Bewildered of Birmingham

I'm back from my travels, in body at least. The good news is that I do not appear to have any invertebrates making a home in my body like last time¹, and I don't even have that many mosquito bites, considering that my bite count is usually around the 50+ mark. However my brain does not appear to have entirely caught up with me after the long hours of travelling across several time zones.

My circadian clock has evidently given up for the time being, until it can work out when, exactly, the sun is rising this week, thank you very much. Consequently my stomach doesn't know when it should be expecting food, and I find myself waking up wondering a) what time it is, b) what continent I'm on and c) why I am not inside a mosquito net.

It will all work itself out eventually. When I know where and when I am again, I'll write about a few of the experiences of this trip, but until then, I leave you with a Puzzling Thing I encountered on one of my many flights.

I'm an obsessive reader, and usually have some form of reading matter at hand while I eat, particularly if I'm eating on my own. When I don't have anything to read, I'll read the labels on packets, jars and bottles instead. So, on a SWISS flight, I found myself idly perusing the label on the wrapping of my cheese sandwich:

Allergy information: May contain traces of lupins, nuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, soya.

Wait, what? Lupins?

I immediately thought, of course, of Monty Python and the mighty Dennis Moore, which made me giggle and look like a slightly unhinged person laughing at her sandwich wrapping. However, on returning to the welcoming arms of internet access, I find that lupin allergy is a genuine, serious condition, and that lupin flour is used quite widely in 'mainland Europe'². So now I know.

Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, riding through the night...

¹ I came back with a bot fly larva embedded in my foot last time. ↑

² I don't know if it's just me, but I detect a distinct subtext of "those crazy Mainland Europeans, using lupin flour in their bread!" in the reference to mainland Europe on that FSA page. ↑

Caturday tales

Mr. Bsag has been away the past week on a printing course in Cornwall, so I've had the bed to myself. I wondered whether the cats would alter their sleeping arrangements, given the sudden increase in available space. Bella usually sleeps at my feet, or on my feet, so that I often wake in the night to find myself scrunched into a foetal position, while Bella stretches out in the bottom third of the bed. Bianca's visits are temperature dependent, and she is also the 'cat who likes to squeeze between two things'¹. In the winter, she sneaks on to the bed in the middle of the night, and we wake to find her curled into an impossibly tiny space between us. It has been very warm, so I was sure she would sleep elsewhere, but I wondered if Bella might move onto Mr. Bsag's side.

The experienced cat owners among you are probably now shaking your heads ruefully at my naivety. "Bsag, Bsag", you're thinking, "why would you expect a cat to do something as logical as moving in to vacated space, rather than squashing into a small part of the already occupied space?" You would be right.

The first night he was away, she slept on his side for a small part of the night, and then — evidently deciding that there were limited opportunities to cause me to scrunch into a ball from that side — moved back to my feet, and stayed there for the remaining nights.

Bianca is less of a handful at night, but often manages to cause chaos during the day. Early yesterday morning, Mr. Bsag called me in a bit of a panic because he had misplaced his coach ticket: could I go in to his email and forward the copy of the ticket he had received to him so that he could pick it up on his phone? We normally keep his studio door shut, because there's so much stuff in there, and the cats cause havoc running around on printed work, bits of paper and so forth, but I was in a rush and couldn't stop Bianca slipping in.

In the time it took me to wake up Mr. B's computer, find the email and forward it to him, Bianca — purring madly all the while — had: strolled around on the desk and found a rubber band which she tried to eat and I had to rescue and hide in my pocket; knocked over a jar of brushes; and played with a couple of USB flash drives, knocking them off the desk and into the bin. Sometimes it's like babysitting a particularly destructive and talented toddler.

¹ If there is a large sofa, with two cushions placed close together in the middle, she will invariably squeeze between the two cushions. ↑

Ikea hacking

We've been thinking about rearranging our guest room/home office for a while. When we originally set the room up, Mr. Bsag needed (for one reason or another) to have his iMac in the office, and I needed a desk too for my laptop, so we put together a couple of quite large desks with Ikea Vika desktops and legs. That didn't leave much room for the double sofa bed to be unfolded, and it wasn't really a good use of space. However, we've recently been able to move the iMac into Mr. Bsag's little studio, so that meant I could scale down the desk and get rid of the one of the horrible fibre-board desk tops which had started to bend badly.

