The internet

Information on how to kill yourself is like porn. You know it's there, but you don't go actively looking for it, because you don't actually want or need it. But you know it's there.

The internet is quite useful. Only this morning I found that you can clean silver with toothpaste (and proved it a few minutes later), and that vegetarians can get iron from beans and pulses.

Pelicans and spiders

It was once thought that pelicans pierced themselves with their sharp beaks to feed their young on their own blood. That meant that the pelican was used as a symbol for the Christian God, who died for his people (and in some traditions is eaten by them on a regular basis).

I learnt today that there is an animal that feeds its young on its own flesh, but it's a type of spider which is devoured by its young. I suppose "O loving spider" would sound even dafter in a hymn than "O loving pelican" (from Adoro Te Devote).

Spotted in the Daily Mail

"Have health and safety Scrooges tried to cancel your Christmas this year? Call the Daily Mail newsdesk on 0207 938 6063."

Sometimes I wish they would at least pretend to be objective.

Last night's Question Time

Such a pity they didn't seat Marcus Brigstocke (irritating left-wing loud-mouth) next to Melanie Phillips (irritating right-wing loud-mouth). It might have caused some huge explosion, akin to that produced by juxtaposing matter and anti-matter, that would have been most entertaining to watch.

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis said that if Jesus wasn't the Son of God, and wasn't a liar, he must have been insane. I think I could live with that. Lots of people are a bit odd in the head, or believe in things that don't exist. It's an occupational hazard of being human, because humans have such big brains.

Kids are going to be taught not to hit girls

It's to prevent domestic violence. Two quick thoughts:

1) That's sexist, unless they teach girls not to hit boys as well. (And it does happen, but it's like male anorexia - there's a massive taboo on talking about it, because being beaten up by your girlfriend makes you look weak.)

2) While we're at it, let's teach them that it's wrong to chuck kittens off tower blocks or stab your teacher in the leg with a fork. I mean, good grief.

Things I learnt from a lecture on the Qur'an and modern science

1) Topsy-turvy can be used as a verb.

2) The sun takes 226 million years to orbit the centre of the Milky Way.

3) Parts of the Qur'an use language that sounds a lot like the King James Bible, e.g. "clove them asunder." Clearly a translator somewhere thought that that was what religious texts are supposed to sound like - sonorous, archaic and poetic.

4) There is a part of the Qur'an that goes "You see the mountains and think them firmly fixed, but they pass away like the passing of clouds." That reminded me of a line in Clannesse by the Gawain poet: "Clowde3 clustered bytwene, kesten vp torres." Roughly translated, that reads "Clouds clustered between, casting up hills." It's describing clouds that look like huge mountains in the sky, and it's from the passage describing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Qur'an verse also reminded me of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which should have won the Booker Prize but didn't. Instead they gave it to The Line of Beauty, which was frightfully trendy because it talked about gay people but wasn't that great a read.

5) You should beware of things inserted into a text in brackets that weren't written or dictated by the original author. In fact, beware of translation full stop.

6) There are 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe. This means that there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, but given the vast distances involved we will probably never come into contact with it. It's just one of those things you have to resign yourself to, like the fact that you are never going to be the Queen of England.

Quotes for the day

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory" - Engels.

"Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it" - Marx.

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful" - William Morris.

Fake sounds

Recently it has really bothered me that the sounds in wildlife documentaries are added in afterwards, having been manufactured in a studio somewhere, so that what is presented to you as the sound of a polar bear's footprints is in fact someone thumping custard powder with a pestle.

It also bothers me that I have never heard a nightingale's song, that the only place I can hear one is on YouTube, and that it reminds me of a car alarm.

Something I read in the Times

There was this seventeen-year-old woman who was sleeping on a roof with the rest of her family in Iraq. Someone threw a bomb on the roof. It destroyed her face. Surgeons managed to rebuild her face but it still looks peculiar, and she's still missing an eye.

The woman said in the article that she cries at night and asks Allah why he punished her like this. "What have I done?" I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and tell her, "Allah doesn't exist!" But then I wondered what would be worse - thinking that Allah decided that this should happen to you, or knowing that it was just bad luck and your life would not have been ruined had you slept on the other side of the roof.

(Perhaps the robust, Dawkinsian, "God doesn't exist so get over it and enjoy your life, there's a good chap" approach isn't always efficacious.)

Souls

Kate Moss is wrong

After years of exhaustive research, I can confirm that actually Yorkshire pudding tastes a lot better than skinny feels.

Carousel

Sometimes my head feels like a carousel. Things keep going round and round and up and down in it, and all the while a tawdry tune is playing.

Flies

The horrifying thing about flies on a corpse is that they show that there is an afterlife: there is life after us.

People used to think that dead flesh actually spontaneously turned into living flies, which is only true in a poetic way.

"I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -"

Emily Dickinson, poem 465.

Seam

The dimple on the end of my lecturer's nose and the cleft in her chin make her look as though she has a seam running down the middle of her face. It's as if the moulds she was set in didn't quite join, or the cells she was formed from in the womb didn't quite separate.

I'm inclined towards the former view, because her dark red lipstick and immaculate haircut, with not a single dyed strand out of place, give her an air of the robotic.

Similes

I have this book called Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English. It includes a list of similes which should not be used because, in the author's opinion, they have been "working overtime."

The sad thing is that most of them are now endangered species. Who now says "as brown as a berry," "like a bear with a sore head," "shake like an aspen leaf" or "as cold as charity"?

Word of the month

Excoriation.

The BNP and women

Reading through some of the comments on the BNP's website and elsewhere, I have noticed that the BNP have an old-fashioned attitude towards women.

If they like a woman, she is a faultless angel, a saint, a lady who is both beautiful and virtuous.

If they don't like a woman, she is treated with contempt and dismissal, and talked about in sexual terms. They reduce her to some horrible nickname that isn't even funny.

BBC headline

"Don't axe MP spouses, says Harman."

Is there a serial killer stalking the House of Commons?

Suffragettes

Why are we in favour of them now? They were technically terrorists.

BNP

The BNP don't just hate people who don't think like them. They also hate people who think like them but are not officially affiliated with them, like UKIP and Melanie Phillips. They call them traitors. Some of the abuse they've dished out to Melanie Phillips has been quite misogynistic (surprise, surprise) and leaves a nasty taste in one's mouth.

Lovely chaps, aren't they?

Daily Mail

What has the Daily Mail got against Muslims?

Whenever I read the Daily Mail I'm told about the hordes of ravening Muslims swarming across this green and pleasant land who want to turn all public buildings into mosques, ban Christmas (like the Empress Jadis in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe) and make wearing the burqa compulsory for all women.

Muslims don't drink. They pray daily and visit a place of worship once a week. They dress modestly and have strong family values. They are opposed to fornication, adultery and homosexuality. They are pious, sober, clean-living, respectable citizens.

Muslims are exactly the sort of people Daily Mail readers would like everybody in the country to be.

The sea

The sea used to be one of the most beautiful things on our planet. It was the focus of literature, myths, religions and art. For many people it was the closest they got to seeing God.

Now we've poisoned it with unspeakable detritus, tampons and condoms and plastic junk and leftover packaging and toxic chemicals. Soon there won't be any untainted ocean left. Just by living the way we do we are killing it. It's not numinous any more. It's a filthy, stinking puddle.

Pope to Anglicans: Come over to the dark side; we have cookies

"Groups of Anglicans will be able to join the Roman Catholic Church but maintain a distinct religious identity under changed announced by the Pope."

Full story here.

"Intercede for our separated brethren that with us, in the one true fold, they may be united to the chief shepherd, the vicar of thy son."

The prayer my mum says - it's all coming true!

Poppy

The first person I've seen wearing a poppy so far this year is Gordon Brown, on ITV yesterday. (Before you rail at me, I don't normally watch ITV. I was in A & E, and the only other thing to watch was a grumpy man with dried blood on his head talking to two equally grumpy police officers.)

It was only October 20th yesterday. I haven't seen anywhere selling the poppies. Is Gordon Brown trying too hard?

ETA: I'm watching Prime Minister's Questions, and Jacqui 'Porno' Smith is wearing something that might be a poppy, but might just be a floral brooch. Who cares about her, anyway?

ETA again: Eight other MPs in the House are wearing poppies. It's an epidemic!

Artifice

The problem with people who live in the 21st century is that they're so used to artifice that they've become overwhelmingly jaded and cynical, and unable to appreciate the true value of anything.

Crumbs!

I read on both the BBC's news website and the front page of the Sunday Telegraph that Gordon Brown's favourite type of biscuit is a chocolate biscuit.

Sometimes I think we get the politicians we deserve.

Gender

The way my brain interprets gender has gone all peculiar. The other day I saw a man at breakfast, and my brain kept telling me that it was a woman with a beard. I saw someone at a pedestrian crossing and, although they came right up to me, I couldn't tell whether they were a man or a woman. A lady walked down the street to me and I thought it was my brother, which made me sad because I miss my brother. (To be fair to the lady, she identifies as gender-fluid or gender-queer, and my brother hasn't finished transitioning yet, so this isn't me insulting the lady.)

I think this shows how much what we think is an immutable binary is just the way our brains interpret the world.

My father, who is anti-gay to the point of being slightly homophobic, is one of the most maternal people I have ever met. Jesus also had a strong maternal streak. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!"

I wonder if there is gender in heaven? I just did a quick internet search and apparently "When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." And angels don't have gender. There's a line from one of John Donne's poems about it: "Difference of sex no more we knew / Than our guardian angels do."

Drugs

Let's face it. I'm one of those people who needs drugs to reach their full potential.

Suicide

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I now know the last Facebook updates posted by two people before they committed suicide. Laura Gerstel posted "Laura is thinking . . . if only." Kevin McGee posted "Kevin McGee thinks that death is so much better than life."

Should I feel guilty about knowing this? Because I don't.

On the bus

There were these two elderly ladies. One had hair dyed in a horrible sickly shade of pinkish orange, like that soap you get in toilets that smells of what a chemist thinks a peach smells like. She was showing her companion a newspaper clipping about a man gaoled for sexual misdemeanours, which she had carefully folded up and tucked away in her purse. They were discussing it with relish.

False choice

This is when someone persuades you that if you don't choose A, then B will be the inevitable result and there are absolutely no other options, when in reality there are more courses of action available.

Stuff

My sibling has said that he is a man and has changed his name by deed poll from Francesca to Francis. I now feel as if I have twin siblings. The one my mum and dad (who are extremely unhappy with Frankie's decision) talk about is a selfish, bullying, exploitative girl who doesn't know who she really is. The one I know is a mature, level-headed, sensible young man who is quite certain about what he's doing and is getting on with me better than he ever has.

As a result of all this, I have become bilingual. I use female pronouns when talking with my family (apart from Frankie), and male pronouns with everyone else. As with most language, context is all.

Durham

I returned there yesterday. On the way up it was raining constantly, so the motorway was wreathed in spray and clouds of exhaust smoke. We could hardly see a thing through the white mist, and I felt as though the car was skidding about like a bar of soap at the bottom of a bath tub.

But then the sun came out, and for a few seconds we were driving right through an earth-bound rainbow.

Exuviate

Here are two words I would like to share with you:

exuviae - cast-off skins, shells or other coverings of animals; fossil remains of animals (geological).

From the Latin exuere, 'to draw off'.

exuviate - to shed or cast off (a skin).

© Chambers Dictionary, 10th edition.

They remind me of part of Hamlet's famous soliloquy:

"To die: to sleep -

To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub,

For in the sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause."

Shakespeare is saying that we slough off our mortal life as a snake sheds its skin. I think of the documents held in the filing cabinets at the summer job I have mercifully completed as exuviae. They are past lives that have been shed but are preserved for examination in a locked room in an unremarkable office somewhere in Warrington, dry paper that rustles like dead skin as you flick through the off-white pages under the arid light of a flickering fluorescent tube. (You know the kind of electric light that seems to suck all the moisture out of the air, and paint everything in the same sickly jaundiced shade?) Or the words could be fossils sandwiched between paper strata.

