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

In this game, you have to be more than just ahead

At around half one on the twelfth of December, I passed somebody in a doorway who gave me the news that there would be a broadcast from CERN the following day, and that there had been “findings”. I emailed my editor almost immediately, requesting to report on those findings, whatever they were.

I got no response.

At just before one on the thirteenth, I sat in the centre of the front row in a seminar room to watch the broadcast. I had my notebook in my arms and my Dictaphone on my lap. I was ready. Nobody was going to take this away from me. I had been ahead of the game.

Physicists: lecturers, researchers and students alike crammed into the tiny room at the University of Liverpool. The screen at the front of the room displays row after row of excited academic faces just like ours. The older members of the audience whisper the names of those they recognise; they are jealous of their position.

The aroma of sandwiches and crisps filled the room. Let it be known that, even when the world stands on the brink of the greatest scientific discovery in decades, lunchtime must be strictly observed.

When the broadcast started, there were early technical difficulties. As it progressed, they became on-going technical difficulties, and by the end of the broadcast, were late technical difficulties.

I ended up moving to another screen, standing in a warm corridor with plenty of other people who had no idea what was going on, holding my Dictaphone above the others’ heads.

I must admit, I knew at the time that what I was doing was futile, that I was resigned to the fact that my editor had ignored my email and that the story would be passed on to the first of my illiterate cowriters to fumble a desperate message on their iPhone.

The eventual response from my editor, when I asked if someone had got in before me was “hiya yer”- Which added quite a bit of insult to my already considerable injury.

Do you know what, though? Sod them. I’m reporting on what CERN found, right here, right now.

Two experiments possibly found something, in roughly the same place, but not quite. It’s all a bit vague. They do, however, agree on the fact that we are a long way off confirming anything and the Higgs Boson will not be announced as a discovery until after more experiments in the following year. I wasn’t disappointed by this, but many of my (mentally) younger colleagues were.

The ATLAS experiment, represented by Fabiola Gianotti, concluded that the Higgs mass is somewhere around 125 GeV. All good scientists should know, however, that a discovery is not a discovery until it has been found to be accurate to something called five-sigma. The Higgs was “found” by ATLAS at 126 GeV at 3.6 sigma. This, incidentally, is a long way off five, and in theory, the readings that scientists are hoping is the Higgs… well, it could just be statistical anomalies.

These are fun in their way, but a massive waste of time and money. As Ms Gianatti put it, “I think it would be really kind for the Higgs Boson to be here.”

After ATLAS concluded their piece, the majority of people left. Only the most advanced particle physicists, many as they were, understood even half of what was going on, and being so advanced, they mostly had better places to be.

I must confess that I too left the corridor and returned to the problem class I was supposed to be in an hour earlier.

I am proud of being there though. I have, on my Dictaphone, a recording of a physicist making a joke. I suffered to get that; I had to trawl through a great deal of tape that was too noisy, or too scientific to use- just for that one sound bite. My arms ached from holding the thing aloft for the best part of an hour.

I was there, though. I stood on the edge of history, all for the distant and evanescent hope that I might one day write it.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. May your dreams be as deep and crisp and even as you want them to be, and may I have the sense to write a festive blog entry next year.

Universally Challenged

I know. I’ve been away. It’s because I’m struggling to express one particular concept. To corrupt a cliché, I have managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success.

Anyone who knows me, or has read this blog before will be mightily aware that I have a certain infatuation with the idea of appearing on University Challenge. The sad fact is, I may be about to miss that train.

I’m the reserve. I’m the cursewording reserve.

Out of the fifty or so who took the test, most were abysmal-let’s face it, most people are at most things. It’s a fact we live with, move on from but still have to put up with at times. There were just six candidates that stood out well above the rest. The team were in that six. I was in that six. One unlucky fellow was also in that six.

I guess I should count my blessings that I’m not him, her, it, zir or em. Another day, different questions, and I might have been. Say, if George hadn’t told me that Niels Bohr had said a particular something, or if I hadn’t looked up the dates of Immanuel Kant that morning. These two facts have now slipped my mind, but they came to my aid when I needed them.

That person is wandering around right now, stunned by the fact that they aren’t as much of a genius as they thought they were. Do they know how close they came?

I hope not. It’s rubbish knowing that you were a whisker from success. It’s rubbish being the reserve. I’m not going to poison the others, break their limbs or anything like that. I can’t pretend I wish them all well though.

They’re my Facebook friends. We went out for drinks last week. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that if anything on Greek Mythology comes up I’m going to be eating my own shoes in the audience, despairing that they don’t know any of it- but I do. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that I’m not really one of them, and that if I really want to get onto University Challenge, one of them is going to miss out.

If that happens, will they hate me? I want it to happen. I want one, non-specific member of the team to go down with crushing gastroenteritis an hour before we go to film the first round. I want him to gladly give his place to me. It might be bad for team spirit, but I’d love to save the day, I really would.

