2015 — 25 April: Saturday
I am1 profoundly ignorant of many things. Indeed, I often suspect knowledge of the depths of my ignorance is the only thing that continues to improve with the passing years. For example, I was sufficiently aware of the little verse about fleas:
Great fleas have little fleas upon their back to bite 'em, and little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.
To appreciate the 20th Century parody variant (I'm aware that Mandelbrot was also aware of this, by the way) written by Lewis Fry Richardson (actor Ralph's uncle):
Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity. And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity.
I found it among his collected (and inordinately expensive) scientific papers. And if the Faber Book of Comic verse (my bedtime reading2 last night) is trustworthy, it seems the author of the original was A de Morgan, the Victorian mathematician and logician. But for the majority of my life I've thought the original was written by Jonathan Swift. It would be wrong to suggest I lay awake worrying about this all night; suffice it to say I checked in with Mr Wikipedia just a few minutes ago. I was (for once) correct. Swift's variant was published in 1733 and de Morgan's in 1872.
That's a huge weight off my mind!
Meanwhile...
... my once-fevered brow is back down to a more temperate 37.1C and I no longer feel quite such a need to keep a precautionary bowl close at hand. Also, tea once more tastes normal — whenever I'm (as dear Mama would say) "under the weather" tea would seem to taste the way described so memorably by Arthur Dent. Given my need for copious infusions of the stuff, this return to normality is a Good Thing.
Oh, good grief
Things are (as Nancy Banks-Smith might say) getting out of hand:
Thick English department prose glues the whole enterprise together. "If thing theory sounds like an oxymoron," Brown states, it may be because things lie "as a recognizable yet illegible remainder or as the entifiable that is unspecifiable. Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects. ... Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates."
I'm so ignorant I have hardly a clue as to what Professor Brown is telling me. But what must it be like to think like this? Can you imagine the pillow talk?
Back in 1977...
... I was a freshly anointed young manager in ICL attending one (of several) often tedious 'management education' courses. I met a nice young lady civil servant from the DVLA who was at some pains to explain that teething troubles with their IT systems were not so much inherent weaknesses in their giant ICL mainframes as the problems posed by handling the sacks of snail mail arriving daily in 20 GPO (as it was then) delivery lorries. Fast forward nearly four decades:
To access your driving history, the car hire company will enter the last eight digits of your driving licence, plus the passcode you have brought with you, "so it's another thing that you have to remember to do just before departure. Or you can do it at the desk with your smartphone if you can remember the website address, don't mind the data roaming charges, can remember your national insurance number and are impervious to the long queue developing behind you".
Thank goodness the DVLA is confident that "the changes have been widely publicised". So that's OK then.
A reliably ungullible...
... chum sent me this crystalline link, adding: "Very interesting in as much as one's personality is very open on the web. I suspect psychoanalysts would make much of your diary and many of my Facebook comments. I've registered to try the site out of sheer curiosity." I await further reports.
[Pause for thought] Psychoanalysts?
Meanwhile, Mr Postie has passed me by, dropping off nothing from the Probate Court. I shall "contain my soul in patience" (as dear ol' Dad used to say) and await Monday's delivery. Irritating. Still, I may as well go ahead and draft the letters in readiness. Oh, no, wait... I've already done that. OK, that's settled then. Tea it is.