Tuesday Morning

I wonder if we shall ever see them again. They set out through the mist, strange shapes looming out around them in the white blankness. We stood in the rain for as long as we could, until they vanished from sight. Inside, a distant signal has activated arcane machinery within the walls and the love songs of giant squid can be heard faintly from beneath their coarse and uneven surfaces.

More prosaically, Bex has driven off into the drizzle to take Rose and Morvern off to the train station and the local hydroelectric plant has signalled the boiler to let it know that power is currently cheap. Which I think is a great use of technology and worthy of being in The Future.

Yesterday we went to Dunveagan for groceries and to phone Val, who might have been going to come. Along the way we briefly encountered phone signal, which caused a five minute burst of writing a mass text in reply and frantically hitting send before signal vanished again.

Dunveagan was solidly uninteresting. Clearly in winter mode, with the hotel firmly shut. We decided it would be safe to park in one of the "residents only" parking spaces and make use of the grocers next door. The only thing of even slight interest was the vegetarian grocers over the road from it, which had a collection of fabulous vegetables from around the world including Romanesca (?) which looks more like a 3D fractal than anything else in the world.

And then on the way back we hit the same patch of signal, which led to lots of swearing at my email app; which managed to discover that I had 25 emails, but only downloaded 5 of them before we went out of range again. (Two spam, one newsletter about science misrepresentation by the US government, two sets of changes to the D&D system from Hugh).

We then holed back up again, Morvern put on some well chopped vegetables to begin the soupification process and I set up the board for Fury of Dracula, a game which Hugh got me for my birthday and I hadn't managed to play since.

It turned out to be good fun, although the first half was very frustrating, due to a mixture of nobody knowing the game (which therefore made it very slow) and unlucky cards meaning that I completely evaded all the hunters for an hour. We took a break to eat soup and went back, to discover that it went a lot faster, and a burst of decent cards (and stupidity on my part) made it a lot more fun. I won, by a hair's breadth, but it was generally agreed that if I hadn't forgotten to add the pile of interesting weaponry to their item stack until 3/4 of the way through the game I'd have been in serious shit much earlier on.

At which point we moved to the living room, made and Rose, Morvern and Bex each made themselves a Mii and we got stuck into Wii Golf, Bowling and Tennis, interspersed with Rose doing tarot readings for everyone.

Shuffle

There's something about the moments at the start and end of songs. Mo and I are currently lying on sofas, still waiting for Bex to get back from dropping off Morvern and Rose, with my iPod on shuffle, listening to randomness. Many of the tracks are designed to be listened to in album form, merging seamlessly into each other, outro merging with intro, never letting the mood lapse - hearing them in random order leaves sudden cliff edges where there had been rolling hills, rising notes abruptly cut off, discordance running straight into harmonies, like a traffic jam where a circus has merged with the morning commuter traffic.

At the same time I'm reading 253, which is fascinating, fun, heartbreaking and joyous all at once. Oh, and goes very well with random play. It was possibly the first internet novel (or at least the first one I heard of) - it's set on a London Tube train, over a period of seven and a half minutes, and consists of 253 textual portraits of the passengers. Each one is 253 words (about a page), with a physical description, some inside information and what's going on in their head. Some of them are travelling with someone else, some of them have encounters with the people near them, some of them just illuminate their prejudices with opinions of their fellow passengers. I'm 94 passengers in so far and there hasn't been any repetition - each person feels individual and unique, which is quite an achievement in itself. The whole thing has a quirky, offbeat style, told by an omniscient narrator who clearly loves all of his creations, no matter how flawed they are.

I think it was in fannish conversation that it was heartily recommended to me, and I can happily recommend it on. I can't read more than 20 or so in one sitting, but it's perfect for leaving in the toilet or by the bedside and dipping into.
(Written by Geoff Ryman, by the way, who isn't just a fabulously talented writer, but is also lovely in person, even if he did fail to recognise me when drunk following his Hugo win).

Rain

I'm just back in from a walk in the rain. For reasons beyond my understanding I decided that spending the entire day sitting in the cottage would be bad, and that I should go for a walk, despite the weather having started out badly and become worse. Not that it has turned into anything as majestic as a thunderstorm - I'm sure they happen here intermittently, but this evening was more like standing in a wind turbine with a shower attachment at one end - imagine high speed mist, hitting you in the face at thirty miles an hour.

I walked to the end of the drive and turned left, away from the wind. This was a great idea at the time, keeping the rain on my back as I walked up the hill, occasionally looking behind me to check for cars, but fifteen minutes later, as I crested the hill and looked out over the valley beneath me, I realised that I was going to have walk all the way back facing into the rain. In fact, I felt strangely exhilerated as I strode back, grinning in a somewhat manic fashion as the tiny drops beat off my forehead and glasses, reducing my vision to a prismed blur. By the time I got back I actually felt terribly, terribly happy, almost beyond the ability to talk as I hung up my coat by the heater and changed into dry trousers.

It was the kind of night when you expect to see something large and furry bound across the road, turning it's snout to look at you briefly before it heads on into the darkness. As it happens, I saw nothing more exciting than a van (although when I saw its headlights round the edge of the hill I originally assumed that I was seeing a lighthouse on the headland, and was terribly excited). Alas, maybe some other night.

Belief

One of the occasional misconceptions about me (and many other non-theists) is that we desperately want there to be no God, Allah, Zeus, leprechauns or tooth fairy, and that we wilfully set out to ignore everything we can in order to uphold our beliefs. In my experience, this is pretty much the exact opposite of what is believed. Many is the time that I've sat about with a few secular types bemoaning the lack of evidence for a supreme being, especially for one that would actively care about us. There are very few things that would make me happier than knowing that when I die there is something more waiting for me, that there is a plan for the universe and that even the unhappy bits happen for a reason.

It was Julie who mentioned a famous experiment with baby monkeys, who had to choose between two fake mothers, a furry one that provided no milk, or a cold, hard one that provided milk. The monkeys uniformly chose the comfortable, useless one. John pointed out that the same thing applied to believers. Sometimes I feel very odd for choosing the cold, hard, uncaring mother, purely because she's also the one that tells the truth. I wish the truth wasn't so important to me. I wish I could say "No, make me happy, take away my troubles, I don't need to understand the truth, and if I'm wrong then I won't know until after I'm dead, by which time I won't care!"

But alas this isn't that kind of choice. No more than I can choose whether to believe that London is the capital of England, or that the Earth goes round the Sun. I wish I could, I just can't.