Justifier

2002-07-14T23:16:00.000Z

Incompetence

Whew, thought Pat to himself, this looks like a tough crowd. Hitching up his cassock, he sat himself down on the little stool provided, and raised his eyes to meet the General Synod's collective steely gaze with a calculated air of meekness.

"Now, Father Patrick," said the Archbishop of Armagh silkily, "I expect you're wondering why we called you here today."

"Well, you know, I, er, that is to say, yes, I was wondering that, indeed, Your Grace."

"Really," said the Archbishop. "So you wouldn't have even a little clue on the matter. Maybe just a teensy-tiny one?"

"Ooh, that's a difficult question and no mistake, Your Grace, give me a moment to think about it, hmm, would it be something to do with The Job perhaps?"

"The Job. You've hit the nail right on the head there, Father Patrick. Now, since you're on such a roll, perhaps you'd like to hazard another brilliant guess, this time as to whether the holy church is satisfied or dissatisfied with your work."

"Oh dear," said Pat modestly, "I couldn't possibly say, Your Grace, it wouldn't be right for me to blow my own trumpet, though if you want to blow it for me, of course I wouldn't dream of stopping you, go right ahead."

The temperature in the chamber was rapidly dropping from merely chilly to positively arctic. They should probably get some insulation work done, thought Pat, maybe he'd recommend one of his cousins to the synod later.

"Okay. Right. I can see that we're going to have to take this right from the top," said the Archbishop, doing his best to retain his composure. "Could you tell all of Our Graces what task it was you were hired to carry out?"

"Ah, an easy one at last, Your Grace. That would be dealing with your little infestation problem, in layman's terms, ridding Ireland of snakes."

"Just so, Father Patrick. And could you explain to us the method by which you planned to effect the extermination of these vermin?"

"Well, Your Grace, after brainstorming a number of possibilities, and bearing in mind that your snake is a tricky little customer that just isn't going to be sorted out by half measures, I decided to introduce the African mongoose to Ireland."

"An inspired solution, Father Patrick. It certainly sent the snakes packing, with their tails between their... well, suffice to say we didn't have a snake problem any more. But presumably you noticed that your sudden insertion of many thousand hungry mongeese to the Irish ecosystem was having unforeseen side effects."

"Mongooses, Your Grace. Well, yes it's true, once all these mongooses had run out of snakes they started on the small local fauna, mice and rats and hedgehogs, maybe a few cats and little dogs, that sort of thing..."

The Archbishop of Dublin could contain himself no longer. "And babies in their crib, Patrick, you blundering idiot!" he yelled, his face red as an apple.

"Well, what you must understand is that your average mongoose is incapable of distinguishing between one small squeaky thing and the next, I'm sure they didn't mean to upset anybody. Anyway, I had a back-up plan for exactly this eventually."

"An even more ingenious one, Father Patrick," said Armagh, pushing his Dubliner counterpart back down into his seat. "Come on then, I want to hear you explain it in your own words."

"It's very simple really - to give the mongooses a taste of their own medicine, we imported to Ireland some mated pairs of, er, the Alaskan wolverine."

"Right. Make sure you're getting Father Patrick's conf... Father Patrick's account down there exactly as it's coming out of his mouth," said the head Archbishop to the scribe frantically scribbling behind him. Turning back to Pat, he continued: "I think we're getting to the crux of the matter now, Patrick. We asked you to rid our country of snakes. Snakes, you imbecile! Do you realise that the very rare Irish elk is now extinct due to your interventions? Has it sunk into your thick skull that there will never again be bears in Ireland thanks to your marauding wolverines? Well? Have you anything, anything at all to say in your defence."

Pat took a deep breath. "Well, Your Grace, I know it looks bad, but I'm not the sort of priest who shirks taking responsibility for his actions, and I've already taken steps to rectify the wolverine problem."

"Steps?" An expression of abject despair had fallen upon the Archbishop's features.

"Yes indeed. You see, I racked my brains to think what might be able to take on a pack of wolverines and win, and eventually I hit upon what I reckon is a foolproof plan - varanus komodoensis, the komodo dragon. I've already released..."

"Enough!" bellowed the Archbishop. "You may be blissfully unaware of the gravity of your situation, Father Patrick, but I assure you that we have a crack team of bishops combing the Scriptures for any little loophole that will enable us to burn you at the stake. You will be informed of your fate in due course, in the meantime, get out of my sight, you utter nincompoop!"

His face a mask of absolute injury that would not have disgraced a kicked puppy, Pat stood stiffly and hurried out of the room. Once out in the open, he breathed a huge sigh and wondered no one ever seemed to understand how good his intentions always were.

Suddenly he was hit by an absolute brainwave. He had in his pocket the perfect peace offering - a cute little brightly-coloured insect hailing from foreign parts, just the thing to cheer up a population currently too scared to set foot out of doors lest they be ripped apart by wild animals. He dug his hand deep inside his cassock, found the matchbox, and opening it smiled at the natty yellow and black stripes of the beetles within. The children especially would love them. Trotting over to a nearby field, he knelt down and, with utmost care, freed leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado beetle, into the Irish wild...

2002-02-20T18:54:00.000Z

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. I just feel I need my life to regain some sort of *shape* before I write about it, you know?

In the meantime, I feel I owe you something, so here's the opener I wrote for an online debate.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls (as long as your fake IDs are in order), This House Believes That It Will Have Another Pint.

