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[wondercurious]

Hedgehogs and Flamingos

Comedy is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.

It is hard to know what Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was thinking when he first wrote those words.

Actually, it’s impossible to know. Impossible to recapture the fizz of electrical energy as it dashes along the corridors of the mind, paperwork flying hither and yon with reckless abandon in the name of timely arrival.

But it is possible to imagine. Comedy is the kindly contemplation of that which makes thought, hurtling along the final furlong, pause at the window and take in the view. It pays no heed to the flutter of pages drifting to the ground, fallen from its arms as it ran. It sees only the Red Queen, flamingo raised high and bearing the woeful expression of one who has suffered a hedgehog to the head on one occasion too many.

Comedy can be found wherever two or more categorical boundaries are, or appear to have been, transgressed. Croquet is a game played by the reserved and genteel, with mallets, and a decidedly inanimate ball. Flamingos and hedgehogs are living animals, seldom involved in the lawn games of the English gentry, and very infrequently found keeping company with one another. It is this incongruity which at the very least draws to our lips a knowing smile. We recognise the transgression, and the improbability of its having occurred to us without the words on the page to create such an image makes it all the more fun.

It has been suggested, perhaps by Freud, that we laugh when we observe that another individual is in error and wish to indicate that we both recognise their transgression, and would not ourselves make the same mistake. A person slipping on a banana skin is funny. A tall, rather prickly City gent slipping on a banana skin is funnier, because it topples a more specific expectation.

But comedy is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous. When we notice, or are shown, a categorical slip-up, it doesn’t always make us smile. If we believe that all human beings deserve to live with equal dignity, our expectation is toppled in a far sharper way. We don’t smile, we frown. Comedy must find those moments in which happiness can be surprised to the surface, so to speak; presented with some scene or concept which gives pause, just enough that the ordinary unthinking way in which we pass through the world can be pushed aside by a sense of wonder. And when that happens, it is very hard not to laugh.

So there we have it. Comedy is a sense of wonder, delight, and amusement. It should not evoke exclusion, but bring forth a smile, allowing us to share together in the silliness that makes life so fun.

[wondercurious]

Heisenberg ate my homework

I was late for work the other day. I was late because my boss had changed the shift rota so that my shift started half an hour earlier, and then very helpfully didn’t tell me that she’d done it.

Well, she did tell me, but not until the exact time my shift was then due to start, when she called to ask where I was.

Which is an interesting question. Because I was at my desk, watching a Roger Penrose lecture and eating blueberries. Because I know how to live! Now, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it’s impossible to know both the location and speed of a quantum object. So the fact that I knew I was sitting perfectly still at my desk meant that I couldn’t know I was at my desk at all.

Which does create something of a paradox. Until you consider that in fact, my desk doesn’t exist, and all locations are relative to an arbitrary idea of space. So I can’t know that I’m at my desk because that desk doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in both a scientific and philosophical sense, in fact, it’s a doubly non-existent desk.

I bought it during a sale. Price reduced because while everyone knew that a desk doesn’t move, no one could find it.

My desk doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist partly because nothing exists in the sense in which we interact with it. Nothing does. When I see this thing I call my desk, or this building, or these trousers, I’m putting a label on something that simply isn’t there. All there is, is energy. And in some places, that energy is so condensed that it has an effect on the energy around it. Which means that my hand, this cluster of energy great enough to have mass, has an electromagnetic field which can’t push through other clusters of energy on the same level.

Which is why I will, devastatingly, never be able to walk through walls.

So my desk doesn’t exist because ‘desk’ is just the word I use to refer to the spot where there’s a strong electromagnetic field that I can make use of for writing essays and holding cups of tea.

My desk also doesn’t exist because outside of my head, it doesn’t inherently possess the property of being a desk. If you think about it, nothing does. Without a sentient organism to consistently label it ‘desk’, it’s just an object without any obvious function or form.

But that’s just a bit of Hegelian pedantry for you. The point is, my desk doesn’t exist. And neither does anything else. So I couldn’t possibly tell my boss that I was sitting at it, watching a Roger Penrose lecture and eating blueberries.

On the other hand, I wasn’t motionless, was I? I was motionless relative to my desk and my chair, but as we’ve established, they don’t exist. I was moving very, very fast, because my desk just happens to be on Earth. And the planet Earth is constantly in motion, orbiting the Sun, rotating on its axis, and constantly undergoing a very slow process of squashing a bit at top and bottom, because that’s what happens with a spherical object spins very fast.

