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I’ve been meaning to write a full review of this book for ages, after posting a brief review on blippr. I read it while I was in Brazil, and was completely gripped. It’s one of those books which you don’t want to finish because you’re enjoying it so much. You’re also desperate to discuss it obsessively with everyone you meet, but at the same time, you don’t want to spoil it for them.
Henry (the time traveller) and his future wife Claire meet when Claire is six years old and Henry is in this thirties. They eventually marry in their twenties, with an age gap of only 8 years. That should give you some impression of the rather complex, non-linear time-line of the novel. In fact, because Henry doesn’t meet her until later in his life, but Henry-in-the-future has been visiting Claire throughout her childhood, when they meet in his present (his past from Claire’s perspective), he knows nothing about her, and she knows a lot about him. And he hasn’t experienced their shared past yet. When Claire was a child the situation was reversed, because he knew her intimately, and he was an enigmatic man who appeared in her parents’ field every now and again. Confused? You will be, but you gradually get used to the warped narrative, and let go of the idea that cause must precede effect.
There must have been thousands of books and films about time travel, but Niffenegger has the amazing ability to make you feel like you’ve never really known about time travel before. For a start, in most sci-fi books or films, the time traveller makes a deliberate choice to go to the future or the past: Henry has no choice. His ability is involuntary, and he jumps into the past or future without much warning, arriving naked and without any possessions. It’s something like eplilepsy, and he is more prone to ‘time attacks’ when stressed or upset. He never knows where or when he will end up, or how long he will stay there before suddenly appearing back in his proper timeline. Because he arrives naked, he becomes an expert in picking pockets and locks (so that he can feed and clothe himself), and running and self-defence (to stave off the inevitable violence that a suddenly-appearing naked man occasions).
As well as visiting Claire at various stages of her/their life, he also visits himself as a younger and older man. One of the most touching scenes in the book (and there are many that will make you blub like a baby) is when he gently guides his bewildered 7 year old self around a deserted museum at night on his first time travel experience. Later, he teaches himself the skills he’ll need in his future life. One of the layers of subtlety is the sense that he bypasses any of the normal mechanisms of nostalgia. When we think about our past, we remember it softened by time, conveniently forgetting things which don’t reflect well on us. Henry sees himself in sharp focus, exactly as he was at the time. This — as you can imagine — is a rather bittersweet experience. He also re-experiences traumatic events again and again, obsessively jumping back into the moment, without being able to influence events at all. It has its lighter moments too. At one point, Henry lands back in the marital bed, forehead bleeding and chuckling, and tells Claire that her child-self has just chucked a shoe at him because he wouldn’t sleep with her.
Along with everything else, it’s a wonderful love story, but it’s not in any way syrupy or a chick-lit novel. The characters and their relationships are so beautifully drawn that you care very deeply about them. Claire is a fascinating character. She’s very independent and intelligent, and yet the fact that she knows she will marry Henry from an early age means that she is constantly in a state of suspended animation, putting her life on hold to wait for what she knows will come. She’s met Henry later in his life and loved that version of him, so when he’s behaving like an immature jerk, she knows that it will get better, but she still has to wait. In fact, her story is all about waiting, while Henry’s is about holding on as tightly to the present as he can to prevent himself being dragged off to the future or the past.
It’s a terrific novel, and I recommend it highly. I want to read it again to pick up all the subtle clues the author gave to foreshadow various events in the book. It might look like chick-lit at first glance, but there’s a lot there for the kind of obsessive geek who watched Primer or Memento with a notebook open on their lap, trying to work out the timeline [raises hand slightly bashfully]…
[Something I wrote in my head at the end of last week, cycling home.]
The bright full moon is floating down the river, trembling and fractured by the breeze. A rider’s lamp behind me spawns my shadow sister, moving in front of me, solid and hunched against the chill. She weaves left and right, now skimming across the grass, now sliding over the gravel path. I’m fascinated by my projected self, encountering the future ahead of me, but keeping me company on this cold, dark night.
Eventually, the rider passes me. My shadow sister slows then disappears, and I feel a sudden ridiculous pang of loss for something which was just a trick of the light. Despite knowing how she was born, I find myself looking for her for the rest of the journey, wondering if she’s around the next corner, or waiting for me in the trees.