I spent quite a long time trying to design an elegant but space efficient desk. I like to have room to write with a notebook and pen if necessary, but I also like to keep the surface as uncluttered as possible. Another consideration is cat-proofing. The cats like to stroll around on the desk, and sometimes view the open laptop as a tempting looking, warm surface on which to curl up. While I like having the cats on the desk (nothing cures writer's block more quickly than a cat sitting a few inches away and just staring at you) I wanted to discourage them from lying on either the laptop or my external keyboard.

I noticed that the Lagan kitchen worktop (solid beech) was very cheap and just the size I was looking for. That set me thinking about other kitchen components which I could use for my desk setup. A little lightbulb came on when I spotted the Asker rail range, and in particular, when I realised that the aluminium dish drainer was a perfect size to hold my laptop off the surface of the desk, with room underneath to slide the external keyboard when I'm not using it.

We had a trip to Ikea to get all the necessary stuff (only one circuit this time!) and I had a busy couple of days putting everything together. I took the legs off the old desks, and reused the biggest desktop to replace Mr. Bsag's work desk in his studio. I put the Vika Kaj legs on the Lagan worktop, then put up the Asker rail so that the laptop sitting on the dish drainer is the right height when I'm working at the desk. It leaves a gap underneath that's too small for cats to comfortably squeeze under, but perfect for sliding my keyboard under, which gives me more desk space if I want to use paper and pen. The Asker clips and containers are great for getting all the desk clutter off the surface, holding Post-It pads etc. I fixed up a Jansjö LED wall lamp on the right hand wall, which is small, but provides perfect, glare-free task lighting for working at night.

I had used a Signum cable basket on the original desk, so I transferred that over too, mounting the powerstrip on the wall and resting the USB hub and my 2.5" external hard drive in the basket too, which gets them out of the way. I'm really pleased with the setup, and it gives us much more space which I'm sure our next guests will appreciate.

It's easy to hate Ikea for homogenising interiors with their mass produced stuff, but actually a lot of their furniture is eminently hackable — there are some excellent examples on Ikea hacker. A lot of items are cheap enough that you don't worry about chopping them up or using them for unusual purposes, so it's a good way for those relatively unskilled at DIY (like me) to put a custom piece together.

The opposite of interested

I have absolutely no interest in football, and very little in any other sport (with the possible exception of the Tour de France). So you might think that the current convergence of World Cup fever and Wimbledon would be deeply irritating to me. Actually, I'm loving it.

I'm not enjoying the sports coverage at all — in fact, I'm studiously ignoring it all. What I mean is that I'm enjoying being disinterested in it all. It seems to me that supporting England in the World Cup is a short route to certain disappointment. Expecting any British player to win Wimbledon is completely irrational. And yet people who are sports fans continue to get drawn up into the hype, and then continue to get let down. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not a fan. I can laugh heartily when England lose or draw, though I don't do it the faces of fans, because that would be cruel, and in the case of some fans — suicidal.

One drawback of the blanket football/tennis coverage is that there is hardly anything else on TV. But even that can become an advantage: I've done more crochet, read more books, and we've been making steady progress through our Lovefilm queue. Last weekend, I finally watched Withnail & I. How I had reached the age of 40 without ever watching it, I can't explain. It was my ex-PhD supervisor's favourite film, and he frequently quoted various parts of it, so it felt very familiar, even though I'd never watched it. Anyway, it was a great film, and we had a very enjoyable and entertaining evening. Unlike England fans on Friday night...

Feeling the distance

In the winter, when we had the snow, I walked to work for the first time from our current house. I don't know why I hadn't tried it before: we live quite a distance from the University, but it's a walkable distance. Perhaps the problem was that I knew only fragments of the area between home and work, and simply thought that the distance was too great to make it a practical proposition. Like many people, I know narrow ribbons of routes that I drive or cycle or travel on the train or bus, but I have little real idea how these ribbons relate to one another.

