Catmachine

As far as buying our music is concerned, we've come a long way in what feels like a very short time. These days it's far quicker and easier to buy music at the drop of a hat - furthermore there's a far greater range of music to choose from. We can pick and choose the tracks we want and best of all we don't even have to leave the house. The downside of this is of course that it can be dangerous going online drunk - a hangover is rarely improved by the discovery that one has bought the box set of Mantovani's 100 Golden Moments because it seemed like a funny idea at the time. In general this means that things are more convenient and in some small way we are conserving resources. What's more we no longer have to cart around half a metric tonne of vinyl every time we move house and lets face it those cardboard boxes were always the heaviest ones. Usually designed for transporting bananas they also had a nasty habit of disintegrating halfway up the garden path ...

Ever since moving to this city I've had a Grudging-Acceptance / Hate relationship with the local buses as anyone who has ever read my blog or followed me on Twitter or other social media will already know. I never shut up about it and am in fact surprised you're still following me. What's that you say? You're not? Oh dear. There are many reasons for this (the bus thing, not the social media thing). For a start there was the whole breaking my arm and lying about it incident which I've already chronicled in this very blog, and then there was the time that The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened occurred on the top deck of a number 25. But on the whole these specific events aren't a major part of the general unpleasantness surrounding such journeys. It's everything else. For a start where I live the nearest bus stop is on a large square - the other side of the square to the direction from which I enter it. This means that I can see my bus is already at ...

When most children play "lets pretend" they imagine a thing that isn't. Whilst I did do that as a kid, I also used to have little games in my head in which I imagined a thing that already was ... The first major incidence of the phenomenon that I can now recall was back in the seventies when we had an German exchange student staying with us, a woman studying architecture. As a favour to my parents - perhaps as a way of saying thank you for letting her stay - she took me off their hands for an afternoon on a trip to visit Welwyn Garden City and Harlow - of some significance to students of architecture and town planning as they were both "New Towns" built in the twentieth century in the commuter belt to ease overcrowding in London. Whilst we were in Harlow I started playing a strange game with myself. To clarify, this was playing a game in the sense of " let's play Star Trek " rather than " let's play Tiddlywinks ". I started ima...

I miss the Sunrise. I miss waking up and instantly knowing how long it is until I have to drag my sorry carcass out of bed to face first the computer world (for my early morning brain workout) and then the outside world as I travel to my place of work (which - if I am feeling energetic - involves my early morning body workout). The problem with waking up and it still being pitch black out there is that you have no idea how much time you have left before the alarm clock (in my case it's an app, but the principle is the same  - and no matter how pleasant an alarm tone you have chosen you will come to hate it) assaults your ears forcing you to get out of bed. You could have hours in which to fall back asleep and have more dreams or it could be less than five minutes until the alarm is due to go off. Let's face it, by the time you actually get motivated to check the time it's usually the latter. You lie there in full wakefulness dreading the noise that is due to come you...

This morning as I dragged myself out of bed early for the first time since the seasonal break I seriously felt that the weather was taking the piss. It was the day that I was due back at work and as such already had a level of terror normally reserved for a visit to the dentist without anaesthetic. The fact that it now sounded as if there was a force ten from navarone blowing out there was merely the cyanide icing on an already unpleasant and slightly rotten fruit cake. If this had been fiction I would have concluded that this was the Pathetic Fallacy at work and that the weather was reflecting the mood of all the people in the land as they were returning to their places of work; the appalling weather itself then serving to sour these self same moods even further in a furious feedback loop... But there are few authors who could get away with this kind of thing these days. If you or I had penned this morning and then brought it along to a writers' workshop we would probably ...

A lot of the time when I was a kid, what I read was dictated by what I could find in the small SF section of Muswell Hill library or the books that I could find in the bargain bins. Once I'd outgrown Narnia, I found most books aimed specifically at children rather boring (with a few notable exceptions - Joan Aiken amongst them) and had been put off the so-called classics by having The Mill on the Floss rammed down my throat as an official text upon which I would later be tested. It took me forever to finish I can't remember a thing about it now. As has been chronicled elsewhere , this exploration of the SF genre meant that I was exposed to a lot of adult themes early - whilst grown-ups may have imagined me to be reading juvenile tales of invasions by robots from Mars I was in fact exploring unexpected worlds of cannibalism, sex with aliens and other taboos. Some of the disturbing ideas from these far out stories have stuck with me ever since. On other occasions perusal o...

So here it is, 2012, everybody's going to die. Or at least that's what the doomsday theorists would have us all believe. But better not join them in this belief otherwise you run the risk of Professor Brian Cox calling you a nobber [ 1 ]. He's got a point though. There's absolutely no basis for the now widely held suspicion that the world as we know it will end on Friday 21 December 2012 - or even that anyone ever predicted that it would. This hysteria came about because this date does indeed appear as a landmark in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar which was used by the Mayans amongst other people. The date wasn't part of any prophecy however - it was merely the point at which the digits of the calendar (which was calculated in a rather complex and confusing manner using both base-17 and base-20) rolled over to 13.0.0.0.0. For the Mayans this was the end of an era - perhaps a bit of an abstraction seeing as it lay so far in the future, but the Mesoamerican...