I'll never know how he knew me and how he knew about the magic word, which was a secret only my brother and I knew and that we guarded like a stash of golden marbles from all the greedy eavesdroppers who would steal it, abuse it, weaken it, rob us of its power. We brought a spider back to life with it once: him holding the chair by its squat wooden legs, me balancing atop the slatted back and craning up into the corner to whisper into the thin grey dense-woven net where the desiccated body floated weightless, curled up like a sprung trap closed on thin air and long rusted away, and in the morning it was whole and black again, dangling from a fresh thread and kicking its legs against nothing at all in that inscrutable way that such creatures have, very much alive. It didn't work on mice, we knew that. I can't remember what that word was now, of course, much as I can't remember my teacher's first name or the names of different parts of a leaf or what the different heiroglyphs mean, not that these things don't matter any more but more that they have gone on to matter to someone else and matter is an undeniably finite affair. I don't know how much of this he knew, but he did. That was all part of his act. The best fucking show on earth, people said. He was the Entertainer, though he never called himself that and only just once did he start off his set with a blast of that god-awful ragtime piano with its trampolining left-hand bassline, octave-chord-octave-chord that you just want to strangle it after the first three bars, and I guess he only did that because he wanted us to know that he knew the name we had given him. We all assumed then that he approved but he might just have been making some oblique point that went right over our pedestrian heads or more likely having a private joke at our expense and now we'll never know.
Gifted kind of implies well a giver, and none of us are sure whether we really believe in that stuff even when we say we do but still whoever was doing the giving was either generous or cack-handed or had a quota to make up or was just downright curious to see what would happen if you mixed this and this and this all in the one cranium and really you know went to town. In some cultures they'd probably call it a curse and banish the son of a bitch to the mountains where he couldn't do any damage and he might just be saved from himself by virtue of isolation with, you guessed it, himself, a damn stupid remedy for just about anything but in this case it might just have worked because if you were compelled to remember every single voice you've ever heard and mimic it back with flawless precision the chances are before long you'd end up thinking a cave in a frozen hillside somewhere would be some paradise. But here was this guy right in the epicenter of the city, thousands of lives rumbling and cracking and shaking themselves apart all around him, and he just sat and walked and rode the subway and kept his ear to the ground and collected these voices, lifted them from their bodies and brought them all screeching and whispering and hollering and bawling and encouraging and remonstrating and announcing and denouncing and pleading and chatting and praying and weeping into this one dark basement where he, they, would all be famous.
He talked them all to us, even the ones we couldn't understand to begin with, and he took the things they said and wove them into this crazy web of truth and sad beauty that waved and shifted in the light of a single spotlight and the heat of the black stage that we all knew from the first fifteen seconds was too small to hold him, them. He was a knife-thrower, a fire-juggler, a sword-swallower with words, their words. In volley after volley he, they peppered us with with bullets of leaden reality that left wicked, bleeding, delicious wounds all over our prone bodies, and when the show was over we would go away and lick and taste and start to comprehend what it is that we are made of, what it is that leaks out when we are cut, what it is that pours out when we scream. And week after week we came back, dangling dressings and sticking-plasters like the great undead and dragging our friends and neighbours behind us because we had to hear more, because the show was not only part of our lives but it really was our lives for that time, we later realised. Neither in all those years were we ever disappointed, and he, they knew it. But when you try and explain it the words fall flat and when we reminisce about it now it feels hollow and like we're all talking about a different person because we are in fact all talking about a different person and we always were.