Ordinarily such a motion would be passed in approximately thirty seconds flat, and we could all repair to the Three Chambers Bar and table some serious motions (elbow on table, pintglass to mouth, pintglass back to table). Apparently, though, three of our number are vetoing this course of action. They say they have compelling arguments against it. I shall only say that, if I were he sort of man who kept a miserly watch on whose round it is, it would seem like a very long time since Ghoti, Hazard or Phyphor last got the drinks in.

I have to say that the Opposition's position is either unusually frivolous, dangerously radical, or both. After all, it flies in the face of the opinion of all the greatest philosophers the world has ever known. Take, for instance, Aristotle, that well known "bugger for the bottle".

Aristotle proposed that there were four "aitia" or causes of a thing or an action: the material, the formal, the efficient and the final. These four causes must be present for a thing to come into being; if these four causes *are* present, it is difficult to see how a thing would not come into being.

The material cause of having a pint is the delicious liquid itself, with its lovely golden or nut-brown colour, topped off with an aesthetically pleasing head of creamy foam. Faced with such blandishments, the human appetite naturally finds it difficult to resist.

The formal cause of having a pint is the measure in question. A pint is the perfect amount of beer, balancing ease of consumption, portability, affordable price and alcohol content in one convenient package. "Another pint" is exactly what we should be having, no more and certainly no less.

The efficient cause of having a pint is that a pint is *designed* to be had. The explicit purpose of a pint is that it should be drunk, i.e. that we should have it. What kind of topsy-turvy world would it be where people failed to drink their pints? The breweries would go out of business, for a start, at tremendous cost to the British economy.

The final cause of having a point is, of course, an extremely pleasant state of inebriation.

Aristotle, using the action of "having a pint" as an exemplar for his theory of aitia, observed that, blimey, philosophy was thirsty work, how's about blowing this classroom and heading down the pub, Alexander, we could talk about more light-hearted things than philosophy, like what laws we'd make if someone put us in charge of the whole world.

Of course, this is just the classical position on having another pint. But if the Opposition really want me to outline more modern refinements, such as Descartes' Oinological Argument, or Kant's Categorical Inebriative, I will be only to happy to oblige.

Come on then, Opposition, let's see what you've got! And if you could make it snappy, that'd be a bonus - we want to get out of here in good time for last orders after all...

2002-02-11T17:31:00.000Z

Bleurgh. You'd think that a fortnight of worklessness would be a great opportunity to get some really useful things done. Sadly, what with all the applications and the fretting, it doesn't seem to have worked out that way. Poor little neglected blog.

These are some seriously bad times for the web development industry, it would seem. Two or three years ago, me being out of work was a cue for half a dozen phone calls each morning from pestering recruitment consultants refusing to take no for an answer. Now, I've sent out my CV (with two or three years more experience on it, of course) to at least three dozen agencies, and gotten only a couple of callbacks, of which nothing much seems to come. Everyone wants senior personnel, no-one wants junior or mid-level people. So if you were already earning £30k plus when the bottom fell out, you're fine, otherwise, dropped like a hot potato!

Still, I do have an interview tomorrow at a very splendid looking company for a Technical Writer position, which would be great to get. I have the funny feeling that the fact that I know one of their people from university (and still play cards with him occasionally) may have contributed to getting me the audition, though. Nepotism, it's the only way to get ahead in this game any more. Anyway, wish me luck.

In other news, this is now officially my favourite joke in the world:

Q. Why is the alligator so ornery?
A. Because of its oversized medulla oblongata.

Maybe it's just me. Did you get sent that picture of a racecar, along with instructions to listen to the accompanying sound file, and if you laughed it was proof that you were completely insane? I didn't notice the instructions, and looked at the picture on a computer without speakers attached, and collapsed into hysterics. I'm not sure if that proves I'm insane or not.

2002-01-29T01:09:00.000Z

"Be careful what you wish for, it might come true."

Or, alternatively, "ask and thou shalt receive."

As of 5.30pm this Monday, I am no longer a gainfully employed person.

At the moment I'm feeling quite positive about this. Then again, I only have a couple of weeks before the money runs out...

2002-01-28T01:07:00.000Z

At a party I was at last night, the question was posed: what comic-book superpower would you have if you could have any single one you liked? (I'd like to hear your answers, if you have time.)

I, true to form, came up with an instantaneous silly answer: that I'd like to be able to shrink myself down to tiny size, like The Atom, due to being tired of being tall, after all these years of banging my head on lintels, tree-branches, low flying aircraft, etc.

I guess it would be nice to be able to hide from view, to slip into the gaps between things and simply observe for a while... but I don't think that's my real answer, just yet another deflection of a tricky question with facetious.

I was thinking about the power of being able to stop time today, to continue the theme of this entry. If we could freeze personal time, such that the whole world ceased to move around us, and had all the time in the world to do things we wanted to do, without fear of aging, how much would we use it? I think at first it would be a lot of fun, you could read all those books and hear all that music that you'd never otherwise have gotten around to, but I think ultimately you'd get bored, there'd be too many bad books, and only a certain amount of music that you *really* like. You could learn a lot of stuff in your "time out", but at some point you have to stop learning and start living... I don't know, I think most of the good bits of life happen when time is ticking by, when you're with people (what's the fun of a world where everyone else is frozen) and on a clock. When you have to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment out of an evening because tomorrow morning it'll be gone forever. And I wouldn't really want to hide from growing older in frozen time, since to age is to develop as a person. We need to have a future to contain our aspirations, we need to have a past to put our mistakes behind us. Even at death's door, I don't know that I'd want to delay the end inevitably, since what lies beyond this world may be the greatest adventure of all, for all we know.