In that moment, I had no idea how fast I was moving, because I don’t know precisely how fast the Earth orbits the sun. I didn’t know my own speed. Which, according to Heisenberg, meant that I could definitively say exactly where I was.

And where I was, by the time I’d reached that conclusion, was at work. Because in a universe of absolute relativity, how else am I going to buy groceries?

[wondercurious]

Not travelling by train disagrees with me

There is an irrepressible romanticism about travel, and especially travel by train. The dual track, cutting without marring the landscape through which it carries an engine whose rhythmic trundle seems only to complement the cosily rounded sheep whose grazing jaws don’t even hesitate as the ship of the rails glides by.

Today, I am travelling by bus. By National Express coach, to be more exact. Where the swell of the train serves only to lull, here each bump in the road feels designed to remind the unhappy voyager of what soaring rail prices have reduced them to.

It is not even possible, curled into the tiny seating space and tense with cold, to write beautifully. An insipid custard sun which would have seemed, on a train, pathetic with poesy, today fails even to warm the imagination.

The bus station, too, falls many strides of the Seven League Boots short of its piston-powered counterpart. The one thing which remains, if one looks for it, replete with beauty, is the moment of revelation. When a hideous siding of forced greenery and neglected back fences gives way in a burst of light and warmth to a panoramic display of all that the country can offer. Fields aligned as they have been since their enclosure – save perhaps this or that disputed boundary log – sport a smart buzz cut of corn, no longer golden and swaying but somehow better suited to this fragile sunlight than anything so forcefully full-bodied.

And then it is gone. The edge of the road sprouts a few determined stragglers – small yellow and white flowers atop long stems, surviving on the noxious explusions of vehicles like ours, slowed to a crawl as we pass by – but little more. The residual awe I feel at the scene now out of sight improves their aspect, but not as much as one might hope. Where a railway siding might delight with the surprise of a rabbit or interesting bird, the most one ought to expect of this road is a squashed orange cone and a steady line-up of trivial debris. The trees, planted along either side, seem to be intended not to brighten our way but rather, to keep us in, and shield the landscape beyond from our monstrosity.

But perhaps I am simply tired. My feet have, I fear, achieved a state of irreversible cryogenesis, and cold toes do not a happy Kate make. It is conceivable, after all my vitriol, that this dismal mode of human transmission should serve as a reminder of the hardiness of a nature which inspired Constable and Wordsworth to such heights of enrapturement and ecstasy. A green leaf which grows amid the discarded cans and inexplicable multipack tea wrapper remains, quite aside from the pretensions of some, a green leaf, and it has never owed it to us to serve as fodder when inspiration is in otherwise short supply.

I have just spotted my first Underground sign of the journey, and with whiplash suddenness, every bit of verdant foliage appears not a straggling loafer but the survivor of a bitter and ongoing war. Good, and to a far greater extent, morning, Redbridge.

[wondercurious]

What is?

Isn’t existence a funny thing? What does it mean to say that something exists? Well, to exist is to have existence, I suppose; to have or possess the property of existence. Except, that can’t be quite right. A pen doesn’t possess any property—much like Schrödinger's cat, its may qualities depend upon perception. It doesn’t possess properties, it transmits qualifiable sense data. But that’s a terribly unhelpful turn of phrase, isn’t it? Cumbersome and unwieldy. Perhaps we should keep it simple, and say that if something exists, that thing is. Of course, we don’t ever say that, do we? “This pen is.” It’s barely even a subordinate clause, let alone a definitive statement. We say, “This pen is pink,” or “This pen is empty.” In other words, we don’t say that an object is; we say that it is something.

For instance: “The object in my hand is a book.” The object in my hand has the property of being a book, and therefore, it is, because it is something. When I say that something exists, I acknowledge that the concept I am expressing has the property of being something, and therefore it is. What this means is that the object to which I ascribe existence has properties which allow me to identify it as something. If I cannot ascribe to the thing in my hand any property, then there is nothing in my hand. It is these properties which allow me to assert with confidence the existence of the object in my hand. In other words: BX = P1, P2 , etc.

My question is, how do we express that properties exist, when they are themselves conditions for existence? If you have any thoughts, I’d be very grateful for them!

