I’m still alive!

When I go too long without blogging, I end up with ten million things I want to tell you about, and I never have time to write an entry that long so I put it off for another day, and ten million turns into twenty million, and so I put it off for yet another day, until it comes to the point where I realise that I’d better blog SOMETHING or I’m never going to write on the damn thing again. So here I am.

Some things - like the imminent return of PuzzleDonkey - are still uncertain and unofficial enough that I probably shouldn’t mention them yet in any case, and other things - like last weekend’s SimonG.org meet - have already been recorded elsewhere, so we’ll skip over them. Still other things - like the tax return I’ve just submitted, and how I forgot to save up enough money to pay it and had to borrow a rather large sum from my dad (thanks dad) I’d prefer not to think about. And so we reduce the twenty million things to the traditional What I Did Today.

Having set the day aside for administrative type things, like kicking all the people who owe me money (in the hope of paying back the aforementioned large sum this decade), and trying to make the puzzle work that I started constructing last night (which I did, and it’s a goodun), it was my firm intention to do no actual drawing whatsoever, and in that respect, the day was a great success. In others, less so. The morning being a sunny one, and Wednesday being one of the many many days of the week that Jess doesn’t have any lectures to go to, we decided to visit the local dog shelter - since we finally got round to hinting to our landlady that we might like one, and she indicated that the ‘no pets’ clause in our tenancy agreement is very much open to negotiation - and then do a spot of geocaching. Well, the dog place was shut, and we couldn’t find the cache. So that was all a bit of a disaster. Though there was an entertaining moment in a slightly guilty I-hope-that-wasn’t-my-fault sort of way when my traffic light went green and I pulled out to turn right, when a man on a pushbike shot out in front of me - despite his light, presumably, being red (are bikers allowed to do that? I have no idea) - realised that if he continued on his current course it would intersect quite painfully with mine, had a bit of a wobble as he tried to stop abruptly, and fell off in the middle of the road. I hope he wasn’t hurt. I managed not to run him over, so he’s got that to be thankful for at least.

It’s good to be back. I should do this more often.

The boy and the girl sat on the hill watching the sunset.

“Where do we come from?” asked the girl. The boy thought for a moment, then inspected her collar.

“Marks and Spencers,” he concluded.

“No,” said the girl, “I mean all of it - us, the sun, the moon, the stars… where does it all come from? How did it start? Why are we here?”

“Ah,” said the boy, with a hint of disappointment at this introduction of the philosophical. He’d been hoping to steer the conversation towards the possibility of them having a snog, and perceived that this would now be difficult.

“The thing is,” the girl continued, warming to her theme, “there must have been a time when there was nothing. And then there must have been another time when there was something. I can’t see how you get from the one state of affairs to the other.”

“There was a big bang,” said the boy, who’d read a book. “First there was nothing, you see, and then it just sort of…”

“…Exploded?” prompted the girl.

“Something like that,” said the boy with a frown, suddenly grasping the limitations of modern physics.

“I’m still not sure I quite understand,” admitted the girl.

“There is another theory,” revealed the boy. He’d also read another, much older book. “Some say that God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

“And where did God come from?” asked the girl. Predicting that ‘Marks and Spencers’ wouldn’t go down well as a response, the boy merely shrugged.

“You see, it doesn’t make sense,” said the girl, pursuing her advantage. “If you start with nothing, there’s no way to turn that into something. But if you start with something, you’ve then got to account for that.”

“Unless there’s something that simply must exist,” mused the boy.

“Such as?” prompted the girl. The boy considered this for a little while, then said:

“Mathematics.”

“Mathematics?” said the girl.

“Mathematics,” repeated the boy. “Even if there was nothing - no sun, no stars, no space, no time, nothing - it would still be true that one plus one equals two, that the five hundredth prime number is” - he thought for a moment - “three thousand five hundred and seventy-one. Even if there’s nothing for there to be a prime number of.”

“Perhaps,” conceded the girl, not entirely convinced. “Though I’m not sure how that helps.”

“Of course, if the universe is deterministic, it’s essentially a big computer program. And a computer program’s really just a mathematical equation in disguise,” said the boy.

“Is it?” said the girl.

“Sort of,” said the boy.

“So the universe is just a big equation? Like seven times six or something?” said the girl.

“‘or something’, yes,” said the boy.

“Then even when there was nothing, our universe would have existed as a potential reality in the realm of structurally valid mathematical constructs?” said the girl.

“Something like that,” said the boy, who by now had abandoned all hope of getting a snog. “But only a potential reality. That still doesn’t get us any nearer to the universe actually existing.”

“Supposing it didn’t exist,” said the girl, who could feel something of an epiphany coming on. “How would we know?”

