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A couple of days ago, I came home to find that I had received a call from the security department of my credit card provider. I panicked a bit, of course, but called them straight away. They told me that they had flagged up a couple of transactions as suspicious, and gave me the details of the dodgy items. To my great relief, the transactions had actually been made by me, so there was no problem.

I have no idea why those particular transactions were seen as suspicious, but I’d certainly rather have a few false positives than for them to miss genuinely fraudulent transactions. I was also quite impressed that they phoned me to check. However, the whole experience did feel a little bit like my Mum reading my credit card statement and pointing out items in a slightly disapproving way: “Now, this one here — did you really need to buy that, it was rather pricey. And this one, what was that for?”

It must the technology breakdown season or something: after the amp blew a capacitor, both our ancient TV and the less ancient Freeview box started to go on the blink. The Freeview box was crashing and needed to be rebooted and retuned several times a week, always — as luck would have it — just as some programme we wanted to catch from the beginning was starting. When I was a kid, we used to have to turn our old black and white set on a few minutes early to let it ‘warm up’, so this didn’t feel like great progress. The TV was also having picture and sound problems, which pretty much covers all the critical elements necessary for a satisfying TV-watching experience.

So we bit the bullet and joined the 21st Century by buying a widescreen LCD TV which was in a sale. After living with a 20 inch 4:3 format CRT screen for so many years, the 32 inch 16:9 TV seems gigantic. No more do we have to squint at the narrow strip of slightly fuzzy picture when sitting more than a couple of metres away. It has made the whole TV, DVD or EyeTV recording-watching process much more enjoyable now that we can actually see the visual details properly and hear the dialogue and sound effects clearly.

The radical change in the quality of our viewing experience (and the earlier improvement in our listening setup with the new amp) prompted me to rearrange the living room. The room isn’t large, so rearranging the furniture is a bit like a slightly frustrating game of Tetris, but I think the new arrangement works better. We used to have the sofa at one side of the living room and quite close to the TV because of the size of the screen. This meant that we were at an awkward angle to it, and had the speakers on the other side of the room, at right angles to the TV. Now that we can sit a healthy distance from the screen and still see it, we could put the sofa across the end of the room, facing the TV. That also meant that I had space to move the speakers either side of the TV, so that we can supplement the TV’s speakers with the floorstanders — it’s poor-man’s surround sound, but it definitely adds to the experience. Also, since the speakers are firing down the long axis of the room instead of the short axis, it works better with the acoustics of the room.

The expression of Cleo (our cat) the first time she walked into the rearranged room was priceless. She looked at where the sofa used to be and did the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a double-take in a cat. Then she looked at me with a “What the hell’s going on? Where’s all my stuff?” look for a bit, before settling a bit grumpily on the sofa in its new position.

While watching House the other day, I was thinking again about the different accents in English-speaking countries. There seems to be a weird non-symmetrical effect in how easy people in one English-speaking country seem to find it to recognise the native accent of another English-speaking country.

For example, Hugh Laurie seems to me to be able to produce quite a convincing American accent (note that my point here is about how easy it is to recognise an accent, not reproduce it, which is much harder). However, as a British-English speaker, it’s perhaps not surprising if I can’t pick up the subtleties of an American-English accent. But many American viewers find his accent very authentic, and are often amazed to find out he’s British. There’s a running gag in Flight of the Conchords about Americans thinking Bret and Jemaine are British rather than New Zealanders. When I went to the States, many people I met thought I was Australian.

It doesn’t seem to by a symmetrical effect. Dick Van Dyke’s wincingly bad Cockney accent in Mary Poppins set a new benchmark for bad accents, but even American actors with reasonably good mimicry skills can be detected¹. Adam Monroe did a pretty good British accent as Takezo Kensei in Heroes, but I could tell immediately that he was not a native British-English speaker before I knew what his nationality was. Other American-English speaking actors who have attempted British-English accents (like Gwyneth Paltrow), have often been quite convincing, but their accent is still detectable to British-English speakers as non-native. Meanwhile, many Australian actors use British-English or American-English accents, and I can’t tell that they are not native speakers.

Note that I’m honestly not getting at Americans here. British people have similar troubles telling a Canadian accent from an American one, or an Australian accent from a New Zealand one. I have particular trouble telling South Africans from New Zealanders, unless the accents are fairly extreme, or the person says particular words (“six” being a handy diagnostic feature). I’m just wondering why — even between pairs of accents — there’s a non-symmetrical effect in how easy either party finds it to recognise the accent of the other. Is it a matter of exposure to the accent? We certainly get a lot of American TV, films and music in Britain. Or is it because we have a wider range of native accents in Britain (I’m not even sure if this is true), so our ears are more highly tuned to detecting differences? It could even be something to do with the time of divergence of the accents from the ancestral stock.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m intrigued by the problem.