To start with it was people we didn't know, or people we thought we didn't know, or people we knew or thought we knew but were too polite to recognise and it was safe to laugh at them under this giant parasol of anonymity because we knew they would do the same to us if the roles were reversed, but he couldn't have stopped there even if he'd wanted to. Once he did the bouncer with those east-coast vowels jammed right up his nose and we heard his laugh like a vomit of gravel reverberating in eerie stereo around the grimey room, and he did his own support act with all the insecurity and self-conscious twitching that he probably went through himself when he was starting out, and he did the mad hairy guy on the green line platform who thinks he's Richard Nixon, and he did Richard Nixon too doing an impression of some mad guy and only afterwards did you wonder how exactly he pulled this shit off. And all these characters he painted with his voices and subtle motions and gestures were joined and superimposed on some enormous canvas that we could only guess at, glimpsing it one small fragment at a time, but then just as we thought we'd got it, that we'd finally added up the twists and turns of this devious maze and seen the impossibility of its contortions revealed for the first time, then just to add to the confusion he would stop, squint through the dusty glare like a sailor caught in the beam of a lighthouse and point and say, “You, what's your name?”
So I told him my name and I told him where I was from and I told him what I did for a living and all in about two dozen words, none of them magic but they were enough for him to learn everything, and I mean everything, and I became in that tiny choking moment another voice inside his head, and he in mine, and together for the next three minutes and forty-five seconds I, we, were all the entertainment in the world.
(In memory of David Foster Wallace, who entertained me.)
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Upon my soapy hoop I breathe
The breath of life, with rare delight,
And skip and spin around to wreathe
My head with shining spheres of light.
Out from this simple wand there falls
A flowing effervescent stream
Of planets, stars and crystal balls
With ever-shifting oily gleam.
Then through the cloud I weave and wind
Now fanning currents in the air:
A playful shepherd, bound to mind
This flock of bubbles in my care.
And though they quickly burst and fade
Their fleeting lives can hold no sorrow:
Every night I lie and dream
Of bubbles I will blow tomorrow.
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I'm not really sure what to write about this. Part of me is shocked, but most of me isn't. There are worse things happening out there in the world, but this made me shudder in a way I don't very often shudder.
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, the largest examination board in England, has decided to pull a piece of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy, written from the perspective of a knife-wielding loner, from one of its GCSE poetry anthologies - on the grounds that "the board had received a complaint ... against a background of fears over teenage knife crime".
Not only that, but they have asked schools to destroy existing copies of the anthology that contain the offending poem.
Yes, we now have state-sponsored book-burning in the UK.
I would advise all readers to destroy any copies of this blog they might have, in case it turns out to be subversive. If the thought police are reading this: it's not my fault. Those people would have gone out and committed the crimes by themselves anyway.
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As seen in the garden this weekend:
This photo is somewhat out of date, of course, because these things grow at an alarming rate. This morning, the largest one was about twice this size. I should do a time-lapse animation really, if I had the patience.
I'd love to know if they're edible, since I'm cooking mushrooms and pasta tonight anyway and have you seen the price of mushrooms in the shops? But I'm not quite brave enough to take a bite, and not quite cruel enough to test it on the cat.
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I remember sitting in a macroeconomics lecture many years ago, being taught about the government bond markets and how the price of bonds (and, thereby, money) is set. The lecturer started with a simple question: what principle is it which ensures that the maximum number of participants in a market - any market - are able to buy or sell at their chosen price?
There was silence. We'd all sat through a term's worth of microeconomics lectures, and most people probably knew the answer - but no-one wanted to actually say anything. This is Imperial College, after all. Everyone's a dork.
"Price differentiation?" said one dork.
There was some muffled smirking. No, that's not the answer. The correct answer, of course, is the principle of supply and demand. Price differentiation is the technique used by a monopolist to increase his revenues, by selling the same goods at varying prices. For example, a "value pack" of orange juice in a basic red, white and blue carton for 50p, or a "regular" carton of orange juice with a prettier label for 80p, or a "premium" carton of orange juice for 95p. Identical contents, but marketed to appeal to as many different segments of the population as possible. This way, they can make more profit than if they just picked a single price and sold a single product.
That dork was me, by the way. But I realised the other day, I wasn't actually very far wrong.
