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My parents visited before Easter, and achieved their long-threatened goal of bringing me a load of boxes of my stuff that had been hitherto cluttering up their loft. “You’ve got your own loft now, so it can clutter up yours.” Fair enough. It’s an assortment of random stuff that I didn’t really want to throw out, but didn’t have room for at the time, including a lot of exercise books from my middle and senior school years.

The school books are hilarious, particularly the ones from middle school. It’s funny how you remember doing some pieces of work quite well, and others are a complete mystery. In my middle school creative writing class, I wrote a totally insane, psychedelic story about turning on the taps to run a bath, and seeing a stream of tiny pink crocodiles coming out, which I then had to hide from my mother under my bed. Quite where that came from, I don’t know — perhaps there was a serious LSD habit I’ve forgotten about along with the experience of writing the tiny pink crocodiles story.

My favourite subjects at senior school were Biology (obviously) and Latin, and I was an unbearably swotty geek in both. I loved translating ‘The Aeneid’, and can just about still quote little chunks of it from memory. Exercise books from both subjects show that I lavished a lot more care on them than on some other subjects. I had also forgotten that I was a fairly decent illustrator back then. There are some quite good drawings and illustrative figures, including a frighteningly meticulous, pull-out, fully-labelled diagram of the male reproductive system. I’m sure my 15 year old self found that interesting for purely scientific reasons… Unfortunately, while my drawing was reasonably good for a teenager, it never progressed to being good for an adult, so I rarely draw now.

French was one of those subjects I didn’t enjoy much at the time, but wish I had paid more attention to now. In one of my French books, I found a folded, handwritten (and illustrated) worksheet. There was a little domestic scene depicted in that lovely, blurry purple Banda ink, and a series of questions about the picture. But wait — what is that sous la table? Could it possibly be un singe? It is! I’d somehow decided that the prominent featuring of monkeys in French lessons was all a product of Eddie Izzard’s comedy genius, but there was the documentary evidence in blurry purple and white. As we all know, the French prize above all else the ability to locate one’s primate accurately in their native tongue.

It was my birthday last week, and I got some money from some very kind and generous friends and family members. I wrote a while ago about my lovely Rotring Newton fountain pen, and I’m afraid that I’ve enjoyed using it so much in the intervening time that the fountain pen bug has struck. I’ve been admiring the Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pens (or Pilot Capless or Namiki Vanishing Point — they go under a confusing array of names), and since I had some gift money to treat myself with, I decided to buy one.

I looked at them a while ago, and thought that they were probably a bit expensive, but then found an online retailer, Cult Pens which stocks them at a very good price, and also keeps all the nib sizes in stock. While I still love my Rotring, there are a couple of things that make it slightly less practical for note-taking use at work. This sounds trivial, but taking the cap on and off (to stop the nib drying out) while intermittently taking notes on a talk is a little inconvenient. I’m also prone to misplacing or dropping the cap when I do so, because it isn’t terribly secure when parked on the end of the pen. The second is probably a function of nib width, but the medium nib on the Rotring lays down quite a wet line. This looks nice, and makes for a smooth stroke, but I then tend to smudge it if writing quickly.

I think that the Pilot Capless will solve both of those problems. The retractable nib is a bit of an engineering marvel and works very well. It sounds like a gimmick, but having a fountain pen you can use with the convenience of a ball point is fantastic. I got the fine nib, which lays down a very fine line of around 0.5 mm or less with the Noodler’s Legal Lapiz ink I’m using. It’s almost like a Pilot V5 fineliner, but the line is very smooth and constant. At that width, the ink dries almost instantly, and I’ve even found that I can use it on newsprint to solve a crossword without the ink spreading. The pocket clip looks like it would get in the way of your fingers, but at least with my grip, I find that it stops my fingers slipping on the barrel, and helps to keep them in a good position for writing.

It’s a really lovely experience to write with, and quite a different feel to the Rotring. I keep finding excuses to write little notes or lists with it, because it’s such a sensual thing. I think it’s going to be a great notetaker at work, and I’ll use my Rotring for more leisurely writing at home.

I would also really recommend Cult Pens to anyone buying pens in the UK. It happened that the finish I originally chose (Black Carbonesque) was out of stock, and was on back order for a number of weeks when the delivery they were expecting didn’t materialise. They consequently offered me a discount on another finish, and sent the pen Special Delivery so it would arrive the next day — great service! I’m not affiliated with them, by the way, just a happy customer, and I think that good service deserves public praise.