¹ I’d be interested to know if his accent sounds reasonably authentic to an American-English speaker, though. ↑

Cycling home today, I had a storm-front behind me. Ahead, all was blue sky, sunshine and fluffy white clouds; behind, deep bruise-grey clouds and a fat rainbow. I was being soaked by the rain, while simultaneously feeling the sun warm my wet face. I felt as if I was pulling the storm-front along in my slipstream.

Of course, that wasn’t what was happening. I’m not (yet) egotistical enough or crazy enough¹ to believe that I control the weather. But sometimes, what a thing feels like is more interesting than what it actually is.

¹ Give me time… ↑

When we went away this weekend, we had to leave Cleo at a cattery for the first time. It would have been better if we could have asked our neighbours to come in and feed her for a couple of days, but for one reason or another, that wasn’t possible. Luckily, we have a wonderful cattery not far from us, run by very caring people, so we knew that she would be in excellent hands.

When we opened her carrying box in her new lodgings, she really didn’t want to come out. When she did, she walked into the run and immediately started hissing and growling at the cats in the neighbouring runs. One very portly black and white cat in the next run wandered over to her in a friendly way in response to this hostile greeting, which only made things worse. Cleo was not at all happy, and it was clear that she would have to be moved to calm her down, and also so that she didn’t kick off a huge riot among the other cats being boarded. This caused a huge amount of hassle as other cats had to be moved, runs cleaned and so on, but eventually she was housed in a run with opaque walls so that she couldn’t see any other cats.

She still wouldn’t come out of the travel box, but looked out of the window of the inner room at the peacocks and peahens strutting around outside and trembled like a leaf. I think she thought that these huge birds were going to kill her, and looked up at us with big, ‘take me home now, please’ eyes. We felt truly dreadful leaving her there, but we had no choice, and it was only for a couple of days. The problem is that you can’t explain to cats (or dogs) that they will be perfectly safe and comfortable and you’ll be back to collect them in two days. When the cat in question is rescued and has had a lot of traumatic upheaval in her life, you feel even worse.

She did eventually settle down, but was still lying on her bed inside her travel box when we came to pick her up — probably for maximum guilt-inducing effect. She seems pretty happy to be back on her own territory, and has been sniffing everything, rubbing up against every available surface (including us) rapturously, and purring like a mad thing.

One of the main benefits of cycling on a car-free path over driving on a car-jammed road is that your mind is free to wander from one pointless, weird topic to the next, without worrying that you’ll crash into someone or something. Sometimes when I actually think about what I’ve been thinking about on these occasions (if you see what I mean), it amazes me that people trust me with a responsible job.

To give an example, this is a rough transcript of my thoughts on last night’s commute. Bear in mind that the parts in quotes were ‘said’ in the privacy of my own head, rather than out loud, because that would make me Crazy Bike Lady, and I’m not her. Yet.

[I pass a gaggle of West Highland terriers and a small, brown, unidentifiable mongrel. I could hear a scrabble of paws behind me, and looked back to see them tearing along, trying to chase me.]

“Can’t catch me, lil doggies! Hmm. Where do you put the apostrophes in lil? The apostrophes are indicating missing letters in this case, so they should come both before and after the last ‘l’. Li’l’. That’s crazy! Apostrophe city. Hehe, Apostrophe City, what a cool place. The kind of place that David Bowie would sing a song about: ‘I’m back on Apostrophe City, Oh Yeah, I’m back on Apostrophe City…’”

[Now I’ve got this fake David Bowie song going round in my head, and it’s driving me mad because I can’t remember the words or title of the original song. Repeat two lines of fake song on loop for another 5 miles…]

For the benefit of those also wondering what the original song was, it’s ‘Suffragette City’. And no — apostrophe doesn’t actually scan terribly well in the original context, but what the heck. Bowie would have made it work.

At night, we shut our cat Cleo into the downstairs rooms (living room, dining room and kitchen) so that she has access to a comfy sofa, her food and water dishes and her litter box. Normally, by the time we’re ready to go to bed she’s happy to have a last bit of food while we’re locking up, then she toddles off to her bed. However, she occasionally gets very playful when we’re going to bed, and refuses to be shut in.