You get bonds. 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, 12 month, 2 year, 5 year, 10 year, whatever you want. You get government bonds, corporate bonds, synthetic bonds, whatever you want. Everything has its price. Everything has its yield. You can buy whole debts, chunks of debts, sliced debts, minced debts, good debts, bad debts, whatever you want. Bought the wrong thing? You can buy insurance in case it defaults. You can hedge. You can buy swaps, options, swaptions, whatever you want. The equity markets are a walk in the park by comparison. But they are all part of the game too. You can buy shares, sell shares, short sell shares, buy puts and calls, short sell short calls by the sea shore, whatever you like. It's like a big money supermarket and everything's on special offer. You can even trade green pieces of paper with presidents on them for brown and purple pieces of paper with "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of" written on them. To your hearts content.
You think you have choice. But it's all an illusion. All you get is a piece of paper. They sell the same piece of paper over and over again. All that changes is the wrapping, and that's a piece of paper too.
It's a piece of paper.
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Only a week and a bit late with this one.
The Royal Highland Show is an agricultural show held in a big field next to Edinburgh Airport. I love this countryside stuff. I know next to nothing about cattle, horses, tractors and farming in generally - and what I do know is mostly derived from accidentally listening to The Archers - but shows like this prove that there are still plenty of people out there who really do know their stuff. It worries me that the knowledge and skills involved in working the land are getting increasingly concentrated in the hands of a dwindling number of experts, while the rest of us just blindly buy whatever is cheapest at the supermarket. But enough of my apocalyptic ramblings. Let's look at some hot guys at work.
A Farrier is basically a specialist blacksmith who makes and fits horse-shoes. The hard-working lads in the pictures above were competing against the clock to transform four rectangular iron bars into four curvaceous horseshoes in the space of 45 minutes. They work in teams of two, and with only the most straightforward tools - forge, anvil, tongs, vice, hammer, punch, file, brush. It's most impressive to watch.
Who wants to see some sheep?
OK, so there aren't many actual sheep visible in that picture. But it gives you an idea of the scale of the place. That was just one half of one of the four or so sheep tents. Continuing the theme of fit young men hard at work: where there's sheep, there's sheep-shearing. And these guys are fast.
There were also some more dangerous-looking breeds, who you probably wouldn't want to approach with clippers:
They have all sort of stuff at the show, but I didn't take photos of most of it. The cattle parade is always enjoyable, because there are usually cute but recalcitrant baby animals who have been attached to a rope and entrusted to the care of a small teenaged girl who isn't quite strong enough to pull it in the required direction. But my real favourite are the Clydesdales - the most popular breed of heavy horse in Scotland. The heavy horse competition is called a "turn-out", where the horses are hitched to a trap of some kind (either in pairs side by side or in tandem one in front of the other, or in larger groups) and proceed to be put through their paces in the ring. Some of the carts in the contest were a hundred years old and still road-worthy!
The exact positioning of our seats, combined with the less-than-perfect weather, made it rather hard to get good pictures. But I did my best!
The Highland Games was quite a fun diversion. Basically a strong-man contest, this featured weight-throwing, shot-putting and caber-tossing by a number of (you guessed it) fit young men. Except this is a different kind of fitness which seems to involve a lot of pie-eating. Actually I have some videos of this, but I'm not entirely sure how to upload them (and they're in crappy AVI format anyway). The vertical weight-throwing competition was the hilight, as the competitors were trying to break the world record for tossing a 65lb dead weight into the air. They got a couple of audience members to try it first, just to show how heavy these things really are (i.e. extremely hard even to lift above your head, let alone throw). Then up stepped some big Polish guy and launched this lump of metal about 15ft into the air. They didn't break the record, but they gave it a damned good try.
The caber-tossing was won outright by the only Scotsman in the competition (who'd've thought it?). The object of the caber-toss is to launch this massive pole into the air, have it rotate so the top end strikes the ground and the bottom end continues on and over to fall flat straight in front of you. It's the angle of the caber where it falls that determines your score.
