For all you hoopy froods

I am not a hoopy frood. In the HHGTTG galaxy, I am more Dentarthurdent (if you aren't familiar with the world of Douglas Adams, imagine Arthur as the proto-Mark Corrigan) than Ford Prefect. They both own good dressing gowns and exist in a state of befuddlement with the world's degradation. Only Mark has eaten a girl's dog though, and Arthur's essentially kind.

Today is Douglas Adams appreciation day, known as Towel Day. This is because 'a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have', and if you know where your towel is, friendly types will lend you anything else you may have mislaid.

I will be donning dressing gown and towel today, because I'm a huge fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series, BBC series and books. They're more than a collection of Adams's one-liners about tea, cricket and technology - there's real heart in there, and serious (though sentimental) liberal-left values. Arthur is a man out of time, baffled by the shallowness of the Porsche-driving advertising executives who stand in for friends. A cup of tea, a girlfriend and peace and quiet is all he needs, yet the universe keeps intervening - blowing up Earth, for instance. The series is essentially a howl of pain as Adams observes the gentle liberalness  which he saw as encapsulating Englishness ripped apart by capitalism and the Tories.



Adams' other books are also bursting with emotion, ideas and funny jokes - Bach and Coleridge are key cameos in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Douglas also cared hugely about species loss, what we've done to the planet, and Apple Macs. He died at the age of 51 in 2001. He's also responsible for my PhD-writing motto:

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by".

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

I am forsaking you, leaving you to wander the streets clutching bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (great website, by the way), staring with mute desperation at passers-by, imploring them to pretend to be Plashing Vole for just a few seconds.

In other words, I'm having a long weekend, returning to my keyboard on Tuesday afternoon, probably.

Which means you'll be needing a Friday conundrum to keep you going.

What snippets of high or popular culture summarise your understanding of the world?

There are so many for me. I loved Marvin the Paranoid Android's observation that 'the dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning', and the talkshow host's claim on The Simpsons that 'your tears say more than real evidence ever could'. Arthur Dent is quite a hero, and I'm just not getting into the Peep Show debate. Chris Morris has a peculiarly accurate though misanthropic approach to life.

Arthur Dent (from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!

"This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

Marvin:

Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow.

Why stop now just when I'm hating it?

Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.

Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

George Eliot:

The world outside the books is not a happy one, Maggie felt (from The Mill on the Floss).

Meanwhile, here are a few lines from Iain Sinclair's Downriver, just because I like them:

A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk and Kish. You were obliged to super-impose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs.

It's a great book - much more wordy, as you can see from this excerpt, than my usual taste, but it's got breadth of imagination and a real nasty swipe at the wideboys, bankers, property developers and all that crew who happily demolished old London to build poxy designer flats for yuppies. It's therefore a very good book to be reading in the midst of our current situation.

34 - waist and years in perfect harmony (dammit)

I've popped home to receive birthday congratulations from the Aged Parents (copyright, the Mitfords). It's such a joy to be in the countryside rain. Everything's green, lush and wet. The cat's as pleased to see me, as pleased as any cat can be anyway, and the bantams are hopefully greedy, which equates to love in my world. 

Anyway, thanks to my dear youngest sister Helen, who made me my favourite biscuit cake, with my age picked out in Smarties. Coincidentally, it's her favourite cake too - she swears that's what she'll have for her wedding. Now she needs to persuade someone (and yes, he reads this blog), to POP THE QUESTION. Though perhaps marrying someone who loves biscuit cake this much is too much to ask. 

So, how to review the year in the time remaining before The Wire starts? What achievements do I have to my credit? I've gained several hundred pounds in books, some of which I've read. I've lost several hundred pounds of gelatine, most of which has stayed off. My hair's thinner and my fuse is shorter. I've attained two years' stability as far as work goes, though this may well change in September thanks to a combination of management evilitude and global political/economic stupidity. My fencing is improving and I'm doing a lot of refereeing and child protection stuff, so I'm doing my little bit for society. 

I'm also a lot angrier, which usually manifests itself in sarcasm and despair. Everybody tells me that people get more conservative as they get older. Not me. I get more and more militantly leftwing. Ten years ago I was a wishy-washy liberal. Now I'm a rock-solid Trotskyist with a streak of serious-minded anarchism - tolerance of what we allow to be done to us is gone. I'm also a failed Communist, in that I'm not in a party and do nothing to radically change society. Sure, I do my best to warp peoples' minds (sorry, enlighten people) through education, and I'm feeling my way in the union, but basically I just whine about stuff on my blog or in the pub. Still, I'm purer than the PFJ. Splitters!

