Pligget

I followed my normal route to work this morning, and I saw something that struck me as ridiculous. I'd seen it hundreds of times, but not really seen it.

I may have been in a tetchy mood because I'd just been pulled over by a policeman for jumping a contra-flow red light at some roadworks - you know the kind of thing: where both lights stay on red long enough to allow for an old dear on a bicycle to wobble through the 300 yards of cones. The light had changed to red just before the car in front went through, and I lazily followed it. Imagine my delight when I (only then) noticed the markings on the car behind me. I managed to bite my lip and act all humble and apologetic, even though I was bursting to say indignantly "well you followed me through", and he let me off with a warning. Apparently, they carry the same penalties as every other type of traffic light (3 points and 60 quid), so be warned....

Aaaanyway. A few miles further on, I crossed the line from Cambridgeshire into Bedfordshire, and noticed this roadsign:

Come again? The best thing they could think of, to tell you what a wonderful world you were entering, was that it was half-way between two interesting places (which are about 80 miles apart). What's more (to further qualify this prestigious alignment), it's only half-way between them so long as you don't actually draw a straight line, but instead draw an "arc". Presumably they mean an arc centred on London (since they're all about 50-60 miles from London).

It's not as if there is such a thing as the Oxford Cambridge Arc (apart, obviously, from in the minds of council PR departments). There's no major road linking the two cities (well, not one that passes through Bedfordshire anyway), and I can't imagine there being much traffic between them apart from tourist coaches. The snobbery between the cities sees to that.

In other words, the sign should more accurately read like this:

That should put it on the map.

"It was twenty years ago today" that I first arrived in Ottawa, an excited young man entering a new world. I remember stepping out of the airport into an amazingly crisp, cold night, and thinking "so this is North America". I was really nervous, and the excitement of having a big, new, American car at my disposal (all I had back home was a bicycle) and the prospect of several weeks of all-expenses-paid comfort (I'd been renting rooms in various shared houses for over 8 years) were both tempered by the fear of losing sight of the car driven by my colleague, who had come out to meet me and lead me back to our hotel.

I'd been in my first career-type job for about 16 months, after nearly 7 years as a student. Over the next 5 months my life transformed. I'd been getting by, trying to live on a modest salary and keep up with the interest on a four-figure overdraft. By the time my stints in Ottawa came to an end in August 1984, I had a four-figure bank balance that was actually paying me interest! I'd been living well within the per diem expense allowance (mainly because I was working too many hours to spend it), had a salary uplift for foreign working, and generous shift and overtime bonuses. For example, for one weekend, in which I clocked 41 hours of work, I received nearly three weeks' extra pay. When I got home to Portsmouth I was rewarded for working all the ridiculously long hours in Canada with a 31% pay rise that I hadn't even asked for.

But all this is nothing compared with the best thing that happened to me that year.

On about the third day in Ottawa, we went for lunch to a local bar at Bell's Corners, called the Corkscrew. It was the regular haunt of a couple of the local guys we worked with - Geoff and Guy, bless 'em. It was comfortable, we sat at the bar and ordered beers and steaks. The staff seemed friendly, and there was a relaxed banter between us all. I could see this was going to be a regular lunchtime venue. On about our third visit, I was bemused to see that we were served green beer. What? The barman explained that this was a bit of fun, it being St. Patrick's Day. I explained that this was something that generally passed us by in England. That bit of green food colouring sparked up a conversation that has now gone on for 20 years and counting.

The barman's name was Jim, a ruggedly handsome local-born man of 23 who was earning a buck while working to follow his cousins into the Fire Department. Over the next few months, we spent many a lunch-hour chatting about our different cultures and the Canadian wilderness (a passion handed down to Jim by his recently deceased father), and Jim became a good friend. He introduced me to his sweetheart Karla, and took me to football games and weekends at the lake with his friends.

The following summer I was invited back to Ottawa for Jim and Karla's wedding - on the same day as Live Aid - and was privileged to share those last few days of his bachelorhood as if I were a life-long friend. I spent a few days at his sister Kim's ranch up in the Gatineau Hills, riding horses (for the first time) at dusk through meadows full of fireflies. I'll never forget the canoe-camping trip that five of us went on, a few days before the wedding. We set off at dawn from Jim's cousin Jerry's house, immediately after his stag party (at which I got stoned, again for the first time) with canoes strapped to the roofs of two cars. We were barely buoyant with all the beer on board as we pushed off from the bank, and I can't remember two days when I've laughed more.

A couple of weeks later Jim and Karla appeared on the doorstep of my new girlfriend's house in Kingston-upon-Thames, on their whirlwind honeymoon tour of "The Old Country". This (in two weeks) took in Cornwall, Loch Ness, the Lake District, Robin Hood's Bay - oh, and a day trip to Belgium - all in a Ford Fiesta.

Two summers later I was back in Ottawa with my now wife, marking our first wedding anniversary, and had another memorable three weeks of cottage-dwelling, swimming, water-skiing, barbecues and songs around the campfire (Jim had also earned money strumming and singing in bars before becoming a firefighter).

