Its a strange reminder about how how a position can change perspectives. Yet again I am in that esteemed establishment, the Arosa hotel in Paderborn. This flying visit was requested a while ago but I have been reluctant to make the journey. This time, I am in the lofty heights of the seventh floor where I can see all of the town stretched out below me, as so often before. Only this time, the view is further and I can see more of the countryside beyond the grey conurbation.
I suppose I was aware of the surrounding countryside before. I just never gave it any thought. It is not really unlike the countryside at home except that perhaps the fields are a little more regular in shape. I have no idea whether there was an equivalent of the Enclosures Act in these parts.
So, once again, I am struck by the rapidity with which I am suddenly elsewhere. And after my rather unsociable Friday evening flight at 9 p.m. this evening, I shall undoubtedly be disorientated by the discovery that I am home again, without seemingly noticing the intervening process of transition. I have long since given up attempting to assimilate the amount of information that such a journey presents to my eyes and ultimately my mind: There is just too much of it and to attemt to do so just results in mild motion sickness.
But it does make me think very carefully about how rapidly situations change. That which seemed unthinkable can in moments become the only choice of action. Once I was berated for my table manners by a well-meaning if misguided soul, on the grounds they would let me down if I ever had to represent my company at dinner with customers. "Yeah, like that is ever going to happen!" I thought.
Lately, there have been too many sudden requirements for a change in perspective. There have and continue to be too may funerals for my liking too. Some of them are rather poignant, like the team mate of my son who, at 20, succumbed last week to cancer. We are all aware of the pointlessness of railing at Fate and the unfolding of the Universe, but this was a particularly bitter loss for anyone who knew him. The words of countless parents and teachers over the generations never rang truer: "No, Life isn't fair!"
And so, looking out from this window so high up, and knowing my vantage point will soon change again, I am suddenly unsettled. Certainties seem elusive and change seems to be constant. And in this we have to decide what to take with us and where to stand for the next transition.
My life has changed this week. Some things have been made clear to me about the attitude of how I approach life. I need to make some changes if I am to retain my sanity and that which I value. Deaths tend to do that to one, don't they? As does standing in a high place and looking out at the workings of humanity, nestled in a landscape.
Alas, I have a presentation to write and fifteen minutes in which to do it. So I must leave this here. It was, in its way, my own attempt to rationalise the processes that are happening in my head. It is not necessary that anyone actually read it, only, for the sake of rigour, that I feel someone could. That's hard to explain, but should you have struggled heroically this far, i am certain you know what I mean.
And now to get down to the nitty gritty of everyday life and to leave all matters whimsical in their proper place. Corporate head on, suit on, smile affixed.
More anon.
Philosophical observations from wandering about noticing things.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Sunday, 18 September 2011
A Job Well Done
My son left home yesterday. We took him, and a van full of his belongings, to his university lodgings, deposited him and his stuff and without further ceremony, left him to his own devices in this strange new city. His lip quivered barely perceptively as we headed back to the van, but hugs and meaningful lingering smiles over, it was time to depart.
I remember how this felt, at least from my own perspective. I was left in a town much less attractive and frankly hated most of my first year. But the loneliness and abandonment one feels is to some extent outweighed, or at least balanced by the sense of excitement that the novel situation, with all its new people and hitherto unimagined possibilities offered. I am sure he will have a great time. All he has to do is avoid fighting with the sailors and be careful not to get drunk and fall in the harbour. Both of these, I confess, have haunted unreasonably those hours when night is darkest and I should have been sleeping. When the night is dark and the world is asleep, you alone are left there with your fears. Often they are ridiculous fears that in the light of day, you would dismiss with a mental brush of the hand. But at night, realism abandons you and all possibilities seem likely and terrifying.
Well, I have come to terms with those. I feel the lad has been prepared as well as we could possibly have managed. I am confident he has all the skills he needs to survive alone, or can develop them based upon his innate character and existing knowledge. My wobbliness subsides a little.
But I came home and sat on his bed. His room is clear, his desk empty. I walked into the garage and my tools still lie scattered on the bench with the remains of the final projects of late-boyhood. I suspect they will have no appeal upon his occasional return. A sense of something ending lingers indistinctly but decisively in the air.
Just under nineteen years ago, we could walk around to any town, drive to any friends and, bump and tiredness notwithstanding, stay out as late as we liked without consideration for anyone else. Then my son came crashing into our lives with a powerful set of lungs and vocal cords and a requirement for constant attention. Our time was no longer our own. Then less than two years later, my daughter arrived and now we were tethered, happily I add, to the home for the routines of daily life and the care of little, developing human beings.
And what a journey it was! I confess, I enjoyed most of it joyously.
There were the little innocent questions, the answers to which formed the growing understanding of the world, the little unselfconsciously offered child opinions on things, which delighted me with their funny little interpretations of a confusing existence.
I became expert in adhesives from mending broken toys brought to me by hopeful little faces. I regressed to my own childhood whilst skipping hand in hand with toddlers through the shops.
I became finally "responsible" as, together with my wife, we charted sensible courses through the sometimes troubled seas of parenthood with the ultimate aim of bringing to successful adulthood, two small offspring of our own conception.
Well, now all the huge shoes are gone from the shoe rack. The coat rack is almost empty as the big vintage overcoats are transplanted to another hall over a hundred miles away.
We have done our job and been successful by any measure.
And so, dropping him off with the gathered possessions of his own choosing, making and collecting, a task is complete. An independent adult, accompanied by vast amounts of food that we bought for him, is now starting out on his own in hopeful anticipation.
And here, the house seems somehow empty. Its a strange feeling and I am not really comfortable with it. But probably I shall get used to it. It is how things should be after all. He might phone sometimes and possibly he will be home in the holidays.
But now I get a sense of how my own mother must have felt leaving me all those decades ago in that god-forsaken campus in South Wales, her feelings being something very distant from my own self-absorbed bewilderment and excitement at my new situation.
Sorry, Mum. I had no idea! You left me with the Red Cross Parcel. I remember it well, and was grateful. I see now the box of food is not just sustenance for the coming weeks, but a token of the love we won't be able to give in person but which we hope will be apparent in every opened tin or bacon sandwich.
So now, we have only one offspring to focus on for the two years until her own similar departure. I hope she can cope with the increased attention!
And then, perhaps, when both are set on their courses, in about two years, independent apart from the occasional financial injection from us, the job will be largely done. Two independent human beings produced to contribute to society, enjoy their own lives as people and to hopefully nurture us when we become toothless and incontinent.
Call home sometimes, though, Son, won't you.
I remember how this felt, at least from my own perspective. I was left in a town much less attractive and frankly hated most of my first year. But the loneliness and abandonment one feels is to some extent outweighed, or at least balanced by the sense of excitement that the novel situation, with all its new people and hitherto unimagined possibilities offered. I am sure he will have a great time. All he has to do is avoid fighting with the sailors and be careful not to get drunk and fall in the harbour. Both of these, I confess, have haunted unreasonably those hours when night is darkest and I should have been sleeping. When the night is dark and the world is asleep, you alone are left there with your fears. Often they are ridiculous fears that in the light of day, you would dismiss with a mental brush of the hand. But at night, realism abandons you and all possibilities seem likely and terrifying.
Well, I have come to terms with those. I feel the lad has been prepared as well as we could possibly have managed. I am confident he has all the skills he needs to survive alone, or can develop them based upon his innate character and existing knowledge. My wobbliness subsides a little.
But I came home and sat on his bed. His room is clear, his desk empty. I walked into the garage and my tools still lie scattered on the bench with the remains of the final projects of late-boyhood. I suspect they will have no appeal upon his occasional return. A sense of something ending lingers indistinctly but decisively in the air.