Everything flows, everything moves on, no river or person is ever the same from one moment to the next. Crystallising what ought to be fluid is a fool's errand, if you freeze a perfect sunset you'll only get bored of it after a while. Transience is very very sad, but it's also a wake-up call, teaching you to discriminate because there isn't enough time to waste on cheap rubbish, teaching you to live now because, like so much dying around us all the time, you may not be around to live tomorrow.

Hmm. It's interesting that whatever I start writing these days ends up being about making the most of one's time. Maybe if I psyche myself up enough I will stop just dreaming of a better, more productive life and start doing things that'll make it happen. Or maybe I'll just wait until I'm hit by a meteorite or bitten by a radioactive spider and the hard task of making my days interesting is done for me...

2002-01-25T01:08:00.000Z

The end of January is in sight at last. It's been a horrible bleak month, in this small corner of human experience at least, and I'm filled with yearning for spring. (Autumn's my favourite season, but right now, spring would definitely do.)

I am having one of those months where I look at the state of my finances and fall into despair: my expenditures are well in excess of my income, and as anyone who has read David Copperfield will know, that way lies misery. Glum thoughts fill my head, such as the nagging doubt that settling my mountainous credit card debt really would require six months-odd of joyless austerity. Not a pleasant realisation to kick off a new year with.

I need a windfall, or at least a payrise, and neither looks likely to happen right now. *Eventually* I'll have paid off all my debts, but by then maybe I'll be too old to travel the world, or be in a band or be an angry young artist, and I'll look at my remaining options and realise that the only course of action is to carry on working behind a desk until retirement because there's nothing much better to do any more, and won't that be sad?

At least I have some nice toys to help me forget my slavish life (thou hast conquered, consumerism!). RW's "Poses", Mull Historical Society's "Loss", Stereo Total's "Musique Automatique", and Rammstein's "Mutter" are new recruits to our CD collection this week; last week I bought "The Eyre Affair", "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and a couple of Lemony Snicket books, not that I ever get round to reading half the books I buy, but I think I'd feel bad if I didn't buy them anyway; my beautiful red electric guitar "The Frail" has been retrieved from Oxford and had lots of Magnetic Fields songs strummed artlessly across her neck; "The Longest Journey", a nice little PC adventure game, came from Oxford with her and is good stuff; I'm in an interesting debate on my BBS ("This House Believes That The Against Team Will Win This Debate"), doing the Quick-Shift writing project on Sunday, and starting our own Chapters clone (except for people who aren't infuriatingly talented) before the end of the month.

A thousand ways to spend my time. But I still feel I'm frittering myself away, one way or another. Need a new job, need to meet more people, I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish something would happen.

And I know I should be able to make it happen for myself, but maybe some of us just aren't competent to take control of our lives and sort them out? Or if there is a way, why haven't I seen it yet?

I'm going to stop now, before all this low moaning convinces people that my blog is haunted by a ghost, and the exorcists get called in, holy water and censer smoke and Latin incantations all over the place. 'Night!

2002-01-22T14:43:00.000Z

Rufus Wainwright is now on my music wishlist, but that doesn't mean I don't hate him:

He immersed himself in Montreal’s café culture, writing and performing songs and, as he puts it, “partying my ass off.” He was also experiencing tremendous creative growth. “I’d be hanging out in my bathrobe all day, stinky, just writing,” he remembers. “And my mom allowed me to do this—as long as I was writing songs. She said, ‘As long as you’re seriously working on music, I’ll support you. Don’t get a job, because if you work, it will crush you.’”

No-one saved me from being crushed by work.

2002-01-22T10:15:00.000Z

Of course, the whole thing is academic if I can't get online in the evenings due to my beloved housemate pre-emptively monopolising the phoneline. Bah!

There are obvious limitations on how much I can add during work hours, so I've decided to take a leaf out of Meg's book and conduct a survey, thus cunningly putting the ball back in your court, dear readers.

Today's hot survey topic is: what is the worst song you can think of to be played at someone's wedding? I'll start you off with Be Sweet by the very great Afghan Whigs.

2002-01-21T11:18:00.000Z

I know what you're all thinking: this blog has gone the way of any New Year's Resolution. An initial burst of enthusiastic action, tailing off to sporadic mewling excuses and ultimately leaving nothing behind except a nagging sense of guilt.

You out there, you with the fantastic regularly-updated, consistently-high-quality blog. How do you organise/motivate yourself to ensure that you get done what needs to be done? Were you ever approached by a Brad Pitt lookalike, informing you that if in six months time you hadn't updated your blog on a daily basis, you'd be dead?

2002-01-16T10:18:00.000Z

I'm still alive, it's just that Blogger ate a thousand words of my insane ramblings when I tried to post last. Bah!

In the meantime, this could be fun:

Join QUICK-SHIFT

31 hours of timed, responsorial writing online during the last weekend in January. Writers gather in the trAce chatroom and work in groups of 4 for 90 minutes shifts. Each writer is given a maximum of 7 minutes in which to write (and proof-read) a piece in response to the segment just posted. No restrictions on genre. Anyone interested in participating is invited to sign up in the January 2002 Writing Event planning conference in the trAce discussion area or to e-mail Andrew Oldham by January 20, 2002.

2002-01-14T02:20:00.000Z

I'd like to be able to say I didn't waste this weekend, but I did. Squandered utterly.

And it's all because I left my mobile phone in my office on Friday. If I hadn't, maybe someone would have called and gotten us out of bed before 2 pm on Saturday. As it was, not only were we uncontactable by friends eager to drag us along on exciting adventures in London town, but, all their numbers being stored in my little phone, I couldn't get in touch with them either. About 5 years or so ago, I had dozens of useful phone numbers committed to memory: nowadays, only those of my mother, and the emergency services.
What if all mobile phones suddenly stopped working? We'd be trapped, totally and dreadfully alone, in islands of our own indolent making, with no way of finding one another ever again. Mark my words, they're making us more and more reliant on them, and once their target of global mobile-dependence has been reached, some sort of vast ransom will be demanded, and we'll have no choice but to pay.

We spent most of the day severely depressed in our technological exile.

In the end we decided to make the most of our travelcards and headed off to Tower Records, in search of anything by Stereo Total or Lovage, as recommended by Grant Morrison ("smart-aleck ironic-romantic lyrics that say something to me about my life" - exactly what floats my boat, especially when placed in the illustrious company of Pulp and Momus). Didn't find them in Tower, which was probably just as well, as paying £17 for a CD is nobody's idea of fun, but walked away with sale-priced Bennet, Manic Street Preachers and Dandy Warhols as a reasonable compromise.

Scuffing through the racks of Tower, my already maudlin mood plunged to new depths, sparked off by a lack of ability to discover any trace that Goodbye Mister MacKenzie had ever existed on this earth, of all things. For all I know, that Bennet CD, slashed down to £2.99 as a final bid by Tower to save themselves the cost of its incineration, is the last Bennet CD that will ever be seen on the shelves of a major UK chain, before they go the way of Mr MacKenzie.

The eighties are dead and gone, my friends, and the nineties will soon follow them. Sure, we'll still be able to get the "critic's choice" of the best dozen or so bands of that decade, in much the same way as we'll always be able to buy Beatles albums: but the little bands, the interesting mavericks, anything that didn't sell out sufficiently to make the top ten, they'll all be history. They will exist only as vague melancholies in the hearts of the fanboys and girls who once loved them to bits, but then dumped them when fashion changed and something more immediate came along.

We're young, until quite recently the whole world revolved around us; but suddenly we've been replaced, and the sentimental trappings of our world are out of print, deleted, surplus to modern requirements. Why can't I find a Goodbye Mr MacKenzie album? Why is it impossible to get hold of Press Gang on DVD? Why has no-one collected Doom Patrol into graphic novel format, when it's one of the best things Grant Morrison ever did? Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, great book, now out of print and, I'm told, available only via an American mail-order firm for circa forty quid. I thought so much of that book I gave three copies of it away so that other people would have to read it. To my great regret today.

You may scoff at this. The Eighties, you'll say, are more or less intact. It's only the terminal no-hopers and second-stringers that have been lost to posterity, and good riddance. But, let me ask you this. The songs that your parents adored in the fifties, the ones your grandparents worshipped in the twenties or thirties or whatever, how many of them can you name? How easy would it be to go out and buy the soundtrack to those decades now?

I'm really worried that one day, I'll be an old man in a rocking chair, and a half-forgotten snatch of The Smiths or Nirvana will come into my head, and I'll know that no-one nowadays would know who those people were or what they meant for a while. Lost, like tears in rain.

We should look after one another more than we do. Inside our heads are treasure houses. Inside our heads is the only place treasure is guaranteed imperishable.

2002-01-11T12:51:00.000Z

I know it's the cheap and obvious riposte, but has anyone ever applied the capalert test to the various books of the Bible?

Wanton violence, impudence, sex/homosexuality, drugs/alcohol, offense to God, suicide/murder, it's all in there. (Especially as capalert doesn't care whether violence, impudence and offensiveness are portrayed as "cool", or as villainous qualities: the objection seems to be that they are portrayed at all.)

2002-01-11T00:57:00.000Z

Thank gracious God that the end of the working week is in sight. A lazy fortnight off over Yule threw me completely out of kilter, and getting through the year's first full fiveday has been a titanic struggle. Friday is normally when the pressure lifts a bit, so, yes, almost there now.

Ought I to feel guilty for making a song and dance about - *gasp* - feeling ambivalent about my job? It's hardly the stuff of great tragedy, after all. England isn't mine, it doesn't owe me a living, 50 hours-odd out of 168 leaves me plenty of time to play, it's not even as if I commit much concentration or exertion to those 50 hours, and I get paid enough to cover my living costs, my horrific burden of debt repayment and still have a little left over for toys. Boo £$€%ing hoo, right? Shouldn't I be reading the increasingly traumatic news content of my favourite newspaper (the Guardian, fact fans) and realising that I'm luckier than most of the planet?

Well, I have to say I'm not sure about that. First of all, the news that our twenty-first century media bombard us with is *unfair*. Never before now in human history has it been incumbent upon a human being to care about every single child lost, be it in Kirkcaldy or Kandahar. Technology has shrunk the entire globe to the size of a television/monitor screen, and so we're meant to concern ourselves with the whole world, now entirely contained within our living room. Stop! This is an *illusion*. Disbelieve it!

Okay, so it's somehow touching that in the New World Order all life is sacred, so much so that, e.g., it's now illegitimate for a civilised nation to harm a hair of the enemy's head during wartime. But I think we lose as well as gain from this global perspective. We sit in our chairs practically paralysed as we are drenched in news, become saturated it, feel our heads spin under the burden of a gamut of statistics from death tolls from natural disasters in remote parts of the world to the inner leg measurements of entertainment celebrities. You have to be an amateur expert on everything these days to make it; a new generation is rising that claims it can't be bothered to read books, but it's still impossible to affect that you have no strong opinion about Afghanistan or paedophile registers.

As the world has become smaller, so has each individual's significance within that world. We have no "slow time" for contemplation, so we fail to evolve as people, so we fail to truly come to terms with the increasingly bewildering amount of information we're given to assimilate. Not enough time to formulate your own opinions? Find a media appendage that broadly chimes with your own intuitions and allow them to provide off-the-peg opinions for you. All the government to take an increasing level of control over your life, because they're the only ones that *maybe* are on top of the information avalanche that threatens constantly to bury you. Yes, we are ordered to care about war in Indonesia and famine in Africa and earthquakes in America, but since we can do precisely nothing about any of these things - what to do but suffer a crisis of self-worth and accept a role as a tiny cog in the vast machine?

I'm not happy about that. So why not be selfish for a change? Why not say, this is my life, this little bit here, and I will not be distracted by anything that does not directly concern me? If everyone deals with their own problems (without screwing over other people in the process, for a change) won't we end up with hardly any problems? It's when people hand over responsibility for solving their problems to higher powers that everything goes terribly, terribly wrong. So, yes, let's recompartmentalise a world of increasing vastness back down to a local, community-based level, where an individual actually stands a chance of having his voice heard, being able to get a fair deal, being able to take pride in his work and his life.

September 11th was a tragedy. But so is Death of a Salesman. And I suspect it's much more realistic that I should take steps to ensure that I don't waste my life in a job I hate, than that I don't build hubristic and structurally fragile skyscrapers while simultaneously alienating the Middle East with my foreign policy.

There are presumably massive holes in this argument, and probably I will have completely altered my position by about next Tuesday, but for now it'll do. Let it stand.

2002-01-10T15:21:00.000Z

An extract from a very special blog, belonging to two (four?) of my friends:

Friday 30th November
We were both woken up at 06:30 by a loud knock at the door. We were told there had been a sudden change in Beatrice's condition and that we should come down to the SCBU. I was sleeping in my clothes and just pulled my shoes on. Dawn was helped into a wheelchair. I felt suddenly cold and scared and Dawn was crying. It seemed to take forever to get there.

We arrived in the intensive care room of the SCBU to see four people around Bea's incubator. One of them saw us enter and came to meet us but the others were too busy to even look up. "There's been a very serious change in Bea's condition," the nurse explained "she has had a severe bleed in her lungs. We're doing everything we can."

As soon as I heard those last words I felt sick inside. I knew what this meant, as Dawn had anticipated all the way down. We moved to the side of the incubator to see a scene weirdly familiar from TV medical dramas. The consultant was very calm, but moving very quickly and speaking in a very clear, crisp voice with no hint of warmth in it. The midwife was talking to me - offering gentle support - but I couldn't hear her at all. I was listening to what the others were saying, whilst they tried to help Bea. I didn't understand all of their quick verbal shorthand, but I could get enough to tell what was happening. This was very bad.

After a few seconds I looked up at Bea's monitor and felt suddenly cold all over. Her blood oxygen saturation was down to 35 (should be in the 90s). Also, it was dropping fast. I forced myself to breathe and began to cry, Dawn was holding my hand and shaking. We looked at Bea and she seemed very pale suddenly. She was moving in a panic, trying to breathe but failing. The consultant was repeatedly switching between sucking more blood from her lungs and ventilating them with oxygen.

It wasn't working. Bea's bleeding was just too bad, even though they'd given her something to increase her clotting, it wasn't anything like enough. I watched her oxygen go down - 30, 25, 20, 15, 10... At the same time, I felt all the strength drain out of me. I had my arms around Dawn in her wheelchair and we could feel what was happening just from each other shaking. Finally, I had to say it, "She's dying". Dawn simply responded "I know".

Oxygen: 10, 5, 0. So this is it... I thought. Dawn and I began to talk to Beatrice. We told her about all the friends she had out there in the world, who she hadn't ever met. We told her about her family. We told her how much we loved her and how she had to try to breathe.

Still 0. The consultant and the nurses were still carrying on, carefully injecting miniscule quantities of drugs, sucking more and more blood from her lungs, giving her more ventilation in between. It wasn't working. Dawn and I held each other tighter and carried on talking to Bea, there wasn't anything else we could do. I was shaking all over and very cold. Then I looked at the other readings on Bea's monitor. Her blood pressure was down. And her heart was slowing.

A part of me wanted to leave, then, but I felt I had to stay and watch the end. Even through my tears I could see her heart rate drop to 60, then 40. Then it became irregular, the sparse peaks in the graph of varying heights. The computer calculating the rate became confused as a result and the number flashed between 10, 200, 60 and 0.

A gentle voice and a hand on my shoulder caught my attention. "Do you have a religion ?" I couldn't talk, I just shook my head. "Would you like Beatrice baptised ?" I looked back to the monitor, there were long flat sections appearing on the heart line. I managed to say 'no' and Dawn shook her head. I took my eyes away from the monitor to focus on Bea. She had stopped moving now and was very, very pale. The doctor and the nurses carried on working, their faces set and unreadable.

I don't know how long it was before I looked up at the monitor again. Holding onto Dawn and mourning for Beatrice I lost track of time. When I did look up it was only because I had decided I could no longer put off seeing that flat purple line stretching from one side to the other. But that's not what I saw - there was a faint heartbeat still and although it was slow, it was regular. A yellow figure below caught my eye: 10, 12, 13... Bea was getting a tiny bit of oxygen. I shook Dawn's shoulder and pointed to the monitor.

Over the next hour, we watched Bea's oxygen saturation creep slowly back to the low 90s. Every so often it would slide back a few points and we would think it was all over. Finally she settled down at a fairly acceptable level. Slowly, we began to move again, stretching and looking around. I looked back at Ryan, feeling suddenly guilty at not having thought about him in the meantime. He was sleeping peacefully.

Eventually we found the courage to talk to the consultant about Bea's condition now. It wasn't good. Yes, she was getting some oxygen, but the ventilator was suppling 100% pure oxygen to her lungs, not air. Also, the ventilator was set to a pressure more than twice the normal for inhalation, to push her lungs open. She was on a drug to keep her paralysed to prevent her own efforts at breathing from causing problems. And she was on a lot of morphine. Also, her blood had lost most of its alkalinity, indicating she was in a bad way inside. We didn't much care about any of that at the time, all we wanted to know is what were her chances. "She has a chance now" said the consultant, but didn't elaborate.

Over the course of the day, the oxygen setting on Bea's ventilator was slowly turned down. By the time we went to bed at almost midnight, she was down to a 75% oxygen mix and her blood had improved almost miraculously to a near normal acidity. Dawn overheard the nurse calling through the result to the consultant who had been there in the morning, "Now don't fall off your chair, but Beatrice's acidity is down to..."

We didn't sleep well that night, but by the morning Bea was still slowly improving.

Once we had the courage, we asked if there would be any lasting damage to Bea from the oxygen deprivation. We were told it might have affected the development of some of her organs, so they would have to watch them all closely. What about brain damage ? We were told that she might be fine, or there might be some short term side effects. What about long term ? "It is possible, but with luck she should be fine." That was good enough for us.

Later, we found out that there had been a point where the consultant herself had not expected Bea to survive. Now, her chances aren't looking too bad.

If you were upset by Gordon Brown's recent tragic loss, you could do worse than cheer yourself up with a happier tale of premature babies unfolding here.

2002-01-10T10:43:00.000Z

I admit it, I panicked.

To submit a blog to The Ageless Project you have to provide ten keywords "based on your personal interests, or features of your site, or whatever". The best I could come up with was:

polytheism

blasphemy

sculpture

Sunday-trading

unfilial

murder

adultery

theft

perjury

covetousness

Why is there no decent word in the English language to convey "total contempt for one's parents and everything their generation stands for"? I'm sure it occurs often enough to merit one, at least among teenagers.

2002-01-09T20:52:00.000Z

Ooh, commenting facilities. Hopefully an endless sea of zeroes will free me from the delusion that I have, or could aspire to, a readership.

The next thing you know, I'll be working out how to include images.

That's me, or was me once. The bloom has faded now, I think.

2002-01-09T13:14:00.000Z

<Tuesday>

If there's one thing that's getting on my wick these days it's negative attitude.

I'm doing my best not to be part of the problem, though it's an effort as negativity comes very readily to me in certain moods. I was proud of myself last night - as a trailer for Black Hawk Down on the house TV burgeoned into a debate on the merits of Ridley Scott, whom I consider to be an overrated hack with the *possible* exception of Blade Runner, my housemate pronounced with great finality that Gladiator was an amazing movie.

Now, a nasty retort rose instinctively to my lips, to the effect that actually in my opinion it was a load of overblown bunkum, a pseudo-historical retread of Saving Private Ryan, one good battle sequence to grab the attention and then hours and hours of all sorts of unjustifiable arse-numbing nonsense. But I bit it back. I did. I clearly wasn't going to convert my housemate to my point of view, especially in the space of time allotted for an advert break in Enterprise. Even a terse comment like "actually, I disagree" would have been purposeless. Someone enjoys a film that I do not. There is absolutely no reason for me to pollute their enjoyment with my non-enjoyment - a perverse delight in chiselling away at other people's happiness is not a good trait to own.

I've even stopped baiting people over the fact that I have hardly anything good to say about either Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. That's how much of a new leaf I've turned over!

I have a very close friend, though, that is winding me up something rotten with his negativity. After taking even a mild dislike to something that someone else is enjoying, he'll spend literally hours carping on the subject. We saw Mulholland Drive at the same time, I really liked it, he had mixed feelings. Our positions on the matter having been established, I didn't really see the virtue of him spending the rest of the weekend repeating to people how he'd like to tie David Lynch to a chair and torture him for every bit of the film he found incomprehensible. We play on the PlayStation, he only really likes Grand Theft Auto 3, whereas I enjoy the occasional game of Silent Hill 2 or Tony Hawks 3. If I play either of those with him in the room, I get a running commentary about how the graphics are cheap, the game design is unforgivably shoddy, the game I'm enjoying is, I quote, "a tawdry piece of crap".

The worst thing is that this sort of ambient nagging is incredibly contagious. It would be really hard to enjoy a film if the person next to you was yawning theatrically, looking at his watch, drumming his fingers on the armrest: human beings are pack animals at heart, and in moments of indecision they look for someone authoritative to tell them which way to go. Even during the dissection of a film that happens in the street outside the cinema, a loudly bellowed opinion can answer someone's question "did I enjoy that film?" for them.

I think it's unforgivable to try to persuade someone that they didn't enjoy the last two hours of their life, frankly.

The picture I'm painting of my friend here is probably unnecessarily black. He's a fine fellow in most respects, and probably thinks of his commentaries of negativity as entertaining wit. But he gets on my nerves with them so much! And I have told no-one this information, except you, my dear secret blog.

2002-01-09T13:13:00.000Z

<Tuesday>

Ah, the self-righteous fury of that last entry. Nothing quite like it for diverting attention away from a multitude of sins.

My company is not so much evil as phenomenally hapless. Arriving in this morning, what should I find but that we've been burgled, for the fourth time since I joined last September. Various bits of expensive kit are missing, and my own PC has been peeled open like a banana to get at the processor and memory chips inside. (As the IT guy later remarked, it would have been much less effort just to slip the case off than physically bend the metal in this way, but I guess the criminal element has an aesthetic to maintain).

As it will later turn out, the malefactors were spotted leaving the scene of the crime across the rooftops (by a guy who lives on our fire escape and makes cathedrals out of old cigarette packets, if I eavesdropped correctly), and they and their loot apprehended by the police, so our losses are only temporary... but it still means an incredibly boring day of sitting around doing nothing for me, probably for the best actually, after two nights of staying up blogging into the small hours.

I read Metro from cover to cover and back again, buy a Guardian and do as much of the crossword as I can (a typically obscure Bunthorne - is "cotta" a word? "evagation"? "hallali"? - maybe I was clutching at straws), waste time playing the dreadful game called Bugdom on a spare Mac. Every so often I get roped in to perform some menial task, lugging equipment up and down many flights of stairs, or scrubbing Macs clean after the police have covered them with silvery fingerprinting gunk. Such is my glorious life as a web development professional.

I want to go up onto the roof and look for the cigarette packet engineer quite badly now.

2002-01-08T19:48:00.000Z

<Monday>

I was on the verge of mutiny at work today!

To set the scene, I work as a developer for a small London design house. I say "small", but at the point at which I started working for them, they might have claimed to be "medium-sized" and not been laughed at. A few weeks after I started working for them, though, I got in one morning to find most of my colleagues on the way out - in order to cope with the harsh exigencies of the post-September-11th marketplace, all non-essential personnel, a full 50% of the company, were being let go at once. Leaving, to all intents and purposes, an extended board of directors plus a couple of developers to get the spadework done.

There's something very depressing about coming on board a company specifically because it's large and thriving (I was made redundant from a struggling company of 5 earlier in the year, and craved something different), only to find... it isn't. Add to that the fact that I signed up for the minimum personally acceptable salary on the basis that they *guaranteed* me a pay review after three months (a verbal contract broken), and the growing sensation that I'm just there to finish off the ngoing projects before being dumped without reward or thanks, and you have a working environment that doesn't exactly fire me with enthusiasm.

So, today, the job at hand is to meet the requirements of a client who wants to upload timetables to their site, in Excel document format. Simple enough to sort out an uploader - but what if the end user doesn't have Microsoft Office? Might not be able to open the document. What we need to do, says the senior developer from whom I take my marching orders, is spend six days handcrafting complex HTML templates that will read and relocated the data from the uploaded spreadsheets.

No problem, say I, look, you can save your Excel document as a perfectly good HTML file without all that faffing around, like so.

Ah, says senior developer, but the client doesn't know that, and if we do it that way, that's five thousand pounds we can't sting them for.

So, let me get this straight, I'm meant to spend a mind-numbing week and a half (for make no mistake, this sort of duty falls automatically to me) painstakingly constructing dozens of HTML tables by hand, there being no actual need to do so, to make a fat profit for a company that has shown precisely no loyalty to me? The main potential benefit, it transpires, is that it may buy the development team a stay of execution, if the continued ineptitude of the sales and marketing people fails to find us any other paying work to do.

I sat there fuming, seriously considering the pros and cons of various dramatic courses of action. Fortunately, I discovered that six timetable templates would actually have to be more like fifteen, and no way would it be possible to sucker the client into buying that, so less unethical options had to be mooted. But it was looking grim for a couple of hours, I can tell you.

I'm the very opposite of a model employee. I'm a daydreamer, a starer out of windows; my attention deficit is often a matter for serious concern. But I *want* to do the right thing: and I hope I manage it at least some of the time.

2002-01-08T19:27:00.000Z

So, how did I arrive in this strange neck of the woods, and what prompted me to set up shop here?

A long long time ago a man named Dan (a fellow classical scholar, a friend of a friend, and an ex of an ex) compiled a list of every e-mail address he could think of, and a few more besides, and used them to convey tidings of a mysterious project called upsideclown to the four corners of the net. And since I am a sucker for circuses, I made it my policy to attend this seven-ring extravaganza at least once in a while, though my visits gradually became more and more infrequent as a natural consequence of the laws of entropy.

Quite recently, in a fit of nostalgia no doubt, I made another flying visit to upsideclown, and in an atypical moment of perceptiveness espied a piece of enigmatic marginalia: tiny letters to one side of the page spelling upsideclone. "I never noticed that being there before," I mused to myself. "Curiouser and curiouser!"

I did not follow the link at once - before that happened, there was the adventure that ensued from my following a white rabbit down its hole, and the one that took place in a wintry land behind the fur coats and mothballs in an aged relative's wardrobe, and the escapade springing from my theft of a never-ending book from a local antiquarian. But adventures will always out, and at long last I found myself clicking on that link and being plunged into a vivid cavalcade of fantastic wor(l)ds.

To cut a long story short, upside clone led me by chance to kevan.org, which naturally paved the way to the dark delights of RavenBlog. Retracing my steps, I developed a definite taste for the exceedingly wonderful Wherever You Are, which begat Not So Soft and Distant Sun and... oh, there are several very promising routes through the human labyrinth that begin Wherever You Are, but I've used up all the twine Ariadne gave me for this entry already.

What I mean, dispensing with superfluous language, is that a serendipitous mouse-click recently introduced me to a culture and community I hadn't realised existed, but was overjoyed to discover. Consider the vast scale of the world-wide web and it is easy to comprehend that there *must* be intelligence and inventiveness and passion out there in virtual space. And then... needles and haystacks spring to mind. For years I couldn't find anything like what I was looking for - then all of a sudden I stumble upon a site that electrifies like a bolt of lightning, and not only that but it links to other treasure troves, which link to more. I feel like I'm that sparrow, who has for his whole life known only the cold night, suddenly flown through a window into a lighted, heated room.

Or maybe I'm just a guy who's rather too effusive under the influence of "the shock of the new". You'll have to wait and see. Certainly the troughs of disillusionment into which I later plunge are never shallow.

In all seriousness, if you're reading this, and I have no idea if anyone is reading this at all, I hope you'll forgive me my rough-and-clumsiness, and maybe even help point me in the right direction for producing something worthy of sharing conceptual space with the masterworks already out there. I solemnly pledge, for a start, that pretty soon I'll stop writing about writing blogs, and actually start writing a blog. I suspect it's advisable.

Hmm, I wonder what it takes to get a commenting facility to work in this here town?

2002-01-07T01:22:00.000Z

Well, that plan went rather badly agley. Shouldn't have let those mice co-design it, I suppose.

Our eyes opened exactly ten hours later, to discover that it was 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. Which would have been bad enough even if we weren't meant to be at the Glassblower's Arms by Piccadilly Circus at that very time, to drink in celebration of a friend's 31st. People with an ounce of efficiency to them would probably have managed to stride through the pub doors as the clocks struck three, but somehow we managed to eke our ablutions and preparations out to nearer four, and then narrowly missed the tube train at Goldhawk Road... so it's after 4.30 before our day can be said to have started, in any real sense of the word.

At the pub we drink for a while, lose money on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for a while, and talk rubbish about nothing of any great consequence. After a couple of hours, the plan is to move on to the Tokyo Kitchen for Japanese: I protest feebly that I need to go home and do something productive, but am vetoed, so the restaurant it is (pleasant enough, though Japanese cuisine seems to me to be a bit *pallid* compared to say Chinese or Indian). The bill paid, some people are going to the Hogshead for more beer, and again I mutter about having things to do before caving in and going along. I'm sure I only intend to have one drink and then make tracks, but needless to say it doesn't work out that way. The birthday boy counters each virtuous attempt to depart by buying another round (though at least I'm on Cokes by this stage, so that I'll have a clear head later), and I chat about obscure bands and win money on the quiz machine until we're thrown out at 11 p.m.

And that's that, another weekend gone, its potential unrecapturable. I drank beer and played Tony Hawks on the PS2. (Though at least the Friday evening was profitably spent watching Mulholland Drive.) I'm weak-willed, you see. Knowing the better course of action, I do the worse, to the great fury of Socrates.

Six hours till I have to be up to get ready to go to work, so I'd better sign off. Oh, there's one thing that's been plaguing me today about my inaugural blog entry last night: how telling is it that, confronted with my massive doubts over my ability to produce anything of artistic worth or significance, I begin to name-drop artists I have respect for, as if that will give me some credibility by association? I am a worm.

2002-01-06T03:39:00.000Z

So here it is, my leap into the unknown.

I wish I could say that this first entry was born of months of careful planning; that my blog could lay claim to a carefully-thought-out reason for existing; that the underlying themes and motifs had been decided on and implemented already. But no, it's almost three in the morning, my head hurts, in all likelihood I'd be better off getting a good night's sleep and attacking this tomorrow.

On the other hand, the CD player's three-disc turntable has rotated back around to "Get Lost" for the third time this evening, and if anything's going to inspire me to get this project started it's a hefty dose of The Magnetic Fields. Stephin Merritt is one of the few artists I actually *idolise* - quantitatively humbling yet qualitatively human.

I should unpack those last five words a little. I've always found it problematic balancing *living* and *creating*. It seems to me that, if you're hard at work in front of your word processor, you're not out there meeting the people and having the experiences that would give you something to write about. Not to mention the fact that you have to keep abreast of the news, go to cinemas and art galleries, listen to the latest music, and read like a bibliomaniac to maintain your artist's soul. Then you have to factor in essential mundanities like eating, bathing, food shopping, tidying up, none of which you can really afford to skimp on for fear of becoming monstrous. And on top of all that, you have the day job. Even if you've made it as a musician or writer, you've got the day job, touring or signing or just keeping an eye on the business practicalities.

Somewhere, in the face of all this, you have to find time for your creative endeavours. I've gone over the mathematics with a toothcomb, and I reckon that it might *just* be possible, for anyone who can function reliably on less than four hours' sleep a night.

So when I come across artists who are prolific, yet continuously sparking with fresh wit and insight - the boys from Hefner are another example dear to my heart - I'm pathetically in awe. I can sympathise with such as my darling Pulp, who these days spend years in the wilderness between albums, only to emerge with a bit of a mixed bag, but you can't idolise if you can empathise. How do Merritt and Hayman and company do it? Are they a race apart from mere mortals like me?

Oh well. The Magnetic Fields have left the building, to be replaced, as chance would have it, by Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's "Spanish Dance Troupe" (popular vote decreed that tonight's playlist would be as "fey" as possible). Time to get those four hours.

2002-01-06T00:37:00.000Z

<taps mike>
Is this on?