[wondercurious]

The Scunthorpe-Doncaster line

Pausing on a solidly Victorian iron bridge whose name I do not know but will find out, it is possible to observe an almost large spider spinning in a dandelion seed, and further down, a fat bumblebee dipping into the vibrant violet flowers which defy gravity in growing above the canal below. Another train rattles by, a thunderous moment which makes little impact upon the army of sturdy rivets by which our platform is secured. And then we're off again, passing the foliage which had obscured the Minster that signals the end of our journey. It is not a cathedral, but rather like a middle class cleric or haberdasher, it carries itself with comfortable dignity.

[wondercurious]

We should have taped the placard to my lacrosse stick!

Arriving at Norwich’s protest against Donald Trump inspires a peculiar thought. As those gathered begin to raise colourful placards against the latest President to whom ‘competence’ is little more than a word of unnecessary syllabic content, I find myself struck by the image of a double decker bus filled with these protesters, each holding their sheet of cardboard with messages turned inward, resolutely avoiding eye contact in absolute silence. The gentility of it is delightfully at odds with the purpose of their journey.

The protest itself is no different. This is not America. A small crowd, watched over in the loosest sense by two police officers, stands shuffling its feet and wondering why it didn’t think to bring its gloves. A murmur makes itself known when the 25 bus deposits another influx of placards at the fringes of the gathering, causing one or two moments of indignant jostling before it is realised that nothing will make the man standing on the steps of City Hall audible from over fifty paces. And so we settle again, until the next twitch of the curtain.

‘Soy protesto!’

The silence which spreads across the immediate crowd is not a sign of the xenophobia they protest, but of incurably English outrage at the fact that she has answered her mobile phone so loudly, over the voice of a speaker too far away to actually hear.

After another half-hour of listening to what I can only assume is an impassioned speech being given to the front five rows, a momentary distraction is provided. A charmingly middle class young man offering newspapers explains that the £1 fee is to cover printing costs, and apologises for talking over the latest mumbling from the steps. With his Nick Carraway spectacles and ‘I’m a student’ Peruvian knitwear, he belongs as much to independent socialism as Marius Pontmercy.

Since we can’t understand a word of the undoubtedly sinew-stiffening, tiger-summoning rhetoric being cast forth from the front, we turn our ruffled attention almost universally to the placard messages around us, peering like meercats over the heads of taller attendees.

Across to my left, a concerned citizen waves a placard bearing a mild request:

DEPORT TRUMP BACK TO HELL

pls!

Even in outrage, we cannot seem to muster up the necessary to abandon our collective upbringing. One can almost hear the conscientious murmur of each participant’s mother, reminding them that ‘manners don’t cost anything, Michael.’

There is also, of course, the now-obligatory Father Ted sign, held aloft by a man whose cultural frame of reference is clearly greater than his spatial awareness:

DOWN WITH

THIS KINDA

THING!

Perhaps the most striking sign is a small cardboard rectangle a few rows ahead of me. In simple, plain black print, it reads:

59785

24″ x 24″ x 18”

Somehow it seems to represent this congregation more than any of the uncertainly lurid slogans now drifting away in search of a warming cup of tea - or something stronger.

[wondercurious]

Browning must be spinning...

O, to be at Lord’s ground

Now that summer’s there,

And whoever wakes this morning

Hears, with pleasure, on the air,

That the England team are batting first

South Africa’s bowlers have done their worst,

While old friends converse on cricket and chow

On Test Match Special - now!

[wondercurious]