“I think therefore I am,” retorted the boy. “Descartes said that.”

“But even if this equation - or computer program, or whatever it is - even if it were never run through a computer, but lay dormant, scrawled on the back of a napkin - within the equation, Descartes would still have said that. And you’d still be quoting him.”

“I see your point,” the boy admitted. “Maybe there doesn’t actually need to be anything. Maybe it’s all just maths, and every logically consistent universe exists as a mathematical construct and nothing more. If that’s true, we may have just solved the fundamental problem of science, philosophy and religion that’s baffled thinkers throughout history.”

“Yes,” said the girl. “If it’s true. But it doesn’t seem very likely, does it?”

“No, I suppose not,” said the boy, wondering whether this would be a good point to ask for a snog. His internal debate was cut short when he looked up to see the sun, which had almost disappeared below the horizon, reverse its course and, reaching a zenith just above the treeline, bounce down in a field and roll towards the town, destroying several council estates and a Tesco Express. Just then a cloud, which - if you squinted a bit - looked exactly like Ted Rogers, exploded impossibly into a flock of a million seagulls, which squawked the full overture to The Marriage of Figaro and then dropped dead simultaneously.

“Whoops,” said God. “I forgot to carry the seven.”

We’ll be heading back to York at the weekend, at which point I might start blogging slightly more regularly again - for now I’m stealing a few minutes of Internet time at Jess’s mum’s house while Jess fights her brothers to the death, or at least their spectacular defeat, at Guitar Hero. I don’t know how long I’ve got - not long, I hope, because I want my dinner - so I’ll make this a quick’un.

…At which point Jess turned up and we went out for dinner, so I’m continuing it the next day, while she’s visiting her dad. Apparently it wasn’t Guitar Hero she was thrashing them at, but Wii Play and Big Brain Academy, but you didn’t need to know that.

This period of feeble (even by my standards) bloggage, for which my excuse has been lack of Internet access, was preceded by an equally feeble period, for which my excuse was that I was busy doing Top Secret Christmassy things. I can now, of course, reveal what those Top Secret Christmassy things were, in case of the unlikely event that anyone cares.

Top Secret Christmassy thing number one: Round about my first birthday, my parents decided that my sister and I were sufficiently interesting, and the price of home video equipment had sufficiently dropped, that they should invest in a state of the art cine camera. Having done so, they set about filming us every time we went to a beach or a model village - both of which we seem to have done with alarming regularity - over the next seven years. They also occasionally filmed us somewhere that wasn’t a beach or a model village, but the beach/model village to non-beach/model village ratio does seem disproportionately high. Eventually they got tired of lugging the equipment - which in those days was the size of a small aircraft hangar - to every beach or model village we visited, and in 1985 it was put away forever, except for one day in 1991 when they inexplicably decided to dust it off and film one minute and fifty four seconds of me playing with the cats in the garden.

It was then stuffed away in the back of a cupboard and largely forgotten about. In the meantime, technology moved on, and the thought of setting up a great big projector and screen and fiddling about with reels of film for purposes of sheer nostalgia seemed like far too much effort in this age of DVDs - in which, due to one of the scart sockets on the back of my parents’ telly being knackered and the sole functioning socket being insufficient for both the DVD player and the video, they only have to squeeze themselves into the cramped space behind the set and fiddle about with cables - as a result of which the films haven’t been watched for years, nor were likely to be ever again. So I decided a nice little present for my parents would be to have the film transferred to DVD.

So I sent the reels off to vt.tv, who did a marvelous job of the transfer, and then set about editing all the clips into chronological order and adding captions and a soundtrack. I could subject you to some of them via the wonder of youtube, but I won’t (unless I do), though I did upload one at MMM’s behest, which you can go and watch if you want to see me and my sister messing about with a sheep in 1985. Why you would want to do that I have no idea.

Top Secret Christmassy thing number two: While I was busy with that, I had the idea of writing and illustrating a little Jess-themed story and getting it made into a book a la The Unhappy Hiccup as a Christmas present for her. But I couldn’t think of a good idea, so I decided not to bother. Then one day we got to talking about poems, and Jess made some comment about how I ought to write her one for Christmas, and so I put some more thought into it and saw a way it might be done. Unfortunately by this point I only had three weeks to write and illustrate the thing in order to hit the publishing deadline for Christmas, and meantime I had to get the cine film stuff finished off - not to mention occasionally doing a bit of actual work - so for a while there I was very busy indeed. And that’s why I only performed a pitiful eleven exercises in bloggage in the final quarter of 2007. Whether it was worth it you can judge for yourself, by having a read of the first poem type thingy I’ve written since 2005:

Messy Jessy Meets Noodle the Labradoodle