Anyway, the enforced walks during the snow made me see that it was not only possible, but positively enjoyable, and a nice, bracing change from my usual routine. I now try to walk one or both ways to work one day a week, cycling the rest of the time, and I look forward to that day. A whole academic field — Psychogeography — has sprung up to study the effect that walking has on the way that people perceive and feel about the urban environment. Will Self has an interest in this area, and tries to walk from his house to the airport and to the hotel at the other end of his journey, in order to properly experience the distance.

The deeper points of the theory are beyond me, but I do think that walking changes the way that you see an area, and also gives you a better grasp on the real distance between places. We tend to often think of distances in terms of time — often the time taken to get somewhere by car or public transport: "it's about half an hour away", we'll say. However, the real distance is how long it would take you to walk, and how much energy that would cost you. After all, if society crumbled and you could no longer rely on motorised transport, or even mechanical devices like bikes, the one thing you would have left would be your own feet. Walking may be slow, but it is extremely reliable: I know to within a couple of minutes how long it will take me to walk a familiar route. It's difficult to say the same about driving, taking the train or even cycling, though delays are less frequent on a bike unless you have a mechanical problem or a puncture.

I've always enjoyed walking. I like the mindless, repetitive, putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other aspect of it, which frees your mind to think about other things. I often solve problems, have ideas or get a new perspective on things which have been worrying or irritating me as I walk, but I'm not just focussed on internal things. You have time, while walking, to look around you and notice things. I admire the flowers in people's front gardens, watch the play of light through trees and listen to bird song.

When people at work find out that I sometimes walk to work, and how far it is, they look at me like I'm crazy, but I think it makes perfect sense. I arrive at work (or home) a bit tired, but knowing exactly where I am, how I got there, and the real distance I have covered. Everything feels more real, more solid and better connected, in an odd way. It's also great exercise. It may take me over an hour to walk one way to work, but many people take an hour out of their day to get in their car, drive to a gym and spend an hour running or walking on a treadmill, going nowhere and staring at a wall or mirror. That's crazy.

The TARDIS bag

I've admitted before that I'm obsessed about bags, and that I'm a total perfectionist about trying to find the One Bag. That Maxpedition bag was good, but it inevitably ended up not being perfect. One of the reasons was that I started walking to work fairly frequently, and so I needed more space to put my packed lunch and a change of t-shirt (without having to carry another bag). I tried using my old Crumpler messenger bag, but that made my back and shoulder hurt when walking with it for long distances, and it was only just big enough for the extra stuff, despite looking like a huge bag. So I swapped to using an old, cheap day rucksack, which was certainly large enough, but the pockets were badly organised so that I was constantly fishing for what I needed, and wasn't waterproof, so I had to mess about with plastic bags. What's more, it felt like an enormous, ungainly bag when I was only carrying a few things, so I was constantly packing and unpacking stuff into smaller bags as necessary.

Since I was about to have a significant birthday, and I have been trying to invest in fewer, better made, longer lasting things, I decided that I would finally spring for a Tom Bihn bag as a kind of 40th birthday present to myself¹.

I had been eyeing the Synapse rucksack for a while, and it seemed like the perfect size and configuration for my needs, as well as being small enough to fit a shorty like me. I couldn't resist the Indigo/Solar colour combination (vivid blue outside and bright yellow inside), as it is almost exactly the same colour combination as the wonderful hyacinth macaws I've seen in Brazil. The shipping cost has also been reduced a bit recently, so it made it more affordable, and I took the plunge, ordering a Side Effect and a few organiser pouches and a sleeve for my netbook at the same time.

Unfortunately, the colour combination was on back order, so I had to wait (impatiently) until they came back into stock again. At last, it shipped, and by a very happy coincidence, the delivery date turned out to be my birthday. When I finally got my hands on the package (several days after my birthday — see below for that sad tale), I was really impressed with the quality of all the products, and the colour of the bag was every bit as beautiful as I had hoped. The yellow lining is actually very practical, as you can see what's in the pockets much easier.