2071

With everything that’s happening in the news at the moment, a lot of people seem to have been talking about 1984. It’s THE dystopian novel – and somewhat fittingly, it’s a novel more people will lie about having read than any other. Now, I don’t mind this. I’ve never read Lord of the Flies, but I’d hold a conversation with someone about it as if the closest I’ve got isn’t that South Park episode – "Oh, yes, I thought it was a fascinating discussion of thematic social normalisation…" You can sound authoritative about anything if you use enough Latinate words. But I haven’t actually read Lord of the Flies, so I should probably stick to 1984. I first read that when I was fourteen – because I’m a nerd, and I enjoyed the excerpt in my English Literature SAT exam. No, really. And until it came to writing this, I hadn’t read it since. Based on that reading, three key things stayed with me: The first paragraph, the ending, and the sex in a church. There’s a lot more to the book than that, though, as Wikipedia has since informed me. You’ll probably know some of it, because a lot of the conventions have become part of our vernacular. Big Brother, for instance. It’s a lot like the show, except that instead of “Please do not swear”, it’s “Pay attention or we’ll give you something to swear about”. The protagonist is a man called Winston Smith, who couldn’t be more miserable. He hates the building he lives in, and the children down the hall, and the price of razor blades. If you showed him the Chad cartoon, he’d probably think it was a mirror. Except, “Mirror? Who can afford a mirror, these days?” Maybe it’s best if we just don’t talk to him. He’s a historical revisionist by trade, which is a very academic joke by Orwell that’s only funny if you’re a historian. Winston’s job is to rewrite old newspaper articles to fit in with the Party line. Everything goes along quite smoothly – it’s dismal, but smooth – until it’s time to kick-start the plot, and Winston starts to keep a diary. Under Big Brother, independent thought is discouraged – usually with fatal electrocution – so it’s a pretty stupid decision. But he does it anyway, and – surprise surprise, in a total surveillance state – he gets found out. Cue Winston doing the least energetic impression of a man on the run ever. We’ve already seen him struggle with climbing the stairs and touching his toes by this point, so it doesn’t exactly break the mold. He sort of stumbles into becoming part of a resistance movement against Big Brother, which is how he meets Julia. Julia really should have been the hero of the piece, but she’s a woman and it’s 1948, so she’s there to have sex with Winston and then have her face eaten by rats. Since he’s the male protagonist and she’s just about the only humanoid woman in the story, Winston falls in love with Julia, and vice versa. The more in love with her he is, the less he can stand to be part of The System. Winston becomes a revolutionary, fights back against Big Brother, undergoes genuine character development, and then gets brainwashed to undo it all. Because the real message here is that love beats hate, but not psychopaths with mind control. Winston is captured by the Party, and they threaten him with torture. He caves and begs them to do it to Julia instead – which is exactly what they wanted in the first place, because he’s immediately brainwashed and sent on his way. Basically, it’s a very strange story. It might actually be for the best that most people haven’t really read it. It’s a novel by an essayist about political authority and oppression, with a few questions about truth and human nature thrown in for good measure. If you like cricket, think of it this way: It’s a bit like the England batting line up. You’re hooked in by the opening, but by the late middle order collapse, it’s only the hope of a miraculous tail-end recovery that keeps you hanging on – except Orwell didn’t have Jimmy Anderson. All said, it could be worse. There are far less interesting dystopian novels out there – like The Carbon Diaries. I’m not going to tell you what they’re about, because if I talk about them for too long, you might remember their title and give them a read. Which you shouldn’t. Just borrow 1984 from the library and join the ranks of people pretending they’ve read it too.

[wondercurious]

As if a hand has come out, and taken mine

‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is even long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.’

- Alan Bennett, The History Boys

‘Thus I think that primitive morality always originates in the idea of the preservation of the species. But is this a rule which a civilized community ought to follow? I think not. My rule of life, which I guide my conduct by, and a departure from which I consider as a sin, is to act in the manner which I believe to be most likely to produce the greatest happiness, considering both the intensity of the happiness and the number of people made happy. I know that Granny considers this an impractical rule of life and says that since you can never know the thing which will produce the greatest happiness you do much better in following the inner voice. The conscience, however, can easily be seen to depend mostly upon education, as for example common Irishmen do not consider lying wrong, which fact alone seems to me quite sufficient to disprove the divine value of conscience. And since, as I believe, conscience is merely the combined product of evolution and education, then obviously it is an absurdity to follow that rather than reason. And my reason tells me that it is better to act so as to produce maximum happiness than in any other way. For I have tried to see what other object I could set before me and I have failed. Not my own individual happiness in particular, but everybody’s equally, making no distinction between myself, relations, friends, or perfect strangers. In real life it makes very little difference to me as long as others are not of my opinion, for obviously where there is any change of being found out it is better to do what one’s people consider right. My reason for this view: first that I can find no other, having been forced, as everybody must who seriously thinks about evolution, to give up the old idea of asking one’s conscience, next that it seems to me that happiness is the great thing to seek after. As an application of the theory to practical life, I will say that in a case where nobody but myself was concerned, if indeed such a case exist, I should of course act entirely selfishly to please myself. Suppose for another instance that I had the chance of saving a man who would be better out of the world. Obviously I should consult my own happiness best by plunging in after him. For if I lost my life, that would be a very neat way of managing it, and if I saved him I should have the pleasure of no end of praise. But if I let him drown I should have lost an opportunity of death and should have the misery of much blame, but the world would be better for his loss and, as I have some slight hope, for my life.’