Just under nineteen years ago, we could walk around to any town, drive to any friends and, bump and tiredness notwithstanding, stay out as late as we liked without consideration for anyone else. Then my son came crashing into our lives with a powerful set of lungs and vocal cords and a requirement for constant attention. Our time was no longer our own. Then less than two years later, my daughter arrived and now we were tethered, happily I add, to the home for the routines of daily life and the care of little, developing human beings.
And what a journey it was! I confess, I enjoyed most of it joyously.
There were the little innocent questions, the answers to which formed the growing understanding of the world, the little unselfconsciously offered child opinions on things, which delighted me with their funny little interpretations of a confusing existence.
I became expert in adhesives from mending broken toys brought to me by hopeful little faces. I regressed to my own childhood whilst skipping hand in hand with toddlers through the shops.
I became finally "responsible" as, together with my wife, we charted sensible courses through the sometimes troubled seas of parenthood with the ultimate aim of bringing to successful adulthood, two small offspring of our own conception.
Well, now all the huge shoes are gone from the shoe rack. The coat rack is almost empty as the big vintage overcoats are transplanted to another hall over a hundred miles away.
We have done our job and been successful by any measure.
And so, dropping him off with the gathered possessions of his own choosing, making and collecting, a task is complete. An independent adult, accompanied by vast amounts of food that we bought for him, is now starting out on his own in hopeful anticipation.
And here, the house seems somehow empty. Its a strange feeling and I am not really comfortable with it. But probably I shall get used to it. It is how things should be after all. He might phone sometimes and possibly he will be home in the holidays.
But now I get a sense of how my own mother must have felt leaving me all those decades ago in that god-forsaken campus in South Wales, her feelings being something very distant from my own self-absorbed bewilderment and excitement at my new situation.
Sorry, Mum. I had no idea! You left me with the Red Cross Parcel. I remember it well, and was grateful. I see now the box of food is not just sustenance for the coming weeks, but a token of the love we won't be able to give in person but which we hope will be apparent in every opened tin or bacon sandwich.
So now, we have only one offspring to focus on for the two years until her own similar departure. I hope she can cope with the increased attention!
And then, perhaps, when both are set on their courses, in about two years, independent apart from the occasional financial injection from us, the job will be largely done. Two independent human beings produced to contribute to society, enjoy their own lives as people and to hopefully nurture us when we become toothless and incontinent.
Call home sometimes, though, Son, won't you.
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Resolving Landscapes
And once more, here I am in my favourite German hotel, in the most interesting town in Westfalia. My room has no view this time, only the wall of the building opposite, which is not particularly inspiring even given its mirrored cladding.
On my way here today, I had to go and pick up a colleague from his house, since he is a participant in tomorrow's meetings here. His house is a newly built dwelling on a piece of land near to the small village where I grew up. I rarely go back there as I find the smallness and insularity of it oppressive and it ushers into my mind those exact feelings of remoteness and loneliness that I experienced as an adolescent there with only a bicycle as a means of escape.
As I approached, it struck me how beautiful the place is. The scarp above the village is the beginning of the Cotswolds, designated as an Area of Outstanding Beauty and frankly, it very much is.
I won't say that this escaped my notice as a boy. I was always aware of how glorious the countryside was and how picturesque the vista of rolling English hills was that rose only a mile or so from our back garden. Oh, I was perfectly aware of all this. I just didn't really care because it represented unwelcome solitude and the bounds of my mental as well as physical horizon.
Villages have their advantages. Not much crime happens and it is quite secure. But they are boring and claustrophobic and you cannot so much as fart loudly without some busybody reporting it to the local Parish Flatulence Officer and everyone pointing at you in the pretty little streets for the next month.
So, it was an unwelcome revisitation that I undertook this morning to my home village, after so many years..
Down the lanes I went, the lanes that were visible from my bedroom some thirty years ago, lanes I ran, walked, cycled along. As I drove, slowly for this is a great equstrian area and many nervous horses lurk around corners (not in a furtive way you understand, but you can encounter them suddenly and disastrously if you are not careful), the ghost of another Pete rode along with me. A smaller, scruffier, more constrained Pete watched as the trees went by and shuddered slightly at the crossing of the parish boundary.
In many ways, things have changed. There are plantations of sycamore and pine grown to maturity where last I looked they were mere twigs in their deer-proof tubes. Houses are different colours. Barns have tumbled to ruins. But the big trees, the oaks and ashes they are much the same as I remember and look familiar in an unremarked kind of way. The landscape before me corresponds to a topography that is burned into my memory such that the new copses remain largely unseen and the countryside of my childhood is still somehow the landscape that I see.
And it seemed incongruous to me that this young lad, his world so small and limited would find the purpose for my being here this day incomprehensible: I am on my way to an airport to fly across Europe for my work, as I do regularly and without remark to myself, save those times I look up and with the words of the Talking Heads ringing in my ears as so often, say to myself: "How did I get here!?"
That boy who aspired to no more than a job as a truck driver, would not comprehend what he would one day become and do. "An Aeroplane? Me? For a job? No. No you must mean somebody else.." Ok, it's not head of the U.N. certainly, but to a country urchin of the 1970s, it might as well be.
Our destinies twist and turn, taking us places we would ever expect and sometimes we stop and look honestly at our situation, with a sudden older perspective, and we are astonished, unbelieving. That ragamuffin child, all long wild hair and tatty canvas coat, he is still here. Not merely a wraith of someone long gone, leaving only an echo of a presence, but still here. I am him. Oh, certainly he has been added to, distorted to some extent perhaps, toughened in places and abraded in others. But there, not so deep down, there he is peering out fearful, but occasionally excited, to see what still awaits.
The boundary that was the horizon has expanded beyond what he ever dreamed.
But at our core, do not all of us have our embryonic selves in some way still extant? Do they not occasionally look out of our eyes and halt a foot about to take a step, out of trepidation and uncertainty?
I am glad I bumped into him again. I shall consider his needs and senssitivities, but I shall also be aware of when he is unduly influencing my decisions and when his small way of seeing the world is hampering progress towards a more interesting and exciting life.
And sometimes I will indulge him, like now, when I shall bounce on the bed in this hotel room as if it was a trampoline and no admonishing adult will come to the rescue of the springs.
On my way here today, I had to go and pick up a colleague from his house, since he is a participant in tomorrow's meetings here. His house is a newly built dwelling on a piece of land near to the small village where I grew up. I rarely go back there as I find the smallness and insularity of it oppressive and it ushers into my mind those exact feelings of remoteness and loneliness that I experienced as an adolescent there with only a bicycle as a means of escape.
As I approached, it struck me how beautiful the place is. The scarp above the village is the beginning of the Cotswolds, designated as an Area of Outstanding Beauty and frankly, it very much is.
I won't say that this escaped my notice as a boy. I was always aware of how glorious the countryside was and how picturesque the vista of rolling English hills was that rose only a mile or so from our back garden. Oh, I was perfectly aware of all this. I just didn't really care because it represented unwelcome solitude and the bounds of my mental as well as physical horizon.
Villages have their advantages. Not much crime happens and it is quite secure. But they are boring and claustrophobic and you cannot so much as fart loudly without some busybody reporting it to the local Parish Flatulence Officer and everyone pointing at you in the pretty little streets for the next month.
So, it was an unwelcome revisitation that I undertook this morning to my home village, after so many years..