¹ Well, as mid-life crises go, it's certainly cheaper and more practical than a Ferrari. ↑

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Exploding Head Syndrome

Every now and again, while wandering around on the internet, you come across the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask. This happened to me the other day, when I stumbled on this passage:

As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.

My first thought was, "Oh, so that's a real thing, not just some weird and random peculiarity of my own." My second was, "And it has a really cool name: Exploding Head Syndrome. I have Exploding Head Syndrome."

The article explains the what, but not the why, probably because no-one knows what causes it or what the mechanisms involved are. There are many comments by readers on that page, most saying that they have experienced it, but never knew what it was, just like me. However, many were also frightened by it and thought it might be some dire harbinger of serious illness. For some reason (and for the life of me, I can't think why) it never crossed my mind that it might be a symptom of something serious. It didn't hurt, I didn't have any after-effects from it, and otherwise I felt fine: it was just my head going bang for some mysterious reason of its own.

In fact, it never really frightened me that much, though of course it does jolt you awake suddenly when it happens. Mine seem to happen when I'm just on the point of going to sleep, so perhaps it's clearer to me that it's not a real sound, but something inside my head. My sounds also vary a fair bit and are rather inventive, so it often makes me smile. For example, I get the standard bangs and crashes, but also a sound like a grand piano falling on the floor from a great height, and another that sounds very like the Mac alert sound 'Sosumi', but at a deeper pitch. I quite like the fact that I have my own alert sounds, even if they do wake me up.

Suspended

We were in Bristol this weekend, for a wedding (the one I had to go clothes shopping for). The wedding celebration itself was great fun, so we had a lovely time on Saturday evening. However, because of travelling problems, we arrived later than we'd expected, and had to leave at lunchtime on the Sunday. This was a shame, because I was looking forward to wandering around one of my favourite cities. As we arrived, I was trying to remember how all the streets interlinked, and found that I didn't instantly recognise parts of the area I spent a year living in. Then I worked out that it is over 20 years since I was an undergraduate in Bristol. Gulp.

I slept really badly on Saturday night for a number of reasons, waking at 4.30 am and lying awake listening to the hotel's extractor fans rumble. I was particularly annoyed because the clocks had gone back an hour that night, so not only had I missed out on sleep, I'd missed out on the 'bonus' hour you get at the end of British Summer Time.

A morning walk in the bright, cold air of Clifton on Sunday morning cheered me up, though. Old Brunel built some pretty spectacular constructions, but I have an abiding and deep love for the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I never get tired of the elegant shape, or the way it responds to and emphasises the natural beauty and drama of the Avon Gorge. I love every gigantic nut and bolt of it. I've put a small selection of the photos I took in a set on Flickr (the whole collection would bore even the most ardent Brunel fan). I'm only sorry that we didn't get to see how it looks at night, now that they've replaced the old lighting with a new LED system. It does sound as if it would nicely accentuate the features of the bridge, while giving the impression that it is floating above the Gorge. However, I'm nostalgic about the warm, slightly random fairy light effect that the old tungsten bulb system used to have.

Parklife

As I cycled home from work through the park, I witnessed this scene:

Two magpies stood watching a hedgehog. The hedgehog was walking — slowly and very precisely — along the white line of a football pitch. The mapgies kept about half a metre from the hedgehog, but walked along behind it, watching it intently.

I'm sure that they were probably sizing it up to see if they could eat it, but I couldn't help thinking that — apart from the fact that they weren't wearing tiny, twee clothes — it looked like an updated and slightly sinister scene from a Beatrix Potter book.

Infinite monkeys

A couple of days ago, I went back to my office after leaving the computer for a short while, and heard the voice synthesiser reading out menus and other interface items. This — needless to say — was slightly freaky. The explanation was obvious, but still rather puzzling. You see, the cats have got into the bad habit of wandering over my keyboard recently. I've also found Bianca curled up peacefully on my MacBook's keyboard more than once. Considering that the laptop is on a raised shelf above the desk, you'd think this would be awkward, but apparently the toasty warmth of the processor and the shiatsu massage provided by the action of the keys is worth the trouble.