- Bertrand Russell, ‘Greek Exercises’, 20th April 1888

[wondercurious]

Where did it all begin?

In 1999, I started school. I remember the year, because I can still see it being rubbed away from the whiteboard as the concept of ‘2000′ was explained to a room of 5-year olds. Most of us barely grasped the fact that time was a regular and measured phenomenon, but by the end of that morning, we knew what a 2000 was.

The subject of numbers was well-placed. We moved straight into a lesson in mathematics, or ‘numeracy’, as we then knew it. Multiplication was the order of the day; a brand new concept to our little brains. New, but hardly more difficult for it. I remember sitting at my table, watching as Miss Roberts drew out again and again the way in which all the digits would hop one uniform space to the left and be held there by the addition of a round, impassable zero. Naïve even in those days, I was not impressed. Numbers do not hop, they are pushed, and we were obviously pushing a zero onto the end of the line and forcing the others along in order to keep in with this silly rule of lining things up which we had set for ourselves.

The worksheets were handed out, and I stared down at mine with no particular awe. It was another case, in the eyes of an already-precocious five-year old, of just pushing another zero onto the page with my pencil. Which I did, quite quickly, as I think anyone would agree that a rough circle is not difficult to conjure up on command. “Finished,” I reported, a few minutes later. The rest of the class was still busily watching their numbers hop around, and keeping them in place with their zeros. I didn’t understand it. Why wait for them to hop, when a zero can simply be drawn anywhere?

Miss Roberts was approximately as impressed by this logic as I had been by hers. No, I was told. You can’t stick a zero to the end, you must first make room for it. I had the whole page, and I thought as much - but perhaps I had been taught something, because I didn’t say it. I nodded, and was given the next worksheet to attempt. Where we had before been multiplying by 10, we were now venturing into the realm of 100s. To say I felt betrayed might put the matter rather mildly. Lifting the zero from the 10 to the end of the number to be multiplied was one thing, and a fine exercise to pass the time. But to repeat the action with two zeros seemed to me quite the colossal waste of time. I lifted and pushed the new oval duos into their correct positions, and by now perhaps ten full minutes had passed. I had completed the work of an hour, and was rewarded for my pattern-recognition with words such as “cheating” and “the wrong way”. It was my first exposure to the way people think

 A year later, I was sitting in a new classroom, though it shared a joining wall with the old one. I was six years old, and therefore almost an adult. We didn’t spend our time learning silly things like multiplication by 10; we were learning to read. And read, and read. In words, I found a world I could trust above any numerical conglomeration. Syntax became, and would remain for the rest of my life, like a dance - a choreography. And as in a dance, I found that knowing the steps made the experience immeasurably more enjoyable. Here, I had found something worth knowing. Reading became my greatest strength, my escape before I ever understood that I needed one. It was how I spent the moments before my father came to wake me in the morning. I would read at breakfast, in the yard as I waited to be called into school, I would read the posters on the classroom walls. In the evening, I would climb up on the arm of the sofa to reach the books on my parents’ bookshelves, absorbing every syllable and taking them all to heart. My childhood was one of hypochondriacs on barges, and crime-solving priests, and detectives and doctors and- I could go on forever. I loved it all.

My trial came, however, shortly after I first discovered this literary opium. I was six years old, sitting cross-legged on a scratchy green carpet in front of our newest teacher. What are we going to be studying today? Her voice posed the question in tones which left no room for doubt that one of us would be called upon to answer. I heard my name. I saw her indicate the board, on which three cards were pinned: Science, Numeracy, and Literacy. One was centralised, and it was this one that I read.

“Can you read what it says on the board?”

Of course I could. I’d discovered the DK Encyclopaedia of Fossils in the bookcase at the school reception weeks ago, and already the obsession which would carry me through to the end of my time there was taking hold. It would be my ambition to become an archaeologist for a further ten years.

“Science.”

It was to my great surprise that I discovered, as I sat down again, that she had intended to use the opportunity to teach us the word. I had not been expected to know it; I had been chosen to personify the ignorance of the entire class, such that she might benevolently rectify our youthful shortcoming. I was asked how I had known that those letters make that sound. I said I had read the word.

It wasn’t sarcasm, but I now understand how much it sounded like it. I was not often called upon again in that classroom. Only my handwriting, meticulously neat under my mother’s tuition, would remain a source of praise from Mrs. Canty, whose plans to impart knowledge I thwarted so early in our acquaintance.