Last but not least, there was the obligatory show-jumping competition. Also known as a fun exercise in long-distance photography and adjusting your camera's shutter speed under poor lighting conditions. Needless to say most of my shots didn't come out at all well, but here is one that almost did:
There were one or two nasty-looking accidents with horses running straight into the jumps at full tilt and demolishing them completely, but fortunately no people or animals were seriously hurt.
Next time, we have to go and see the dog agility thing. I need stuff to caption.
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Once more, I find myself abusing bits of the Internet to satisfy my own warped curiosity. (To be honest, I blame the parents.)
This week: TinyURL. If you've never used TinyURL, here is a brief explanation. It's a free web service that helps you to manage long, unwieldy URLs. Just paste an arbitrary web address into TinyURL and hit the button, and it will return a tiny little thing that looks like http://tinyurl.com/LLIvo or something, which redirects to the site you originally specified and is easier to type, remember, send to someone else, write on a post-it, whatever.
So I got to wondering – if so many people are using this service, then how hard is it to guess a valid TinyURL? (More precisely: how densely populated is the TinyURL keyspace?) To find out, I wrote a small script that picks short random strings of letters and numbers and looks them up on TinyURL, returning the website they point to (if any).
The result? Well, for five-character strings, 627 out of my 1000 randomly selected identifiers were valid. So, if you type http://tinyurl.com/ followed by five random letters or numbers, the odds are roughly two in three that you'll get some random page off the internet that someone, at some time, has found interesting or important enough to run through the TinyURL mangle.
The next question is obvious. What sort of pages are people using TinyURL for?
The answer is disappointingly mundane. Most of the links I found were very boring. Maps to boring places, news stories about boring events, boring people's MySpace pages, searches for boring products on boring e-commerce sites, boring images of anime characters.
Many of the sites I came across this way were rather technical in nature, which suggests that TinyURL is (at the moment) mostly used by geeks. Although there were some definite signs of online shoe-shopping as well. No porn, oddly enough (except for one site that appeared to sell anal sex toys, which I wasn't in a hurry to click on. TwCrs, if you're braver than I am.)
There was one interesting-looking page on the list, which was (I think) a news story about a Boston skateboarder who was sueing the city after getting his forehead branded by a manhole cover. Unfortunately, the target link had already expired. Like, bummer.
And finally, there was clear evidence of at least one person taking the output of TinyURL and feeding it back into TinyURL – presumably to see how many levels of redirection they could get away with.
Honestly. Some people clearly have too much time on their hands.
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Actually, I'm not sure exactly why we chose to go to Northumbria on holiday. Other than the fact that we went there last year and it was great. But I'm not sure exactly why it was great. I think it's because no-one really knows about it. So I'm not sure exactly why I'm telling you about it. It just seemed like, you know, a reasonable thing to do.
Just as the reasonable thing to do when one arrives in a new town is to go out and poke around, trying not to look too much like a nosy tourist but still allowing your brain time to translate the preconceived ideas you got from staring at a 1:25,000 map for hours on end into a demonstrable ability to find your way back to where you started from. And then rummage around in the drawers and cupboards of your rented townhouse looking for a cafetiere and a spare AA battery for the clock on the living-room mantelpiece which no-one has bothered to change, nor even just straighten the hands to 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock or something that at least looks presentable.
One drawer, as you might expect, contained Useful Information. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I locate that drawer, and this time was even better, because in it was not just Information, but also Evidence of the Prior Existence of Intelligent Life, or at least a form of life that shares my suspicion of Indian Takeaways with Very Large Menus and had taken the time (and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do) to calculate the minimum number of different saucepans required to support such a wide choice of spicy fare:
That's encouraging. Someone else is looking for order in chaos. Someone else is finding patterns, rationalizing the arbitrary, distilling sense from the senseless. Moreover, someone else remembers GCSE mathematics. I wonder if they knew, when they were scribbling down their factorials, how happy it would make me when I saw it? Probably not.