Evidently, in the course of either wandering across or lying on the keyboard, one of the cats had turned on a Mac OS X feature called VoiceOver: it is intended to assist people with visual disabilities by reading out the labels of whatever they are interacting with, text on screen and so on. The mystery part is that you turn it on with the Command-F5 keyboard combination: that's not easy to hit accidentally, even for a human with two hands. The F-keys are also quite small on both the external keyboard and the MacBook's own keyboard, so they aren't a big target.

My mind immediately conjured images of infinite numbers of monkeys sitting at typewriters. But forget the complete works of Shakespeare: if the cats ever randomly type 'FEED ME CAT FOOD NOW HUMAN', then trigger VoiceOver, I will be forever enslaved.

Memo to Bianca

Dear Bianca (Cat¹),

It's really sweet that you always want to accompany me to the bathroom if I get up at night. After all, I could get lonely in there, and a friendly, wide-awake cat is always a pleasant companion. And it's lovely when you rub around my bare legs — you have very soft fur, and it's nicely soothing.

However, we have to talk about the toe licking. I know that you're just being affectionate (or perhaps my toes taste of tuna?), but it's downright unnerving. You see, I try to maintain a state of being just conscious enough if I have to get up at night. But you have an phenomenally scratchy tongue and it tickles like nobody's business, particularly when you try to lick between my toes. That tends to rocket me into full consciousness pretty quickly, which — you'll realize if you've been following along — is a Bad Thing.

So the Executive Summary is as follows: leg rubbing = good; toe licking = bad.

Thank you for your attention (between bouts of pouncing on bits of fluff you've pulled out the carpet and trying to eat paper tissues).

Your pal and cat biscuit provider,

bsag

¹ I think this qualification is necessary for people who don't know she's a cat. Otherwise, there could be... misunderstandings. ↑

Cat occupations

Cats are strange creatures. Many seem to find themselves odd modes of unpaid — but deadly serious — employment. Maru inspects boxes with great thoroughness and Tom Cox's cat Janet (a he, not a she, by the way) collects retro plastic wrappers from a nearby lake for a living. One of our cats has also revealed her occupation recently.

When we got our cats, the previous owner told us that Bella liked to drink from the tap. This took some time to manifest itself, but after a few weeks, she would hop up onto the cistern in the bathroom and position herself near the tap, waiting for us to turn it on. You have to select just the right flow rate though, or she looks at you with that classic disappointed feline gaze which implies, "Oh, you just can't get the staff nowadays."

A short while after Bella started drinking from our taps, Bianca started her very important job: Advanced Basin Surveillance. If you have closed the bathroom door to get a bit of privacy, then open it, Bianca will come rushing in, and leap immediately on to the cistern. If she had access to a blue flashing light, I'm sure she would use it, because she shows Emergency Services levels of urgency. She then crouches down and watches the basin from close range with an intensity and focus that would shame many humans. She does this for very long periods, only changing position when a drop of water in the basin makes a break for the plughole, and then she's right on the case. It's hilarious to watch.

Between the two cats, it's actually quite hard to have the bathroom to yourself, and I've frequently found myself sharing a very small bathroom with two cats perched on the cistern or trying to walk around the edge of the basin.

Perfect afternoon

Life seems to have been incredibly busy and tiring recently, but I've just had one of the most peaceful and relaxing afternoons I've experienced in a long time. Mr. Bsag and I sat reading on the sofa with the cats, listening to Aleyn by June Tabor. He read the paper with Bianca lounging gracefully on his lap, while I started my library copy of Kate Rew's Wild Swim. I dreamed about how nice it would be to swim off a Hebridean beach or a Cornish tidal pool, while Bella purred in between us, her head and forepaws tucked into the curve of my hip, long whiskers twitching slightly while she dreamed some feline dream.