Down the lanes I went, the lanes that were visible from my bedroom some thirty years ago, lanes I ran, walked, cycled along. As I drove, slowly for this is a great equstrian area and many nervous horses lurk around corners (not in a furtive way you understand, but you can encounter them suddenly and disastrously if you are not careful), the ghost of another Pete rode along with me. A smaller, scruffier, more constrained Pete watched as the trees went by and shuddered slightly at the crossing of the parish boundary.
In many ways, things have changed. There are plantations of sycamore and pine grown to maturity where last I looked they were mere twigs in their deer-proof tubes. Houses are different colours. Barns have tumbled to ruins. But the big trees, the oaks and ashes they are much the same as I remember and look familiar in an unremarked kind of way. The landscape before me corresponds to a topography that is burned into my memory such that the new copses remain largely unseen and the countryside of my childhood is still somehow the landscape that I see.
And it seemed incongruous to me that this young lad, his world so small and limited would find the purpose for my being here this day incomprehensible: I am on my way to an airport to fly across Europe for my work, as I do regularly and without remark to myself, save those times I look up and with the words of the Talking Heads ringing in my ears as so often, say to myself: "How did I get here!?"
That boy who aspired to no more than a job as a truck driver, would not comprehend what he would one day become and do. "An Aeroplane? Me? For a job? No. No you must mean somebody else.." Ok, it's not head of the U.N. certainly, but to a country urchin of the 1970s, it might as well be.
Our destinies twist and turn, taking us places we would ever expect and sometimes we stop and look honestly at our situation, with a sudden older perspective, and we are astonished, unbelieving. That ragamuffin child, all long wild hair and tatty canvas coat, he is still here. Not merely a wraith of someone long gone, leaving only an echo of a presence, but still here. I am him. Oh, certainly he has been added to, distorted to some extent perhaps, toughened in places and abraded in others. But there, not so deep down, there he is peering out fearful, but occasionally excited, to see what still awaits.
The boundary that was the horizon has expanded beyond what he ever dreamed.
But at our core, do not all of us have our embryonic selves in some way still extant? Do they not occasionally look out of our eyes and halt a foot about to take a step, out of trepidation and uncertainty?
I am glad I bumped into him again. I shall consider his needs and senssitivities, but I shall also be aware of when he is unduly influencing my decisions and when his small way of seeing the world is hampering progress towards a more interesting and exciting life.
And sometimes I will indulge him, like now, when I shall bounce on the bed in this hotel room as if it was a trampoline and no admonishing adult will come to the rescue of the springs.
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Fly with Respiratory Airways
Oh deep joy... written a couple of weeks ago when i still had a holiday to look forward to.
Once more I find myself in an airport. Terminal one at London Heathrow. I have hardly travelled this year and this is the first time in nearly two months that I have assumed my business persona, clicking into the routine easily and without undue thought.
I like to travel comfortably, but also with a slight dash of style and so today I am wearing my favourite summer suit in cream linen, referred to as "That Suit" by a friend of mine who was most taken with it when it graced my frame in a profile picture somewhere. So, beautifully made is it that it even has a small, lined pocket in the left breast for my reading glasses that I can no longer deny I need.
Refusing to be one of those business types, all grey suit and self-importance, that one sees so many of in the course of business travel tapping on a laptop hurriedly and worriedly or talking loudly and obtrusively into their phones, I use instead the email function of my phone. It has no text editor and so this is the only way I can write on it. Its tiny qwerty keyboard is rather tortuous to use but such is the dexterity of the opposable thumbs so characteristic of our species that I can relatively easily enjoy a reasonable level of self-expression before thoughts elude me, otherwise escaping out of my ear and into the ether to be lost forever.
It occurs to me that in most of the airports I have been in this year, the only way from security to the flight gates is actually through a shop. This strikes me as somehow cynical and mercenary: You cannot avoid this minor temple of commerce, selling as it does, overpriced spirits, perfume and general tat. It would be forgivable if there was an alternative route and you could choose not to wander past the deceitful "Low Price!" tags on the gin bottles, but there is not. No, the path takes you through the shop and you have no choice but to go with it. Of course, it snares enough of the unwary and ill-informed whose foraging urges lead them to hunt a bargain, only to discover disapointingly on their next visit to Tesco that it in fact was anything but.
Two Chinese girls alight beside me on the adjacent seats. So happy are they to be in a departure lounge in London that they try to take a photo of themselves. I offer to take it for them and they are embarrassingly grateful, all unfeasably cheerful smiles and schoolgirl excitement.
And boarding commences. Up everyone rushes. I can see no point in standing in a queue that moves so interminably slowly so I stay here writing until there is only one person left in it. I wander through to the jetway with my stub of boarding pass and on to the plane where everyone is still milling in the aisle deciding if they should keep their jacket on or roll it up and stuff it in the overhead locker. They dither, doing neither and we all wait while indecision rules the space.
So, now, later, sat uncomfortably in seat 30b, sandwiched between two fellow inmates, I am wedged for two hours or so. It is an unfortunate fact that the space allocated for each of the passengers in economy class is insufficient to house my frame. I am not unduly large but my straightened legs allow my feet to be visible to the person sat in front of me and my shoulders are wider than the seat so they occupy the spaces where my neighbours' shoulders should be. This is unavoidable. The seats should be at least as big as the passengers and not comfortable only for the person of average size, such that by definition 50% of people are too big to fit.
I can see now below us, a beautiful blue English Channel, as we English feel justified in calling it. At various angles to each other are tiny ships, their wakes visible as white streaks behind them. I feel a sudden pang of longing to be by the sea. That possibility seems a world away to me now. Indeed, it will be several weeks before I am in a position to contemplate such a trip, such are my commitments.
Momentarily disheartened, I sink back into my seat and indulge myself in a daydream of being sat on the step of my van, a mug of tea in my hands and the breeze and seagulls making the only sounds I can hear. It gives disproportionate comfort to imagine being there and though I can conjure up immaculate details of what I would see, its not the real thing, solace though it is.
We hit turbulence. It seems strange that clouds can be so bumpy. They are after all merely water vapour and we know we can pass our hands through fog and feel no resistance. But at five hundred miles per hour, the change in density is as significant as that of the coffee table as your shin hits it at four miles an hour in the dark.
I watch, amused, as two hundred heads wobble left, then right, then left again, as the plane lurches and bounces along. Only from the back of the plane can this collective capital oscillation be seen. It makes me smile every time.
Such flights are, happily, not crowded with eventfulness. Again, it strikes me how mundane it has become to soar above the clouds at inconceivable speeds. I turn my mind to the idea.
Somehow, at 500 miles per hour, one tends to think a little more clearly, removed as we are from the distractions of modern life by the confinement to an aeroplane seat, with all the attendant discomfort and privations that implies.
That I should, in the course of my day job, be frequently on an aeroplane would have bewildered my young, wild self. I may have occasionally looked up from the fields and footpaths of 1970s Gloucestershire at a passing vapour trail and wondered briefly at the mechanical and chemical processes by which it had been formed, but it would have seemed sheer folly to suggest that on a regular basis, my employer, one of the world's biggest computer companies, would pay me to travel up there, albeit in cramped discomfort.
But here I am, en route to Munich where I will speak the German that I felt was so pointless when I was first compelled to learn it at age twelve.
And the words of the song come echoing back to me "and you may ask yourself How did I get here?" How indeed?
So, lulled by the engine noise, I close my eyes and lean my head back on to the too-low headrest and nod off. Until..
Phlegmatic: Not given to displays of emotion, difficult to excite, full of phlegm. Its definitely the latter definition...
Sharing an aeroplane with several hundred other people in enforced proximity always causes me to remark to myself just how revolting certain aspects of respiration really are.