Picture the scene: Mr. Bsag and I are both reading in bed. He is reading ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy, and I am reading the lighter (in all senses) ‘Hogfather’ by Terry Pratchett. I’m feeling a little out-gunned in the worthy reading department, but enjoying ‘Hogfather’ for the nth time, nonetheless.

As Mr. Bsag starts to get sleepy, he begins to lose his purchase on the book. Suddenly, it slips out of his grasp and all 1,392 pages hit him smack in the face. I know that it’s unworthy of me to be amused by my husband being assaulted by works of classic Russian literature, but I can’t help it — I snigger a bit like Muttley. “What?”, he says, irritated. “Nothing”, I say innocently.

At long last (more than two months after ordering it), I’ve finally got my hands on the bike I bought using the Tax-Free Cycle scheme through work. It’s a Fahrrad Manufaktur S200 Comfort, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

I rode it to work for the first time on Friday, and after Mr. Bsag’s bike, it felt supremely comfortable. It has a much more upright position, which is great for my back, shoulders and wrists. I also felt more relaxed, more engaged with my surroundings, and less confrontational than I felt in the typical ‘head down’ position of the old bike, which made for a very pleasant commuting experience.

I won’t be able to talk definitively about the reliability until I’ve used it daily for a few months, but the build quality seems superb. It’s a very solid bike, with good quality components, and a nice finish, but there a few components that make it a much better ride in terms of comfort than any I’ve had before.

1. It has a suspended seat-post, but also very fat Schwalbe Big Apple tyres, which have relatively low rolling resistance, but provide a luxurious, cushioned ride. Together, these smooth out the inevitable bumps and holes in the road very well, without making bike feel ‘flabby’ and unresponsive.
2. There’s a strong spring which connects the back of the front mudguard to the frame of the bike, which automatically and passively centres the steering. I’ve never come across anything like it before, but I understand that it’s a fairly standard feature on Dutch-style bikes. It’s hard to think of a simpler bit of technology, but it makes for a very stable ride, and effortless ‘no-hands’ riding (off-road, of course).
3. The Nexus 8-speed hub gears are silky smooth, and have the perfect ratio for my route.
4. The handlebar grips have a kind of flattened palm rest at the end, which significantly reduces the pressure on your hands as you ride. Though the upright position means that there’s less weight on your hands and arms anyway.
5. The bike has a back-pedal, ‘coaster’ brake, in addition to normal front and back lever brakes. I haven’t ridden a bike with one before, but it’s very useful when you’re slowing for a junction, and having to indicate as well as brake. The only thing you have to be careful about is that you don’t twiddle the pedals backwards gleefully as you’re coasting (as I used to do when I was a kid), or you’ll come to a messy and abrupt halt.

There are a couple of other nice features (a built-in lock, very sturdy stand, and a hub dynamo and automatic stand lights), but the comfort-oriented features are the real benefit for me. I’m really looking forward to my ride to work on Monday.

A post by Jason Kottke about origami got me thinking about how we learn new skills and the role of instruction. By coincidence, I spent some time at the weekend trying to do some origami myself. The Saturday edition of The Guardian newspaper printed some patterned and coloured squares to cut out, along with instructions to create cranes, cicadas, penguins and sloths, among other things. I had a go in an idle moment, and did fine with some and got completely baffled by others. The sloth, for example, totally defeated me.

Even with step-by-step instructions, there are some folds that you just have to play or experiment with in order to understand them. It might be better if you had someone demonstrating the procedure live, but I still think that there are parts you have to understand structurally in order to be able to do them properly. Like many complex skills, the best an instructor can do is to draw your attention to the salient parts of the process so that you’re not randomly trying things, and to steer you back on course when you veer off it.

Thinking along those lines, the photograph of the incredible origami silverfish created by Robert Lang, and the staggeringly complex crease patterns that go along with his designs are even more impressive. The crease patterns only show part of the story of course; you still need to know the pattern of manipulating the creases in order to create the 3D structure, and that seems unimaginably hard unless you’ve got Jedi-level spatial visualisation skills. As Robert Lang himself says:

The creases all work together when they are fully folded, but it is often the case that there are no intermediate states — no subsets of the creases — that can be folded together, which would form the individual steps. For such a model, the only way to assemble the model is to precrease all of the creases, then gently coerce them all to come together at once with a minimum of bodging.