Ah yes, the blog. Thanks to all of you. It's been going since November and I'm slowly gaining a readership. I love the fact that we often disagree (I'm looking at you on politics, Ewarwoowar), are from all over the place (Merciless, Intelliwench, The Quiet Life, SCW, The Deer Friend and lots of others) and now don't all see each other on a daily basis. You ignore my lefty rants and abuse my haircuts and taste in music and I love it. I'm no stylist, unlike lovely Cynical Ben, who can really write, but you're performing a valuable service. If I didn't unload on you, my office mates would have torn out my tongue long ago. I've found lots of people to respect and like on the web, such as all my fellow bloggers and superstars like Bad Science and Pharyngula, who remind me that there are other troublemaking lefties around who don't spend their time building rockets and planning to start again on some other planet (or Norway, which is my ideal). 

What else? I've read a lot of books, and bought a lot more, often recommended by you. For a seventh year in succession, I haven't managed to find a flat to live in, partly because the thought of buying enough shelves for books and records would bankrupt me, and partly because I'm a lazy man. I haven't been to Wales or Ireland enough this year, and have certainly spent too much time in the Black Country, though Dan has organised some brilliant walks (without the Map Twats, life would be utterly featureless, despite their perpetual harassment). I've religiously visited the upei.ca site every week in the hope that one of their English department teachers has a terrible accident (after reading all 8 volumes of Anne of Green Gables, and I've thrilled to the weekly sight of Stoke City slaying the pretty boys of the Premiership. It's been a weird sensation to be on the winning side in something. It's never happened to me in sport (playing or supporting) and definitely not in politics. I mourned Labour's wins under Blair because it covered the loss of all socialist ideals. 

So am I happy, all things considered? Yes. I'm fitter, better-read, and surrounded by great colleagues and brilliant friends, and unlike many, there's an overlap. I've almost done a PGCE and need to get on with some proper research. I'm still single (restrain your shock), but that enables me to get a lot more reading done and lo-fi listened to. 

Aims for the next year? Teach less, teach better. Move out. Pun more. Read more. Be funnier. Get thinner. Get out on my bike again, as Neal's restored it for my birthday - what a brilliant present. Write letters. See my distant friends more often. Stop whipping my arm back with every attack - people see it coming and referees don't like it. Cook more cool stuff. Remember birthdays, anniversaries and peoples' names. Lighten up. Perfect my ironing technique. Resemble David Mitchell less. Conduct ceaseless war on apostrophe abuse and superfluous wordage ('still continuing'? - deserves kneecapping). Add more heroes to my pantheon of Arthur Dent and Marvin the Paranoid Android. Say what I think. Devise an anti-SUV weapon. Upset more Christians and 'alternative' therapy adherents. Listen to the wind and merge with some waves. Climb every mountain, etc. etc. etc. 

Oh. It is my birthday now. Happy birthday to me. 

All aboard the effete train

Cynical Ben and I are on the verge of starting our sort-of culture/book/stuff online club: The Culture, Cheese and Pineapple! Thanks to Ben for sorting it out. We'll get going before long, so sign up for excitement, adventure and really wild things, as Arthur Dent is promised, much to his horror.

This Friday's conundrum

A nice one this week.

Who are your fictional heroes? With whom do you identify or admire? I'm opting for Arthur Dent ('I seem to be having trouble with my lifestyle'), who fruitlessly and accidentally travelled the universe in search of a decent cup of tea, which is disastrous. He also sported a fine dressing gown, as I have been known to, loved cricket and was pretty decent.

I've been accused of resembling Mark Corrigan too. It's true that he (and David Mitchell) is right about most things, worries about ordinary human decency, comes from Shropshire, wears a good dressing gown and the actor shares a birthday with me, but I'm ignoring all that. (Some people say Mark's conservative - they're wrong. He's just not a liberal). My university ID card has a photo of Mark on it. Nobody has ever challenged me.

(Today's xkcd cartoon is a lovely typography one - don't miss the mouse-over. Did you know I went to watch a film about Helvetica and own several books on fonts?).