The only other time the mechanisms by which we supply oxygen to our blood and hence bodily tissues is at the theatre when I am astonished at just how much people cough.
I did not ask to sit next to the rude, taciturn bearded man. I suppose that I did choose my seat myself as I checked in, from the screen in the departures hall, and so I have some culpability in my subsequent location.
But the grunting, hacking and snorting that has assailed my ears since boarding has been utterly stomach-churning. Never have I been so aware of the movement of this most particularly unpleasant and seemingly viscous of the humours.
It makes me quite bilious.
Now, I am a tolerant person, but I am certain that all this hacking and squelching is unnecessary. Frankly, I fear it may drive me to violence ere long. I put in my earphones and find some music that feels appropriate to being at 37000 feet: Ether Song, by Turing Brakes. Yes, that will do. I have forty minutes now till we all stand up and mill about with nowhere to go. I might as well go back to sleep.
With the building criscendo of the guitar, I slide into happy oblivion.
Once more I find myself in an airport. Terminal one at London Heathrow. I have hardly travelled this year and this is the first time in nearly two months that I have assumed my business persona, clicking into the routine easily and without undue thought.
I like to travel comfortably, but also with a slight dash of style and so today I am wearing my favourite summer suit in cream linen, referred to as "That Suit" by a friend of mine who was most taken with it when it graced my frame in a profile picture somewhere. So, beautifully made is it that it even has a small, lined pocket in the left breast for my reading glasses that I can no longer deny I need.
Refusing to be one of those business types, all grey suit and self-importance, that one sees so many of in the course of business travel tapping on a laptop hurriedly and worriedly or talking loudly and obtrusively into their phones, I use instead the email function of my phone. It has no text editor and so this is the only way I can write on it. Its tiny qwerty keyboard is rather tortuous to use but such is the dexterity of the opposable thumbs so characteristic of our species that I can relatively easily enjoy a reasonable level of self-expression before thoughts elude me, otherwise escaping out of my ear and into the ether to be lost forever.
It occurs to me that in most of the airports I have been in this year, the only way from security to the flight gates is actually through a shop. This strikes me as somehow cynical and mercenary: You cannot avoid this minor temple of commerce, selling as it does, overpriced spirits, perfume and general tat. It would be forgivable if there was an alternative route and you could choose not to wander past the deceitful "Low Price!" tags on the gin bottles, but there is not. No, the path takes you through the shop and you have no choice but to go with it. Of course, it snares enough of the unwary and ill-informed whose foraging urges lead them to hunt a bargain, only to discover disapointingly on their next visit to Tesco that it in fact was anything but.
Two Chinese girls alight beside me on the adjacent seats. So happy are they to be in a departure lounge in London that they try to take a photo of themselves. I offer to take it for them and they are embarrassingly grateful, all unfeasably cheerful smiles and schoolgirl excitement.
And boarding commences. Up everyone rushes. I can see no point in standing in a queue that moves so interminably slowly so I stay here writing until there is only one person left in it. I wander through to the jetway with my stub of boarding pass and on to the plane where everyone is still milling in the aisle deciding if they should keep their jacket on or roll it up and stuff it in the overhead locker. They dither, doing neither and we all wait while indecision rules the space.
So, now, later, sat uncomfortably in seat 30b, sandwiched between two fellow inmates, I am wedged for two hours or so. It is an unfortunate fact that the space allocated for each of the passengers in economy class is insufficient to house my frame. I am not unduly large but my straightened legs allow my feet to be visible to the person sat in front of me and my shoulders are wider than the seat so they occupy the spaces where my neighbours' shoulders should be. This is unavoidable. The seats should be at least as big as the passengers and not comfortable only for the person of average size, such that by definition 50% of people are too big to fit.
I can see now below us, a beautiful blue English Channel, as we English feel justified in calling it. At various angles to each other are tiny ships, their wakes visible as white streaks behind them. I feel a sudden pang of longing to be by the sea. That possibility seems a world away to me now. Indeed, it will be several weeks before I am in a position to contemplate such a trip, such are my commitments.
Momentarily disheartened, I sink back into my seat and indulge myself in a daydream of being sat on the step of my van, a mug of tea in my hands and the breeze and seagulls making the only sounds I can hear. It gives disproportionate comfort to imagine being there and though I can conjure up immaculate details of what I would see, its not the real thing, solace though it is.
We hit turbulence. It seems strange that clouds can be so bumpy. They are after all merely water vapour and we know we can pass our hands through fog and feel no resistance. But at five hundred miles per hour, the change in density is as significant as that of the coffee table as your shin hits it at four miles an hour in the dark.
I watch, amused, as two hundred heads wobble left, then right, then left again, as the plane lurches and bounces along. Only from the back of the plane can this collective capital oscillation be seen. It makes me smile every time.
Such flights are, happily, not crowded with eventfulness. Again, it strikes me how mundane it has become to soar above the clouds at inconceivable speeds. I turn my mind to the idea.
Somehow, at 500 miles per hour, one tends to think a little more clearly, removed as we are from the distractions of modern life by the confinement to an aeroplane seat, with all the attendant discomfort and privations that implies.
That I should, in the course of my day job, be frequently on an aeroplane would have bewildered my young, wild self. I may have occasionally looked up from the fields and footpaths of 1970s Gloucestershire at a passing vapour trail and wondered briefly at the mechanical and chemical processes by which it had been formed, but it would have seemed sheer folly to suggest that on a regular basis, my employer, one of the world's biggest computer companies, would pay me to travel up there, albeit in cramped discomfort.
But here I am, en route to Munich where I will speak the German that I felt was so pointless when I was first compelled to learn it at age twelve.
And the words of the song come echoing back to me "and you may ask yourself How did I get here?" How indeed?
So, lulled by the engine noise, I close my eyes and lean my head back on to the too-low headrest and nod off. Until..
Phlegmatic: Not given to displays of emotion, difficult to excite, full of phlegm. Its definitely the latter definition...
Sharing an aeroplane with several hundred other people in enforced proximity always causes me to remark to myself just how revolting certain aspects of respiration really are.
The only other time the mechanisms by which we supply oxygen to our blood and hence bodily tissues is at the theatre when I am astonished at just how much people cough.
I did not ask to sit next to the rude, taciturn bearded man. I suppose that I did choose my seat myself as I checked in, from the screen in the departures hall, and so I have some culpability in my subsequent location.
But the grunting, hacking and snorting that has assailed my ears since boarding has been utterly stomach-churning. Never have I been so aware of the movement of this most particularly unpleasant and seemingly viscous of the humours.
It makes me quite bilious.
Now, I am a tolerant person, but I am certain that all this hacking and squelching is unnecessary. Frankly, I fear it may drive me to violence ere long. I put in my earphones and find some music that feels appropriate to being at 37000 feet: Ether Song, by Turing Brakes. Yes, that will do. I have forty minutes now till we all stand up and mill about with nowhere to go. I might as well go back to sleep.
With the building criscendo of the guitar, I slide into happy oblivion.
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Sound at the Speed of Light
Sometimes a small point will intrude into the muddy pool that is my consciousness and send a ripple to the surface, demanding further examination. Occasionally, if I am not otherwise occupied, and indeed, often when I should be, a curious and entertaining facet of our Universe will emerge insisting on philosophical scrutiny.
One such notion appeared to me today. I was listening to BH on Radio4, as I often do on a Sunday, whilst dripping marvellous marmalade absent-mindedly onto my trousers from my toast. A piece came on from someone who had noticed a strange phenomenon pertaining to the chimes of Big Ben.
