Spare Time, or What's Left of It

In the Douglas Adams novel Life, the Universe and Everything, Slartibartfast expresses his intention to take up the octraventral heebiephone. As Adams explains, Startibartfast has "the wrong number of mouths", and any attempt to learn to play the heebiephone therefore would be, "pleasantly futile".

The point behind my latest diversion into the world of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is this: when I have something important to do, my spare time tends to be consumed by a far more complicated, and therefore more enjoyable, task. One which can be described in no better manner than with the words "pleasantly futile".

I have, at the moment, a very important thing to do. This is to revise my little blue socks off for my upcoming exams. This is of course, happening, but progress is slow. The problem is this- it can never truly end, thus rendering it a task which is unpleasantly futile.

Meanwhile, I have been using my Sunday and the fifteen minutes between revision hours attempting to construct a family tree for the entire pantheon of Greek gods. This is an incredibly slow task, especially as different writers give gods different origins and different names.

So far, I have positioned 59 different Olympians, mortals, Muses, Protogenoi, Titans and so on. I have written a biography for all but a handful. I am not yet proud of it, but I do feel a sense of impending pride.

I have hit upon something of a hurdle, however. After becoming tired of the many and varied progeny of Zeus, and returning to the primordial gods for some amusement, I hit upon the Wikipedia entry for Thaumas, the son of Gaia and Pontus (earth and sea). It said that he married and Oceanid.

Not thinking I had anything to fear, I tapped the link.

The writings of Dr. Wikipedia kindly informed me that the Oceanids were the children of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, and there were three thousand of them.

Now I accept, being immortal, that you tend to have a lot of time on your hands. Boredom is going to set in eventually. "Tethys dear, shall we try for another?" "How long since the last one, Oceanus?" "About six hundred years." "Oh, that's a reasonable age gap, I suppose we could."

Three thousand, though? And that's just the daughters. The sons were known as Potamoi. Care to guess how many of those there were? That's right, another three thousand.

When I tried to find out the names of all these children, Dr. Wikipedia pointed out that only a "relatively small portion of their names" were actually given in Greek writings. It surprised me that Hesiod hadn't taken up the majority of his Theogony with listing them. In fact, fewer than two hundred Oceanids and Potamoi are named in all known Greek works.

All I can do is speculate then, that none of them were called Blue Ivy.

I must admit, the prospect of filling out another six thousand biographies, the latter 5800 with the word "Unknown", has moved my task from the realms of the possible but daft, into the land of the impossible and barking.

Back to revision then. Or learning the names and locations of all 27 French regions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oceanids

Nation of Shopkeepers

I am both incredibly proud, and unforgivably ashamed, of being English.

When I say that I am English, I do not mean that I was born in England, or brought up in England, or that my ancestors were English (the majority weren't). It says "British" on my passport. England, having no national anthem, is not really a place any more. It's an idea.

It's not a brilliant idea, mind. It is a collage, a stew, manufactured by the offcuttings of every remark made about the inhabitants of this green and pleasant land. An Englishman cannot be insulted by anything a foreigner has to say; if anything appears to be disparaging, it is dismissed as a humorous misunderstanding, or more frequently, a fault of the foreigner in question.

For example, the Hungarian humourist George Mikes, wrote a book called How To Be An Alien. In the preface to the 24th edition, he complained that the book had been received too kindly- he had hardly annoyed anyone. There was one example of a bank manager reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting and hurling it into the fire for its impertinence, but little else.

Mikes had wanted to stir something in the English, for them to realise that they were being mocked. On the contrary, the Central Office of Information requested that the book be translated into Polish for the benefit of Poles moving to the country.

So that was it. Mikes wrote about the English not as they were, but how they wanted to be seen. And so it was with many other writers- once a nation, the English became a caricature of tea-drinking, island-dwelling, excessively polite cricket fans.

This, in turn, spelt bad news for me. I always read far too much. As a result, I became English.

In particular, I would have to blame the character of Arthur Dent. He scuppered a spaceship for a cup of tea, tried teaching cavemen to play Scrabble, nearly blew up the Universe trying to bowl a cricket ball and, when stranded on an alien planet, made sandwiches. I didn't like him for a long time. Then one day, without warning, I became him.

To prove my point, I will describe something that happened to me just the other day.

I was on a bus, and it was packed. I was standing next to a Frenchwoman and her teenage daughter. Before this story goes any further, I would like to make clear that I have nothing against the French- 1066 was a long time ago and that silliness with Napoleon could have happened to anybody.

In any case, the point of the story was this: I had my hand on a metal bar and the French girl was unashamedly leaning on my hand. With her head. Her hair was on my hand. Fifteen years of education failed to prepare me for that moment.

Arthur Dent, in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish tells a story about how, sat at a table with a stranger in a railway station, he finds himself in an awkward situation. The stranger begins to eat his biscuits. Strangled by English impotence, he can do nothing but eat the biscuits along with the stranger until they part company.

Arthur is relieved to find that his biscuits are hidden under a newspaper, and it is he who has been eating somebody else's all along.

No such relief was available to me. It is most definitely socially unacceptable to rest your head on a stranger in public in England. I do not know about France. It could be that, on a crowded Continental bus, personal space becomes a thing of the past.

Yet there I wasin England, staring into space, pretending someone wasn't leaning on my hand, desperately hoping that the girl's mother would correct her. For twenty minutes, I stood there, wishing I could say something, wishing I could cause a fuss, wishing I wasn't so English. But I wouldn't have it any other way.