Catmachine

I can't believe that it's already five years since I wrote the first blog in the I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan  series, a series which turned into a book self-published on kindle and paperback . Five years now is very different from five years back then. As a Teenage Toyah Fan five years was the gap between my first Toyah LP The Blue Meaning  and the realise of Minx - five long years of adventure many of which are detailed in the book and which at the time seemed to last forever. Whereas this last five years seems to have lasted just a few months in comparison. That is not to say that the most recent half-decade was without incident - far from it. The self publishing was an adventure in itself which gave me far more confidence in my writing as a whole and contributed to the fact that I have now had several short stories published (with more on the way). Fingers crossed for the novels as well... Plus since writing those first blogs - quite by coincidence - there was a re...

There is no-one to blame. The whole feeling of being put upon by fate, the weather or other so-called acts of God comes not from reality but from the human brain's almost infinite capacity for Pattern Recognition. Pattern recognition is how life makes sense of the universe. In the case of human beings the process has become so baroque and complex that it's unsurprising when it starts to throw out anomalies. We may think we see what is in front of us but that is very far from the truth. Without the high intensity interpretation and pattern matching going on in the visual cortex of the brain, the field of view is a chaotic mess of shape and shade. Even something as simple as identifying colour is tied up with image identification and processing. As the recent furore about a certain dress and - more interestingly - the very different colour palette perceived by the Himba tribe of Namibia prove, it seems that the ability to distinguish between shades of colour is linked to...