Four and a bit years ago I got a job in Montreal for a few months, and was able to renew the friendship that had persisted for the intervening dozen years or more (most of it without the benefit of email) despite the distance between us. I shared many winter weekends with Jim, Karla and their two children (the same ages as mine), and inevitably was invited to bring my boys over there to meet them, which I did in July/August 2000.

Jim and Karla packed a whole lot of magic into those three weeks, and now, whenever the subject of holidays comes up, the boys plead with me to take them back to Canada.

Jim, I couldn't let this milestone pass without letting you know what you have contributed to my life. You have this uncanny knack of relating to me as the best person I can be, and I want you to know that you can count on me to ensure it continues for at least a couple more twenties. Here's to you and all yours, mate.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Does this picture blow you away as it does me? Does it help put our little ball of warm rock into some sort of perspective? If it doesn't, sing along to this and you'll get it.

I can feel a soap box moment coming on.

Can you conceive of an idea so ludicrous as to suggest that all of this was created by a higher being, for the sole benefit of one species of animal found on some parts of the surface of that little ball of warm rock? Well, you don't need to - someone already has.

When I heard about the photo I thought "Aha. I bet there's a "Thought for the Day" piece to be made out of this.", and I wasn't disappointed. In fact today's TftD wasn't about the HUDF picture, but it was closely related.

I love it when people purloin results and take them entirely out of context to support their belief. This is something bad scientists, many journalists and virtually all politicians do every day. What Elaine Storkey conveniently ignores is that the research she talks about is expressly aimed at taking ideas like "achievement" and "creation" and showing them to be unnecessary. She says

We have been used to thinking that everything came about through a long, slow, leisurely process of barely perceptible change over millions and millions of years. So it comes as something of a shock to find cosmologists now focusing on the first millisecond of the universe.

As if the two are mutually exclusive. In fact the Big Bang has been the focus of much attention for ages. We've known the theory about masses of things happening in the first split second of the universe for a generation. What the current work is aimed at doing (like much of the work of the last centuries) is finding the mechanism for it. Not looking at the face of the "creator" who "achieved" it, but finding a theoretical basis for its autonomy.

After this shaky start, she starts to make some sense:

Belief, not objectivity, is in fact the dimension through which we all live our lives; the taken-for-granted perceptions about reality that lie unchallenged and usually unacknowledged. And those beliefs either see reality in relation to God or they don't; they see the activities of an intelligent designer in the intricate structure of the universe or they see nothing. They find evidence for God in the minute intelligibility of the quark or they find none. And at one level, what excited astronomers see through a radio telescope won't of itself change belief and produce faith in God.

I'm with her here. She seems to accept that belief is just something that occurs in our heads, and bears little relation to reality. But then she goes and spoils it all with:

And yet, it still implies a creation of everything out of nothing. And reports of the whirl of rapid energy at the very beginning of creation, more intense and complete than anything previously envisaged, leave, at the very least, the question of a Creator wide open.

What bollocks. It implies no such thing - in fact it implies the opposite of "a creation of everything out of nothing". And the only reason it leaves the question of a creator wide open is because it has absolutely nothing to do with it.

It's like saying "Adding fluoride to drinking water may or may not decrease the occurrence of tooth decay, but it certainly leaves the question of the Tooth Fairy wide open".

Belief is our invention. It doesn't occur in any other animal, because belief is only possible with our facility for language. It is what we believe that comes directly between us and what is real, and in most cases prevents us from ever seeing what is real.

Our beliefs are our inventions. Belief in God is our invention. God is our invention.

One from the Archive

I was browsing some photos I took ages ago, and loved the contrasting clouds in the upper part of this:

click on photo to enlarge

A lot has been made of the 11 out of 11 awards won by The Return of the King on Sunday, and I've seen and heard a few pieces about how this puts it alongside other movies that also won 11 Oscars�. Ben Hur won 11 out of 12 nominations, and Titanic got 11 out of 14.

First small piece of trivia: only 2 out of the total haul of 33 were awarded for acting (Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith for best actor and best supporting actor in Ben Hur).

What nobody seems to have mentioned is the record of the LOTR project as a whole. I'm not sure to what extent the trilogy can be regarded as a single project, but everyone knows that the clean sweep of the awards this week was for more than just the final instalment. Certainly it was always planned as a single project.

So, a full summary of the LOTR Oscars� Trivia:

Parts I, II and III gained a total of 30 nominations (13 for Part I, 6 for Part II and 11 for Part III).
They won a total of 17 awards (4 for Part I, 2 for Part II and 11 for Part III).
The total number of statuettes handed over was 41.
The same 4-man team won the Visual Effects award three years running, netting 12 of those 41 statuettes.
Howard Shore won the award for Original Score twice (for Parts I and III). I'm pretty sure it was the same tune throughout....
Peter Jackson was nominated 7 times, and won 3 (all for Part III).

All of a sudden, I'm bored with this.

Spring

Squirm, little worm

Neither Here nor There (updated)

Sergeant Pepper

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

One from the Archive

LOTR Oscars�

Toulouse