Dear Google Maps

Dear Google Maps,

We need to have a quick word about your walking directions feature. Don't get me wrong -- I love your maps, and dragging the selected route around to re-direct it is brilliant. I use your service a lot, and not just when I'm trying to find directions to an unfamiliar destination. For example, this weekend, I used the walking directions when I was too lazy to get out a map and a bit of string and measure a distance we'd just walked to a familiar destination.

You see, we often walk out to a favourite country pub at weekends, and take a number of different routes, depending on whether the footpath will be too muddy, or how much time we have for a leisurely walk. We were wondering how long each leg was, and had guessed at somewhere between 7 and 8 miles for the round trip. So I turned to Google Maps and set directions for each leg separately. Combined, the route came to 7.7 miles, which was pretty close to our estimate, but the time estimate was out. By quite a bit. Despite having set the method as 'walking' the time estimate read 11 minutes for the 4 mile leg.

That would make the pace 2.75 minutes per mile, which is quite a lick. The winner of the men's race at the London Marathon this weekend set a roughly 4.8 minute pace for each mile. Granted, 26 miles is more than 4, but even so. Furthermore, when you've had half a pint of lovely real ale (OK, a pint. All right, a pint and a half) while sitting in the sunshine in the pub garden, and are then meandering home in Fotherington Thomas mode, looking at the pretty wild flowers and butterflies, listening to birds singing and watching buzzards circling on thermals, your pace is substantially less than 2.75 minutes per mile.

In fact, it should be much easier to predict the time taken to walk a given distance than to drive it, because you are not going to get held up by traffic, roadworks and so on. So here's a suggestion, Google. Why not provide a slider next to the dropdown for walking directions, with which you can set your own walking pace? Set it at 3 miles/hour as default (which will be pretty accurate for most people), and then fast or slow walkers can increase or decrease as necessary. Then all you need to do is a simple calculation based on the measured distance.

Love, bsag xxx

P.S. In case you are wondering, our actual time for the 4 mile return trip was 1 hour 15 minutes. Without the beer, sunshine and when not in Fotherington Thomas mode, it would have been about an hour.

Yellowstone

I love wildlife documentaries. I grew up watching all the classic Attenborough natural history TV series, glued to the wonders he showed us, and desperate to find out more. I couldn't really tell you whether I watched them because I was obsessed with animals, or whether I was obsessed with animals because I watched the documentaries, but either way, both played a large part in my eventual decision to become a biologist¹. I still enjoy them now, and I often learn new things from them. I do find that my acquired pedantry means that I wince at over-simplifications or anthropomorphism in the commentary, but the photography is better than ever.

Yellowstone -- the new BBC series which started last night -- is a great example. There were breathtaking shots of the landscape in winter: stars wheeling around frozen trees; the air itself seeming to sparkle in an ice storm; ice crystals forming on the rich brown hair of a bison; an extreme close up of the feet of a dipper, clutching smooth nodules of ice as bright water flowed below. All of these sights are things that you and I could probably not see, even if we were allowed into the closed park and could stand the -40deg;C temperatures. The camera compresses or extends time, so that we can see processes we're too slow or too impatient to perceive. We can get up close to animals behaving naturally, and see every hair and feather sharply and look into their eyes.

In one particularly painterly shot, we saw the long furrow produced by a bison moving through the virgin snow with a meandering track. The shot was framed so that the track originated in the bottom left with the exhausted and weak bison pausing at the top right of the frame. It was so eloquent about the life of a bison in deep winter than no words were necessary.

And yet there are words, and swirling, emotional, overblown music. The commentary wasn't as bad as on some documentaries I've seen recently, but I found myself wishing that the magical red button offered an option to view the pictures with only the ambient recorded sound: no commentary and no music. If there could be a further option for a discrete, on-demand caption giving the Latin and common name of any of the species featured, that would be the icing on the cake. As it is, I'm tempted to listen with the TV muted, but then I would have missed the beautiful sounds of wolves howling, the craak of the raven and the huffing breath of bison and elk.

¹ After I decided that I couldn't be a vet because I was too soft and couldn't stand seeing animals in pain every day. ↑

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