2008 — 19 Feb: Tuesday, and it's also cold!
It's 07:46, and time to start getting ready for today's mystery destination.1 The idea is a stroll of perhaps four or five miles to "work up an appetite" for a pub lunch somewhere. We shall see.
An earlier night has at least resulted in a correspondingly early morning. And there doesn't seem to be too much fog in this part of the world. Plus, I've just learned a new adjective:
[Oliver] Sacks's style and method in Musicophilia will be familiar to readers of his earlier works: he provides us with descriptive summaries of various cases he has
studied or encountered, which blend the humanistic and the clinical in a uniquely Sacksian style (the adjective seems warranted).
The person, for Sacks, is irreducibly a center of thought, feeling, and will, yet is also a puppet of the circuits and nuclei that make up the brain. The brain is our
ineluctable fate, but the person is more than a mere syncopation of brain regions. And you have to live with the brain you've got, making the best of its contingent
strengths and weaknesses, not the brain you2 might ideally have preferred.
Now, ain't that the truth!
Next up, brekkie
Busy day — gotta dash... As, it seems, must Fidel Castro. And Barclays has just announced pre-tax profits of £7,000,000,000 (and a write-off of a further £1,600,000,000 on bad debts related to the American mortgage mess, if I heard right) for last year. Quite a lot of the first figure (in my humble opinion) comes from their failure to pay dear Mama more than a pittance on her (large) current account balance. She has more in her current account than Christa and I spent buying our first house (a three-bed semi in Old Windsor) in April 1976, though it's fair to say we derived more pleasure from that purchase than Mama is now finding from her earthly riches. So there's one potential new measure of value, I suppose.
Researching "ineluctable", by the way, brought me to an interesting discussion of web design and reminded me that (in the author's opinion) my most important user is blind. That would be Google, of course. Mind you, given that I "Googled" my way to Steven Pembleton's pitch in the first place, there's a certain circularity to that conclusion. And now that his name is on this web page, people searching for the model of car that my main co-pilot is now wishing to sell will also possibly end up here instead... It's all very well talking about the semantic web, but has anyone done a useful signal-to-noise analysis of the thing? (Probably, by now.)
As I said, gotta dash. Or at least, get dressed first. My companion is all ready for the "off" it seems, so out into the cold I go. It's only 09:00 dammit. More later.
Alongside (and on) the GWR with GWR
Click each pic for a larger image:
Kennet and Avon, near Hungerford
I haven't checked the map to pinpoint exactly where Geoff navigated me, but it was nearly as far as Newbury, then off through Hungerford and beyond. We had an enjoyable (somewhat muddy) walk along the Kennet and Avon canal for eight miles or so, with a fairly hasty baguette at a pub and a five-minute wait for a train ride back to where I'd parked the car. We took a fairly circuitous route back, too, to see more than one stunning view from the road. And an amazing stone mason's outlet with some bizarre carvings3 and texts. Hursley's ex-Lab Director turns out to have a soft spot for natural beauty in addition to a wide range of interesting conversational4 topics. Quite how it compares with God's own territory of Yorkshire was a topic I never quite broached.
To restore my geek credibility, however, I did leave him with the suggestion that he replace his SCART RGB connection with component video leads and reset his DVD recorder's output to progressive scan into his little Sony HD ready flatscreen TV. I await news that that's what he's done, of course.
A new (to me) Eric Gill anecdote
I skimmed through my copy of his nephew's book of the complete "Engravings" without finding the example we'd seen. My further searching turned up a delightful follow-up by his biographer Fiona MacCarthy quarter of a century after her initial researches into his work (eventually published in 1989 — a fine biography). Anyway, the anecdote:
There is great ebullience in Gill's early work at Ditchling, a true sense of discovery. He was already working at the extremes of the domestic and the risqué his placid mother and child carvings contrasting with the sheer effrontery of such works as Votes for Women, an explicit carving showing the act of intercourse, woman of course on top. Maynard Keynes bought the carving for £5. When asked how his staff reacted to it, he replied: "My staff are trained not to believe their eyes."
Clouding the issue
Weird weather we've been having:
