It's all in the definition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is much to be said to a Carrollian approach to life, that is, using the work of The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, in books like Alice Through the Looking-Glass, as a guide.

     I was thinking of one aspect in particular, the concept of the “un-birthday” that Humpty Dumpty explains in Chapter VI of Through the Looking-Glass.  You have only one “birthday” a year, but you have 354 “un-birthdays” in most normal, non-leap years.  Thinking about it, the idea of an “un-birthday” is more like something Pooh could have discussed with Piglet and Owl, rather than something out of the altogether darker pages of Carroll, but Carroll has the credit.

     Further thinking about it, I do have a (borrowed) copy of The Tau of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff, where the Pooh books are mined to show how far the stories and the characters exemplify elements of Taoist religion, with Pooh himself of course being the prime example of someone or something that can just be!

     Far from being a mere frippery, this book is well worth reading.  Yes, it is witty and amusing, but it is also serious – and a gentle way into one of the world’s major religions.

     The “reading in” of meaning also reminds me of a book that I have treasured for some time, ever since I found a compelling Penguin paperback version in the sixties, The Annotated Alice with the texts by Lewis Carroll, academically (if indulgently, and nothing wrong with that) edited and footnoted by Martin Gardner – any book that prints foreign language versions of the Jabberwocky nonsense poem has got my vote! 

     And there is a lot to think about in what Carroll wrote.  The footnotes do not seem forced, and the wealth of information and thought prompted by discussion of the text can be demonstrated by the fact that Gardner’s book has been republished as More Annotated Alice and Annotated Alice – The Definitive Edition - I am only writing out their titles in a vain attempt to stop my purchasing them!

     So, “un-birthdays”.  These have been on my mind as my birthday was on United Nations Day and, for the second year running, the people with me to celebrate were limited by the pandemic.  To compensate, therefore, I have decided to have a week-long birthday with treats on each of the seven days!

     So far, apart from The Day itself, on other subsequent days I have, so far, had a lane to myself for my morning swim; a truly outstanding menu del dia; the arrival of the catalogue of the Surrealist exhibition in The Tate (ordered months ago); tomorrow a book on the French painter Poussin arrives, so my extended festivities are going well and look set to continue.

     I hope you enjoy your un-birthday days as well!

Envy

It’s funny how a blast from the past can change electronic delight into ashes!

I cannot now remember the exact date that I was finally beguiled by the seemingly reasonable price of a Polaroid camera into parting with hard earned cash for the dubious delight of producing instant photographs of Things That Didn’t Need to be Remembered in Concrete Form.  It was only after you had bought the machine that you realized just how expensive each of those pictures actually was.  And suddenly no occasion seemed sufficiently worthy of immortalization and the camera became an unwanted reminder of how you had been ripped off by efficient marketing!

But, time has come full circle and the buying of a new camera for a birthday has stimulated desire for something which is obviously backward looking, namely one of the new generation of instant cameras.  The marked difference between the old Polaroids and the new Polaroids and their imitators is in the printing technology.  I do not pretend to understand the technicalities of the process, but it certainly seems to less immediately chemical than the old version.

In Toni’s birthday camera (a neat, fairly slim, white number) the photographs are only 2x3 inches, but they emerge from the camera already partly developed and they do not necessitate the frantic waving around that was an essential part of the older versions of instant cameras.  The detail is impressive and in Toni’s camera he has the ability to save photos to the internal memory and edit them before they need to be printed – a step up from the point and shoot and print version that I remember.

Now, I am not without cameras of mine own.  I have a totally embarrassing number of them, and my new phone, a Huawei P20 Pro, has a camera system which has been developed in association with Leica with three (count them!) rear cameras!  I have already taken what I regard as some astonishing photographs.  Not that I have an instinctive sense of photographic style, but rather that the capture of detail and the depth of field is astonishing for a fairly thin mobile phone.  I look forward to exploring its possibilities and have printed out a manual from the internet to try and tease out the details of their working that too often lies hidden from the ordinary user.

Even this prestigious phone is not enough to protect me entirely from resentment at a new piece of technology being flaunted in my ever-so-gadget-sensitive face!  Now, I am not saying that I want one of these cameras myself, but I don’t like being without one – if you see what I mean!

Today’s weather is sullenly awful and takes its place in a series of sullenly awful days.  We are now into May and according to the contract that I have with Catalonia, we should be getting bright, warm, beautiful days.  And we are not.  While not actually raining, there was certainly rain in the wind and that is not something that I want to experience when cycling back from my Spanish lesson.  I consider that, having made the effort to exhaust my remaining brain cells by the different varieties of the Spanish word ‘porque’ in all its accented and unaccented forms, the very least that the weather could do was shine on me.  Is that really asking too much?

Perhaps my mood will change when we go out to lunch, though I doubt it as we will have to spend some time planning yet another of the Family Celebrations that make May one of the most expensive months in the calendar!

Rain, sun and lunch!

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YESTERDAY

 

Each time I took a breath going upwards towards the school end of my local pool I noticed the sky.  At first it was a light lilac, then it went to a grubby bluey-grey and finally it took on the appearance of the sort of sky that they use as a backdrop for those dystopian, Armageddon-like total disaster movies that at least take your mind away from what the 45^th POTUS might or might not be doing.  Then the first fat drops of rain began to fall.

It’s an odd experience swimming in the rain.  I am always amused by a shower of rain on the beach: there is instant evacuation as if the liquid that is falling (and in which of course they have been bathing) has suddenly taken on corrosive acidic properties and precautions must be taken.  Given where we live, fairly near a very large city and on the flight path of a busy airport, I would not be at all surprised to find out that our rain is anything but Ph. neutral - but generally all we worry about is getting wet.  Even when getting wet is something that we had been doing a few minutes previously.

But rain in an official swimming pool is different.  There is a different quality to drops of falling rain on skin to the splash of a passing swimmer.  And anyway, experiencing rain in a commercial swimming pool is a limited pleasure because Health and Safety regulations indicate that rain will affect the safety mixture in the water and consequently, as with our pool, the roof has to be closed.

As our Russian-doll roof structure began its slow progress enclosing the pool, we were able to go from outside and the rain, to inside and the gloom in a single length.  Luckily I had virtually finished my swim when the shower ended, and by that time the moveable structure had just aligned itself with the exit and so I was able to move seamlessly to my shower and my eventual cup of tea.

I dried off the water on my café chair with my towel and was quite happily imbibing in the threatening gloom when it started to rain again.  The cloud cover look as though it would quite easily be able to sustain  showers and downpours for the foreseeable future so I gave in to Nature and moved to a giant parasol (what irony!) protected table and sulked notes into my trusty jottings book.

But this is Spain.  A visit to the Birthday Girl in Terrassa and by the time we came back the sun was out and, even with odd clouds, all was well with the world and sunbathing was a possibility.

And that is what I love about living here: we do not have the sort of spiteful weather that cursed my life in the UK.  The sort of threatening clouds that I swam under in the morning could easily have accompanied my exercise for the next fortnight in Britain - but in Spain it is an isolated day when you do not get at least a sight of sunshine during it!  Yes, Spain, and Catalonia are not as green as Britain.  You have to go to a region like Galicia in the north west of the country for the lush greenness that Brits might recognize.  But I am content with a certain degree of aridity and the sight of the sun.

TODAY

 

I was beset with a lingering malaise of indolence and so decided (because I can) not to go for my swim today.  I suppose the idea was that I had thought that preparing, going, swimming, changing and tea drinking took up such a disproportionate amount of my time, I wanted to get settled into some sort of academic activity without the distraction of swimming to act as displacement activity.  Needless to say such laudable motivations did not translate into actuality and what I actually did was have a cup of tea, do the Guardian quick crossword and read further information about the Antikythera mechanism.

I think that there are two approaches to the acquisition of knowledge not previously known: the first, is one of sheer delight in discovering new areas of understanding that were previously blank; the second is a deep sense of shame that one didn’t know about it previously.

The Antikythera (I love the sound of the word anti-kith-ar-ee-ah, it is the sort of word you can roll around your mouth) Mechanism, falls securely into the second category.

An account of what the ancient shipwreck offered historians may be found here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decoding-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-180953979/ and you can tell that I have been doing courses in the Open University because I did not give you a Wikipedia entry first!

This ancient shipwreck has been described as the most astonishing archaeological discovery of the twentieth century, or indeed of the twenty-first century - the discovery of what might truly be called the mechanism of the first computer ever discovered, dating from some two thousand years ago!

And I had never heard of it!

I am not saying that I am the datum point of common knowledge, but surely something this astonishing and revolutionary should have impinged on my rag-bag accretion of general knowledge at some time since its discover in the early 1900s?

 

With the discovery of early ‘technology’ I am always reminded of the invention of the first voice recorder.  The mechanism and the raw materials and the whole technology while put together for the first time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, were actually available in Classical times!  A way of recording the voice could have been available during the time of Christ, and we could have heard the last words from the cross or the text of the sermon on the mount as they were spoken.  But the machine was not invented and we didn’t.

The sophistication of the Antikythera Mechanism was around over a millennium before its next iteration!

And I knew nothing about it!  What shame!

 

It is at times like this that I am reminded of my first reading of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, where a revolutionary world view disrupts conventional acceptance.  This book is constantly revelatory and, rather like one of my tutors in university, constantly says things that you should have thought previously!  The sort of things that are blindingly obvious as soon as they have been articulated, but you need their help to get there!  Diamond’s book (as indeed are the works of M Wynn Thomas https://www.swan.ac.uk/crew/staff/professormwynnthomas/  are wholeheartedly recommended.

And now I shall echo Osvald’s plea, “Mother give me the sun!” - though, I am glad to say in rather different circumstances, and I will only retire to a sun lounger rather than the murderous ministrations of a mother!