Catmachine

The introduction of the keyboard into my life - that is at first the typewriter and then the computer rather than the Yamaha Home Organ - I found to be The Great Enabler. Before that I was always hamstrung when it came to expressing myself on paper and I suspect the messiness of my writing and how slow I was were a contributory factor to the "disappointment" teachers expressed in my efforts. For some reason they equated writing neatly with trying hard and intelligence, despite no evidence to support this whatsoever. " Could try harder " OH FUCK OFF. At first I used to blame this on the fact that I'd effectively missed being taught joined up writing at school. I left Galliard Road Junior School in Edmonton the year before we learnt it, only to arrive at Tetherdown Junior School in Muswell Hill and discover that they'd learned it the year before. I ended up teaching myself and whenever possible would lapse back to printing.  Handwriting was just too ...

Previously in this blog... At the age of nine or so an unnamed friend and I discover two disused platforms at Highgate Station. Now read on... The gorge was set into the side of a hill which meant that the cliff face that loomed over the eastern end of the platforms was much higher than the one to the west. In this artificial escarpment yawned two enormous tunnel mouths. My friend and I decided to investigate. There were no tracks or even sleepers present on the line, just pumice rubble and weeds. As we approached the twin maws we started to feel apprehensive. It was going to be very dark in there. "Shall we hold hands?" I suggested. I was serious. We only got a few yards in before panic got the better of us and we fled. But where did these tunnels emerge? A little nearer home than Highgate Station was Highgate Wood , reached by going through the park (which obviously had aspirations to be like its bigger scarier brother given that it bore the name Cherry Tree Wo...

East Finchley Station was quite an impressive building. I could forgive it for being above ground because it had an aura of mystery. For a start there were more platforms than the station actually needed. This was a conundrum. And then there was the statue of the archer looming over the platforms, caught in the act of loosing an arrow towards Central London. To feed my growing obsession I told the staff at East Finchley ticket office that I was doing a project at school and was given a red plastic folder which contained a collections of maps and timetables. This was wonderful. The map was far better than the ones I'd had to make do with up until now, tiny ones in the back of diaries and black and white versions in the A-Z. This one was in full colour and made of card, folded twice in to what years later I would discover was known as a “triptych”. I covered it in the sticky see-though plastic sheeting you got for covering school books. I made a nuisance of myself going back to t...

Alleyways weren't the only obsession during my first few years of life. The London Underground also captured my imagination. There was something about H C Beck 's brightly coloured wiring diagram that plugged straight into my childhood brain and lit up all the bulbs. I first came across the Tube when we moved to London at the tail end of the sixties. Most of the time when we went into town we travelled by car but on a few occasions my Mum had to take us into town by public transport. We would catch the bus from the end of the road (opposite the police box, just outside Tesco) which would take us all the way to Seven Sisters where we'd get on the tube. Thus my introduction to the service was the Victoria Line . The new Victoria Line as it was known at the time. I seem to recall talk of the trains being driverless at first but that people got too freaked out by seeing no-one in the cab as the trains entered the platform so they installed a person there to reassure th...

I watched a fascinating documentary on BBC4 last week, part of the series The Brain: A Secret History . It was all about emotions, where they come from, how they work and what they're for.  All interesting stuff, but I was surprised that at no point was the evolutionary root of emotions discussed - it was all behavioural. And yet I've found that simply looking at things from an evolutionary perspective can provide astonishing insight into what makes us human and just why it is that we do all of the things that we do. Evolution says that anything that makes it far more likely for organisms to pass on their genes to future generations will be exaggerated over time, and for sentient beings lusts, urges and instincts are what make us do things we have to (if we didn't "enjoy" food we'd forget to eat and starve to death). The stronger the lust and protective instincts felt towards a chosen partner will result in more sex and therefore more children; the stronge...

Some people might have noticed that I have suddenly started blogging a lot more frequently than in recent months. Amongst other things this is because I finished the first draft of the work in progress novel that has been hanging around my brain since the Christmas 2007. Those worrying about whether this is going to be a boring self-indulgent blog take heart - I promise not to mention the novel again after today until a much later stage. As I have mentioned in a couple of recent blog entries this completion was in no small part thanks to the  machinations of 750words.com which seems to have successfully tapped into the addictive qualities of social media (which I am given to understand is to do with something called Random Intermittent Reinforcement ) so that rather than obsessively checking Twitter every two minutes to see what everyone has said since the last time I looked or checking into Palmeira Square on FourSquare twice a day to ensure I retain the mayorship, I actually...

Thinking back to my earliest memories, I recall myself as having been surprisingly (mentally) articulate even as a very young child. Perhaps what I was thinking wasn't necessarily in adult English or even in words but it was still recognisably me doing the thinking, exactly the same person, the same mind that is doing the typing now.  Particularly recognisable is the way things use to puzzle and bother me, in exactly the same way then as now. Why was Fred Flintstone ordering a deckchair to be delivered to his car , and what was the deal with Top Cat? Firstly it bugged me that he was called Boss Cat in the Radio Times and on the TV continuity announcements but that in the theme tune and throughout the show he was Top Cat or TC. My mother did explain that this was because the BBC didn't allow advertising and that there was already a brand of cat food called "Top Cat", but this explanation didn't stand up to scrutiny for me. If this was the case, why didn't...

The problem with writing anything about politics is that people see it as carte blanche to Have A Go. Even though I'd hope that the bulk of people reading this very probably share my views, it is all in the public domain.  If I'm not very careful I'm going to end up with abusive comments. You see, I experienced something like this once before when I wrote a miniblog entry on Tumblr about the whole Bigotgate scandal . You must remember.  It was when Gordon Brown was caught off the record saying he dislikes bigotry and got pilloried for it. The gist of what I wrote was that whatever you thought of his policies I considered that his treatment by the press had been unfair. The link to this miniblog was retweeted a couple of times and before I knew it was was drowning in angry responses from people who loathed Brown and completely missing the point I was trying to make were telling me so in no uncertain terms. Of course many of them were dyed in the wool Tories, which i...

Friday November 12th, 2021 To the Managing Director of Mattoy Educational Dear Sir I am writing to complain about the Mattoy “My First DNA Sequencer Kit” I purchased for my daughter Blaze’s fifteenth birthday in October. From the widespread publicity and advertisements, I had been given to understand that the kit would “ turn my kid on to the intricacies of genetics with simple experiments such as extracting DNA from root vegetables and revealing DNA fingerprints on doorknobs, thus giving her a head start in one of today’s most exciting and challenging growth industries ”. However, upon opening the kit we discovered that not only did the electrophoresis chamber lack a power cord, but that the manual was missing. Temporarily transplanting the cord from her PlayStation Seven, Blaze was naturally eager to begin experimentation, even without a manual, and so downloaded what at the time I believed to be appropriate material in order to make a start whilst we waited for the replacement ...