Somewhere in Cheshire there is one of those files about me, and I've toyed with the idea of asking to see it but I eventually decided that it would be humiliating and upsetting.

Carol Ann Duffy (3)

I've gone off her a bit since I read a poem of hers in the Daily Telegraph this morning. It was about Atlas. She didn't know that it was the sky that Atlas carried on his shoulders, and not the world.

I know that since the popular conception is that Atlas carried the world on his shoulders, it doesn't really matter. But it matters to me.

James Delingpole on modern life

"This is what I loathe about technology. It really doesn't make you any happier, just forcibly answers needs you never actually had. The Seventies were way better with their Space Hoppers, and slide shows, and no one being able to get in touch with you unless you were at home and you chose to answer the phone. Give me the slow life of power cuts, pressure cookers and Buckaroo any day, rather than the wired, impossible-to-switch-off world of now."

The Spectator, 26/09/2009

Eternity

Lots of people misuse the word 'eternity' nowadays and it really annoys me. Eternity means a state with no beginning and no end, a "great ring of pure and endless light," as Henry Vaughan puts it. That means that no earthly thing can be eternal, so the beauty salon down the road that calls itself 'Eternal Beauty' should be shut down for false advertising.

Life

I like my life. I like the way I can speak many languages. I love the sheer multiplicity of it, everything from Ctrl Alt Del to As You Like It; webcomics; Tennyson; 'epic fail'; 'brb bio'; grey wagtails; Doctor Who; Sir Terry Pratchett; John Donne; lexicography; T.S. Eliot; saving the cheerleader and saving the world.

I like being able to be serious or be silly, and know the importance of both while I do so.

Life is like the rose window in Durham Cathedral, but with so many more colours and patterns, and so heart-breakingly beautiful, especially when you realise that it's going to end, and it will go on without you for a little while, like a clock slowly running down, and then it will stop.

Things to remember

"One day, one room." House, David Shore.

Never judge a book only by its cover.

"'Sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.'

'It's a lot more complicated than that -'

'No. It ain't. When people say things are more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.'

'Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes -'

'But they starts with thinking about people as things.'" Carpe Jugulum, Sir Terry Pratchett.

Test

This is just a test, so I don't want to waste my time writing anything remotely approaching eloquence. (No chance of that when I have to keep correcting typos, amyway.) I'll just say that I like season four of Heroes, and I'm glad to have finished my summer job. Oh, and I've discovered that the iPhone keyboard has caps lock. Now to hit 'Publish'...

Waiting

The internet takes longer to load on my iPhone than it does on a computer, and the speed of the internet on my laptop has slowed considerably since I started downloading on a regular basis.

But I don't mind. I've grown used to instant gratification, and rather repelled by it and the effect it has on me. Waiting for things is oddly satisfying.

After the flood

Post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction allows authors to look back with a mixture of condemnation and nostalgia to the time when people owned devices as radiant as jewels, and as intricate and complex as hummingbirds - a wealth of beautifully useless devices performing endless esoteric actions for their bewitched owners, fulfilling and creating desire.

Rainbow

This morning there was a segment of rainbow hanging in the sky, high above the horizon in the dawn glow. It looked as if God had dipped his fingers in coloured chalk and smudged them across the clouds. It was beautiful.

Serpent

It's an anagram of 'repents'.

One of my friends is struggling with anorexia again. (Well, not really struggling. It sounds like she's given in.) She says she really admires me for beating it, but I don't know how I did it. There isn't some magic trick I've perfected or a secret word I just had to whisper to make everything better again. I just... got better.

I'm lucky. It turns out that I'm one of the people who recover from anorexia, as well as one of the people for whom Prozac actually works (it's a godsend), and one of the people with a loving family, great friends, access to a decent education, enough money...

But it wasn't strength. Just luck.

(On the other hand, I'm a short-sighted asthmatic with yellow teeth. But that's a small price to pay.)

My office

A woman in my office is in tears because her son has split up with his girlfriend again. Last time this happened he slit his wrists.

I'm sitting here listening to Jake Thackray on my iPhone, trying not to hear.

Solecism of the day

Unattached participle: "Eating my lunch, a spider crawled across my desk." Was the spider eating your lunch? The sentence should be amended to read: "While I was eating my lunch, a spider crawled across my desk."

However, I'm unsure about this one. In spoken and/or informal English, perhaps it is an acceptable abbreviation. It could be taken as read that the words in italics are omitted for reasons of brevity.

It's still interesting to know for formal occasions, though - or if you're interested in trying to speak/write correct English.

Mental interestingness

Since Seaneen once declared me an honorary member of the mental health blogosphere, I suppose I ought to blog about mental interestingness once in a while. Recently I've been having a mild bout of depression, just the usual stuff - feeling like I'm not doing anything worthwhile with my life, tiredness, apathy, messed-up eating and sleeping patterns, lack of interest in things I previously found engaging, et-bloody-cetera. I blame my summer job and worry about my brother.

Oh, and the new clothes. They're not helping. They make me feel all self-conscious and ugly.

Letters

I find it difficult to write letters. If I tell the truth about myself it seems unbearably narcissistic and self-centred. If I hide the truth and say that everything is blandly sunny, that's a form of lying. If I ask the recipient about himself, that leads to a long string of questions with no answers.

Worlds

I am intrigued by how there are six billion worlds, but they all overlap so it looks as if there's only one.

I've been hearing talk - I think it was in the Daily Telegraph - about a future hand-held computer that would superimpose the world one sees with labels, information, directions, options and what-not. We already have one of those. It's called a brain, and it's far more complex and sophisticated than the most cutting-edge technology.

Summer 2010 now on sale

So says the travel agent in Stockton Heath. I would like to buy a summer. It would come in handy now that the days are getting colder. I could live in three or four months of summer while the rest of the world has to undergo winter, and then next year they will skip straight from spring to autumn. Or I could rent my summer out, a day at a time, and make a small fortune.

Stories

There is no pain quite as heartrending, in its own peculiar way, as that of a reader whose favourite story cannot be completed because the author has died.

XVI

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Melpomene

Melpomene is the Greek muse of tragedy, and her name literally means 'songstress'. That is apt because there is something beautiful about sadness and grief.

Despair, on the other hand, is grey and claggy and clings to you, like cobwebs. It numbs your senses like cold fog. You can read about it in Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill, and Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics.

I think that mermaids sing sad songs because they grieve at being trapped between two worlds.

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."

Clothes

Funny things, clothes. As soon as I start dressing like a girl again, all the old insecurities come flooding back.

Terry Pratchett said that hats are magical. I'd extend that to the whole of my wardrobe. Clothes make you feel and act differently, and I didn't realise it until yesterday, when I felt like a timid little girl in my skirt and tights.

I also felt myself channelling my mother, as I was wearing her coat. Mind you, that might be just because I'm much more like my mother than my brother is.

Nerves

I've got a stomach full of butterflies. I knew I shouldn't have eaten all those caterpillars.

Today's realisation

I was sort of a misfit at school. Today I realised that if I hadn't spent twelve months in a couple of psychiatric units I might never have gained the social skills I needed to make my university life a success.

In other news, everyone must go to Aethelread's blog and read his Sherlock Holmes story because it is, to coin a phrase, made of win:

http://aethelreadtheunread.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/previously-unpublished-sherlock-holmes-story/

Sleep

I like the clarity that comes just before you go to sleep. All the pieces of the kaleidoscope seem to come together to make a perfect picture and just before you sink through the gate of horn you say "Yes, that's how it was all along."

Synonyms of the day

Shell: carapace, armour, shield, skin, tegument, coat.

Why I like Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos

He wrote them while he was in prison, kept in a cage in the scorching sun. They're made up of scraps of thought and memory, mixed in with snippets of other poems he kept in his head. I like the idea that Pound was so worn down by life that the only memories he had left were the hard, pure ones, like veins of quartz in a pebble tossed about by the sea, and it was those memories he used to make poetry.

Lateral thinking

I saw a headline in one of those trashy magazines that read 'So fat I broke the bed!' The subtitle was 'Now 6 stone lighter'.

The woman in question did look rather cetacean. But could she not have just bought a stronger bed?

Stuck

Ever felt like a scratched C.D. that keeps playing the same fragment of song over and over again, so that the mind-numbing repetition blurs into nonsense?

Myself

Have you noticed how people nowadays are increasingly saying 'myself' instead of 'me'? They also say 'yourself' or 'yourselves' instead of 'you'. It seems odd in an age of informality and faux-chumminess, where we all call each other by our first names and my superior gently teased me for sending him an email that began "Dear Mr Jones" and ended "Yours sincerely."



It looks clumsy, sounds daft and seems to indicate that the self is something stored outside of the body, to which the person sending the letter is merely acting as a sort of secretary. Perhaps it refers to people's business selves, which have to send and receive letters when the innermost self would rather be messing about on the internet instead of working (as I am doing now).

Hyperbole (2)

The Daily Telegraph, who used to know better, described the death of Agatha Christie's mother, followed by her husband telling her that he wanted a divorce, as "the massacre of the life she had known and trusted." As I understand it, 'massacre' is usually taken to mean the indiscriminate slaughter of a large number of people, and not the emotional trauma of authors. Y'know, as in "the My Lai massacre," "the Rwandan massacres," etc.

In other words: "Daily Telegraph - get a grip."

(Not that I'll be subscribing to it, or any other newspaper, when I leave home, so it's no skin off my nose.)

Clark Kent

Why do so many people like comics? Because Superman is a benevolent, omnipotent father figure. He's like God, except that you know he doesn't exist. He is the patron deity of America.

Why is Superman a journalist? Because journalism used to be a profession you could trust, and not one consisting of copying and pasting, distortion, frivolous unimportant non-stories, populism of the very worst kind and pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Hyperbole

Hyperbole creates a phenomenon I like to think of as word inflation. Word inflation means that words mean less and less over time, so that 'tragic' (see my earlier post on its misuse) just means 'bad' or 'regrettable'; 'devastated' means 'upset'; 'infamous' means 'notorious' and 'excellent' means 'very good' (even though to excel means to be better than anything else in one's field).

This means that words become as empty and untrustworthy as a pound coin made out of tin foil. Hyperbole should only be used in an informal or humorous context.

Fifty years

One morning at my job I was taught how to archive documents. All documents relating to patients have to be kept for fifty years in a disused salt mine. I picture is as a vast, dark, echoing chamber filled with rows and rows of shelves containing hundreds and thousands of boxes filled with documents, the air smelling faintly of a dead sea. In the boxes are millions and millions of words relating to every single aspect of the patients' lives - diet, aspirations, friends, family, crimes, sexual habits, petty annoyances, despair, suicide attempts, childhood misery, the sudden terror that strikes like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. All carefully packaged and stored down there in the darkness for half a century, waiting, until they are finally taken up into the light and allowed to crumble into dust.

Self-centredness

Self-centredness is one of the biggest delusions humanity can experience. It means thinking that the whole world revolves around you, that everything has a special significance that points straight to you, and that the rest of the world is there solely to harm or benefit you. In mentally ill people this can manifest as paranoia (which is not the subject's fault), and in mentally well people it often manifests as selfishness (which is).

The truth is that the universe is mostly neither malign nor benign, and doesn't really care about you one way or the other (except for those parts of it which constitute your friends and family, of course). You are a cloud of atoms so diffuse that someone could poke a finger through you, and when you die the atoms will go off to mingle with the rest of the senseless universe (well, mostly senseless - life is in the minority) and that will be it.

Wordsworth wrote a poem that this rather rambling and pretentious thought reminds me of:

"A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seem'd a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees."

'She' could refer to a loved one, or to the poet's spirit itself. The final image is unintentionally comic - the dead person tumbling around as if in some sort of cosmic washing machine - but true at the same time.