It appears that at a distance of about 300m from the tower housing the iconic clock and its campanological companion, when listening on the radio to the "bongs" which announce the passage of time, it is possible to apparently hear the chime before it actually happens.
Astonishingly, The Wireless will play you the sound of the bell approximately one second before you hear it with your own ears. How intriguing! How can this be?
Well, it appears that this illustrates the enormous difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. As a child, sound and light were somehow related inasmuch both conveyed information to us, only of course at seven years old, I didn't really think of seeing and hearing as information. Nevertheless, they seemed to be manifestations of the same kind of thing: What our senses receive. So, it seemed quite strange that later, when I began to have a grasp of physics, to discover that they are in fact two entirely different mechanisms, moving two different types of energy in entirely different ways, one compressive and relying on a medium, and the other, radiation, able to travel through a vacuum (ok, leaving out "the Ether" as a concept, now largely abandoned) as a mish-mash of electricity and magnetism (that I frankly still can't quite reconcile in my poor, overly-spherical head).
But here we have a perfect example of how the two differ.
So, how do we hear the bell on the radio before it actually seems to chime within our actually range of hearing.
Well, it is less mysterious in actuality, but nonetheless delightful in explanation:
The microphones that pick up the chime for the BBC, and which carry the sound to the radio transmitters and thence to the radios of Britain and the World, are mere metres away from the source of the sound. As such, the characteristic "bong" reaches us as the speed of radio waves, plus the time it takes the sound to go a few meters to the microphone. In effect, instantaneously.
Whereas, being physically 300m from the source of the sound means that, at the speed of sound (340 metres per second at sea level) it takes approximately a second or thereabouts to reach our eardrums.
So, on the radio, it arrives pretty much as it happens but over the intervening London air, it arrives about a second later.
Isn't that a delightful and strange thought?
One such notion appeared to me today. I was listening to BH on Radio4, as I often do on a Sunday, whilst dripping marvellous marmalade absent-mindedly onto my trousers from my toast. A piece came on from someone who had noticed a strange phenomenon pertaining to the chimes of Big Ben.
It appears that at a distance of about 300m from the tower housing the iconic clock and its campanological companion, when listening on the radio to the "bongs" which announce the passage of time, it is possible to apparently hear the chime before it actually happens.
Astonishingly, The Wireless will play you the sound of the bell approximately one second before you hear it with your own ears. How intriguing! How can this be?
Well, it appears that this illustrates the enormous difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. As a child, sound and light were somehow related inasmuch both conveyed information to us, only of course at seven years old, I didn't really think of seeing and hearing as information. Nevertheless, they seemed to be manifestations of the same kind of thing: What our senses receive. So, it seemed quite strange that later, when I began to have a grasp of physics, to discover that they are in fact two entirely different mechanisms, moving two different types of energy in entirely different ways, one compressive and relying on a medium, and the other, radiation, able to travel through a vacuum (ok, leaving out "the Ether" as a concept, now largely abandoned) as a mish-mash of electricity and magnetism (that I frankly still can't quite reconcile in my poor, overly-spherical head).
But here we have a perfect example of how the two differ.
So, how do we hear the bell on the radio before it actually seems to chime within our actually range of hearing.
Well, it is less mysterious in actuality, but nonetheless delightful in explanation:
The microphones that pick up the chime for the BBC, and which carry the sound to the radio transmitters and thence to the radios of Britain and the World, are mere metres away from the source of the sound. As such, the characteristic "bong" reaches us as the speed of radio waves, plus the time it takes the sound to go a few meters to the microphone. In effect, instantaneously.
Whereas, being physically 300m from the source of the sound means that, at the speed of sound (340 metres per second at sea level) it takes approximately a second or thereabouts to reach our eardrums.
So, on the radio, it arrives pretty much as it happens but over the intervening London air, it arrives about a second later.
Isn't that a delightful and strange thought?
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Employment, work and human contact
Going to work can be such a drag. So, you can imagine how "exotic" and liberating it seemed when "working from home" started to be talked about. Where once I had to drag myself every morning through the North Bristol traffic to a huge grey flight shed, in which my great-grandfather had worked in WW2, now I could sit in my own armchair to take phone calls and write emails from the comfort of my dining room table. I wouldn't have that Monday-morning-feeling of the requirement to be somewhere I didnt really like.
I recall the impressions of work that set the scene for my regard to my future working life: the oppressive hours sat at a desk, watching the dragging hands of the clock till I could leave this dispiriting place, The Boss, the rigid heirarchy, the expectation to keep nose to grindstone without looking up to gaze upon a more hopeful professional existence. I realised that this depressing spectre would always be to some extent present in my attitude to work: the requirement to be in a place of work for employment purposes would lay heavily upon my spirit.
How I detested the presence of The Boss, in his glass fronted office, his beady eyes fixed on us for any sign of deviation from our allotted tasks. The bell would ring at 8:45 and I was to be at my desk in the windowless room; a small open-plan container in the larger expanse of the flight-shed. I would sit at my drawing board or workbench, longing for that moment at 12:55 when the bell would ring for dinner and I would have a brief hour's respite from the grim industrial tedium. Then the afternon would follow a similar pattern until at 5 p.m or 5:15 depending on which day it was, the bell would ring and out we would all pour, elated to escape the place for another day. How miserable those days were. Only getting tothe shops on a Saturday, never having the chance to buy a stamp and post a letter but tethered by the disapproving gaze of The Boss to that disheartening space.
Later, when I escaped to work on the production line at my current place of employment, the strictures were similar, though much more relaxed, the enlightened realisation of my employer being that happier employees work better. And we did. But still there were the core hours and the beady eyed-boss. The feeling of compulsion to be present where you would rather not be wasstill palpable.
Gradually as my job became more flexible, things eased up. When you may be required to jump on a plane at short notice and fly to Europe or even the other side of the world to meet a customer, a certain flexibility is necessary. Gradually, I no longer came to feel imprisoned. Work meant something quite different and as long as we meet our numbers, nobody needs you to be a certain regular place all that often. A hotel room in germany or China can be my workplace. Deosn't that sound exotic?
Then came "working from home". I had heard during the wackier predicitons of the 70s and 80s, that this would come to pass. But like aluminium foil suits, flying cars and a complete meal in a pill, all confidently expected by 2001, I didnt expect it to materialise. But suddenly, I could get email at home and I had a mobile phone to replace the one on my desk. I could, in theory, be anywhere and still do the majority of my job. How liberating!
So, now mobile, with laptop, permanent internet access, phone, and my trusty old notebook (yes, pen and paper even in this day and age), I discovered the freedom of the "Home Office".
Ok, it is still a little disconcerting: I may get a call from some customer in a distant office in a far flung land when I am sitting at home writing an email on my bed. And I feel that to some extent, it is a little invasive to mix this external world of work with my home life. But in general, I can do most things at least as well at home as I can in the office and the tea is better.
Surely, this is an ideal situation to banish forever the misery of the imprisonment of the office or the factory?
But little by little, I notice a change in my behaviour. I miss people; My fellow inmates! After an hour or so, I will start talking to inanimate objects. I ask questions of the cacti in the bay window and request opinions from the chairs. The appearance of the hamster, sleepy-eyed from his recent waking, delights me disproportionately and my own reflection in the mirror seems a welcome visit from a character with features and expressions.
This cannot be healthy, I think to myself and I head off, at an appropriate time roughly corresponding to the ancient markers of "tea-break" or "lunchtime", to the High Street, to buy a paper, have a cup of tea in the deli and populate my field of vision with active, moving humans.