Anyway, there was a clock. Not that clock, the other one. This one hadn't stopped, although it was a few minutes fast. It was in the kitchen, on the wall, and it gave me a shock. I'd written about it, you see. It has unusual numbering. But I wrote about it a long time before I saw it. (That's because the numbering is not that unusual, and my imagination is not as fertile as all that. I am well aware of this. Don't start.) The clock looked like this:
It couldn't go unremarked, and I could even do a post clock ergo prompter clock joke, if anyone wanted to hear it. Actually, the clock I wrote about was even more interesting than this one, but that's another story. Literally. Still it feels like I'm getting things out of order here. Fortunately, the Useful Information drawer has a solution to that, too, and it's only a phone call away:
I imagine that was probably caused by an over-zealous spellchecker. But under the circumstances, it's probably not my place to speculate.
Where was I? Oh yes, that's right - Alnwick. A wonderful, clean, friendly little town which is home to one of Britain's most impressive castles (so impressive, in fact, that almost every drama series or film with a medieval or fantasy setting has been filmed on location there at one point or another, including Cadfael and Harry Potter). The Duke and Duchess of Northumberland live there – actually in the castle, mind you! – and they let people come in and marvel at their collection of 12-foot-high mirrors and ornate Louis-XIV-era furniture and naff china (and I'm not kidding, some of it is really kitsch like you wouldn't believe). The castle looks like this:
Anyway, they don't let you take photos inside so all this talk of fixtures and fittings is pretty much academic. And besides, I'm getting ahead of myself again: it's only Sunday at this point (if we gloss over Saturday night, that is) so we haven't even been to said castle. We thought about it, but it was kinda rainy, and to British people that means that it's an ideal time to do something that involves being outdoors. So Alnwick Gardens, here we come. (Came. Whatever.)
Now Alnwick Gardens are basically the grounds of the Castle anyway, although they're somewhat removed from the fortress itself and have their own admissions kiosk and gifte shoppe. The Duke has been busy of late reshaping the gardens and installing water features. And when I say water features, I really mean one great giant water feature the size of a large car park, taking up a whole hillside by itself:
It's much more impressive in person. And it does feel almost alive, in a way, so I wouldn't hesitate to anthropomorphize. As you climb further up it, you find little streams and pools cut into the pathways, and planted islands within those, and smooth pebbles just under the surface. It feels recursive, like zooming in on a big wet Mandelbrot set.
In one of the pools in the upper courtyard garden, we came across a chaffinch bathing itself, as brash as anything:
It must be a wonderful place to be a bird or a bee or a butterfly. We saw many interesting kinds of all three, but none of them stayed still long enough to be captured on camera. (Can we say "on film" these days? Has the romance gone out of photography, now we've only the harsh precision of the CCD behind our lenses? But I digress.) There is a particularly interesting species of bee with a deep red colouration, and a white butterfly with orange-tipped wings that we immediately dubbed Lepidoptera Stelios Haji-Ioannou, or the EasyButterfly, although that does really have too many syllables, and shortening it to EasyFly would inevitably result in a namespace clash as soon as we discovered an orange-and-white fly, and EasyButter would be more of a no-frills dairy product, so we ended up at just EasyBy. We saw rather a lot of them over the week. Fortunately, not all of the wildlife was so fast-moving. Indeed, bits of it were hardly moving at all, and we'd come at the perfect time to see the late spring blossoms. There was grove upon grove of apple trees:
...and cherries, too, and a beautiful euphorbia that I'd love to grow myself, given a real garden:
We decided to go to the Treehouse for lunch. This treehouse, I understand, is one of the largest in Europe (who audits these things? Honestly?) and houses a well-regarded restaurant in amongst a lot of rope ladders and rickety bridges and such-and-such.