I am also reminded of the passage in Lord of the Flies about Simon's corpse. If you've read it, you'll know what I mean. If not, I won't spoil a superb piece of literature by tearing it from its parent body and posting it on here.

(P.S. When Googling the Wordsworth poem to get the exact words, one of the search suggestions I was given was 'a slumber did my spirit seal analysis', which suggests that some feckless numpties have been using Google to do their homework - perhaps even their university work - for them. Such people do not deserve access to poetry.)

Changes

Because of our Ongoing Family Crisis, my parents require a daughter who looks like a girl, so I have decided to provide them with one. I've put away my shirt, jacket and tie, and replaced them with a sparkly tee-shirt, a heart pendant, two rings (amethyst and diamond, borrowed from my mother) and some lipstick. I also put clip-on earrings, strong perfume and pink sparkly lip gloss on the shopping list.

So now I am not a girl pretending to be a boy, but a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl, like Rosalind/Ganymede in As You Like It.

I have no girly trousers or socks, and I'm dashed if I'm shelling out for a new pair of shoes. So I am only feminine from the waist up. Or, to put it another way, "But to the girdle do the gods inherit,/Beneath is all the fiend's."

Opposite of the day

-plasty is the opposite of -tomy, because -plasty means to sculpt a new body part but -tomy means to remove one.

Word of the day

ultracrepidate - to criticise beyond one's sphere of knowledge.

Familiarisation

"If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."

If you use the same words over and over again, they become worn down like grey pebbles washed by the sea, until they are dull and uniform and mean nothing to you.

History

I think that a huge chunk of history, including a fair few religions, makes a lot more sense if you think of all the mental illnesses (well, what we consider to be mental illnesses) which must have gone undiagnosed before the advent of modern psychiatry. As a species, it is a side-effect of our intelligence that we are enormously susceptible to mental illness, but these illnesses must have been interpreted differently in bygone times - as character traits, sins, divine inspiration or just a natural part of life. Saints and sadists both have bits of their brains that seem to work differently from average, run-of-the-mill brains. If they lived nowadays they might, if they came to the attention of the authorities, end up with a file on them sitting in the drawer of a mental health service somewhere, and labels appended to their name.

The fact that many historical figures, both known and unknown, were probably what we might call 'insane' isn't a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.

Knowing

When I became an atheist, I realised that it's okay not to know how the world works and what the answers are. It's okay to admit that you don't know the answers, and may never know them.

Today

She's enmeshed in the crossword. Cyanide-laced smoke drifts languorously across the table. All the words I want to say to someone who isn't here I hold on my tongue, where they curdle.

This week

I have a summer job that involves filing documents on people who need secure mental health care.

Some of the files have spelling mistakes in them.

One document meant to say that a person had no table or chairs in their room that they could damage, but it actually said they have "no future to break."

Another said that a person had been arrested for attacking someone with "a peace of glass."

Coincidence

It turns out that what I posted yesterday was, for reasons which I am not at liberty to disclose, unexpectedly prescient.

Masks

Sometimes I feel as if everyone's acting a part, except we've forgotten that that is so and it's not so easy for us to stop. And you could keep on taking the mask away, and the mask beneath that, and so on like peeling an onion until there's nothing left, because layers of masks are all we have, built up out of flimsy strata like papier-mâché.

I normally stop feeling like that when it makes my head spin, and when I realise that it is a cliché. But just because it's a cliché it's not necessarily untrue.

We have to act because we're all different, but we expect ourselves to be the same as other people, and other people to be the same as ourselves.

Language

I use accents on words that don't strictly need them any more, like rôle, naïveté and cliché. I also use interesting words such as maculate, nemoral and sciosophy. I don't do it to be pretentious - well, not only to be pretentious - but because the English language is so beautiful and so much fun to play with. It's like making chains out of all the flowers in a meadow. There are millions* of interesting words and diacritical marks out there lying unused in dusty corners, just waiting to be picked up and given some love and attention.

This Christmas, why not sponsor an adjective? 'Aeruginous', for example, is such an interesting word and yet it rarely gets given the affection it deserves. Adopt a needy member of the English language today!

*possibly an example of hyperbole - incidentally, another interesting word that can be used in analysing almost any area of modern life.

Rose

There is a rose bush growing just by the front door. It's extended one of its branches to hold out a white bloom with a pink heart just at face level so you can smell it whenever you step outside. I like the way it peeps round the door shyly, like an unexpected guest.

Digital

Electronic communication is 'digital' because you can either say something or not say it. There is no room for subtext.

Sometimes I wish I was the sort of person who could handle the subtle shadings of analogue communication.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England, thinks that Facebook and suchlike are damaging and may cause suicide because they mean that people view friendship as a commodity and don't know how to actually talk to people. He said it in the Sunday Telegraph.

He might have the shadow of a point, but I think that demonising an entire medium is silly. Also, he was the man who said that paedophile priests showed courage for speaking to investigators. Firstly, it's not as if the priests were the ones who revealed the abuse. It was the victims. They were the ones who showed courage. Has he any idea how hard it is for victims of sexual abuse to speak out about what happened to them? I know I haven't.

Secondly, the courageous thing would have been for the paedophiles to resist their urges and not abuse anyone in the first place.

Could this be... (2)

Silence

The BBC is running a campaign to "Save Our Sounds". I wish they would save silence instead. People don't seem to like silence any more.

Perhaps they are afraid of what they might hear. Perhaps they are afraid of hearing their own thoughts.

Life

I don't want to live fast and die young. I want to live slowly, so that I have time to appreciate what's going on.

Circle

When the feeling's gone and you can't go on...

I recently heard the death of two police dogs left in a car in the heatwave described as "very tragic," and the police force in question as "devastated".

This is ridiculous. The death of two animals is not "tragic", let alone "very tragic", and anyone devastated by the death of two working animals clearly has an extremely empty life.

"Tragic" used to be an adjective applied to someone who murdered his wife because he was told that she was unfaithful, then realised too late that he had been deceived by someone he thought of as a trusted companion, and killed himself in an agony of remorse.

Nowadays, it is applied to the death of dogs - not circumciséd dogs, but actual dogs.

I also heard the death of a three-week-old baby in a fire described as tragic.

From this, I can deduce that one three-week-old baby = two police dogs.

Could this be...

...the new "No blacks; no Irish"?

Sperm donation

I heard a radio programme on children conceived by sperm donation who end up having many 'donor siblings' scattered all over the country. On the programme, a single mother who conceived her son through sperm donation found out that he has thirteen donor siblings. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn't ask her the questions I wanted answered, like "How do you feel about your son being one of thirteen children? Would you have gone ahead with the procedure if you'd known this might happen?"

Sperm donation means that some children grow up with fathers who aren't biologically related to them. I thought about how I'd feel if I found out that my dad wasn't related to me, and I came to the conclusion that I honestly wouldn't mind. I would feel proud that such a wonderful man had chosen me to be his daughter.

Other people

Sometimes it's easy to see other people as not quite human - as not experiencing the world in the way you do, or feeling the same emotions. But then at times I read literature by the great poets and authors, and it's me who feels not quite human.

What is being human, anyway? We're basically animals in clothes, albeit animals with fantastically large brains. I read in the newspaper that the early humans were cannibals, regularly consuming children and adolescents. (Not that regularly, of course, or the human race would never have got off the ground.) To think that we're all descended from cannibals... no wonder horror films are so popular. We're tapping into our racial memories of consuming human flesh and drinking human blood.

(This also could explain a lot about the doctrine of transubstantiation.)

Is cannibalism a crime if the victim offers their life up willingly?

Byron wrote about cannibalism in his poem Don Juan, where starving sailors adrift after a shipwreck draw lots to decide which of them shall be eaten:

"The lots were made, and mark'd, and mix'd, and handed,

In silent horror, and their distribution

Lull'd even the savage hunger which demanded,

Like the Promethean vulture, this pollution;

None in particular had sought or plann'd it,

'Twas nature gnaw'd them to this resolution,

By which none were permitted to be neuter -

And the lot fell on Juan's luckless tutor.

He but requested to be bled to death:

The surgeon had his instruments, and bled

Pedrillo, and so gently ebb'd his breath,

You hardly could perceive when he was dead.

He died as born, a Catholic in faith,

Like most in the belief in which they're bred,

And first a little crucifix he kiss'd,

And then held out his jugular and wrist."

Transparency

I am one of the most transparent people I know (apart from another woman I know with Asperger's syndrome). I never lie, and I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am honest to the point of tactlessness. Sometimes I worry that I have debased the currency of my secrets by sharing them too freely, but on balance I think I like living like this. I went through a period in my life when I lied on a daily basis, and afterwards I swore never to lie again.

I know someone else who is about as transparent as a brick. It annoys and intrigues me that I don't know what goes on in their head. Sometimes their mouth twists strangely as if they're holding back tears, laughter or pain.

I'm constantly amazed at how much all the humans I know differ from each other, and I keep having to remind myself that it's all right not to know some things.

Individual

When did we stop using the mass noun 'people' and start using the plural 'individuals'? I can't decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. It seems to evoke a sense of isolation and alienation, but it also encourages the idea of taking responsibility for one's actions instead of hiding in a group.

I'm also slightly worried about the tendency to preface every single word with the letter 'i'. It is egotistical, orthographically incorrect and plagiaristic (since the prefix was originally used by Apple).

Haiku

A warm summer night

Fireworks shower silver stars

Whispering like rain

Homosexuality

I've been reading the newspapers! And adding my own footnotes.

I read something interesting in the Times Saturday Review on June 20th, by Caitlin Moran:

"While there has been amazing progress over the past ten years in making this country less homophobic (Graham Norton getting Eurovision* and bisexuals on Doctor Who**), the dark reality is that many people have merely swapped homophobia for 'finding gays cute'.

I attended an advance fan-screening of Torchwood last week, and every piece of dialogue between Captain Jack and his boyfriend† was greeted with knowing, slightly hysterical laughter from the audience - as if everything that the characters were saying was high-camp, bitchy banter. In actuality, a great deal of it wasn't, and some of it was outright sombre - yet it was all drowned out by Pavlovian giggling at the 'cute queer couple having a bitch-fight'.

If we really are reducing gayness to camp, in terms of social progress, it's going to be as useful as supporting sexual equality - but only so long as all the women are giggly and have big tits."

I also read this in the Guardian on June 22nd:

"[Sacha Baron Cohen's] depiction of a sex-obsessed, shallow, Austrian homosexual has created a new insult to be used against any schoolboy who shows a hint of effeminacy.‡ You can count down the days until Bruno will be used as a catchy battering ram for them. While the chattering classes debate whether Bruno/Baron Cohen is questioning or propagating homophobia, a teenager in Bradford can be fully expected to reap its fallout.

Bruno isn't alone. Our TV comedies are awash with caricatures of gay men from the stereotyped mincing Bruce in Kröd Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire to Matthew Horne's flapping gay newsreader on The Corden and Horne Show. Al Murray's inexplicable character study of a Gay Nazi (how those branded gay men chortled as they were marched to the gas chamber!) and Jonathan Ross's tireless innuendo with his 4 Poofs and a Piano have created a comedy culture in which male homosexuality is depicted as two-dimensional and ridiculous."

* Never mind all the gay MPs, journalists, authors and actors - Graham Norton presenting Eurovision is what has finally dragged homosexuality out of the closet...

** Not to mention gays, lesbians, a transsexual, what was technically bestiality, and a man with a crush on a paving slab (agalmatophilia?)

† I presume she means Ianto, unless John Hart is making a surprise reappearance. (Which would be fantastic. John would be a fab boyfriend for Jack, whereas Ianto has the face and personality of a potato.)

‡ Ah yes, the old 'male homosexuality = effeminacy' trope.

Cledonomancy

More from Wikipedia on cledonomancy:

"Cicero observes that the Pythagoreans made observation not only of the words of the gods, but of those of men; and accordingly believed the pronouncing of certain words at a meal to be very unlucky. Thus, instead of prison, they used the word domicilium (residence, dwelling); and to avoid Erinyes [the Furies] said Eumenides [the Kindly Ones].