[…] Small wonder, then, that to many people, the concept of an origami crease pattern as a form of origami instruction is more than a little reminiscent of a famous S. Harris cartoon in which a scientific derivation is described by the phrase “then a miracle occurs…”

I’m in awe of his ability to produce these amazing origami pieces, when I have trouble with a very abstract, 2D sloth and step-by-step instructions.

Alan’s recent post about a crab spider reminded me that I never followed up on my promise to talk about Brazilian giant flattened spiders. True, I haven’t exactly been deafened by people wanting to hear the story, but since when did I write things that other people wanted to read? Despite the earlier billing, this spider wasn’t exactly giant, but it was big by the standards of British spiders. I should also say that, while I’m generally not frightened of spiders, invertebrates aren’t really my thing, and I don’t like spiders of unknown species and biting propensity creeping up on me¹.

My colleague and I had been working quietly on the balcony of the hotel room, when we suddenly saw this big, flat, grey, ghost-like spider. Our first instincts were solidly scientific — we took the photograph you see above, complete with carefully placed binoculars for scale (the diameter of the binocular is about 4cm). This was swiftly followed by a very non-scientific, big-girl’s-blouse moment when we flicked it gently but firmly off the balcony with a long ruler.

A few hours later, I turned my head slightly and saw the same species of spider (perhaps even the same individual, back for revenge!) a few centimetres behind my head, sitting on the wall of the chalet in the perfect position to hop onto my neck. Eeek. I didn’t scream, but I did move away from the wall fairly sharply. We stood at a safe distance and looked at the spider, speculating about its unusual flattened body plan, and coming to the unwelcome conclusion that it was perfectly adapted for slipping underneath closed doors. There followed a lot of activity in which ring binders, books and other stacks of paper where jammed into the gap under the closed door to form a spider exclusion zone. I spent the rest of the evening looking nervously over my shoulder at the spider on the wall, not sure whether I would be more relieved to find it still there (where I could see it), or gone to an unknown location.

Now that the memory is several months old — and the spider itself is safely several thousand kilometres away — I’d quite like to know what species it is, and whether I was worrying about nothing.

¹ Before anyone else points this out, yes, I do know that very few spiders will bite a human unless provoked or in imminent danger of death. It’s just that there’s something about a big, unfamiliar spider that tends to override this knowledge in a primeval way. ↑

Yesterday was supposed to be the opening night for the Birmingham Open art show, at which Mr. Bsag was exhibiting. With the snow falling heavily and Birmingham City Council closing things left, right and centre, he called them to ask if the opening night was still going ahead, to which they said yes. I was supposed to be joining him, but as the weather deteriorated and our prospects of an unhindered journey back on the train afterwards decreased accordingly, I wasn’t feeling too keen. Nevertheless, the instinct to stand by my man and celebrate his achievement (and — I must admit — the faint but highly appealing prospect of free wine), forced me to toil into town through the slippery combination of fresh snow on partly-melted slush. A quick call to Mr. Bsag to arrange a meeting place revealed that he’d found the Gas Hall shut up, with a message that the opening night was cancelled. Great. It was a real disappointment, and doubly annoying as we’d made the effort to get in.

We had a consoling drink in the Wellington to cheer ourselves up (and warm up), then trudged home again, hoping that the opening night will be re-run sometime next week.

Mr. Bsag has been producing some cracking etchings¹ and prints recently. I think they’re wonderful, and — at long last — other people are starting to think so too. This week, he’s had two prints accepted for two different exhibitions. The first is the Friends of the RBSA exhibition at the RBSA, and the second is the Birmingham Open at the Gas Hall, Birmingham. The RBSA exhibition runs until the 17th February, and the Birmingham Open runs from this Saturday until 29th April. If you’re in Birmingham and at a loose end for an hour or so, do go along. I think both exhibitions are free. Of course, if you also have a few quid knocking about, a space on a wall, and feel like buying Mr. Bsag’s work, that would be very welcome .

¹ Which, of course, gives him a legitimate reason for using the line, “Do you want to come up and see my etchings?”, but only with me, unless he wants his etching hand broken… ↑

I’ve been thinking about how people make decisions about their daily journey options lately. My commute by bicycle is about 7 miles each way, and at a very gentle, non-sweat-inducing pace takes about 50 minutes, door to door. The corresponding journey by foot and then train takes about 25-30 minutes door to door — on a good day. And that’s the problem; the train system is so unreliable that on about 4 of 10 journeys each week, you can expect the trip to take up to 50 minutes. That’s still a shorter total journey time over a week, but the problem is that you can’t plan properly if you go on the train. If you have to be somewhere at a certain time, you really have to aim to get the train before the one that would get you to your destination on time. Because on a non-significant number of occasions, your train will be late and so will you. That means that you end up losing about 50 minutes each way anyway, because of allowing extra time.