I’ve come to the conclusion that owning a cat makes you change your stair-descending technique. As all cat owners know, cats appear from nowhere when you start to walk down the stairs. You set off with a clear run, then almost as soon as you’ve started, your cat flashes past you in a blur of fur. This wouldn’t be so bad, but the cat then immediately comes to a dead halt on the step immediately in front of you. Our cat, Cleo, adds a particular twist to this manoeuvre by turning sideways and having a big, arching — and apparently urgent — stretch, thus maximising the surface area available for human-tripping. As soon as you screech to a halt yourself, grabbing the bannister for support to avoid plummeting to a messy death, she trots happily in front of you down the remaining stairs.
Every. Time.
So I now automatically take one step then stop — waiting for the cat to zoom past, stretch and carry on — before I start walking again. Apparently, I also do this when at work, causing a human pile-up behind me as I inexplicably come to a dead stop for a few seconds. Oops.
You might wonder — in this age of free email accounts with gigabytes of storage — why anyone would pay money for an email account. Well, I’ve just done exactly that.
For a while, I’ve been consolidating numerous email accounts into one account using Gmail, so I can receive email at my usual range of email addresses, but check, search and send my email within one account. It worked fairly well, but Gmail’s quirky implementation of the IMAP protocol has its own irritations, and I experienced a few reliability problems. The reliability issue is especially difficult when you’re forwarding all your email to an account. Also, while Gmail allows you to send email from your Gmail account as if it comes from another account that you control, it sets one of the headers (I can’t remember which one offhand) as “From [my own address] on behalf of [gmail address]”, which isn’t what I wanted at all. That meant I had to set up send-only accounts in Apple’s Mail, which was an unwanted complication.
So I began looking around for another email provider, and came across Fastmail.fm. It had some very good reviews from happy users and seemed to have all the features I needed and more, so I bit the bullet and paid for an account.
I’m really happy with Fastmail. It certainly lives up to its name, and while some of the features can be replicated (with some effort) using Gmail, the level of polish and sophistication is wonderful. It’s ideal for consolidating accounts, because you can set up “Personalities” which specify not just which “From” address to use, but which signature to use, an address to “BCC” to and a sent folder to store the mail in, among other things. So you have a great deal of control of how you send mail. The magic thing is that when you send email from a desktop client with a particular from address, it sets up the rest of the rules for that Personality automatically.
The spam handling is also very sophisticated (with much more control than Gmail gives you), and if you want them, there are flexible rules for filtering incoming mail. I mostly use my desktop email client (Apple’s Mail), but the web interface is also quite powerful and very fast. It doesn’t have all the visual polish of Gmail, but it’s very functional.
I’m not abandoning Gmail entirely: I still use my incoming Gmail address (forwarded to Fastmail automatically, of course), and then I automatically BCC all my incoming and outgoing mail to another secret Gmail account for backup and emergency access if Fastmail should ever go down. I may have to pay for Fastmail, but if feels as if it’s worth every penny. My one and only minor quibble is that it only checks external POP accounts every hour at a maximum. That’s not a problem for most of my accounts (which I just forward directly to the account), but I have frustratingly little control over my work email account and can only pull it into Fastmail using the POP checker. That’s not really Fastmail’s fault though, as it would be unreasonable to check POP mail much more frequently than that. In practice, if I’m expecting some urgent work email, I can log into the web interface and trigger the checking manually. If there was a way to do that with a script, I’d be a very content bunny indeed.
Perhaps I’m a bit of a killjoy, but I’ve never quite seen the point of Halloween. It’s a fairly recently imported tradition in the UK, so there’s not really any consensus about how to celebrate it, or indeed whether it should be celebrated at all. I wouldn’t mind so much if we got adorable little kids dressed up as ghosts or witches coming round. However, in our neighbourhood, we get 16 year olds who haven’t even bothered to dress up (unless you count hoodies as fancy dress), who just hammer indiscriminately on doors. Without some kind of long-standing tradition of everyone providing ‘treats’, or a pre-arrangement between neighbours with kids, I think that this amounts to a protection racket: give us sweets or your front door gets egged!