An example of cledonomancy occurs in the Odyssey, Book XX. Before taking vengeance on the suitors, Odysseus asks for a divine sign, and Zeus answers with a clap of thunder. This is immediately followed by words from a servant-woman, asking Zeus to 'Let this be the very last day that the suitors dine in the house of Odysseus.'"

Written deaths

It's hard to write a good death, because you're writing something that you have never experienced and that no-one can describe to you. The best you can do is to describe what death might be like, or the sensations immediately preceding it. The rest is silence - or, in a more literary metaphor, the blank white pages at the end of the book where description breaks down entirely.

Some of my favourite literary deaths are those in Anna Karenina, The Awakening and the Iliad. They make me feel that I have been brushed by a flicker or fold of that immense, multi-faceted idea called the 'sublime' - the feeling that there is something that transcends the everyday world of the senses - like the sick woman who was touched by Jesus' cloak and immediately felt that she was healed.

It's harder to dramatise death than it is to write it, because of the absence of a narrative describing events from the dying person's point of view. Shakespeare nevertheless does it very well, and the magnificent, majestic dignity of Cleopatra's suicide never fails to send shivers down my spine. (In that respect Antony and Cleopatra is the opposite of Othello, where the man kills himself with stately swiftness and the woman dies a lingering, painful death.)

The human touch

Everything in my life is a product of an intricate web of human relationships which I couldn't comprehend even if I tried. Hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of human lives have participated in putting the food I eat on my table, placing the keyboard I write on under my hands and making the clothes that I wear. I am the product of millions of other people's lives, and I effect millions in my turn by what I choose to buy, do and say. The world I live in is mostly artificial, and the small parts of it that aren't - the birds, flowers and trees, for example - are there by permission, under sufferance. Most of them are the property of a human.

We think of animals as somehow pure and in tune with the natural environment, but nowadays they aren't. For hundreds of generations, animals have lived in the same artificial anthropogenic world that we have. They think - if they think at all - that cars, roads, electric light and bus stops are as natural as trees and thunderstorms. Millions of rock doves live on the 'cliffs' of modern architecture, scavenging from litter bins. Millions of seagulls follow the plough to eat the worms it overturns, and have never seen the ocean.

Words

'Detritus' and 'trite' both come from the Latin 'terere', 'to rub'. They mean worn-out fragments of things produced when something degrades or is overused. Trite words and thoughts are like nerdles, those tiny pieces of plastic that you get when bigger bits of plastic break down. They're currently causing environmental catastrophe in the oceans. Even if you put plastic in landfill it eventually makes its way to the sea, like salt. We'll be dealing with our current plastic addiction for thousands of years.

'Cyber' comes from the Greek 'kybernetes', meaning a steersman. I don't know whether we steer cyberspace or cyberspace steers us. A navigational aid would certainly be helpful in charting the reefs, shallows and sea-monsters of the internet. The BBC's 'Have Your Say' website would be labelled 'Here be dragons'. (Luckily, their spark is almost as feeble as their bite, and they're always too cowardly to leave their real names. A name is very important, and you should never hide behind a false one when attacking somebody. It's a form of lying.)

'Friend' means lots of things. I checked in my dictionary. One of them is 'a person loving or attached to another', which is good because I love lots of people (loving is good - see below) and am attached to many more. But apparently it can also mean 'a close or intimate acquaintance', which is puzzling because it doesn't say if it means geographical closeness or some other, more abstract kind of closeness which can't be measured in inches and miles. 'A favourer, well-wisher or supporter' is easier, and means I can say that I am Terry Pratchett's friend. (And reading his books makes me feel as if I am inside his brain, which I suppose means I am pretty close to him.) In Scotland the word can mean a relative - and many of my relatives are my friends - and an obsolete meaning is 'lover', which doesn't apply.

Griffin

Our college has a new mascot. It is a griffin. I was doubtful about it at first, but I've become quite reconciled to the idea. Griffins are fantastical chimeras, creatures of two elements who can sprint along the earth like a cat or soar through the air like an eagle.

In Paradise Lost Milton portrays griffins as fierce defenders of gold, and compares Satan to them when he is making his way through uncreated chaos to Earth so he can tempt Eve:

"As when a gryphon through the wilderness

With winged course, o'er hill or moory dale,

Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth

Had from his wakeful custody purloined

The guarded gold; so eagerly the Fiend

O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,

With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,

And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."

Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones was my first introduction to university life. It's about a griffin who goes to university to learn magic with her friends and has fun. It was very realistic, because it was all about friendship and I've made some wonderful friends here. I'd like to think of myself as a griffin defending my friends. Or maybe universities are griffins defending the gold of learning (which is much more important than the gold of, well, gold, whatever the Pro Vice Chancellor thinks).

Everything v Nothing

Religion offers you eternity as your reward for doing the right thing: infinite time and infinite space, with the full abundance of a redeemed universe to explore. I have no idea what one does with infinite time, because presumably if you are in Heaven you have nothing to strive towards, no goals to achieve, no tasks to complete. You will have nothing to offer your loved ones that they do not already have, and no sacrifices to make for them. There will be no need to learn anything, for the same reason that there is no reason to light a candle if you are sitting next to a bonfire. I presume that one merely basks in the perfect fullness of God's grace, satiated without being surfeited.

If you have sinned, you are consigned to infinite pain and suffering. You will suffer even though you are incapable of being redeemed, reformed or even chastened by your suffering. You will be swept into the dustbin of eternity, irredeemable human trash, the rejects of creation whom even God the Almighty and Infinite is unable or unwilling to accept. It will never end.

Atheism offers one reward and one punishment, which are both the same: oblivion. It's the ultimate equity. Whether you are a sadistic murderer or a child you receive the same portion: no self-awareness, no memory, no pain, no desires, no fear, no boredom, no joy, no suffering, no happiness and no despair. If anything remains, it can surely only be called peace.

Religion promises you Everything, an endless multiplicity. Atheism promises you Nothing, a perfect stillness which is only endless because it has no beginning either - there will be no 'you' to begin it.

Everyone comes from the darkness, being crafted by themselves, Chance and Nature into an intricate, beautiful, transient pattern that sparkles briefly in the night. But they all go into the darkness in the end.

Cameras

People are like cameras. If you alter just a few things about them, they see the world in completely different ways: bright, dark, monochrome, red-tinged, green-tinged, negative, blurry, sharp.

Hatred

There are two very good reasons not to hate anybody, and they are both born from self-interest. The first reason is that hating takes up a lot of energy. The second is that hatred corrupts and tarnishes your soul, opening the door to all sorts of other poisonous feelings like wrath and envy.

Sister Wendy Beckett says that she doesn't hate anything, but merely has things that she "very much dislikes." I'm going to try and follow her example. I can be vehemently opposed to lots of things, of course, but that's not the same as hating them.

Thoughts

When I lie down to sleep all these thoughts keep flitting through my brain, and I have to write them down before they escape. It's as if they only emerge when the light's out, like bats.

Words of the day

astraphobia - a morbid fear of (thunder and) lightning. From the Greek astrape lightning, and phobos fear.

autarky - self-sufficiency; the economic situation of a country which is a closed economy conducting no international trade. From the Greek autarkeia, from autos self, and arkeein to suffice.

cledonomancy - divination based on chance encounters or events, such as words occasionally uttered. (With thanks to Sandi Toksvig and Wikipedia.)

Corinthian - (of literary style) over-embellished or over-brilliant; (of sport, sportspeople, etc) amateur; profligate, dissolute.

hecatomb - a great public sacrifice; any large number of victims. From the Greek hekaton a hundred, and bous an ox.

lucubrate - to study by lamplight; to discourse learnedly or pedantically.

Lucy Stoner - a woman who keeps her maiden name after marriage. From Lucy Stone, an American suffragist (1818-93).

Manichean - relating to, following, or designating the beliefs of Mani or Manichaeus, a native of Ecbatana (c.216 to c.276 AD), who taught that everything sprang from two chief principles, light and darkness, or good and evil.

printer's devil - the youngest apprentice in a printing office; a printer's errand-boy.

profligate - debauched, having given oneself over to vice; dissolute; prodigal, rashly extravagant; overthrown, defeated (obsolete). From the Latin pro forward, and fligere to dash.

Goings-on

I didn't post yesterday because I was in London, at the BBC building in White City (what a wonderful name - evocative of Gondor or the New Jerusalem) for a project where the BBC talk to the yoof of today to find out what they're thinking. Apparently I am a yoof and I have thoughts, so I'll do.

(Quick aside - I'm going to try and update this blog daily, because writing is a good thing to do. I feel guilty for abandoning it for about a month during the exam period. After the exams finished I slumped into apathy like a bored teenager sinking into an old sofa, and spent a lot of time watching online TV - which is just letting myself down.)

I had to get up at 5:30am to go to the BBC, with a three-hour train journey from Durham to London and then a trip on the Tube. Thank goodness the Tube strike finished the day before my jaunt! If God exists, He likes me. I felt very proud of myself for navigating a teeny-tiny sliver of London entirely on my own, just as if I were a proper adult. There were some interesting people on the Tube. (In the Tube?) A woman with brown skin had an eyelid that was half brown and half grey, and I couldn't stop staring at it and wondering why. Eyelids are beautiful body parts - like two butterflies hovering over the eyes, or small silk pouches holding bright jewels - and deserve more attention.

(A woman on The Apprentice was using a contraption that looked like a medieval torture instrument for fairies - possibly used on leprechauns to force them to reveal the location of their gold - to curl her eyelashes. Imagine doing that every single morning of your life! And what's wrong with eyelashes au naturel? I'm so glad I'm not her.

By the way, Byron mentions mascara in Don Juan:

"Her eyelashes, though dark as night, were tinged

(It is the country's custom), but in vain;

For those large dark eyes were so blackly fringed,

The glossy rebels mock'd the jetty stain,

And in their native beauty stood avenged.")

There was also a man with a scroll tattooed on his right forearm, with the words 'Fear No Evil' written in it. A true scholar, he had the source tattooed at the bottom: Psalm 23. On the curled-up bit of the scroll was written INRI, thus uniting the Old and New Testaments in one tattoo. I wanted to compliment him on his body art, but he got off before I had a chance.

My time at the BBC was really fun. A woman gave us a tour of some of the building. There was a statue of a golden Greek god in the centre courtyard. His hat made him look like Hermes (communications and what-not; a sort of Greek Archangel Gabriel whose mother is a star) but he was holding a ring of fire reminiscent of the one Shiva dances in, which made me think of the sun-god Apollo (poetry and learning generally).

I'd emailed them to say that I have Asperger's syndrome, so please could they explain everything as clearly and simply as possible. I'd give them 10/10 for fulfilling this request and making me feel at home. At first I was rude because I was so nervous and felt as if I didn't fit in to the project, because I'm not a typical twenty-one-year-old. My mobile phone is ancient, I'm teetotal, I hardly ever go out at night, I don't have an MP3 player and I'm a virgin. Why would anything I say be of any interest to the BBC? However, I eventually got over my nerves and just enjoyed the day.

I was working with some other young people called Adam, Hannah, Kunj (this is not a typo) and Tanya. There were two other boys, but their names escape me. The boys were rather quiet - perhaps they were nervous too. We were asked about timeshifting, which isn't an emergency temporal shift à la Dalek Caan but means watching television at a time other than the broadcast time. They also wanted to know what we thought of HD. I told the that Ezra Pound's friend Hilda Doolittle was often referred to as HD, but they didn't care. (I always get unnecessarily erudite when I'm nervous.)

From what I can see, everyone who works at the BBC is scarily young. Some of them looked about my age. I asked them if it was true that Moira Stuart had been sacked for being too old, but they didn't know.