The cycle journey make take longer, but (barring rare punctures or mechanical failures) I know how long it will take to within a couple of minutes, and I know that if I leave on time, I’ll arrive on time. This was brought home to me on Wednesday, when I had to get the train in after a couple of days of cycling. The train was (of course) delayed, and I stood fuming on the platform, worrying about being late for a meeting and wishing that I could be pottering steadily along on my bike. None of this will be news to those of you who suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous public transport system.

There was, however, a gorgeous sunrise, so I could at least amuse myself by taking some photos while I was waiting.

We fared remarkably well in the very high winds of a couple of weeks ago. In fact, the only casualty was some fencing around our back garden, which was already very rickety. After the winds hit, several of the panels were leaning at crazy angles, but none of the panels themselves were badly damaged.

Our house was built in the mid-1980s (along with two others) on the garden of a nice Victorian cottage a few doors down. Being at the end of the row, we have the good fortune to have a lovely Victorian brick wall as one boundary of our garden. The others are cheap larchlap fencing panels and posts. If we had the money, we’d love to buy some reclaimed bricks and replace the fencing with walls matching the existing one, but it would be very expensive, and we have very little money to spare.

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The wind has died down a bit now after a stormy couple of weeks, so we took the opportunity to start to define the planting beds on our allotment plot. It actually took a couple of goes, because on our first visit in the morning we realised that we couldn’t remember which of the three newly-created plots was ours. Rather than put a lot of work into measuring out beds, only to find that we were measuring the wrong one, we went back home to call the person who looks after the site, and ask him which one we were supposed to be on. It was lucky we did, because our guess was wrong.

So, the afternoon saw us wheeling the wheelbarrow out again in take two, which was much more productive. We were amazed by the size of the plot when we measured it — it’s about 8.5 m by 14.5 m, so we can fit many more beds in than I’d originally calculated on paper. We’re working on the basis of a set of four beds, with paths in between, that we can rotate from year to year so that we can avoid the build up of pathogens in the soil, and improve the beds successively. One will hold members of the Solanacae family (potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers), the second legumes (beans and peas), the third brassicas (broccoli, kale, cabbage etc), and the final plot for onions and roots. Anything that doesn’t fit into those categories will slot into one of the other plots, depending on the kind of soil conditions it likes. We’ll probably also have a few permanent beds eventually for perennial crops like soft fruit bushes, rhubarb, asparagus and so on. We’ve managed to fit 8 beds in quite easily, so we’ll have two beds of each kind of rotation bed.

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Mr. Bsag and I went to London yesterday to run a few pleasurable errands. I visited Bikefix to test ride a lovely, Dutch-style bike for commuting to work (more on that later, I’m sure, if I decide to buy it), and Mr. B went to a printmaker’s supply shop called Intaglio. He’s been printmaking for a couple of years now, and someone recommended this shop. It’s in the Borough area, which in itself is an fascinating area of London. The shop itself is in a basement, and feels like a treasure trove.

I don’t really know anything about printmaking — other than what I’ve learned via Mr. Bsag — but it’s still an interesting place to visit. It’s one of those shops that — if you ignore the cash till and a few of the plastic containers — is probably more or less unchanged since the Victorian period. The walls are lined with shelves filled with tins and tubes of ink, which have exotic names like phthalo blue and carbazole violet, and there are cabinets with engraving tools and smoothing tools, alongside jars of gum arabic and beeswax. More shelves are stacked with thick, creamy sheets of printing paper, waiting for an image. Best of all, there are the tiny, end-grain blocks of wood for wood engraving, sanded and polished so smooth that you can’t help but pick them up and stroke the silky surface. It’s really another world, and one that I find very enticing, despite my complete lack of artistic ability.

Happy New Year to everyone!

As I’ve almost certainly said somewhere here before, I’m not really one for making resolutions in the New Year, partly because I think that the coldest, wettest, grimmest time of the year is the worst possible environment for encouraging you to stick to them. However, I have been thinking about some things I’d like to change a bit in the coming year.