[wondercurious]

I dined last night with the Borgias

John Betjeman once wrote in a beautiful gift that ‘by identifying himself with the period to which he belongs Max Beerbohm is making himself immortal.’ He expressed sincere gratitude for this act, which has preserved the world of a gentleman – and in so doing, preserved his own world for the delight of our times.

It is a lovely concept. Preserving in literary amber the iridescent thoughts which represent a unique world is a gift afforded to every writer, and denied every person who does not hear the music of words.

For me, every letter has a sound, but also a texture. It is not constant, but varies, fluctuating its face according to the company it keeps. The alphabet is a congregation of individual personalities, twenty-six worlds waiting to show themselves. Sharing a moment with h, c might be soft, yielding to the charms of a russet voice, but with k, it coolly sips a crisp lemonade with lime. Every word uttered is new, and every repetition is new too, because not one of those syllables has ever existed before. It has the life of a mayfly, fleeting and bright, coloured glass ground into fragments and cast into an ocean of air.

It is not the period to which I belong with which I identify, but the world in which I think. I will never be a writer like Max Beerbohm – and I will never express that with the elegance of John Betjeman. They are immortal – but I am alive.

[wondercurious]

A fresh outlay of stuff

Glancing out of the window, my eye searches for the living flower arrangements and unassuming stonework of the blossoming quad, adorned with students fresh from their latest hibernation and yawningly eager to resume that aspect of their existence for which they have paid so gorgeously. As I currently inhabit a second-floor flat in Norwich, however, my eye goes unfulfilled in its rather ill-considered quest.

Spring has uncoiled its frabjous tentacles and poked its insidious way into the head of every comfortable pessimist in the country. Words such as delight, joyful, and indeed frabjous inflict themselves upon the ears of the more tempered optimists whose fair spirits have taken themselves away to one side of the field for an orange and a moment of respite after the grey trial that is winter in Norfolk.

The arrival of this latest in the seasonal parade has also heralded a rather more sparkling event: The notification of all European leaders whose heads have enjoyed a recent extended holiday beneath a boulder of crushing enormity, that the Isles Larger Than the Breton Region of France intend to abscond from the union of states which has maintained peace – of a sort – across the geographical area we know as home of the East Wind. Or, if your mind is not addled as mine is by age and Easter Camembert, that Great Britain intends to extract itself from the European Union.

It is at present dreadfully fashionable to have quite definite and quite definitely permeable views on this situation. The difficulty, as I am sure my delightful readers whose egos I must stroke in a vain bid for my own positively punctuated opinions to be continually proliferated realise, comes in an absence of perspective. We are producing views with the frequency of Giotto, and none of the skill. Our feeble cries echo with the resonance of a scream from a shallow grave. Our vocative brushes trace over and again the childhood scribblings of the Masters, conscious as the Eloi of their depth of meaning. We are all quite equipped to regurgitate the thoughts – a word I must acknowledge is used quite wrongly in this context – of those whose mouthpiece are the many and scattered socialis instrumentis of this decade, but we find ourselves quite woefully incapable of contributing to the clamour. Or perhaps this is a grace.

No, I cannot stand by that. Parthian perhaps, but correct not. The higher and fuller the swell of voices, the louder and more clanging the reflective tide, the better surely for all fields of human mentality. The Athenians had it, in their first blinking swipes at assembling a democracy from its flat packaging. Their society underwent the most gratingly refreshing of undertakings, like a winter breeze unexpectedly composed of facially-targeted ice shards. A Solonic irrigation, if you will. A flushing through of ideas in such an arena as comment by any citizen carried sufficient magnificence that it would at least be heard. An awful lot of rot is spoken of the fathers of philosophy – and that is as it should be. All respectable things deserve a knock or two. If the column remains standing, then perhaps Lord Nelson ought to be a little higher than the rest. If not, he may rejoin the carpet of people attempting to gather together enough lint to make it a head-width above.

I’m afraid I have become quite dismal in my nonsense. I should imbibe of the unmarked vial and say no more on the matter. I suspect we readers all know this will not be so, but we must dream nonetheless. Perhaps something quite horrific will inflict itself upon my fingers, and I will find that typing with my nose holds greater difficulty than I have long suspected. Perhaps we will all be spared this silliness as the season crawls on. Spring has uncorked itself, and now we must drink of its hopefulness.

I see a struggling flower in the car parking area below. Do try not to shake yourselves up too vigorously.