They had a reception area with well-known quotes from television programmes on the glass walls. (My favourite quote was "Exterminate!" They had it written once on each side of the glass, sharing the same exclamation mark.) Unfortunately they had omitted the apostrophe from "It's an ex-parrot." I pointed this out to a nice BBC lady, adding that the BBC was intended to inform and educate as well as entertain, and she promised they'd rectify the error.

Despite all this, I later got an email saying the BBC had "liked me."

Today I've been relaxing. I went to town to buy some mouthwash and paracetamol. (I read in a newspaper once that one of those "clever men at Oxford" has a very plausible argument for all of modern life being a simulacrum invented by people in the distant future to keep themselves amused. I knew immediately that this couldn't possibly be true, because my life is far too boring to be of interest to anybody. Only authenticity is that mundane. Russell Brand's life, on the other hand...)

In town there was one of those bungee trampolines. (If you don't know what one is, see here.) It was surreal, and deeply satisfying, to see the small children on it almost float up into the air before gliding earthwards again. They looked like slightly scruffy cherubs. I couldn't stop a big grin spreading over my face. I love watching children play. I was tempted to have a go myself, but (a) it would have made me late for lunch and (b) I would have looked like an idiot. Besides, there was a sign saying you couldn't go on it if you had mental health problems. Honestly - first not being able to donate bone marrow, and now this!

It reminded me of the first bungee trampoline I saw, in Covent Garden when I was a child. A woman with some sort of paralysis who had to get around in a mobility scooter went on it. The sheer joy on her face and the face of her relatives as she soared into the sky is something I'll never forget.

Normal

Bees

This morning I've been photographing bees collecting nectar from pink roses. I wanted to get a decent picture of them to put on the college environment notice board. Bees, of course, are famously impatient, so it was tricky getting them to remain still long enough to be photographed. Even when they were enfolded by roseate petals, knee-deep in yellow sepals, they still kept buzzing and vibrating. At first I thought they had forgotten how to fly, but I soon concluded that it was a special nectar-gathering tactic they'd learnt in bee school.

There must have been bees all over college, gathering sustenance from hundreds and thousands of flowers, but I could only concentrate on a scant half dozen. The variety and multiplicity of the natural world dazzle me, so my understanding falls short and I have to focus only on what I can see in front of me. That's difficult enough. Humans think they are powerful, but flying insects and birds can swoop to the top of the tallest tree in an instant, or dart across a field and hide from us at the speed of thought. When I try to photograph them I feel like an uncouth, clumsy giant, easily evaded by my nimble subjects.

Photography has made me appreciate my eyes a lot more. I ended up wishing that my camera could take photos half as good as the ones taken by my eyes. My camera is quite nifty, but it bleaches deep, blushing cerise to insipid, watery pink, and blurs the golden hairs on a bees back. Photography also makes me look at things more carefully, and appreciate their transience.

I took about eighty photographs, and saved just one of them. It was a bee chasing another bee away from a flower. Bees seem to love wrestling with one another, holding fierce contests deep in the heart of flowers where all six legs are employed to grapple with the interloper. Eventually one of them will fly away with a peevish whine, tumble into another fragrant bloom and forget all its grudges as it squirms with delight in a cloud of golden pollen.

Water

When I use language, I feel like a small child playing in water. I love the joy of language, the splash and sparkle of it, the long streams of glittering adjectives. I love how you can immerse yourself in it completely and emerge refreshed and reinvigorated, your eyes clear and wide open.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Talking to my mum about Sodom and Gomorrah, I asked her, "What about all the babies who must have been killed?" She said that, "Given the proclivities of the inhabitants, there probably weren't many babies around."

"Well, that makes it all right then," I said. "I wonder - when they heard the fire raining down from the heavens, did they hold their lovers? Because that's what you'd do if you knew you were going to die, isn't it - tell your partner that you loved them? Did they scream? Did the fire make the flesh on their bones crackle? Could you smell their burning skin?"

I saw hundreds of people in unquiet beds, woken from slumber too early, man holding man and woman holding woman. They clung to their lovers as the fire engulfed them, as they were buried in ash whiter than salt, frozen in immortal embraces like the citizens of Pompeii.

Before I read the Old Testament, I was a committed Catholic.

(I came out on this blog a few months ago, and then deleted the post out of embarrassment - that most British of emotions - when I thought it was too self-centred.)

Writing

Writing is one of the few pleasures that are both sensual and moral. I don't mean writing with a keyboard, although that is jolly useful and helps if your handwriting is too messy for other people to decipher. I mean writing with a pen, on paper. I love the feel of the ink gliding across the page, the smooth flourishes and curls of my writing trailed behind the pen like black lace. I also love the feeling of putting thoughts into language, and using language to form new thoughts. That is, after all, one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animals.

I believe that writing is, or should be, a moral act because it makes you examine the way you think. You take the thoughts out of your brain, put them on the page and look at them. As well as recognising the whorls and loops of your handwriting, as distinct as any fingerprint, you can recognise the way your mind forms thoughts. It's fascinating.

Writing should be beautiful, because it has a moral beauty. The Chinese, the Muslims, medieval monks - they all recognise that. The process of writing should cause joy.

(By the way, I'm sorry about my recent radio silence. I've been sitting exams and then recuperating from them. Normal service will now resume.)

Eternity

I genuinely believe that I know someone who walks in eternity. Such people are not easy to know.

"-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer."

"But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity."

Sunday

I stood on the bridge and watched the ripples on the river's skin. The beauty of the Wear makes it easy to believe that it has its own genius loci. She would be a woman, of course. Rivers always seem so feminine to me. The nymph of the Wear has leafy green hair which the wind blows through and soft skin which sparkles in the sun.

A rowing team skimmed across the surface of the water like a giant insect, yellow blades moving in perfect unison, and three young girls splashed about in a hired boat. It was so perfectly quiet, with only a few soft noises that sculpted the edge of the silence to give it a more perfect form. I need more silence in my life.

The breeze blew its blessing down the river, into my face.

It was a typical Sunday, with parents taking their kids out on bicycles and the church bells ringing out from the cathedral. It's a curious feature of Durham that wherever you are, you can somehow always see the cathedral above its fringe of trees. The sun soaks into its stones and gives it a look of weightlessness, as if it had just that moment descended from the sky its towers reach towards. Even if it's no more than the architectural expression of a gigantic "What if....?" it still makes me glad to see it.

Light

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Reason to be cheerful

A millionaire is going to sell his £16 million country estate and use every single penny of the money to fund a Macmillan cancer nurse for north Northumberland, and a fleet of vehicles to take cancer patients to and from hospital.*

Ministers of Parliament, take note.

*Why yes, it is that time of the night - or, to be precise, very early morning - when I start randomly trawling the BBC news website...

Bird flu

Remember that bird flu virus a couple of years back? The one that caused the media to run round like headless chickens? The one that was going to wipe out homo sapiens?

It turns out that human noses were too cold for it to live in. Our noses are 32 degrees Celsius, whereas the virus favours the cosy 40 degrees Celsius of chicken guts.

Swine flu, shmine flu. Let's all stay clear of Mexico and wait for the fuss to die down.

Stockholm syndrome

I've been writing my essay on The Waste Land for so long that I've got Stockholm syndrome. I'm talking about The Waste Land as if it were my child, or my lover. I know every pore of its skin. Its sentences have woven their way round my bones, nestling alongside my blood vessels. My heart beats to the rhythm of its compressed quatrains. In a little while I shall open my mouth and Eliot's voice will come out.

I can hear the dawn chorus.

Moving on

As I add more years to my lifespan - at the moment my life has only spanned 21 years - it will no longer be the defining episode of my life, but just one of those things that happened to me a long time ago.

Hypocrisy

It's always struck me as hypocrisy that I'm strongly opposed to the use of mind-altering drugs, yet my own happiness is dependent on pills. I try to justify it to myself by arguing that when I'm depressed I'm no use to anyone. And if I can't be useful to my parents, my friends, my college and my university - who have all been so kind to me - I might as well dissolve into a cloud of senseless atoms.

Close friends

I read in a newspaper report that modern phenomena such as Facebook and Twitter mean that nowadays people 'only' have three close friends. I was going to count my close friends, but the report did not provide any criteria I could use to judge whether a friend is close or not. Can anyone enlighten me?

Prayer

Even though I don't believe in God any more (I think), I still pray. Sometimes it's the only thing left to do, when you have absolutely no idea how to help someone. And sometimes I pray because I feel so thankful for my life that I need to have somebody to thank.

Is it hypocritical of me to pray? Coleridge (well, strictly speaking the Ancient Mariner) said that "He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small." I love lots of people. I love my family, my friends, my internet friends and the people who help me at home and at university. I even have some love left over for people in the news, and things like trees and birds (which are so easy to love). I can't help but pray.

Lolcats

These chilling images depict a world where seemingly innocent domestic animals are both intelligent and malign, communicating with each other in a hideously debased form of English and actively plotting the demise of unsusupecting humans.

Hope

This is for all the people sitting exams at this time of year, and anyone else feeling downhearted.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

Emily Dickinson.

Sanity

Time in the library

Religion

Is it possible to be a Catholic, an agnostic and an atheist at the same time?

Spring

Internet (4)

Granny Weatherwax looked at the multi-layered, silvery world.

‘Where am I ?’

INSIDE THE MIRROR.

‘Am I dead ?’

THE ANSWER TO THAT, said Death, IS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NO AND YES.

Esme turned, and a billion figures turned with her.

‘When can I get out ?’

WHEN YOU FIND THE ONE THAT’S REAL.

‘Is this a trick question ?’

NO.

Granny looked down at herself.

‘This one’, she said.

Ironies

Life's too short for us to give it the appreciation it deserves.

Humans are just rational enough to realise how irrational they are.

Internet (3)

"Lily Weatherwax looked at the multi-layered, silvery world.

‘Where am I ?’

INSIDE THE MIRROR.

‘Am I dead ?’

THE ANSWER TO THAT, said Death, IS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NO AND YES.

Lily turned, and a billion figures turned with her.

‘When can I get out ?’

WHEN YOU FIND THE ONE THAT’S REAL.

Lily Weatherwax ran on through the endless reflections."

Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.

Tarot

My favourite Tarot card is the Fool.

The Fool is the zero, the blank, the eye of the storm, the white halo around the black orb of the eclipse, the one who asks ingenuous questions.

"I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -

Almost, at times, the Fool."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot.

Politics

Gordon Brown is often reported as being optimistic about the future of the economy. The words of Voltaire's Candide come to mind - he said that optimism is "a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly."

Mr Brown is useless. He is so useless that I am starting to feel sorry for him. I mean, at least he isn't a lying blood-stained hypocrite like Mr Blair.

Simon Heffer, a deeply unpleasant Telegraph commentator, says that Mr Brown has an "inability to compute an argument, or a point of view, contrary to his own. It has always signalled to me a massive insecurity.

It is not just that he seems incapable of accepting a challenge to his way of thinking; it is that he seems to have a fear of having to do so, a fear not just of departing from the script and having to think outside his briefing notes, but a fear also of what he might find if he did. This is a man who not only chooses to operate within a well-defined comfort zone: it is a man who by compulsion must do so.

The arguments, the ideas, the policies, the people must all be familiar. Any attempt to go outside risks not merely derailment, but possible catastrophe."

If there was anything Mr Heffer could say to make me feel sorry for Mr Brown, this was it.

Paradise

'Paradise' comes from an ancient Persian word meaning 'a wall around a garden'. This means that all paradises are man-made.

Findings

During my revision I've found that Coleridge described himself as a figure of "indolence capable of energies." That would be a good description of me, too.

I've decided I like my new hands. They may not have the porcelain fragility of the old ones, and the slender elegant fingers, but they can do a lot more. Although the knuckles are disappearing under a layer of blubber, these hands can lift heavy boxes, work in the kitchens, make toasties, write good essays, hug friends and comfort people.

I don't think they're seal flippers. I think they're like the hands of a baby. They're chubby and have potential.

"'You couldn't have done that with a mere-smear nose.'"

Lukewarm

Occasionally my whole life feels lost in a grey soup of lukewarm flaccidity. Not today, though.