Interestingly, though my town is not big, perhaps a dozen thousand inhabitants when you include the conurbations that have proliferated over recent decades, most faces I see are unfamiliar. You would think that after twenty years or so of wandering down the same High Street and going in the same shops, I would have seen most of the faces of the people who live in the area. Not so: Only a small proportion are people I recognise and the majority are faces I have never seen and probably will never see again. I wonder briefly, every time, where they have been hiding themselves all this time, or whether they are visitors to the area.
Of course, I do see some I know: The barber who cuts my hair once a month, which his roguish Ming-the-Merciless aspect, the pretty blonde girls in the bank behind their glass screen, the greengrocer who is visited as much for the mock-grumpy insults he offers his customers as for his vegetables.
I exchange a cheery "Hello" with each and I am reassured that I exist by the confirmations of their greetings. It can be hard to be sure of this alone in a house with only streams of text arriving by way of communication with other human beings. But, catching peoples' eyes in the street and smiling, exchanging a few unimportant words, all reaffirms our presence in the world.
I pop in for my tea and cake in the cafe. It seems the manager has the knack of hiring very personable and attractive ladies as waitresses, not necessarily young, but all with a ready wit and a twinkling smile. Also I note there appears to be a theme to their physiques that personally I find rather alluring. I wonder briefly if this is intentional and if their employment is contingent upon a small waist and a shapely bottom.
But the banter exchanged is one of the reasons I continue to go there, despite the proliferation of such establishments in our town.
They seem genuinely pleased to see me and one asks why I am so "bouncy" today. I reply that I have had a good week from an activity perspective, five hours of playing in the surf with my kayak and several hours of dancing on Tuesday. I do a little dance to reinforce the latter point, much to their amusement. One of them comes out from behind the counter and requests a dance with me, holding out her arms in type of ballroom hold. I lead her a couple of steps of tango, looking as faux-arrogant as I can muster whilst smiling so broadly. She is no dancer but I finish with a small lean and release her to her tasks, noticing as I do the trace of a blush on her cheeks, which I find immensely gratifying.
I note the manager, a personable if slightly Uriah Heap kind of chap, looking on, attempting to manage the interplay of pleasant smiling appearance with mild disapproval. I smile and nod at him if to say "These ladies make this place. Know this!"
The conversation reaches a natural point at which i feel I should disengage and let them get on with their jobs and my tray is carried up the stairs for me to the quietest tables where I will eat my baked cheesecake, drink my tea and read this weeks "New Scientist". I am positioned en route to the store cupboard so occasionally one of the staff will pass me with a comment, a smile and an expression of intelligent curiosity that I find somehow endearing. A few small minor conversations ensue, but aware that it is approaching lunchtime, their busiest time, I do not keep them from their tasks for long.
I do find the information exchanged to be most fascinating. On the simple conversational level, there are sentences, comments, inflections all which give a particular set of messages. Added to that are the other messages of expression, gesture, posture. Sometimes these latter say far more than the words ever could and in general I think we don't consciously register what they might be except for the emotional signal that we feel as the output of the complex interpretative and computational processes that go on in our unconscious.
The sum total of the exchanges are a good feeling. I leave full of cheesecake and tea with a sense that people, especially a group of attractive ladies, are well disposed towards me and that, therefore, I must be generlly a Good Egg, worthy of the time spent talking to me.
I leave my table I stow my NS in my freebie IBM shoulder bag (I feel it hangs sufficiently nonchalantly and unselfconsciously from my shoulder that it lends the merest touch of intellectual to my bearing. I may be wrong: I might just look like a knob with a man-bag).
as predicted, the lunchtime rush is beginning and they are all occupied. I shelve my disappointment with this rational understand and leave, pausing only briefly in the doorway to allow through a couple of Ladies-who-lunch who are seemingly oblivious to my chivalry at holding the door for them. I remark to myself, bolstered by my recent confidence-building encounters, that they are the poorer for not acknowledging me and hence being failing to be rewarded by one of my appreciative smiles.
I walk home, back to my taciturn furniture and mute succulents.
So, sitting here now in the silence of the house, I reflect, as so often, on events.
Interpersonal contact seems like a kind of vitamin to existence that we ignore at our peril. We can be fed, housed, clothed and otherwise healthy but without the validation of small encounters with others, we start to feel very unhappy indeed. Perhaps this is why the most severe penalty that a civilised society inflicts on its miscreants is solitary confinement.
And I try to work out exactly what it is about being with other people that feels so uplifting. And I can't. It seems irreducible: It just is Good. It makes you happier and secure about being an acceptable member of the human race.
I recall the impressions of work that set the scene for my regard to my future working life: the oppressive hours sat at a desk, watching the dragging hands of the clock till I could leave this dispiriting place, The Boss, the rigid heirarchy, the expectation to keep nose to grindstone without looking up to gaze upon a more hopeful professional existence. I realised that this depressing spectre would always be to some extent present in my attitude to work: the requirement to be in a place of work for employment purposes would lay heavily upon my spirit.
How I detested the presence of The Boss, in his glass fronted office, his beady eyes fixed on us for any sign of deviation from our allotted tasks. The bell would ring at 8:45 and I was to be at my desk in the windowless room; a small open-plan container in the larger expanse of the flight-shed. I would sit at my drawing board or workbench, longing for that moment at 12:55 when the bell would ring for dinner and I would have a brief hour's respite from the grim industrial tedium. Then the afternon would follow a similar pattern until at 5 p.m or 5:15 depending on which day it was, the bell would ring and out we would all pour, elated to escape the place for another day. How miserable those days were. Only getting tothe shops on a Saturday, never having the chance to buy a stamp and post a letter but tethered by the disapproving gaze of The Boss to that disheartening space.
Later, when I escaped to work on the production line at my current place of employment, the strictures were similar, though much more relaxed, the enlightened realisation of my employer being that happier employees work better. And we did. But still there were the core hours and the beady eyed-boss. The feeling of compulsion to be present where you would rather not be wasstill palpable.
Gradually as my job became more flexible, things eased up. When you may be required to jump on a plane at short notice and fly to Europe or even the other side of the world to meet a customer, a certain flexibility is necessary. Gradually, I no longer came to feel imprisoned. Work meant something quite different and as long as we meet our numbers, nobody needs you to be a certain regular place all that often. A hotel room in germany or China can be my workplace. Deosn't that sound exotic?
Then came "working from home". I had heard during the wackier predicitons of the 70s and 80s, that this would come to pass. But like aluminium foil suits, flying cars and a complete meal in a pill, all confidently expected by 2001, I didnt expect it to materialise. But suddenly, I could get email at home and I had a mobile phone to replace the one on my desk. I could, in theory, be anywhere and still do the majority of my job. How liberating!
So, now mobile, with laptop, permanent internet access, phone, and my trusty old notebook (yes, pen and paper even in this day and age), I discovered the freedom of the "Home Office".
Ok, it is still a little disconcerting: I may get a call from some customer in a distant office in a far flung land when I am sitting at home writing an email on my bed. And I feel that to some extent, it is a little invasive to mix this external world of work with my home life. But in general, I can do most things at least as well at home as I can in the office and the tea is better.
Surely, this is an ideal situation to banish forever the misery of the imprisonment of the office or the factory?
But little by little, I notice a change in my behaviour. I miss people; My fellow inmates! After an hour or so, I will start talking to inanimate objects. I ask questions of the cacti in the bay window and request opinions from the chairs. The appearance of the hamster, sleepy-eyed from his recent waking, delights me disproportionately and my own reflection in the mirror seems a welcome visit from a character with features and expressions.
