cromercrox and expressions of the gosh-you-really-know-how-to-show-a-girl-a-good-time variety, but, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. My shed is my workshop, not a dumping ground, and this summer I have kitchen cupboards to make, as well as finishing a long-neglected wooden boat project with Cromercrox Minima. Spring arrived a week earlier in our 10'x10' summerhouse, wherein we redicovered the joys of our table football set, so why shouldn't the shed follow?

So, Mrs Cromercrox took Cromercroxi Minor et Minima into Cromer to do a trawl of the charity shops, and I took Canis cromercroxorum to the beach.

Canis cromercroxorum, on Cromer Beach. Not yesterday, but this'll have to do. Whaddya expect from a personal website, anyway?

After that, it was down to the shed. I unearthed our old wooden garden furniture, sanded off any imperfections (mostly spots of paint when I used the garden furniture as a workbech last year), sprayed the lot with teak oil, and generally spiffied it all up. I love getting the garden furniture out, for the same reason I love tidying up the shed - it's a springtime ritual, an acknowledgement that warmth and light have arrived, and we can emerge from our enforced hibernation. I removed most of the contents of the shed, swept the floor, sorted and bagged any old rubbish, and put back the remainder in good order. Now I can actually have space to sit down inside the shed, and enjoy the warmth of the sun streaming in.

When the family arrived home Mrs Cromercrox told me that there is a whole stream on the Discovery channel devoted to sheds. For some reason she'd never let me know this before and so I've been forced to endure endless shows on giving your cat a makeover and people deciding to re-decorate their piles for sale. However, this is a channel clearly marketed at sad middle-aged blokes like me, wherein husky chaps demonstrate the power of their drills to one another, and show you the best way to fillet a splanch-necked throstle-grinder for less than £50 and other useful things of that sort.

On Sunday, Mrs Cromercrox and Cromercrox Minor went for a jog with their personal fitness trainer, Canis cromercroxorum, as preparation for their forthcoming appearance in a local Race for Life. That's when Cromerox Minima and I headed off to one of our favourite places, Taverham Garden Centre, to buy plants and compost, our garden for to refresh. Cromercrox Minima loves shopping, and we both like garden centres, so we both returned with £££ of garden plants, bedding plants, houseplants and potting compost. The drive to and from the garden centre was lovely - windows down on those country roads, just like summer. Goodness, we even had to wear sunhats.

By that time Mrs Gee, Cromercrox Minor and Canis cromercroxorum had arrived home and put on the roast dinner. No longer, for us elder Cromercroxi, the roast potatoes and the yorkshire puddings. No, we are now on a diet and I hope by year's end to have shed the equivalent in poundage of a sack of chickenfeed. So we enjoyed steamed veg, and veg will feature greatly in our diet from now on. Instead of snacking on a cookie, I shall now munch celery and carrots. This diet is likely to make me fart like the exhaust on a 1927 Hispano-Suiza

A 1927 Hispano-Suiza, driving hastily off, stage left.

But you're likely to see less of me in future. After lunch, Gee Minima and I worked for two and a half hours solid, potting up those plants. We had pyorrhoeas and hernias; neuralgias, amygdalas and alopecias; impetigoes, gingivitis and sanitaria, and were left wondering why it is that the loveliest flowers have the most horrible names.

Another benefit of the Spring is that we've relocated Cromercrox Minor's shamefully under-used 8-inch Dobsonian reflector telescope from a corner at the back of the summerhouse to the conservatory, whence it is easily shifted to the patio, which, now hosed clear of a winter's worth of chicken shit, makes a lovely viewing platform. As balmy evening fell I trained the scope on the rising, gibbous moon. I had a 4.5-inch Newtonian when I was a lad, but spending the money on raw power and economizing on the mount - a flatpack Dobsonian rather than an expensive Equatorial - really paid off. The 8-inch is great as a light-bucket, so even with a wide field eyepiece, which shows the whole of the moon, you can see the most incredible detail. Moon-raking with a high-power objective at the terminator shows every crater, ever wrinkle, the flatness of the lunar seas against the pin-sharp mountains. Cue much expressions of wonderment and joy from the younger Cromercroxi.

Yes, we had a wonderful summer this year. Many memories to save against the inevitable washout to come.

Ideas For Making My Fortune #15

I've just come across a perfect eco-replacement for plaster filler. It's a mixture of equal parts hamster food, hamster bedding, hamster pee and hamster poo. When mixed together and allowed to set, it's practically impossible to shift. I could market it as Hamstercrete^TM. Excellent for filling those small cracks and holes in the Eco-Home.

A Message From Our Sponsor

Spot The Dog

Except her name isn't Spot, but Heidi.

The Data Entry at the Maison Des Girrafes

Well, this is my Wearable Office^TM earlier this evening, as I pounded numbers into my ancient iMac. You really, really don't want to know what these numbers are all about. You do? Look, you'll regret it, but you asked for it. The numbers, if you must know, are measurements of ancient bovid metacarpal bones. See? I told you it was dull.

Some of the numbers were from my 18-year-old PhD thesis, Bovidae from the Pleistocene of Britain, (a.k.a. How To Tell The Difference Between Cows And Bison) read squintingly from yellowing twice-copied mainframe printouts. Some more of the numbers were from my - gasp - lab book as seen in the above picture.