This year, I just pretended to be out when the trick-or-treaters came round. I was working in the office upstairs, but Cleo threatened to blow my ploy to lie low by miaowing loudly at the kids when they rattled the letterbox and shouted through it. She was getting quite agitated, so I was trying to stage-whisper reassurance to her from upstairs to calm her down and draw her away from the door, without being seen or heard by the kids. In the end, we all survived, and the house remained unmolested by eggs.
Like many people who work on more than one computer at more than one location, I’ve had a perennial problem with making sure that all the files I need are on all the computers I use. My first attempt used a home-brewed set of rsync scripts to sync files up and down from Joyent’s Strongspace file server. For various reasons, I then switched to using a portable hard drive with ChronoSync. I used that successfully for quite a while, but it meant that I had to carry a fragile hard drive around, and it took a while to sync things up and down at the beginning and end of each day.
Recently, there have been a rash of services which sync your data between computers, using an online store as an intermediary. I had a trial of SugarSync and liked it a lot, but when I tried Dropbox, I was smitten. Ironically, it has fewer features than SugarSync (though many of the missing features are in development at the moment), but there’s something about the transparency of the way that it works that appealed to me. I liked it even better when — after signing up for a beta with 2 GB of free space, I was entered into a competition to win 50 GB of space for a year and won! 50 GB is more than enough to hold everything I need to sync in my home folder, and gave me the opportunity to really try it out properly.
The way it works is very simple: you install the Dropbox client, which just shows itself as a menu bar item in Mac OS X. This creates a “Dropbox” folder in your home folder, though you can relocate it if you want. Everything you put into the Dropbox is automatically synced to all other computers running Dropbox. If you put stuff in ~/Dropbox/Public it’s accessible to anyone to whom you give the URL, and a quick right-click on the file copies that URL to the clipboard.
At the moment, you can’t choose to sync existing folders outside your Dropbox, but a clever trick with symlinks allows you to make it work. In the instructions, you’re told to create a symlink in the original location to the original file in the Dropbox, but I do it the other way around (so that my files remain in their original locations), and it works perfectly. So in my Dropbox, I have a collection of symlinks to other folders, which means that everything I want to sync between computers (all of Documents, Music, Movies, Pictures, a few folders in Library and a few in Library/Application Support) get synced up.
It keeps revisions of files, so if I want to go back to a previous revision, I can, and it creates a copy if it can’t reconcile changes made concurrently. In practice, I’ve never had a problem, and it has all worked transparently. Because it’s constantly syncing changes, it takes very little time to sync the latest changes at the end of the day, so it’s much faster than my previous methods. Likewise, if I lose the network connection for a while, it’s not a serious problem, because syncing will just catch up as soon as I get back online. Also, if Dropbox went away tomorrow, all my files would be exactly where they’ve always been: on my hard drive. I’d just lose the syncing part and have to go back to one of my previous methods. I’ve also found the public box very useful when collaborating on documents with colleagues, rather than emailing attachments.
There are some interesting new features planned, the most useful of which will be the ability to specify folders to sync, without having to use symlinks, but it works so well right now, that I’m very happy with it as it is.
I think we’ve more or less come to the end of the vegetables from our allotment and garden. There are one or two tomatoes left on the plants in our conservatory, but that’s it. So I’ve been looking back on our gardening year.
In some ways, we did better than last year. The allotment is more productive and better organised, and some crops that we utterly failed with last year (courgettes and tomatoes, for example) have done fairly well this year. But we were battling the weather all year. Both the garden and allotment are on heavy clay soil. It’s quite fertile, but the downside is that when it rains, it gets waterlogged very easily. And when it’s waterlogged, the slugs come out in plague-like numbers. So the incessant rain and lack of sunny conditions really hampered our horticultural efforts this summer.
One or two plants thrived in the rain. The potatoes did very well, and we got a good crop, except for a few tubers eaten by slugs underground. The courgettes also revelled in the rain, and because we sowed the seeds in pots first then planted out when they were larger, they were big enough to withstand the ravages of slugs. Courgette stems and leaves are quite spiky when they get bigger, so I think they deter slugs naturally once they get beyond a certain size. The fruits put on incredible growth in a very short time. We frequently left a small courgette on the plant, thinking it wasn’t quite big enough for picking, then came back a couple of days later to find a giant marrow.