This cannot be healthy, I think to myself and I head off, at an appropriate time roughly corresponding to the ancient markers of "tea-break" or "lunchtime", to the High Street, to buy a paper, have a cup of tea in the deli and populate my field of vision with active, moving humans.
Interestingly, though my town is not big, perhaps a dozen thousand inhabitants when you include the conurbations that have proliferated over recent decades, most faces I see are unfamiliar. You would think that after twenty years or so of wandering down the same High Street and going in the same shops, I would have seen most of the faces of the people who live in the area. Not so: Only a small proportion are people I recognise and the majority are faces I have never seen and probably will never see again. I wonder briefly, every time, where they have been hiding themselves all this time, or whether they are visitors to the area.
Of course, I do see some I know: The barber who cuts my hair once a month, which his roguish Ming-the-Merciless aspect, the pretty blonde girls in the bank behind their glass screen, the greengrocer who is visited as much for the mock-grumpy insults he offers his customers as for his vegetables.
I exchange a cheery "Hello" with each and I am reassured that I exist by the confirmations of their greetings. It can be hard to be sure of this alone in a house with only streams of text arriving by way of communication with other human beings. But, catching peoples' eyes in the street and smiling, exchanging a few unimportant words, all reaffirms our presence in the world.
I pop in for my tea and cake in the cafe. It seems the manager has the knack of hiring very personable and attractive ladies as waitresses, not necessarily young, but all with a ready wit and a twinkling smile. Also I note there appears to be a theme to their physiques that personally I find rather alluring. I wonder briefly if this is intentional and if their employment is contingent upon a small waist and a shapely bottom.
But the banter exchanged is one of the reasons I continue to go there, despite the proliferation of such establishments in our town.
They seem genuinely pleased to see me and one asks why I am so "bouncy" today. I reply that I have had a good week from an activity perspective, five hours of playing in the surf with my kayak and several hours of dancing on Tuesday. I do a little dance to reinforce the latter point, much to their amusement. One of them comes out from behind the counter and requests a dance with me, holding out her arms in type of ballroom hold. I lead her a couple of steps of tango, looking as faux-arrogant as I can muster whilst smiling so broadly. She is no dancer but I finish with a small lean and release her to her tasks, noticing as I do the trace of a blush on her cheeks, which I find immensely gratifying.
I note the manager, a personable if slightly Uriah Heap kind of chap, looking on, attempting to manage the interplay of pleasant smiling appearance with mild disapproval. I smile and nod at him if to say "These ladies make this place. Know this!"
The conversation reaches a natural point at which i feel I should disengage and let them get on with their jobs and my tray is carried up the stairs for me to the quietest tables where I will eat my baked cheesecake, drink my tea and read this weeks "New Scientist". I am positioned en route to the store cupboard so occasionally one of the staff will pass me with a comment, a smile and an expression of intelligent curiosity that I find somehow endearing. A few small minor conversations ensue, but aware that it is approaching lunchtime, their busiest time, I do not keep them from their tasks for long.
I do find the information exchanged to be most fascinating. On the simple conversational level, there are sentences, comments, inflections all which give a particular set of messages. Added to that are the other messages of expression, gesture, posture. Sometimes these latter say far more than the words ever could and in general I think we don't consciously register what they might be except for the emotional signal that we feel as the output of the complex interpretative and computational processes that go on in our unconscious.
The sum total of the exchanges are a good feeling. I leave full of cheesecake and tea with a sense that people, especially a group of attractive ladies, are well disposed towards me and that, therefore, I must be generlly a Good Egg, worthy of the time spent talking to me.
I leave my table I stow my NS in my freebie IBM shoulder bag (I feel it hangs sufficiently nonchalantly and unselfconsciously from my shoulder that it lends the merest touch of intellectual to my bearing. I may be wrong: I might just look like a knob with a man-bag).
as predicted, the lunchtime rush is beginning and they are all occupied. I shelve my disappointment with this rational understand and leave, pausing only briefly in the doorway to allow through a couple of Ladies-who-lunch who are seemingly oblivious to my chivalry at holding the door for them. I remark to myself, bolstered by my recent confidence-building encounters, that they are the poorer for not acknowledging me and hence being failing to be rewarded by one of my appreciative smiles.
I walk home, back to my taciturn furniture and mute succulents.
So, sitting here now in the silence of the house, I reflect, as so often, on events.
Interpersonal contact seems like a kind of vitamin to existence that we ignore at our peril. We can be fed, housed, clothed and otherwise healthy but without the validation of small encounters with others, we start to feel very unhappy indeed. Perhaps this is why the most severe penalty that a civilised society inflicts on its miscreants is solitary confinement.
And I try to work out exactly what it is about being with other people that feels so uplifting. And I can't. It seems irreducible: It just is Good. It makes you happier and secure about being an acceptable member of the human race.
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Formidable Formicidae
I am writing this in some considerable discomfort due to the intrusion of nature into my comfortable world.
Red ants bite. Or do they sting? I am not sure which it is. Or perhaps it is both.
I have poked them, in far-off distant days of childhood summers, with those stalks of grass which if pulled, can be extracted, white and soft from the cylindrical outer leaves.The definitely bite. I have seen their fearsome laterally-hinged mandibles opening menacingly and closing tenaciously on the grass stalks. I can imagine just how formidable these must be if you are about ant sized. Indeed, the etymology of the word ant appears to point to an origin in ancient Germanic "amaitjo" meaning "biter".
That they sting is alluded to by the fact that as kids running about in the forests of Gloucestershire, we would sometimes find rock ants nests, usually holes in the limestone in some bank, and poke in late flowering bluebells to annoy them. The colour of the flower would take on a pinkish hue as the ants, nasty creatures about a centimetre long, would set about it roundly, attacking with abdominal contortions. This was obviously an early experiment with chemical indicators for us, though the mechanism was not explained to me until some years later when learning the explanation of pH in A level chemistry.
Anyway, ants are formidable as I have discovered to my cost.
Finally resolving to rid the allotment of ten years of lazily applied carpet mulch, I disturbed a red ants' nest at the lower end under the hawthorn tree. Their outraged presence was made immediately apparent to me by the sudden fiery stinging on my left ankle. I looked down to see it encircled by a garland of quite cross red ants, all intent on sinking their jaws into my skin. There were dozens, possibly hundreds of them swarming around the unfeasible knobblyness that characterises my ankle bones, and in answer to my uncertainty about their means of attack, I could see them stabbing their abdomens into my epidermis whilst gripping tightly with their mandibles. I brushed them off roughly and fully expected the stinging to subside in a few moments. It did not. Indeed, a day later and it still hurts, with the additional bruised sensation underlying it as if I had been struck repeatedly on the ankle bone with a small metal hammer some days earlier.
This must have been some potent chemical weapon! That a relatively small number of tiny insects should inject what is basically the simplest organic acid possible in microgramme quantities and render a huge beast such as myself in some considerable discomfort smacks of some impressive efficacy.
So I sit here contemplating my elephantine ankle, smeared with antihistamine and elevated on several cushions on a coffee table. Being immobile forces me into sedentary lassitude and I suppose I am to some extent grateful for the prod towards this, my first attempt to string words together for several months.
I am struck with a thought: In the allotment, in the area of the accursed red ants' nest, are several other ants nests. Ants seem to come in various colours, or rather, a variety of two distinct variants (leaving aside those scary monster ants i used to see in the forest as a kid which are much bigger but not often seen outside of very rural areas).
There are black ants, which are generally about six or seven millimetres long and usually all about the same colour. There is also a myriad of "red" ants, none of which, to my knowledge, are actually red, varying as they do from a yellowy-orange to a dark brown.