I drafted my PhD on a BBC microcomputer in some long-forgotten word processing program. I rewrote it on an Amstrad PCW3256, in which the operating system had to be loaded on, every time, from a diskette. Bill Gates might as well have been flipping burgers, Steve Jobs was still delivering pizzas from his skateboard, 'email' hardly existed and the word 'web' referred mainly to spiders.

My lab book happened several years later (1996), when I was on sabbatical from Your Favourite Weekly Science Journal Beginning With N, in the days when management allowed such things. I was teaching a graduate seminar course at UCLA, and was also a visiting researcher at the George C Page Museum up the road - this is the Museum that floats on the asphalt of the tar pits whence comes enormous quantities of the bones of Ice-Age creatures that fell in. There were more bison bones in them thar pits than I could eat, so those I couldn't chew, I measured. These numbers have never been transcribed. I have to say, it was nice to see them go into an Excel Spreadsheet, even after thirteen years, with the ease of a buttered ferret careening down a Teflon trouserleg. I wish such things had been invented in my day. Spreadsheets, that is. Not buttered ferrets and whatnot.

It didn't take more than an evening's squinting and typing before the relevant data were entered, and emailed to my prospective coauthor in California...

Aftermyth of Creation

'Given your recent conversion', Dr N. G. of New York City, NY asks (rather cheekily, I thought), 'care to share whether these are true?' He referred to the Top Ten Atheist Myths, a screed disseminated by the American Atheists. Putting aside the well-known fact that a myth is a female moth, I said I'd look into the matter.

Given that the American Atheists have an annual convention whose keynote speaker is He Who Must Not Be Named, I could easily refute ...

Myth #1: that atheists are all the same.

I'd rather closet myself in my shed listening to my tapes of kittens being impaled on red hot skewers than go to the American Atheists' National Convention, any day of the week, (Praise the LORD!!!) and am on record, or at least I should be, as saying that The God Delusion reads like the semi-digested ravings on kindergarten-level Bible stories by an aspergic and sexually repressed sixteen-year-old.

Myth #2: that atheists have no morals since they don't believe in God

is just ridiculous. The writer of the AA document is clearly more patient with such lunacy than I would have been, had I written a responsa, which would have consisted of two words, the second one being 'off', the moral justification being that life is too precious to spend listening to such arse-dribble. The answer to

Myth #3: that atheists believe in evolution, but that doesn't answer as many questions as creationism

is rather more problematic. I agree with all of it (the response, that is), though, except this bit

We do believe in science, and that all questions will eventually be answered with science if they are not answered today

because I believe that there are good logical reasons for asserting that many questions will always remain formally unanswerable. That applies to the existence of God, of course. As for Creationism, well, it works arse-backwards. It comes up with all the answers first, and then poses the questions that fits the answers. Neat, huh? The AA response to

Myth #4: Atheists cannot know there is no God, since you cannot prove he doesn't exist

is rather snarky -

Well, if they [religious people] can be sure [God exists] despite evidence to the contrary, we can be sure in light of evidence in support of atheism.

and they also say

Atheists don't need to prove the non-existence of God, any more than we need to prove the nonexistence of Zeus or Jupiter

which is all very well, except that HWMNBN, the Pope of Atheism, claims to do precisely that in Mein Kampf (sorry - slip of the digit - I mean The God Delusion. Sorry sorry sorry. Won't happen again), which is completely unnecessary because one can make a perfectly good argument for atheism based on logic rather than notions of falsifiability.

Myths #5, #6, #7, #8 #9 and #10 are all dreary old tripe and if I won't waste my time discussing them, I see no reason why I should waste yours, either.

Here endeth the ... um .... wossname.

Everything That Goes Around...

Many years ago when the world was young (back in the 1980s) I did a Ph.D. thesis in Cambridge entitled Bovidae from the Pleistocene of Britain. It was a big morphometric study of the cattle and bison that roamed Britain during the Ice Age. It was a solitary exercise, I hated pretty much all of it, and the sole paper that emerged, in 1993 (if you must know, the doi is 10.1002/jqs.3390080107) has gone almost entirely uncited.

A few years after my thesis was done and dusted and I'd become an editor at a well-known science research journal beginning with N, I happened to be at a palaeontology conference in the US and saw a platform presentation in which the student had done pretty much everything I'd done, but with American material. We talked, and it was so great to be able to talk about the same things. It could have been that the misery of my graduate years came from the fact that I was working in complete isolation. We met over the course of a few years, decided we might do a paper together - pooling our results - but somehow, after I'd drafted it, it just fell by the wayside. I was busy with books, and family, and the aforementioned science journal beginning with N; my LA-based prospective collaborator had an archaeology consultancy to get off the ground, and a small son to raise.

A decade passed, and then, suddenly, I got an email - last week - from my once-prospective collaborator saying, hey, her business is now so secure that she can take her eye off the ball; her son has long since grown up and left home; she's coming over to a palaeontology conference in the UK, so can can we resurrect our paper so that we can submit an abstract by April 20? And can I send her my data?

My thesis is by now at my former PhD advisor's house (by happy chance he lives a few miles from Cromer) and I'll have to extract the data from the fading data tables, put them in a spreadsheet and email them over.

Like, yesterday.

Palaeontology is like that. You know, nothing for thirty million years and then it all happens at once.