This is obviously no big deal: we can leave the door open to the downstairs rooms, and she’s free to wander as she likes, so when this happens, we just go to bed ourselves. Inevitably, what happens about 20 minutes later (just as we’re falling asleep, inevitably) is that we hear her little chirrups, which gradually become more strident. In the darkness, we see the fluffy tip of a tail moving around the end of the bed, and then a clunking noise as she tries to open the wardrobe doors. She never does this during the day, so quite why it’s necessary late at night I don’t know. Perhaps she can hear Mr. Tumnus calling to her from Narnia? Or perhaps it’s just a convenient way of generating enough noise to get us out of bed. Either way, it works, and one or other of us will get out of bed.

At this point she’ll rub around our legs (the way cats do), and trot obediently down the stairs ahead of us to go into the kitchen. She has some more food while we’re there, then settles down on her bed.

Cats are weird sometimes. Her food (she has a complete dried food) and water is available all the time, her bed is there, and she’s free to roam around the house. So I have no idea why she needs us to supervise her when she feeds (she won’t eat unless we’re there and stroking her), or to put her to bed.

I’d been meaning to write about a Channel 4 series (now finished) called City of Vice. As usual, I’m too late in writing about it to allow you to watch it, but there was one particular puzzle in the film that I haven’t quite solved, so I decided to ask the Lazy Web if anyone knows the answer.

City of Vice tells the story of the establishment of the Bow Street Runners in the 18th Century (the forerunners — no pun intended — of the modern Metropolitan Police) by novelist and playwright Henry Fielding, and his half-brother John. The Fieldings were Magistrates and were keen to enforce justice, without the corruption of the thief takers¹. It was a brilliant — if rather too realistically gruesome — series, apparently based on records of the time.

One thing intrigued me, though; John Fielding — who was blind — was shown wearing a black ribbon like a headband on his brow. That seems to be a genuine detail rather than a TV embellishment, as you can see from this portrait. It was never alluded to in the series, but I had two possible explanations.

1. It was some kind of strap to hold his wig on straight, if he had trouble keeping it straight. That doesn’t sound like a good explanation to me, because I’m sure he could feel the canvas edges of the wig with his hands and tell if they were level.
2. It was some kind of symbol of his blindness, so that others could accommodate his needs without needing to ask him if he was blind.

I like the second explanation better, but it raises a lot of questions. There isn’t much point in a symbol unless it is fairly universally understood, so was this standard practice in the Georgian period? John used a cane, but it was similar to the kind any Gentleman might carry, and he didn’t seem to use it feel his way around, so some other symbol might have been useful. Why did the black band above the eyes symbolise blindness, rather than any other symbol? If it wasn’t widespread, and was his own idiosyncrasy, what was the point of it?

I’ve done a cursory search, and found that Joel Segal had noticed the same thing, but I haven’t found any authoritative and definitive answers. So, are there any historians specialising in the issue of disability in the 18th Century out there?

¹ If you had property stolen, you could contact the thief takers. If you paid them, they would ‘make enquiries’ and — miraculously — your property would be mysteriously ‘found’, though there would be no sign of the thieves themselves. Hmm. ↑

When I was in school, we used to be allowed to take in board games for the last day of term. Right now, I really wish paid employment followed the same pattern. I’ve got a pile of things to do before I finish for Christmas on Friday, but I’m so exhausted that I’m having tremendous difficulty getting them done.

All I really want to do is play Hungry Hippos or Cluedo with my friends. And while we’re about it, I wouldn’t mind a four week long holiday.

I noticed yesterday that the rain coming down was a little more solid (and colder) than usual, but I didn’t really expect it to snow properly. We were going to do some work on the allotment, but chickened out because of the foul weather, and spent the day cosily inside, reading, listening to music, and in my case, writing installation and upgrade instructions for the next version of Tracks.

We closed all the curtains before it got properly dark, so it was a bit of a shock when I went into the kitchen at about 10.30, and saw an eerie glow outside. At first, I thought our security light had come on outside, but I gradually realised that the glow (I’ll you’ll forgive the rhyme) was coming from snow. It was at least 4 or 5 cm deep, and still falling, giving the sky a strange orange cast.

By this morning, it had mostly melted with remnants of greying mush, but the effect last night was quite magical because it was so unexpected.

In my various ramblings about our cat, Cleo, I think I mentioned that she wasn’t at all interested in toys, and didn’t really play. That certainly used to be true: if you rolled a ball towards her, dangled string, or jiggled a toy mouse, she would look at it steadily, then look at you, then walk away. But in the past couple of months she’s started getting playful. I think part of the change is down to her being stronger and more energetic now that she’s put a bit of weight back on. When we first got her, she didn’t have the strength to jump up onto the window sills on her own, and we’d find her clinging on to the top of the radiator below the window with her front paws, vainly scrabbling to get on the sill. Now she can jump straight on to the sill unassisted, though she still feigns helplessness when she gets “trapped” behind the curtains, and there’s a good deal of chirruping and Eric Morecambe-style curtain waggling until we open them for her.