This latter group however, has one feature their darker cousins lack, their aforementioned aggressive mode of attack. Ok, I do know that the black ones bite. I have felt the nip of the occasionally miffed black ant and it seems altogether more of an admonishment than an assault. But the red ones, they mean business. They really set about you with spite and malice.
And it is this malice I rue right now.
But my thought: Oh yes. I remember now. If the red ants are so pugnacious and offensively equipped, why are there still black ants? Surely coldly indifferent nature must have favoured the more hostile species. I cannot imagine for one moment that any conflict between adjacent colonies of red and black ants would hold any hope for a black-ant victory.
And yet, both exist. Why?
Could it be that they have different dietary requirements?
No. It seems not, in fact. They seem to eat pretty much the same things. I have seen both lots carrying off dismembered insects and whole caterpillars. So somehow, they must coexist by colonising only the space that they require and not infringing on the areas inhabited by other ants.
None of this, of course, helps with my poorly ankles.
But it does give me introspection on these creatures of which, my research informs me, there are an estimated 22000 species worldwide, ranging from 0.75mm long to an terrifying 52mm. The most painful bite is from the Bullet Ant whose bite, eponymously, is said to resemble the pain felt when shot by a bullet. It is, on the international scale of pain, right up there at the top, presumable with a smite from a fluffy feather duster at the opposing end.
For those of a new-age naturalistic bent, I may point out that many ant species attack and invade other colonies in order to steal eggs and larvae to raise as slaves in their own nest. I am sure this is not malevolence on their part, but it hardly propagates the ideal of the harmonious balance of nature, as if a ten minute viewing of any David Attenborough programme would not make this abundantly clear.
Indeed, looking at the little creatures, I wonder if they are in fact mere automata. They have a cluster of a few million neurons and all look remarkably identical. Perhaps they are just tiny machines, programmed with all the information and behavioural patterns that they need, responding to stimuli with a limited set of reactions.
But no, some ants have been observed in the act of interactive teaching: A mentor ant will take a novice ant out foraging and will lead it to food, taking great pains to ensure the novice isnt left behind and keeps up.
So, all in all, I wonder why ants do not rule the world. They are immune to the ravages of radioactivity, they can eat pretty much anything, learn and defend themselves viciously, as my lower legs attest. In fact, perhaps they do and we just havent realised.
Perhaps I will give them a little more respect next time I lift a slab to discover their little city bustling underneath. And I will resolve to wear long socks and trousers in the allotment in future.
Red ants bite. Or do they sting? I am not sure which it is. Or perhaps it is both.
I have poked them, in far-off distant days of childhood summers, with those stalks of grass which if pulled, can be extracted, white and soft from the cylindrical outer leaves.The definitely bite. I have seen their fearsome laterally-hinged mandibles opening menacingly and closing tenaciously on the grass stalks. I can imagine just how formidable these must be if you are about ant sized. Indeed, the etymology of the word ant appears to point to an origin in ancient Germanic "amaitjo" meaning "biter".
That they sting is alluded to by the fact that as kids running about in the forests of Gloucestershire, we would sometimes find rock ants nests, usually holes in the limestone in some bank, and poke in late flowering bluebells to annoy them. The colour of the flower would take on a pinkish hue as the ants, nasty creatures about a centimetre long, would set about it roundly, attacking with abdominal contortions. This was obviously an early experiment with chemical indicators for us, though the mechanism was not explained to me until some years later when learning the explanation of pH in A level chemistry.
Anyway, ants are formidable as I have discovered to my cost.
Finally resolving to rid the allotment of ten years of lazily applied carpet mulch, I disturbed a red ants' nest at the lower end under the hawthorn tree. Their outraged presence was made immediately apparent to me by the sudden fiery stinging on my left ankle. I looked down to see it encircled by a garland of quite cross red ants, all intent on sinking their jaws into my skin. There were dozens, possibly hundreds of them swarming around the unfeasible knobblyness that characterises my ankle bones, and in answer to my uncertainty about their means of attack, I could see them stabbing their abdomens into my epidermis whilst gripping tightly with their mandibles. I brushed them off roughly and fully expected the stinging to subside in a few moments. It did not. Indeed, a day later and it still hurts, with the additional bruised sensation underlying it as if I had been struck repeatedly on the ankle bone with a small metal hammer some days earlier.
This must have been some potent chemical weapon! That a relatively small number of tiny insects should inject what is basically the simplest organic acid possible in microgramme quantities and render a huge beast such as myself in some considerable discomfort smacks of some impressive efficacy.
So I sit here contemplating my elephantine ankle, smeared with antihistamine and elevated on several cushions on a coffee table. Being immobile forces me into sedentary lassitude and I suppose I am to some extent grateful for the prod towards this, my first attempt to string words together for several months.
I am struck with a thought: In the allotment, in the area of the accursed red ants' nest, are several other ants nests. Ants seem to come in various colours, or rather, a variety of two distinct variants (leaving aside those scary monster ants i used to see in the forest as a kid which are much bigger but not often seen outside of very rural areas).
There are black ants, which are generally about six or seven millimetres long and usually all about the same colour. There is also a myriad of "red" ants, none of which, to my knowledge, are actually red, varying as they do from a yellowy-orange to a dark brown.
This latter group however, has one feature their darker cousins lack, their aforementioned aggressive mode of attack. Ok, I do know that the black ones bite. I have felt the nip of the occasionally miffed black ant and it seems altogether more of an admonishment than an assault. But the red ones, they mean business. They really set about you with spite and malice.
And it is this malice I rue right now.
But my thought: Oh yes. I remember now. If the red ants are so pugnacious and offensively equipped, why are there still black ants? Surely coldly indifferent nature must have favoured the more hostile species. I cannot imagine for one moment that any conflict between adjacent colonies of red and black ants would hold any hope for a black-ant victory.
And yet, both exist. Why?
Could it be that they have different dietary requirements?
No. It seems not, in fact. They seem to eat pretty much the same things. I have seen both lots carrying off dismembered insects and whole caterpillars. So somehow, they must coexist by colonising only the space that they require and not infringing on the areas inhabited by other ants.
None of this, of course, helps with my poorly ankles.
But it does give me introspection on these creatures of which, my research informs me, there are an estimated 22000 species worldwide, ranging from 0.75mm long to an terrifying 52mm. The most painful bite is from the Bullet Ant whose bite, eponymously, is said to resemble the pain felt when shot by a bullet. It is, on the international scale of pain, right up there at the top, presumable with a smite from a fluffy feather duster at the opposing end.
For those of a new-age naturalistic bent, I may point out that many ant species attack and invade other colonies in order to steal eggs and larvae to raise as slaves in their own nest. I am sure this is not malevolence on their part, but it hardly propagates the ideal of the harmonious balance of nature, as if a ten minute viewing of any David Attenborough programme would not make this abundantly clear.
Indeed, looking at the little creatures, I wonder if they are in fact mere automata. They have a cluster of a few million neurons and all look remarkably identical. Perhaps they are just tiny machines, programmed with all the information and behavioural patterns that they need, responding to stimuli with a limited set of reactions.
But no, some ants have been observed in the act of interactive teaching: A mentor ant will take a novice ant out foraging and will lead it to food, taking great pains to ensure the novice isnt left behind and keeps up.
So, all in all, I wonder why ants do not rule the world. They are immune to the ravages of radioactivity, they can eat pretty much anything, learn and defend themselves viciously, as my lower legs attest. In fact, perhaps they do and we just havent realised.
Perhaps I will give them a little more respect next time I lift a slab to discover their little city bustling underneath. And I will resolve to wear long socks and trousers in the allotment in future.
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