So perhaps it’s my calling to be the reserve. My brilliance has been confirmed, so my ego isn’t suffering. I probably won’t get onto the program, but there is still a chance. There is a chance of me being the happiest person alive for just a little bit, as a door that was creaking shut suddenly opens for me.

I want it to happen. I know it won’t. Wish me luck.

Stupidly Clever

These days, I am giddy with anticipation at the fact that I am as close as I have ever been to appearing on University Challenge. This is coupled, however, by the grim reality of the fact that I am far less prepared to do so than I was at this point last year.

I had a class test this week, a lab on Monday, an essay due the same day, a presentation the following week, an assignment due that I am too busy to even think about looking at. What’s more, this has been going on for a year now, and all of the general knowledge I had previously accumulated has been replaced by Physics.

That’s not to say I’m not a formidable quiz opponent. I certainly have the broadest base of knowledge of anyone I know- but is that enough?

On the entry form, I was asked what my specialist area of knowledge was. Baffled by this, I put “all-round”. I have no idea whether this will play to my advantage or not.

Isn’t this how things should be, though? We are human beings; whereas birds can fly and fleas can jump, the one thing we can do is think.

In any case, I have a 100-question exam next Tuesday. I have no idea what format the questions will take. There are no past papers, nor clues as to what form the test will take.

It’s the most exciting, and the most terrifying exam I will ever take. There are no real negative consequences if I fail- aside, that is, from the lack of positive consequences. Still, I do want those positive consequences.

Think about it. What’s your gift, your talent, your ability? What are you good at? Don’t you like it when people realise?

The older I have become, the more the educational system has wanted to limit what I can study, attempting to make my knowledge more and more specific. The fact of the matter is, that I am a jack of all trades and a master of sweet Fanny Adams. I want an opportunity to show what I still know.

I am not some sort of “mad scientist”. I am not a “bookworm”. I’m a well-rounded human being, and, no matter how much my schedule seems to want to make me fail, I am beyond determined to prove myself.

If it goes well, I’ll let you know how it goes. If it doesn’t, I’ll be too busy sulking.

The Comfort of Strangers

Generally, strangers don’t bother me. The way I see it, I’m probably never going to come into contact with them again for as long as I live, so I may as well act as I please. When I say “act as I please”, I don’t mean anything too extreme, just being myself.

This outlook has its upsides; for example, I have no issue asking for refunds or replacements if something doesn’t meet my standards. I also realise that shop assistants are actually there to assist me in the shop. That’s a little too easy to forget, especially when an awful lot of shop assistants pretend that their job is to stand and chat with their colleagues.

My rules with strangers are these:

1. If they have a job, it’s only right to let them earn their pay. You don’t want them to get complacent.

2.  Thank people when and only when they have done something for you, never out of misguided politeness. By allowing them to think they have done a good job, you have done them a disservice. 

3. You can let them think what they want afterwards. What matters is the few seconds you come into contact. It doesn’t matter if you become a funny anecdote or a haunting memory, just as long as you act in a way that you are comfortable with.

These rules have some exceptions. If people look suspicious, for instance. There’s nothing wrong with being suspicious. It’s not prejudice (most of the time), it’s a complex combination of instinct and experience. It could be that you’ve seen the person on Crimewatch, perhaps, or could be that you associate their features with drug or alcohol abuse. Either way, it’s probably best to avoid causing aggression.

The other exception to the rules is public toilets. There is no logical reason for this, only that when I am in a public toilet, I do not want to seem weird. It just doesn’t seem the place for it.

It might be because of how I would respond to unusual behaviour if I encountered it. Just the other day, I was aware of a girl being in the toilet for rather longer than typical, and then exiting without washing her hands. I was outraged. How lucky that girl was that I did not see her face! If I had, the walls of the university would be plastered with photo-fit style drawings of her, accompanied with the details of her misdeed.

I find it difficult to be “normal” in public toilets though, particularly when hand-driers are available. On a cold day, there’s little better than sticking the hand-drier on and just sitting under it. You could let the hot air blow down your sleeves, dry your damp hair under it, or twist the head around and thaw out the icicles forming on your nose.

If anyone should walk into the toilets, however, dive away from the hand-drier as quickly as you possibly can. It’s not worth the shame.

October Round-Up

No posts last weekend, so I thought I'd round everything up from the month of October. This may become a permanent feature; it may not.

9/10 - A review of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
16/10 - Some helpful advice for anyone on the internet (it's you)
19/10 - The Chronicle of the Supermarket Price Wars, and a review of the best party I have been to in a while
23/10- The trouble with Englishness, whatever that is

I am also pleased to say that my life has once again been a Halloween-free-zone. I can only hope that you were as lucky as I have been.

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.