The second half of 2006 involved a lot of upheaval; we bought and moved to our first house, I had a long trip to Brazil, and then I was in hospital or recuperating for much of the rest of the year. So in 2007, I want to slow down a bit. I know that it’s going to be incredibly busy (particularly the first half of the year), but I want to make sure that I make time to relax properly.

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I’m back after the usual round of visits to relatives, which were slightly complicated by the fact that our car decided to have a festive breakdown. It has been somewhat grumpy of late, but a couple of days before Christmas, it failed to start. After a phone call to my auto consultants (my Dad and brother), the consensus was that the battery might be just resting rather than dead. So I bought a charger, charged up the battery and it started the engine, though now the lights behind the instrument panel were flickering on and off. On Christmas Day, we drove across town to visit Mr. Bsag’s family, and the car was playing up again. The drive belt and/or fan belt seems to be slipping, generating a loud and highly embarrassing squealing noise. Worse, half way through our journey, the car seemed to lose a lot of power, and we could smell burning. When we stopped, smoke was pouring out of the driver’s side front wheel. It seems that the brake had stuck on, and set the brake pad smouldering. Our festive greeting to my in-laws went something like, “Happy Christmas, and can we have a bottle of water to put the fire out on our car?”

That was pretty much the last straw. There wasn’t enough time to get it fixed before we travelled to see my parents, so we booked train tickets instead. Amazingly, the train journey turned out to be pretty painless, and much less stressful than braving the motorways at Christmas. We’ve decided that the time has come to go car-less. We’ll get the problems fixed, sell the car, and revel in our freedom. We hardly use the car at all at the moment, so all the money spent on insurance, road tax and repairs is mostly wasted. We worked out that with the money we’ll save, we can hire a car on those occasions when we need to get away for a weekend, and can’t use the train, and taxis when we have a sudden emergency, and we’ll probably still have money left over.

We’re lucky that we live in an area with pretty good public transport links, so it will make very little difference to our lives to get rid of the car, but it’s amazing how people think life would be impossible without having a car sitting in the drive. “But what will you do in an emergency?” they say. Taxis are rarely more than a couple of minutes away, and anyway — because Mr. Bsag doesn’t drive — we would only be able to use the car in an emergency if I wasn’t incapacitated. Personal transport was supposed to bring us freedom, but it seems more often to be a financial and environmental millstone around our necks — another responsibility and source of worry that we don’t really need. I’m looking forward to cutting the chain and setting us free.

Against my better judgement — because I was pretty sure that it would end with me yelling at the TV in frustration — I watched one of the Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days documentaries, which involved an atheist woman (Brenda) staying for 30 days with a devoutly Christian couple (Michael and Tracy). Actually, it was pretty interesting for the most part. The Christian couple were intelligent and reasonably open-minded (though Michael made some rather shockingly intolerant comments when discussing the “In God We Trust” phrase on dollar notes), so there was less overt conflict than you might have expected. But one particular comment made my jaw drop to the floor. When Brenda’s husband and children came to visit her, Tracy commented — with palpable shock and surprise — that Brenda seemed to really love her children and be a good mother.

What did she expect? Did she think that atheists neglect and beat their children and feed them crack? Did she think that without a belief in God, people must be immoral? Other conversations with people in Michael and Tracy’s church revealed that this was quite a common belief. I find that frightening and sad. Frightening for obvious reasons, but sad because it implies that people like Michael and Tracy are infantilized. It seems that they believe they need a higher power (or his representatives in the form of the clergy) to tell them how to behave properly, and that if they did not have this, they might behave badly.

It seems to be another instance of a religion treating its followers as children — something I’ve talked about before. It’s just not true, in my opinion. I’m pretty sure that humans, on average¹, naturally behave in a moral way and always have done, irrespective of any religious or secular laws. There’s a lot of experimental evidence to suggest that we naturally behave fairly towards other individuals, empathise with the plight of other humans (and even other species), and basic biology would suggest that it is in our own interest to treat our children well. Of course, there are wars (regrettably there seems to be a big difference in the way that humans treat other known individuals and anonymous, distant groups), but it’s not as if religious moral strictures have a great record of preventing armed conflict.

I’ll leave the last word to Sadie (age 2), who has a excellent counter-argument to a heckling little boy, who accuses her of being “a baby”. You tell ‘em, Sadie. And a peaceful and harmonious Christmas to everyone.

¹ Of course, there will always be a minority of humans (both atheist and religious), who behave badly. ↑