Photography

Sometimes I want to photograph the whole world, because it is beautiful. I don't reckon that seeing the world through a lens makes it less real. I think that taking a photo of something shows that you think it is worth being paid attention to.

Shampoo

Hello. Am very busy with revision. Just a quick note: Head and Shoulders do a special shampoo 'for men' that has exactly the same ingredients as their normal brand. What a con.

Cellophane

Sometimes the world feels like it is wrapped in cellophane, and I need to take the wrapper off.

Petitions

I've been reading through the list of petitions on the Number Ten website which were rejected for various reasons. They're an absolute hoot.

Some of them were rejected because they were, or could be seen to be, bigotted. One bloke wants the statue of Nelson Mandela in London to be relocated to South Africa, "where it belongs," because "statues in London should be reserved for British heroes and heroines." That's the first time I've seen someone be racist over a sculpture.

Others were just plain daft. There were calls for the Prime Minister to:

• sing "We're Going To Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line" through a megaphone while standing in a barrel of custard outside the Houses of Parliament
• sex a badger
• change the National Anthem to 'You Suffer' by Napalm Death
• dance naked in the moonlight on Midsummer's Day
• accept that Tuesdays are boring and should be replaced by Fridays instead
• "ensure that mashed potatoes are 100% mashed potatoes, not like turnip or nowt"
• allow trolls to live under every bridge in London
• "nip round this weekend and give me a hand to put me new windows in and paint the bog"
• ban broccoli as an edible foodstuff and reclassify it as a toxic substance
• declare, publicly, that Owen Gibbons is a nice, decent chap. (Submitted by Owen Gibbons.)

Three were from a man who said that the British and Iranian governments were torturing him using microwaves. They were rejected on the grounds that "it was an issue for which an e-petition is not the appropriate channel," which is civil service speak for "go and see a doctor."

My favourite rejected petition was "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to let mice be allowed free travel on public transport." It went on, "...and make the buses have an especially low step so that the mice can get off and on safely."

There's hope for the country yet.

Remembrance

I was in the shop today and I noticed that we hadn't handed in our Poppy Appeal collecting tin from last year. So I said, "It's okay, we'll hand it in next November. We're supposed to remember forever, aren't we?"

That made me wonder whether we will still remember in 2111, or 3111. I suppose there will be a lot more wars to remember by then. On the other hand, we might all be dead and the world might be covered with radioactive poppies.

Earthworm

Yesterday I was walking back from town when I saw an earthworm on the pavement. I picked it up and put it on the earth under the hedge. It inched along, expanding and contracting its body, looking for somewhere to enter the soil. At one point it poked its front end into a hole, but the hole was too small. I hope it eventually found safety after I'd gone, but I fear the worst. There are lots of birds in the hedge.

Sitting on the pavement watching my worm I felt a sense of complete peace. It was warm and drizzling very slightly; just a few drops here and there. I watched the ants clambering among the dried leaves, one of them carrying a dead insect in its mouth, and for the first time I really understood the force of Pound's observation, "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world."

Then one of the kitchen staff came as the drizzle was turning into rain, and told me to go home before I got wet.

When I got home I looked up earthworms on Wikipedia. They're fascinating creatures. Hermaphrodites, they copulate by swapping sperm to fertilise their eggs with. Even though they're proverbially lowly and seen as insignificant, they are living pistons and digesters that maintain the fertility of the soil. Without worms we would be in as much trouble as we will be when all the bees have gone. They are eaten by many species, but also have their own internal parasites.

I can see why Charles Darwin spent years studying them.

Carol Ann Duffy (2)

Hooray! They made her Poet Laureate! This is evidence that some people in government actually have brains. I was beginning to wonder.

Carol Ann Duffy will be the first woman to hold the post (which makes her definitely the first lesbian to do it), and the first person from Scotland (she was born in Glasgow). Seems odd that they've appointed a Scot when it looks like the Union's going to split up, but there you go. Three cheers for her anyway. She's a decent writer.

Here is a poem by her to celebrate.

Anne Hathaway

'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed...'

(from Shakespeare's will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world

of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas

where he would dive for pearls. My lover's words

were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch

a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed

a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance

and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.

In the other bed, our best, our guests dozed on,

dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -

I hold him in the casket of my widow's head

as he held me upon that next best bed.

Swine flu

I've just seen a twelve-year-old girl on the News at Ten crying because she thinks she's going to get swine flu. The BBC is making me really angry with its coverage of this disease.

For the record, we are not all going to die from swine flu. Hardly anyone has caught it, and we have every reason to believe that the flu drugs we have will combat it effectively.

For once, I trust the government to handle this. Gordon Brown's control-freakery and micro-management are actually good attributes to have in an epidemic. The BBC's scare-mongering is not.

Stories

We're all stories.

"But what if there's more than one real world?"

Buttons

I think people are born with two buttons inside them. One is labelled, 'This is how the world works.' The other is labelled, 'You can do this.'

Either mine are both switched off, or (a more likely scenario) I was born without them.

Travelling

I went back to Durham on the train today. I'd planned to read an improving book during the journey, but instead I just sat back and let the rain-soaked, chalky green world scroll past me like a daydream. I saw the new shoots in the fields like a green gauze veil laid over the dark earth. I saw traffic lights bleed gold into wet tarmac. I saw the double helix of an iron spiral staircase reaching up into heaven.

I think England feels most English in the rain.

I also think that what Ezra Pound said is true: "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross."

Fiction

Don't let your children read fiction. It will teach them to distinguish between fact and fantasy, which will make their adult lives a lot more complicated.

Dandelions and daisies...

...two reasons to be cheerful. A whole lawn full of them gladdens the heart. They look like a field of suns.

Susurrus

A susurrus is a soft rustling, whispering noise. It's what you hear when the long grass or the bushes rustle ever so slightly, and you whip your head round to see if there's a small animal there, watching you. But there's only the grass. Or maybe the grass itself has come alive.

I love the feeling that the whole world around me is full of hidden life. I'll stare at a hedge for ages, trying to see the bird concealed inside.

Green shoots

The Oncoming Storm

I feel a bit lost and edgy because I'm going back to university on Monday, and I always feel on edge when there's a change coming. I'm like one of those animals that gets all tense when it senses there's a storm on the way.

Talking of storms, check out this hilariously bigotted film on YouTube. It's an American right-wing group who seem to think that gay people getting married is a global disaster akin to terrorism, plague or a great big lesbian Hurricane Katrina.

This group call themselves the National Organization for Marriage (but not gay marriage, obviously) or NOM. Honestly. First 'teabagging'*, now 'NOM NOM NOM i can haz homophobia plz? kthx bai'. Do these people have no knowledge of popular culture whatsoever?

As this blogger has already pointed out, they manage to hijack one of the most recognisable symbols of gay rights by talking about a 'rainbow coalition' of people coming together to oppose gay marriage. Perhaps they just meant it as a reference to Noah's rainbow, which appeared after the huge floods that caused him to take a male and a female of every animal on board his ark. "Yeah! He took a MALE and a FEMALE! It's in the Bible, people, and the unicorns all died out because the only unicorns Noah could find were GAY!"

But it seems much more likely to be a deliberate hijack, an attempt to paint gay people wanting to get married as oppressive and monolithic ("flaunting their wedding rings in our faces whether we like it or not"), while those opposed to gay marriage are diverse, tolerant and harmoniously united in the great cause of, um, ganging up on a section of society whose actions they disapprove of.

However, there is one heartening aspect to all this. The dozens of parodies of the advert on YouTube have, when added together, received far more hits than the original advert. The only storm whipped up by NOM has been a storm of laughter.**

*No matter how many times I hear about 'teabagging', it's still funny. What were they thinking?

**I'm quite proud I managed to avoid the phrase 'storm in a teacup' in this post- oh, bugger...

Happiness

I've noticed that I blog more often when I'm happy.

Or possibly blogging makes me happy.

Last night I made a bread and butter pudding which Mum said was the best she'd ever tasted. I made one on Tuesday night but it was rubbish, so last night I made some improvements to Delia Smith's recipe and they worked like a charm.

It's nice to be good at something. I might make a bread and butter pudding for the annual McGough get-together on Boxing Day.

Earth Day

Apparently today was 'Earth Day', which was designed to inspire awareness and appreciation of the environment. I didn't know, because I was too busy gardening. Breaking up a patio with a sledgehammer is very satisfying. I saw a juvenile bluetit and an orange-tip butterfly, Anthocharis cardamines.

We tidied out the garage and I saw the little brown mouse that lives there, Mus musculus, running for cover. I feel a bit guilty for making him homeless.

Walnuts

Apparently walnuts may help to prevent breast cancer. But I'm allergic to them. Yet more evidence that life isn't fair.

Gardening (2)

I saw a female speckled wood butterfly in the garden today, Pararge aegeria tircis. It's nice being out in the garden. The empty patches of earth are dark and full of potential. I hope that when I come back in the summer plants will have sprouted there.

Science

I was reading this story on the BBC news website today. Basically, one group of scientists says that the activity of the sun causes climate change, and one group says that the activity of the sun has nothing to do with it. Each group says the other group is misinterpreting the evidence.

The moral of the story is as follows: trust no-one. Everyone has some agenda of their own to promote, and everyone is biased either consciously or unconsciously. You can't trust a word scientists say. And even if you could trust them, you couldn't trust the media to report correctly on what they say.

Face it: there's no truth.

Humans

I think it was a mistake to have evolved such unfeasibly large brains. As far as I can see, all humans are mildly (at least) insane. We are a neurotic, argumentative, superstitious, fearful, bigoted species. Unfortunately, large brains are a drawback we seem to be stuck with - like the panda is stuck with its faddy diet and low sex drive.

Gardening

Yesterday it was so sunny that I felt like gardening, even though I don't normally like gardening and I'm prone to hayfever. I cleared all the junk off our patio. The garden hose had been there so long that it had become all tangled with the weeds and plants around it, so when I forcibly dragged it from its resting place it decapitated several flowers. Luckily, they were flowers Mum doesn't like.

I planted a couple of onions that we were going to eat but had sprouted long green shoots in the vegetable basket. They were so desperate to live that I felt sorry for them. I had no idea how to care for them so I just bunged them in the soil to sink or swim (as it were).

This is a wonderful summer for forget-me-nots. They're all over the patio. I'm breaking up the stones of the patio with a sledgehammer so that plants can grow in the cracks, hopefully, and eventually we will have a lawn all the way up to the back door.

The fact that seeds can grow out of bare soil into stems and leaves and flowers - and more seeds - is so amazing to me that I don't care if what grows turns out to be plants that we have designated weeds.

Liverpool

I went to Liverpool on Saturday and really enjoyed it. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. Even waiting at the station felt like a new and interesting experience, as if someone had taken the plastic wrapper off life for the first time and all the colours were shining like they'd never shone before.

There was a peacock butterfly resting on the grey stones between the train tracks. From one angle it just looked like two thin lines of black shadow, indistinguishable from the shadows betweeen the stones, but when it shifted you could see its red wings soaking up the sun. A train rushed past like a bullet, the windows too blurred for me to see the passengers inside. When it had passed, the butterfly was gone.

I liked the journey to Liverpool because you could see the countryside from the window. My favourite part was when we were waiting in a cutting. The walls of the cutting were rock, but there were occasional patches of brickwork embedded in the stone like impromptu mosaics. Green moss covered the rock, and where water trickled down from some unseen source above the moss flourished in great extravagant swags of greenery. A cheeky dandelion had rooted itself in a crack in the stone, shining like a yellow sun.

Arriving early, I took a stroll round St John's Gardens. It's a cross between a public park and a cemetry. Nearly every tree has a memorial plaque beneath it dedicated to soldiers from Liverpool who died in the wars. I nearly started crying as I read them all. Children were clambering all over the statues of Justice and Truth, shouting and scaring the pigeons. Justice and Truth didn't seem to mind.