She’s always keen to play first thing in the morning (when we’re trying to get our breakfast) and in the early evening (when we’re trying to cook dinner). She loves a ping-pong ball toy which is covered in fake leopard fur, and has some beads rattling inside. She waits on the stairs, having previously engaged Pounce Mode; body pressed into the stair tread, ears horizontal, and a wild gleam in her eyes. We rattle the ball to grab her attention, then throw it over her head. She flings herself after it, often catching it rather gracefully in mid-air, or hurtling after it up or down the stairs. She does the ‘holding-the-ball-with-front-paws-while-biffing-it-with-back-feet’ thing, and sometimes gets distracted, then pounces back on the ball when its guard is lowered (like Cato and Clouseau). Eventually, the ball drops back down the stairs, and we throw it again, repeating until we get bored or our porridge goes cold. She seems to enjoy it, and it’s pretty entertaining for us, too.

Now that the clocks have gone back, my cycle home is in the dark. I have fairly decent hub dynamo lights, but even so, the way is unlit across parks and open spaces and on moon-less nights, I can really only see a patch of path about 3 m in front of my wheel. That makes for quite an interesting trip, particularly as most pedestrians seem to wear dark clothes at night. There seem to be a lot of ninja dog walkers. But I’ve found that as my visual panorama is restricted, the olfactory landscape unfolds.

In the past week, I’ve been acutely aware of all the smells that drift into my path on my route home. There are the natural smells, of course: the warm, sweet scent of wet grass, the cool, earthy tang of the river, and the distinctive smell of the canal, which is different from the river in a way I find hard to describe. There are also less natural smells: a particular whiff of sewer on one stretch of path, the dizzy smell of solvents as you pass a place where kids have been huffing, the sharp, metallic buzz of a metal pressing factory, chinese take away food, and the omnipresent fug of traffic fumes. I even pick up the smells of people as I drift past them: strong perfume, laundry detergent, cigarette smoke.

It all adds an interesting new dimension to my commute, as long as I can avoid crashing in to anyone or falling in to the canal.

In our house, we have our bedroom at the front. Generally, this is fine, because we both prefer the rooms we spend more time in (the kitchen, Mr. Bsag’s studio, my office) to be at the back of the house, with a nicer view. However, there are two drawbacks to the location of the bedroom. One is that there is a pub opposite, so we sometimes get disturbed late at night by drunk people reeling away from a night spent imbibing as many lagers and/or alcopops as is humanly possible. The second is that there is a street lamp just outside our house. While it’s handy as a free security light for the front of our house, it does make our bedroom rather light.

I can sleep through noise once I’m asleep — I’m infamous in my family for sleeping through the Great Storm of 1987, while chaos raged all around — but light invariably wakes me up. Over the year that we’ve lived here, I’ve more or less got used to the light levels in the room at night, but last night the wretched light decided to start randomly turning itself on and off as frequently as once every 20 seconds. It woke me up at 1am, and it was like being in a really tragic disco, with one white light randomly flashing away to the deafening sound of silence. I could see the change in light levels even with my eyes shut, so I was lying awake, waiting for it to turn on or off again, which nearly drove me crazy.

I think that it’s about time we actually got our act together and got some light-proof material to line the curtains with. Otherwise I’m going to have to tie a bandanna around my eyes and blindfold myself before I go to bed.

I saw a van belonging to a local bathroom fitting company today — a company which has the word Classique in its name. Now, what does that word bring to your mind when applied to bathroom fittings? What logo would would say Classique to you?

• Luxurious Roman baths, decked out with fine mosaics?
• Basins with Doric columns supporting them?
• A Victorian claw-foot bath?
• Something redolent of ancient Greek temples?

Evidently, that wasn’t what the graphic designer had in mind. The van featured a large logo depicting a stick man sitting on the toilet, reading a newspaper. Classy.

One endearing characteristic of Somali cats (well, one of their many endearing characteristics) is their chirrup. Where other cats miaow or yowl, Somalis chirrup. Imagine someone pronouncing a rolling ‘r’ (as in Spanish¹) with a rising, musical inflection, which sometimes ends in a miaow-like sound. I’ve never heard a cat make a sound like that before, and it makes me smile every time.

The other night, during a protracted chirruping bout before her dinner, I realised that the sound reminded me of something else: Chewbacca on helium. All she needs is a little bandolier and a cat-sized space ship, and she’s all set.

¹ Which I have just discovered, courtesy of Wikipedia, is called an alveolar trill. ↑