The tomatoes outside rotted in the wet, but the ones inside did OK. We didn’t get a huge crop, but the fruits we did get were really sweet and delicious, and I felt as if they were worth all the pampering you have to give tomatoes.
The runner beans struggled a bit, but produced a reasonable crop, but our Cherokee beans — which did so well last year — were disappointing. All our other beans and the many varieties of greens (chard, pak choi, spinach greens etc.) were eaten to frilly stumps by the slugs. We did our best to control slugs, but despite trying everything (organic slug pellets, coffee grounds, crushed egg shells, plastic bottles cut into spiky protective collars, you name it) the little blighters still managed to munch on our veg.
I hope we have a sunnier, drier summer next year. While we can raise some plants in our conservatory to plant out, we can’t do that for all of them, so some have to brave the ravages of the slugs on their own. We’re trying to grow some baby leaves in the conservatory over the winter to tide us over. Today I sowed some rocket, Australian yellow leaf lettuce, black Tuscan kale and some bunching onions, so hopefully we’ll have some small but tasty home-grown greens over the winter. Meanwhile, I’ll order some seeds for next year and dream of a balmy, warm summer.
As I cycled through the park yesterday, I saw a young lad on a bike which had the unmistakable outline of a Raleigh Chopper. He was sitting back on the banana seat, hands loosely on the ape-hanger bars, sweeping graceful, joyful curves across the path in the late evening sun. He had a huge grin on his face, and it made me smile just to see how much he was enjoying his ride. I always wanted a Chopper when I was a kid, but my parents said it was an impractical bike1 so I got a more sensible ride. This chap’s Chopper was the ‘revival’ model, of course — they stopped making the original models, with their potentially castrating top-tube mounted gear lever, long before he was born.
When he saw me riding towards him with a smile on my face, he honked his horn — a lovely, rubber bulb horn with a clownish “honk honk” sound, which made my day.
1 Of course it was impractical and not particularly well-made, but that was half the fun of it. And it was cool. ↑
The streets around our house are often really noisy in the hours around midnight at weekends. We live directly opposite a pub, and people tend to pile out — drunk and belligerent — to bellow at their friends or enemies1 for hours on end. If it’s not drunkards disturbing the peace, it’s youngsters on mopeds opening the throttle right up and letting the street hear all 50 cc of raw, wasp-in-a-bottle power squeezed out by their irritating machines. So when we were woken at 4 am this morning by someone yelling in the street and beeping their car horn repeatedly, we just sighed in resignation. As usual, we looked out the window to check that no-one was in danger of injury or death, and that our property and that of our neighbours was relatively safe from accidental or deliberate vandalism. We couldn’t quite work out what the bloke in the street was yelling, but he seemed OK (if angry), so we went back to bed.
When we got up in the morning, there were a couple of Police cars parked in the street. Almost as soon as we’d turned our lights on, an officer knocked on our door and asked permission for him and his large Alsatian dog to search our garden. We’re generally law-abiding people, so it isn’t every day that we watch the Police rummaging around in our herbaceous borders while we have breakfast.
It seems that the shouting-at-4am man had been robbed of his phone and iPod2 by a thief, who had then disappeared in the general direction of our back gardens. So he was shouting at the thief to try to flush him out. Needless to say, the search didn’t turn up any evidence, but I doubt that they would have found him even if they’d arrived earlier, because there are so many places to hide and then sneak away. Assuming that a mobile and iPod was all that was stolen, I’m also surprised that the Police turned up in such force. I would have thought that stolen phones/iPods are two a penny, and would elicit nothing more than a resigned face and the offer of a form to fill in from the local constabulary. But perhaps I’m cynical.
1 It’s often hard for the casual listener to determine whether the bellowees are indeed friends or enemies. ↑
2 And perhaps more, but that was all we heard about. ↑
As a postscript to yesterday’s post, while I was writing it, I wasn’t sure of my spelling of Robert Burns’ gang aglae and decided to do a quick Google search to check. Google kindly asked me if I perhaps meant “gang algae”, which I found a charming notion.
Yes, those gang algae are always hanging around in their slimy green hoodies, throwing floppy gang signs and corrupting all the young, innocent liverworts and mosses in the neighbourhood. Something ought to be done!
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