We arrived not long after noon and even though we couldn't get a table straight away, we remained undeterred. The menu really did look enticing, and much more fun than the egg-and-cress sandwiches on sale in the main café. So we killed an hour or so by talking a stroll around the nearby woods. It was an interesting walk: at some point, someone had clearly imprisoned some art students in this forest and made them decorate the place with sculptures and triptyches and other odd installations, like these:
Yes – there is a surreal door standing in the middle of the forest, there, just like the one in my last story. I almost needed a trip to the causality department when I spotted that. (Actually, there were two or three of them, but the novelty wears off surprisingly fast.) One of them had made their art practical as well as decorative, by providing upmarket nesting-boxes in various colours and architectural styles.
Our right hemispheres duly exercised, we returned to the treehouse and waited another forty minutes or so for our promised table to materialise. Normally I find that waiting (particularly for food) stresses me out, but being on holiday makes a lot of difference. And it was worth the wait! The lunch menu inside was very different from the one posted on the door, so we actually ended up with a proper sit-down meal rather than the light snacks we'd been expecting. But the quality of the food was outstanding – local ingredients well-chosen and well-cooked, and enormous portions of everything at about half the price of a city-centre restaurant of the same quality. And the inside is as fantastic as the outside, although the photos I took don't really do it justice. The restaurant is divided up by knots of twisting branches like great walls of wooden spaghetti. (What is it that you can't shake at a large number of sticks, if you have too many of them, I wonder?)
One thing was for sure: we were going to have to do some serious walking to work off the weight gain from this unexpectedly generous meal. Fortunately, the drizzly cloud was already lifting, and the next day was bright and clear and warm. We decided to get up early and see the castle before all the bank-holiday tourists arrived in force.
The castle itself is quite an imposing site. Most of the UK's castles are crumbling ruins, so it comes as quite a surprise to see one that's in relatively good nick. It would have to be, I suppose, if a family of rich people had chosen to make it their ancestral home, but there's no accounting for taste, as they say. (And judging by the grandeur of the place, the Duke and Duchess have no taste for accounting.) Here are some random photos from the ramparts:
One of the most intriguing things about Alnwick castle is the amount of detail to be seen everywhere. There were some big name designers (well, big names at the time) involved in the 18th Century restoration work, but this isn't a history lesson and you know how to use Wikipedia. They bedecked the battlements with ornate gargoyles and life-size statues, most of which have weathered down to indistinct stumps, but hold your gaze the more for all that as you squint to make out what that strange pose might once have been. (When three hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmmm?)
As well as the grounds and the state rooms, the castle has a number of interesting mini-museums dotted around it, including a fascinating collection of antiquities. I was particularly impressed by some of the saxon jewelry. We definitely could have spent all day there. But we were eager to stretch our legs, so we headed off into another swathe of the Duke's territory just next door – Hulne Park. I've never felt so immediately in love with a place in my life. It's like someone distilled and bottled the English countryside and laid it down in a hundred-acre cellar, then let the public wander in and taste it for free. We wandered through fields of pheasants and sheep in the glorious sunshine, and crossed bridges and climbed hills, and took wrong turnings and saw a perfect red squirrel, and could gladly have done it all again if the day had hours enough.
(This is the point where I'm mentally costing up the season ticket and working out ways to persuade my boss to let me move to another country and work from home.)
I ought, at this point, to stop and say something about the word "Alnwick" for the benefit of those of you unfamiliar with English place names. Neither the L nor the W are pronounced; hence it sounds as if it were spelled "Annick". The town is so called because of its proximity to the river Aln, which is pronounced "Aln". Well, the L is just barely there, anyway. The train station for Alnwick is called Alnmouth station, because it's near (but not actually in) the nearby coastal town of Alnmouth. Which is pronounced "Allen-mouth". Almost. Honestly. It took me most of the week to memorize all this.
The next day we walked along the Aln from Alnwick to Alnmouth. (See why I had to put that last paragraph in there?) It's not far; or at least it's not supposed to be. We started out from the beautiful Lion Bridge:
The Lion-with-a-flagpole-up-his-bottom is kinda the symbol of the Duchy of Northumberland. He pops up on the crest of arms, and conceals himself in floral borders, and there's another statue of him on a big pillar on a hill on the other side of town, next to the best bookshop in the world. But more about that later. We wandered around the edge of the town along the river, watching the wildfowl and avoiding patches of bog and getting annoyed by footpaths that disappear without a trace just when you've got far enough from the main road to make it a pain in the neck to turn round and try another way. Even so, it was all going brilliantly until we tried to cross the river.