Talking with my friends was good. The lines of conversation from one person to another made a net which could hold me comfortably. After lunch we went and looked at the Mersey. The waves were lapping gently at the shore. I like rivers because they always look comfortable in their own skin, sprawled voluptuously in the sunlight.

Everyone must watch this immediately

It is awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZjYBomadZo

Wrinkly Drinklies

Gray and Sid waiting for the booze to arrive.

Camino glowing beneficently.

Jenny explains to Camino how her camera works.

Jenny has a nice smile.

Frank toasts Sid and Gray.

Frank beams at the camera.

Frank and Kate looking happy.

Gray and me.

Sid by the docks, giving me a condensed history of Liverpool which was actually jolly interesting.

Jenny, Gray, Kate, Camino and Frank. Almost the full set!

Amazing

This world can be pretty amazing, fantastic and wonderful. I heard about a man who inhaled a seed and had a two-inch fir tree grow in his lung. The doctors thought it was a tumour until they extracted it.

Illegal (2)

According to this article, it is apparently now illegal to photograph anything to do with transport.

Good grief. Next time I see a bus station, railway station or airport I'm photographing it, and P.C. Plod can do his worst.

This government is barmy.

(I apologise to any mentally ill people who are insulted at being compared with this decrepit, pathetic excuse for a government.)

Michelle Obama

I bet she's getting really fed up of people judging her by (a) her clothes and (b) her husband.

Shopping

Inspired by Aethelread's recent expedition, I went to Matalan to buy pyjamas and underwear. (Yes, my life really is that exciting.)

Shopping in the men's section is brilliant. In the women's section each purchase is unbelievably stressful: "Am I a 14? I was a 10 in the last shop, but this might be one of the ones where they just stick random numbers on everything - or is it one of the ones where they say you're smaller than you really are to make you feel good about yourself so you'll buy more clothes? Why am I a 12 for this top but an 8 for the top on the next rail? This fits okay - oh, wait, that's maternity wear. Damn. Why are all the sizes even numbers anyway? Can't I have a size eleven? Is Matalan prejudiced against prime numbers? Why don't I just wear a bin liner instead?"

In the men's section you go, "Hmmm. S, M, L, XL or XXL? Well, I'm pretty small for a bloke. I'll get S." And it fits.

The only annoying thing was the massive picture of a bronzed, fit young man with muscles like Superman and a stomach you could bounce rocks off, looming over the rows of socks and underwear. If any guys are reading this, nobody looks like that without Photoshop. Like Mitch Benn said in a recent Now Show song, "Love your lovehandles." Life's too short to obsess about your physique.

Seasick

Feeling seasick when you're on dry land is disconcerting. It's like being on a spaceship careering out of control in a black, gravity-free void. There's no stability or centre to anything.

Blue tit

The other day I rescued a blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus, from our garage. They only live for one and a half years. The poor thing was fluttering madly about and couldn't find any way out. Sympathising, I did my best to shoo it towards the door.

I know there is at least one mouse around the place because I saw one of those in our garage too. It looked at me for one long, frightened moment, before running up the wall and out of sight. I thought of leaving some food out for it, but Mum said it would be fine. Besides, we have a bin full of scraps for the compost heap by the back door, and we scatter food for the birds regularly.

Windflower

On Sunday I saw a wood anemone, anemone nemorosa. Another name for it, which is much more poetic, is 'windflower'. It was created by Venus from dead Adonis' blood.

I also saw a peacock butterfly, inachis io. Apparently Sir Théodore de Mayerne, physician to King Charles I, said in 1634 that the 'eyes' on its wings "shine curiously like stars, and do cast about them sparks of the colours of the Rainbow."

Hair (3)

Reality

"'Then you think there is no God?'

'No, I think there quite probably is one.'

'Then why? ...'

Mustapha Mond checked him. 'But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now ...'

'How does he manifest himself now?' asked the Savage.

'Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all.'" Brave New World.

"'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'" Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

"A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick." Maskerade.

"... an Archduchess who thought she'd swallowed a sofa which had become permanently lodged in her head, and she refused to leave her room for fear that the ends would stick in the door-jambs. A quick-witted attendant performed a miraculous cure, by gaining admission to one of Her Highness' frequent bilious attacks, and slipping a doll's sofa into the basin."

'Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight' by George L. K. Morris.

Top ten fictional games

10 - The Glass Bead Game, or Das Glasperlenspiel.

Inventor: Herman Hesse.

Played in a fictional country by an order of austere intellectuals hundreds of years in the future, it links all the academic disciplines. However, Hesse never tells us any of its rules.

9 - Wizard chess.

Inventor: J.K. Rowling.

A great improvement on the Muggle version. The pieces are alive and will attack each other when ordered to. However, they will also stage an insurrection if they think the person playing with them is insufficiently experienced.

8 - The story-telling game.

Inventor: Geoffrey Chaucer.

To while away the time on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, the pilgrims must tell two stories each on the way there, and two stories each on the way back. The winner gets a free supper, and posterity gets the first masterpiece of English literature.

7 - Cripple Mr. Onion.

Inventor: Terry Pratchett.

The Disc's most fiendish card game. Whatever you do, don't play it with Granny Weatherwax - she learnt it by playing against an opponent with a detached retina in her second sight, and can run rings around the most experienced cardsharp.

6 - Wonderland croquet.

Inventor: Lewis Carroll.

The balls are hedgehogs, the mallets are flamingos and the hoops are anthropomorphic playing cards. Be careful not to antagonise the Queen of Hearts.

5 - The games played on Satellite Five.

Inventor: Russell T Davies.

Participation in these 2002nd century versions of 21st century games is mandatory. The hosts are robots (which makes the presenter of The Weakest Link slightly less scary). If you win, you get to live. If you lose, you get turned into a Dalek. What's not to like?

4 - Poohsticks.

Inventor: A.A. Milne.

Stand on a bridge, facing upstream. Drop two sticks into the river. The first stick to emerge on the other side of the bridge wins. This game is quintessentially English in its pastoral charm and sedate pointlessness.

3 - Numberwang.

Inventors: David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

This diabolically complicated television panel game has been known to make strong men weep. It is banned in thirty-two countries, but the annual Numberwang World Cup regularly attracts viewing figures in excess of one billion.

2 - Quidditch.

Inventor: J.K. Rowling.

Just the right mixture of excitement, suspense and bone-crunching violence. The game we all wished we'd been able to play in P.E. lessons, instead of those endless dreary rounds of netball practice and cross country runs.

1 - Mornington Crescent.

Inventor: disputed.

And you thought Numberwang was hard...

Immersion

I like fictions you can immerse yourself in, which don't entirely make sense, like Sandman and The Waste Land.

I think that the modern art form is the collage, because it has bits of different things all jumbled together and you have to find the meaning for yourself.

Burning

I like the way the early evening sunlight makes the house opposite me look like a tiger.

Yesterday

The trees gripped the sky with their branches, hanging on for dear life.

There was a pinecone next to a purple shard of sweet wrapper, glinting garishly in the sunlight. The pinecone was a soft brown colour and all its scales fitted together perfectly, twisting round the cone like the carvings twist round the pillars in Durham Cathedral. I felt sad that we had messed up the wood by dumping our sweet wrappers in it. But then I remembered that without humans there would be nobody to look at the pinecone and know that it was beautiful.

Actor-observer bias

This means that we are inclined to attribute our own actions to external influences ("I was late because the traffic was appalling"), but attribute other people's actions to internal dispositions ("She was late because she's a lazy cow").

Remembering this can help us to be charitable. It also helps to explain why I find that robot so lifelike.

Robot

I find this robot deeply disturbing. It looks like a lost child, or an adult with mental health difficulties. Something to do with the sweet, vacant smile and the stiff, cautious body language. If I were to fall in love with a robot, it would be this robot. I want to give it a hug and tell it - her -that everything will be all right.

King of Twitter

Mitch Benn wants to be the King of Twitter. So if you have a Twitter account, follow him. If not, get an account (it's so easy, even a concussed platypus could do it) and then follow him.

Everyone should have a chance to realise their dream.

Marah

I like eating bitter things, like lime, lavender and printer ink. I eat the little slips the library gives me saying when my books are due back.

Insan

"In Arabic, the word for human is insan, derived from nisyan, which means forgetfulness." I got that from The Islamist by Ed Husain, and I rather like it. We are the forgetful animal, homo amnesiac.

What was it Wordsworth said? "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." And I read somewhere that "Happiness is good health and a bad memory."

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a book about the destructive potential of memory, which must be neutralised to allow us to live happily in the present.

Janus (2)

Here is a poem I like, by Wordsworth:

It is no Spirit who from Heaven hath flown,

And is descending on his embassy;

Nor Traveller gone from Earth the Heavens to espy!

'Tis Hesperus - there he stands with glittering crown,

First admonition that the sun is down,

For it is yet broad day-light: clouds pass by;

A few are near him still - and now the sky,

He hath it to himself - 'tis all his own.

O most ambitious Star! an inquest wrought

Within me when I recognised thy light;

A moment I was startled at the sight:

And, while I gazed, there came to me a thought

That even I beyond my natural race

Might step as thou dost now - might one day trace

Some ground now mine; and, strong her strength above,

My Soul, an Apparition in the place,

Tread there, with steps that no-one shall reprove!

The other day I read this and then walked out into a calm, clear twilight. The evening star was dazzling in a liquid green-blue sky, and a rabbit was nibbling quietly at grass under the fence by the pavement.

I like the poem because it is about borders and transcendence.

Adverts

Apparently, current rules on condom and abortion advertising are to be relaxed. Present condom advertising is rubbish because it tries to portray using a condom as some blokish, macho badge of virility, like drinking a lot or driving too fast. The slogan is, 'Want Respect? Use A Condom.'

This is a load of horsefeathers because nobody views condoms like that - nobody in the feckless group the advert is targeting, anyway. But then again, 'patronising government twonks are chronically out of touch' is hardly headline news.

I suggest two new adverts. The first will be a close-up of a screaming baby covered in puke, which will be shown for sixty seconds. The second will be a bloke called Steve telling his mates he can't go out for a night on the tiles because he's spent all his money on child maintenance.

In both adverts, the picture will fade away and be replaced by the words USE A CONDOM.

Medical matters (2)

The pharmacist sells dog tags for people with serious medical conditions. You can get them inscribed with EPILEPSY or ALLERGIC TO PENICILLIN or DIABETIC.

I want to get one that says HYPOCHONDRIAC.

Owl

For the past couple of days I've been hearing an owl hoot in the morning, when it's light. If I were superstitious I'd probably take that as a bad omen.

Owls are widely considered to be unlucky. Ascalaphus snitched on Persephone eating the pomegranate seeds and she turned him into an owl. But in Hinduism. a white owl is the messenger of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. No wonder Harry Potter was so rich!

Coleridge wrote something about daylight owls in his poem 'Fears in Solitude':

"Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place,

(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,

Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,

Drops his blue-fringéd lids, and holds them close,

And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,

Cries out, 'Where is it?'"

Some say that if you hear an owl call it means you're going to die. Fat lot of use that is! Everyone's going to die.

"Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,

Passing through nature to eternity."

3am

There's nothing quite like standing in the rain at 3am and listening to a blackbird sing.

Obama

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!"

That's Wordsworth talking about the French Revolution before it went pear-shaped. It's also a pretty good description of how I felt on the early morning of November 5th, 2008.

(I think my generation might be the one that asks each other in future decades, "Where were you when Barack Obama was elected?" I was so young when Princess Diana died that my response to the tragedy was to run round the house with my sister playing at being Diana chased by paparazzi. "Drive faster, Dodi, they're after us!" I would shout. And when the Twin Towers came down I was at school, and I didn't know what the Twin Towers were.)

I stayed up all night to watch the election coverage on BBC One on my laptop, talking to my friend on Facebook as the votes rolled in. It was a great lesson in US geography and politics.

