I've just seen two luxury tour coaches in the same company livery. There is a stylised globe as a logo, above the proud strapline:
“The future of travel in Basingstoke!”
Just imagine it ... starting, perhaps, with a grand air conditioned tour of the roundabouts...
I've just spent some time jointly preparing a history of art lecture. The other person involved chose the subject, decided the direction and thrust of the message to be carried, and will be doing the delivery, but is new to teaching. My responsibility, therefore, was to provide nuts and bolts experience in the construction and management of somebody else's vision, without getting in its way.
It was a richly, surprisingly, and thought provokingly educational experience for me. The approach and material selection differed, in several respects, from those which I would myself have followed. Both from this difference in itself and from my own necessary introspection in ensuring that I didn't pollute it, came a continuous and multidimensional process of self examination. Some of my own views changed, some were reaffirmed, others broadened or refined.
Immensely valuable.
In my "Prostho plus" post, a couple of days ago, I focused on humour – not difficult, in what was, in one of its many dimensions, an openly comic novel.
I wouldn't describe the Bryant and May novels of Christopher Fowler (which I discovered, as with so much else, through JSB) as comic, but they certainly contain immensely comic lines and passages. Here are two of my own favourite examples...
From Seventy senen clocks:
“The coven has a resident numerologist called Nigel. He's very good at Chaos Theory, which is just as well because his maths is terrible...”
and from The water room:
“The last time Bryant had accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.”
In his JSB post "The roots of fiction", yesterday, Ray Girvan mentioned Prostho Plus, a novel by Piers Anthony. The protagonist is Dillingham, a dentist kidnapped by aliens, who tries to buy his freedom by practising his profession on a variety of worlds and life forms.
As I said in a spur of the moment comment to the post, “I loved Piers Anthony at a certain age ... but I went on loving Prostho Plus after I left that age...”
I hadn't reread it in forty years, but still vividly remembered parts of it. I was particularly fond of a scene in which the protagonist attempts to solve the oral hygiene problems of Trach, a vegetarian dinosaur diplomat. He tries cleaning Trach's teeth of food debris by filling his mouth with a quick setting foam. I couldn't remember exact words, but even in paraphrase memory it remained hilarious. At Ray's suggestion, I obtained and read a copy of the novel today and refreshed my memory. Here is the foam tooth cleaning snippet; it still makes me laugh just as much at fifty nine as it did when I was nineteen:
The cast seemed to have set somewhat more securely than anticipated. Dillingham took his little prosthodontic mallet and tapped at the mass, finally dislodging it. "See all that green stuff embedded in it?" he asked the dinosaur, pointing. "That's the left-over greenchomp, all yanked out at once."
Trach pointed in turn. "See those little white bits also embedded? Those are teeth."
Ray Girvan, in a comment to my "Remembrance Day" post on Friday, made several good points with which I agreed, whilst arriving at slightly different behavioural results.
I am, in principle, a pacifist. It's a principle which i believe must always and everywhere be continuously striven for. At the same time, in world where war remains a regrettable reality, I acknowledge that we must decide how to act in the immediate present. I rarely support (indeed, usually vociferously oppose) foreign wars, but back in April I reluctantly supported NATO military operations in the face of threatened genocide in Libya. Three and a bit years ago, I described military forces as being like bacteria: simultaneously both essential to life and the source of many of its problems. Nevertheless, I do not waver from the view that pacifism is the ideal towards which we should always try to steer.
This year, for the first time in a quarter century or so of wearing a white poppy, I encountered aggression because of it. I have always had people disagree with me, sometimes criticise me, but always in a civilised manner – which is fine, and almost always valuable besides. Four days ago, I encountered the first person to tell be that I am "a fucking faggot" and threaten to stuff the white poppy down my throat. While this wasn't a pleasant encounter, I regard the uniqueness of its occurrence as a generally positive aspect of the society within which I live.
There is another side, though ... what my friend Maureen (a one time European Union administrator) yesterday called “poppy fundamentalism”. I like her term better than “poppy fascism” which, in my opinion, devalues language. Whatever we call it, however, the phenomenon is the same: treatment of a (red) poppy on one's lapel as a shibboleth. Either you wear it or you are somehow suspect.
I agree with the British Legion's expressed viewpoint, three years back, that it doesn't have a problem "whether you wear a red one or a white one, both or none at all".
Joan Smith, writing in her Independent on Sunday column today, sums up my view of this: “The dead we honour won our freedom to disagree”.