Most people cross rivers using bridges. But the most pleasant route to Alnmouth took us across country and over the Aln by means of a ford, with stepping stones. It looks really cute on the OS map. When we reached it, we found the ground around it was ankle-deep mud for twenty feet on either side, and the crossing itself was obscured by a bend in the path. Intrepidly we took off our shoes and waded through the wet dirt, to reach the edge of the stream. The day was baking hot but the water was seriously cold, and flowing fast. We found the stepping stones were all but submerged, and certainly no use for stepping. I waded a little way out, and was in above my knees before I could even touch the first of the stones. The current between the teeth was fierce, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that we were going to have to find another way. So we retreated to the dry grassy path, and washed the mud off our feet with water from an Evian bottle, and sat and laughed and ate our lunch while the noon sun dried our legs. He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
From hereon in, things went from bad to worse (in nominal terms, at least). The next footpath took us into a field and left us there. The footpath after that wasn't even there, which wouldn't have been so bad except that the sign for it actually was still there. That led us into a reedy, boggy, overgrown field, which we navigated based on the principle that we were somewhere between the river on one side and the road on the other, so we couldn't actually get lost, and if anyone actually owned this place, then they obviously didn't care too much about it. Under a railway bridge we found the path again, for a while. It took us up a hill, under some prickly trees, and dumped us in a patch of brambles. But we could hear the road just ahead, so we scrambled on and over a couple of wire fences until we reached the tarmac. Pausing for breath and to pick the burrs and thorns out of our jeans, we looked up the road and saw a well-beaten track and a neat stile leading back over the fence, just a dozen yards away. Typical.
Of course, this is all part of the fun. And from this point, the rest of the journey wasn't so hard. We only took one accidental detour, and it was scenic enough. We walked around a number of fields with odd-looking barrels placed at intervals around the edges. The small-print on the labels told me they were dispensing a chemical called a "rheology modifier". Even after ten minutes of browsing the Internet, I'm still not entirely sure what they were doing there. Something to do with preventing erosion or landslips or flash flooding, I presume.
We made it, in the end, to the beach at Alnmouth. In case you didn't know, this is what beaches look like:
Then common sense got the better of us, and we caught the bus home.
For our next trick, we decided to do another walk and see another castle. This time, the castle was in ruins and the walk was just a couple of leisurely miles along the seafront. Dunstanburgh castle must have been quite a sight, in its day.
Now it makes a quiet, craggy home for swallows and wagtails, not to mention the hoards of seagulls that mill around the skies and perch in the shelter of the cliffs below the outer walls.
After we'd explored the castle and watched the fishing boats running up and down the coast we popped into the pub at Craster for a crab sandwich, and across the road to the smokehouse to pick up some kippers for breakfast. And some to bring home and stuff in the freezer to be taken out with a triumphant flourish on a rainy day and eaten with baked potatoes and beer.
The bookshop! I have to tell you about the bookshop!
Barter Books is an enormous second-hand bookshop housed in what used to be Alnwick train station (before Mr. Beeching axed all the smaller branch lines in the country and cut off hundreds of thriving communities from the rail network in the name of efficiency). It's bigger than most large libraries, and infinitely more fascinating. They specialise in rare and antique books, with an incredibly diverse collection spanning centuries and continents. I found a wonderful tri-lingual dictionary of engineering terminology from the early twentieth century, and a second-edition Winnie-the-Pooh, an original Mein Kampf, dusty old tomes by Mrs. Beeton, an encyclopedia of Latin phrases used in the Scottish legal system, a guide to creating the perfect rubber plantation... so many treasures, so little time. And the jewel in the crown, which will probably have me sneaking back there with a wodge of banknotes and a heavy-duty airtight watertight container any day now: the first edition of Max Born's treatise on Einstein's Theory of Relativity! I must confess, I nearly rushed and bought it on the spur of the moment. But on reflection, I think it deserves better than to sit in a plastic bag in a box in our attic for the rest of eternity.
