Going without

The traditional blog diatribe begins with two seemingly unrelated events, and brings them together with some more or less relevant narrative device. Let me here be no exception to that formula:

A random stumbling upon an advert online for Earth Hour, an hour in which the lights of cities across the globe are supposed to be switched off in a reminder of the supposed power of the people to make a difference, led to us sitting in our kitchen lit only by candles and the staunchly not-switched-off street lights outside ("what's a few dead due to road accidents in comparison to a ruined environment?" said somebody). This led us quite naturally to the idea of reading aloud to one another what each had been reading privately in the cosy story-telling shadows. This is a trend that has, to some degree, been extended into our normal electricity consuming lives. We've read newspaper articles, poems, short stories and bits of novels to one another, and I find it to be totally brilliant. It has that same appeal as has watching episode after episode of Family Guy on the laptop, in that you're entertained without having to do anything yourself, but it's somehow more... well, it's definitely different anyway. There's something necessarily communal about it, which seems to lend it a legitimacy that watching TV seems to lack.

Also this week, I've had one of those things that men seem to have, where their back suddenly decides it's had enough of doing whatever it is a back normally does, and is going instead to shoot the empty beer bottles of ones nervous system with the Colt 45 of unexpected twinges and seize up in the process, forming some kind of unbending kebab skewer of hot, slicing pain. To cut a long story short, I've done my back in. This has led to previously unscheduled periods of lying on the sofa, standing aimlessly in the kitchen, and walking gingerly about clutching my lower back, like a late-in-the-term pregnant woman. This has had various unexpected pleasant consequences however. Firstly and foremostly, I've been forced to think of things to do that don't involve going anywhere or moving in any serious way. I've read the Süddeutscher Zeitung from cover to cover, and also a great deal of my hilarious novel, always either standing propped up against the fridge or lying on the sofa with the afternoon sun shining through the window. I've also found the time to finally paint letters in the German Scrabble distribution on the back of my Bananagram tiles (see photo) and in the process have discovered that the name of the game is supposed to be pronounced with an american accent, making it rhyme with "anagrams", making the name a rather clever pun, rather than the confusing nonsense it is when said in a British accent (try it yourself!).

The fruits of my labour. The nail polish remover and filthy rag were used to correct the many mistakes.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling, is that sometimes going without something (electricity, motor skills) can lead to inventive ways of having fun. And no one can accuse me of not being interested in that.

Yours stiffly,
Rob

What does RL stand for? Because he can't sit down: me writing this blog entry

The Scientist

With the first proper feeling of having really acheived something since the start of this long and sometimes tortuous route through the ins and outs of political economy, the moment has finally arrived where I can call myself something new: I'm officially a scientist.

When I say officially I am, of course, referring to a decision made by the governing body of my own body and self, myself: I have written and sent to the relevant professor a scientific paper in which a new and previously undiscussed theory is outlined, data found for the proof or otherwise of said theory and analyses are made on said data the results of which are presented in serious-looking tables in black and white with enormous margins, double-spaced type and a small number at the bottom of every page, preventing the bewildered and overwhelmed reader from losing his very sense of self and location as he gazes in barely credulous fascination at the argument laid out in words of greater than one syllable in incontrovertable font-with-serif seriousness before him on the leather bound pages.

Ok, I may be exaggerating somewhat for dramatic effect, but the point still stands. I've written a paper. It's not an essay, nor is it a project. It's neither a worksheet nor a take-home test. It's a paper and I know this because it starts with an abstract not an introduction. This is how I know I'm now officially a scientist.

Today, in the style of a Roman emperor, I have lain on the sofa reading a book and drunk two coffees in my tracksuit bottoms, with ne'er a thought that I should have a shower or deal with the serious issues of the day. It's the first time I've been rid of that horrible student sense of having something very important to do which hangs over every moment of unending free time, spoiling the mood but not quite being forceful enough to convince you to leave the lilo in favour of the library. And it feels good. I'm geniunely very relaxed.

Inspired by a book I have been reading in which it is mentioned that an English woman learns French via the Langenscheidt method - by which one learns by heart a minimum of 30 pages of a foreign text - to learn a German poem by heart. It's the kind of thing that, caught in the struggle for higher position (J. Mitchell's words), it's easy to forget to do. Since I was a wee teenager I've wanted to be able to recite at least the first few pages of STC's 'Ryme of the Ancient Mariner' but just kind of assumed that you either can do that sort of thing and hurrah for you, or you can't and so must it ever be. It never occured to me that if you want to be able to do something like that, one option is to just sit down and learnt how to do it; it's just always seemed to somehow take a back seat to the driving desire to write CVs and get a job sitting at a computer all day. I'm sure that by tomorrow this feeling will have left me and I'll once again throw the poetry book into the corner in favour of Facebook and job applications, but today, just for a day, I'm going to use my hours in the service of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I will do so today for as long as my consitution allows...