I kept telling myself, "Just one more state and then I'll go to bed." But it ended up being all the states, plus John McCain's concession speech and Mr Obama's acceptance speech. (Don't tell anyone, but I preferred McCain's speech - it was very dignified and moving, unlike his election campaign.)

That morning I was SO HIGH. I smiled at complete strangers in the street, and got into conversation with two pretty black girls from another college about the result as we were waiting at the pedestrian crossing. I felt on top of the world, as if a new era had dawned and just maybe everything was going to be all right.

I immediately noticed a difference in how people talked about Mr Obama. Before, hardly anybody had made fun of him because we were all secretly afraid that he would fail. He was the underdog.

Now that he was part of the establishment, the media started to criticise him and make jokes about him. This is probably a good thing, because the most powerful man in the world needs deflating a bit.

A few months on, it looks like the shine is rubbing off Golden Boy. He's made some bad decisions and it turns out his gift of the gab isn't a permanent fixture. I hope he doesn't let me down as badly as the French Revolution let Wordsworth down, because the world needs America to succeed.

Paranoid schizophrenic

I'm fed up of Radio 4 referring to Ikechukwu Tennyson Obih as 'a paranoid schizophrenic'. He is not a paranoid schizophrenic, he is a person with paranoid schizophrenia.

I know he murdered Pc John Henry, but that does nothing to abate my outrage at media demonisation of people with mental illnesses.

"A paranoid schizophrenic." They might as well say "a rabid dog" or "a Negro" - words designed to objectify, to help the speaker to keep their distance from something they don't fully understand and have no real wish to. It's dehumanising.

It's as if schizophrenia walks around on its own, murdering people, and only looks like a human being.

Schizophrenia is a natural disaster, like flooding. Occasionally it kills the nice, sane, normal people, and then we lock it up again.

Medical matters

I was in the pharmacy wondering how much my medicine actually costs. If it were less than the prescription charge of £7.10, I'd feel happy because I'd be giving an infinitesimal sum back to the NHS. I still feel kind of guilty for the amount I've cost them over the years.

The BMA 'Understanding' books they sell in the pharmacy are hilarious because of the ridiculously insensitive pictures they put on the covers:

• Understanding Angina and Heart Attacks - a felt heart being squeezed in a carpenter's vice.
• Understanding Menopause and HRT - the valve on top of a pressure cooker at 'max'. (Just the sort of thing to make a menopausal woman feel better about life!)
• Understanding Eczema - a power sander. (Is that a treatment suggestion?)
• Understanding Pregnancy - a big rubber duck next to a smaller, baby rubber duck. (Women are not rubber ducks. Also, ducks do not get pregnant.)
• Understanding Irritable Bowel Syndrome - a sign on a toilet door saying 'engaged'.
• Understanding Prostate Disorders - a glue gun with no glue coming out. (!!!)

I wanted the 'Understanding Autism' one to have a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine on it, but there were no such volumes available.

Excision

Like Cybermen, I am prone to deleting things that I dislike. This includes posts that I think look stupid, irrelevant or rubbish. I get rid of them and pretend they never existed, airbrushing them out of history. (If I were a political party, I would be the Communist Party.)

I'm sorry if you went to the trouble of commenting on one of my excised posts and your comments were deleted along with it.

Audacious

The Royal Navy are building a new submarine called HMS Audacious. I would love it if its fellow subs were called HMS Impudent, HMS Impertinent and HMS Cheeky.

How to save the world

Sir Fred Goodwin's home has been attacked by people who are angry because he's receiving a massive pension (circa £700,000) for ruining the Royal Bank of Scotland (largest annual loss in UK corporate history, bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of twenty billion pounds). They've smashed his windows and damaged a car.

My mum says that this won't achieve anything, but I told her that at least it will make the vandals feel better. Also, it will provide much-needed work for the local glazier.

And with that, it hit me!

The way to save the economy is to go out and vandalise as much property as possible. That will keep glaziers, painters, builders and their comrades in work, and more police officers will be needed to try and stop the vandalism. Jobs for the private and the public sectors! And if we torch enough cars, we might even resuscitate the car industry.

Who's with me?

Janus

Janus is the two-faced god who looks to the past and the future. He is the Gateway God, the god of thresholds, doors and vortices.

 

(For more information on vortices, see Ezra Pound and Doctor Who.)

 

"Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old."

Magpies

Magpies are black and white birds whose wings have an iridescent sheen. 

They are noisy and rapacious, with a fondness for picking up unconsidered trifles, especially shining or glittering ones. 

Their name is Pica pica (and pica is also the name of an eating disorder). 

According to the rhyme, one magpie is unlucky.

The magpie is the only non-mammal capable of recognising itself in a mirror. 

Nine mortal women who challenged the Muses to a poetry contest and lost were turned into magpies. 

'The Magpies' is also the nickname of Newcastle United.

Conservative

I learnt in geography that two tectonic plates sliding past each other in opposite directions - like commuters in a packed Tube station - are known as a 'conservative margin'. The friction causes earthquakes. That is how I feel when two beliefs conflict in my head.

Happiness

I have wasted a lot of time looking for happiness in the wrong place, and hiding from life instead of living it.

Canto XLV

With Usura

With usura hath no man a house of good stone

each block cut smooth and well fitting

that design might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

harpes et luz

or where virgin receiveth message

and halo projects from incision,

with usura

seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines

no picture is made to endure nor to live with

but it is made to sell and sell quickly

with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper,

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation

and no man can find site for his dwelling.

Stonecutter is kept from his stone

weaver is kept from his loom

WITH USURA

wool comes not to market

sheep bringeth no gain with usura

Usura is a murrain, usura

blunteth the needle in the maid's hand

and stoppeth the spinner's cunning. Pietro Lombardo

came not by usura

Duccio came not by usura

nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura

nor was 'La Calumnia' painted.

Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,

Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.

Not by usura St Trophime

Not by usura Saint Hilaire,

Usura rusteth the chisel

It rusteth the craft and the craftsman

It gnaweth the thread in the loom

None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;

Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered

Emerald findeth no Memling

Usura slayeth the child in the womb

It stayeth the young man's courting

It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

between the young bride and her bridegroom

                                 CONTRA NATURAM

They have brought whores for Eleusis

Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura.

Objects

"And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.

And Leah conceived, and bare a son, and she called his name Reuben: for she said, Surely the LORD hath looked upon my affliction; now therefore my husband will love me.

 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the LORD hath heard I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also: and she called his name Simeon.

And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Now this time will my husband be joined unto me, because I have born him three sons: therefore was his name called Levi.

And she conceived again, and bare a son: and she said, Now will I praise the LORD: therefore she called his name Judah; and left bearing."

This is one of the saddest passages in the Bible. It shows how useless it is to think that if you give objects to people they will love you, or that objects prove people's love for you - even if the objects are children.

Hard-working student

This is what I spent last night doing.

Paw

When I look at my hand and its short, stubby fingers it looks like the paw of an earth-grubbing animal, or maybe the rudimentary flipper of some blubbery marine mammal. Perhaps I am a selkie after all, rather than a mermaid.

Ill

The problem with being mentally ill is that you don't know how ill you are until you've recovered. You only realise the seriousness of your situation in retrospect.

 

This is heartening, of course, because I can look back and feel happy at how much better I am than, say, months or a year ago. But at the same time it is frustrating, because I can see that I was struggling and I didn't ask for help at the time because I didn't realise that I needed it.

 

I've wasted so much time being ill. I don't want to waste any more.

Deconstruction

I am a deconstructionist. I like pushing theories and assumptions to their logical limit to point out the flaws and inconsistencies, just because I can. 

I am a sort of respectful iconoclast. I tend to disagree with the prevailing opinion in the room just because I think that disagreement is, in principle, a good thing.

Being Human (2)

To be human is to read poetry.

To be human is to be ill.

To be human is to be unique.

To be human is to elude categorisation.

To be human is to attract labels.

To be human is to care about people.

To be human is to be quietly insane.

To be human is not to fit generalisations.

To be human is to live in paradoxes, as a mermaid lives in water.

Philip Larkin poem

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Gratitude

My internet was down for about a day. Being without it was like missing an arm.

I like the internet.

I hate Comic Relief

It is about as funny as a medieval jester relentlessly hitting you on the head with a pig's bladder while screaming "Laugh at me! Laugh at me! LAUGH AT ME!!!!!!"

Charity is a virtue that should be exercised 365 days a year (366 on leap years) and not just when the BBC deigns to shove it down our throats, and asks us to enjoy the sight of overpaid, deeply unfunny celebrities doing useless 'challenges' and tired old gags because "it's for charidee."

Gordon Brown has called the celebrities who climbed Mt Kilimanjaro "heroes." They are not heroes. 

The fire fighters who went into the World Trade Center after it was hit are heroes. Someone caring for an elderly relative with dementia 24/7 is a hero. Martin Luther King was a hero. Jesus is a hero. The parents who never gave up on me when I was ill are heroes.

If the celebrities really want to make a difference, they should pledge to give 10% of their income  to charity for the next ten years. I wonder how many of them are avoiding paying full taxes by loopholes and offshore accounts, and thereby depriving the NHS, schools and police forces of money?

Next year, do something serious with money - and start by putting it where your mouth is.

Song

One of the many things I like about Shakespeare is the way his characters express themselves by singing. Desdemona sings in her heartache, Ophelia sings in her madness, Iago sings a drinking song and in the Forest of Arden they serenade the delights of the pastoral life. That's a very human trait, to love singing. (And after all, Shakespeare was "The most human human there's ever been.")

 

I sing nonsense to myself when I'm alone, walking down the street or preparing the toastie bar. Just silly stuff like "Green Grow the Rushes-O" or snatches of pop songs. It's like having an iPod, but cheaper. Also, people have their iPods stolen but no-one can steal my voice.

Fear

Fear is like a jellyfish. It drifts through your body, so translucent that its outline is barely visible, and every so often its tentacles sting your heart.

Nervous

When lecturers are nervous they cling to the lectern like a drowning sailor grasping a floating spar, and leave lacunae between their sentences. Their voices sound as if someone is pulling a string out of their backs. I worry that the string will wind all the way in, and they will be left with nothing to say. There will just be silence, and a few nervous coughs from the students.

 

I sit at the front of the lecture hall, so I don't know what a full hall of students looks like to a lecturer. Like so many pores of a sponge, I suppose, all waiting to absorb knowledge.

Lichen

I was struck by the way this lichen makes this stone look like it has been gilded. 

Wikipedia says that lichens are composite organisms consisting of a fungus and a photosynthetic partner - either an alga or a cyanobacterium.

Cards

Life is like a game of cards. At first you clutch your hand nervously to your chest, and you gradually choose which ones to reveal. 

You start with the low value ones - the Two of Vegetarianism, the Three of Catholicism. 

Then you move up to the higher values - the Six of Homosexuality, the Seven of Depression. 

Finally, you reveal the big ones - the Queen of Bipolar Disorder, the King of Gender Dysphoria, the Ace of Sexual Abuse. 

The aim of the game is to reveal all your cards without your partner ceasing to play with you. If they do cease, you have to start all over again with the next person.

Nocturne

I can tell when the evening is drawing on, because all the jackdaws fly overhead in a huge flock, cawing their hearts out. I don't know how they can tell.

Even birds have their daily rituals, it seems.

Silence

Hamlet ends by saying that "The rest is silence." Iago is led away to be tortured, saying that "From this time forth I never will speak word." 

Lear's most famous quote is not one about silence, but an expression of absolute negation: "Never, never, never, never, never!"

Silence is attractive, but very hard to maintain. I have always spoken my mind and told the truth. Silence is a talent I have yet to learn. Iago knows how to manipulate people with words, but also how to hold his tongue. He uses speech as a scalpel, and I use it as a battering ram.

Absolute silence... it's rare, but very attractive. It is as cold and silvery as platinum, and far more precious.

Window

When I sit at my desk my reflection is superimposed on the sight of a lit window opposite, so it looks like my head is a window.