I suspect that they also have a contraption in there which sucks time out of the universe and blows it back out as warm air, but I couldn't quite figure out how they did it.
Our holiday almost at an end, we found that we hadn't had time to visit even half the places on our list. The incredibly warm weather was still with us, so we decided to spend our final day at Howick Hall. This, in fact, is the historical residence of Earl Grey, the nobleman for whom the original Earl Grey tea was created. The walk there took us past a beautiful piece of landscape called Hips Heugh, which I am grateful not to have to try to pronounce. I took several photographs with the intention of stitching together a panorama of this, but I didn't have time to do the requisite post-processing yet. So here is a straightforward snap:
Howick Hall has some of the most impressive gardens I've ever seen, plus a huge arboretum which is still being landscaped. One of the most original things they've done is to sow wildflowers in many of the lawn areas. The effect is quite dramatic!
Not far from the main house was a pond, planted around with some fascinating species, and attracting dozens of butterflies (as well as some less desirable insects).
Amongst the many trees we passed, this acer stood out quite boldly. Standing under its branches, you felt like summer would never leave. And there were blossoms of all shapes and colours everywhere we turned:
And closer to the ground, the flowers were even more vivid (and various). Their gardeners have planned the site expertly; every twist and turn of the path brings something new to see. Even the humble primroses looked exotic, nesting in the shade of the trees and surrounded by so many other vibrant plants.
With all these green and growing attractions, it's understandable that they might be worried about getting an unwanted visitor or two.
I'm just very slightly concerned that the rabbits and hares might not be able to read the sign.
We couldn't help but pay a visit to the tea rooms for lunch. And very impressive they were too. Simple food, but fresh and well-prepared and tasty – with serious portions. The scones were easily big enough for two to share, and came with proper whipped cream (and jam and butter). The tea, as you'd hope given where we were, came in pretty pots, was made with proper loose tea-leaves and tasted quite excellent. I resisted the bakewell tart mostly through being too full to move by the end of the preceding meal.
The rest of the afternoon was spent pootling around the arboretum while I tried frantically to take photographs of moving butterflies. This, incidentally, doesn't really work. But I did get another lovely shot of the wild poppies and tulips, when we were stopped examining the map under the shade of a tree, which I think is my favourite photograph from the whole trip. (That's why I saved it until last.)
On the morning of our departure, the owner of the house we were staying in gave us a friendly telephone call to ask whether everything has been all right. "Yes," I told her, "although the clock in the living room has stopped. It doesn't have a battery in it". I'm not sure that's quite what she meant. She was probably even more confused when she turned up to show her next guests in and discovered that the clock is in fact working perfectly and telling the correct time. (I left one of my spare rechargable batteries in it by mistake.)
What? You didn't seriously expect me to sit in a room with a stopped clock for a week, did you?
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How popular are integers?
I didn't know, so I wrote a short perl script to find out. I present... the GoogleFunction.
GoogleFunction(n) is defined as the number of results reported by http://www.google.com/search?q=n. Here is what it looks like for integers n between 0 and 100:
And here it is again with the range extended upwards to 1000:
I could go on, I guess, but you get the general idea.
It looks... almost exactly how I would have expected it to look, except that there's a definite and completely counter-intuitive trough at 13 which I can't explain. Spooky, huh?
(Oh, and the first person to suggest I have too much time on my hands gets a slapping.)
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Next
The Vengeance of Rome by Michael Moorcock. That Pyatnitski chap is at it once more - blundering through history in a stupendous fog of self-delusion and sleeping with anything that isn't nailed down. Possibly including Hitler.
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