Author: frizzyLogic

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Full catastrophe blogging

Switched on the sockets yesterday and dammit, no internet. Looked at the router. The ADSL light was not on. It must, therefore, be a fault on the line. Because after all I’d only replaced the router a few months ago.

After a series of conversations with a series of representatives of a series of companies which shamefully ranged from overly patient to curt to downright rude on my part and actually taking the damn router and plugging it into F’s ADSL line I finally grasped the dreadful truth. There was nothing wrong with my line. The router was well and truly, utterly, totally fritzed.

Immediate descent into catastrophe mode. I don’t have any money. I can’t afford a new router. How much do routers cost anyway? I can’t find out because I don’t have the internet. I haven’t kept the receipt. I won’t be able to get it mended/replaced. Oh fuck-shit-bollocks disaster. Woe, alas, alack. Wail. Moan.

By the time the children came home from school I’d calmed down a bit and was able to point out, when they realised the full horror of not having all episodes of The Simpsons and South Park permanently available for immediate viewing, that I was being quite brave about the situation myself. However after series of helpful suggestions from the Spawn – “is it plugged in?” “is it switched on?” “have you checked the cables?” – I did advise them with some asperity to believe me when I said I’d tried absolutely everything possible to rectify the situation. At this point the suggestion was made by a-Spawn-who-shall-remain-numberless that I sell my one and only family treasure, a small clock, in order to buy a new router.

By this morning I was regarding lack of internet access as a form of spiritual discipline. Like a hair shirt or self flagellation. I was considering various schemes to raise money for a router and viewing the time taken to do so as a therapeutic online fast. I even began wondering whether I should cancel my broadband altogether (clear saving) and sustain online life through the free wifi at the café round the corner. But of course just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch there’s no such thing as free café wifi. There’s a password on the network now and the cheapest drink is £1.65. So that would be 12 or so trips to the café a month during its opening hours for the length of time it takes to consume, however slowly, an espresso, versus 24-hour unlimited access at home. Not such a clear saving after all, then.

Whilst sipping one of the aforementioned espresso extremely slowly and downloading e-mails for later off-line consumption I bemoaned my routeless fate to A. But far from troubling deaf heaven with my bootless cries I was in fact addressing someone who had, tucked away in a drawer, a fully-working but surplus-to-requirements router. Now what are the chances of that? I mean really. With the utter crapulous fragility of your average router how many people have a spare one that actually works? And how many of them live around the corner from me?

Thus it is, dear reader, that after a vicious but expected and mercifully brief struggle with the configuring business here I am, floating along the strands of the interwebbing like a butterfly in a hothouse full of sugar bottles. But I’m a butterfly that knows how lucky it is. Unless of course I’m wrong in assuming that butterflies don’t have that level of consciousness.

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Watching me watching you

examination

The Homo sapiens all looked away first.

eyes in the crowd

The minicab driver who eventually delivered me home had a small but hyper-realistic glass eye on a silver chain at his throat.

Looking without seeing. Seeing without looking.

Time for some shut-eye.

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One bruised petal

one bruised petal

This little flower has given me such pleasure. I picked it up from the pavement where it had been dropped, I am pretty sure, by a man who had just walked past with a huge bunch of flowers carefully tied up in paper and ribbons.

When I got home it put it in this little earthenware pot (which I also found abandoned on the street, some months ago) and it has been sitting on the kitchen table for more than a week.

You can just see, on the top petal at the back, a couple of lines of transparency in the colour where it was bruised. These are just as beautiful, I find, as the fine brush-strokes of pigment on the rest of the flower.

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Blogging is good for you

I bet this is all over everywhere, given the subject matter, but I’ve only seen it on Mind Hacks.

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not…

Some hospitals have started hosting patient-authored blogs on their Web sites as clinicians begin to recognize the therapeutic value. Unlike a bedside journal, blogging offers the added benefit of receptive readers in similar situations, Morgan explains: “Individuals are connecting to one another and witnessing each other’s expressions—the basis for forming a community.

As a self-medicating blogger I say *yay* for scientists catching up.

However as a pathological producer and consumer of web2.0 (or whatever it’s called at the moment) I say *grrrrrr* for epic del.icio.us auto-link-to-blog fail.

This is the sort of story I’d delish in the knowledge that it’d appear on the blog. Only that knowledge, already challenged by a previous unexplained outage of the automated system, is now cowering in the corner reduced to hope more than expectation.

Luckily I know the ideal way to deal with my pain and frustration at this terrible situation. I write about it.

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It was an accident

it was an accident

…the sun came out, just for a moment on this otherwise mostly flat-lit grey morning, giving a twist to the twist.

I am very lucky having the time to look as I walk each day. And at the moment I am unable to stop taking pictures. A function, I suppose, of having a small camera about my person rather than failing to cart round the weight of the big one.

knot a hole

It’s not a camera I would ever have chosen for myself but having ended up with it (another accident) I’m learning that what I think I want or don’t want isn’t necessarily the best guide to the best fun.

m2

Metal and wood are what I saw on my walk today. Such a short distance, so many lines and curves, so much beauty.

broken hearted

The rest (what, there are more? oh yes, discrimination has never been my strong point) can be seen here.

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Coils and thorns

bramble and bindweed

Such a delicate determination to life. The sinuous embrace, the needled defence. I once saw a bindweed which had slowly, inexorably, thrown coils around one of its own flowers and strangled it.

Last night I dreamt I was going to die. Not in some vague future but specifically within a day or so. I was somewhere waiting, prepared, terminally ill I supposed. When I woke, in the dream, not yet dead but in a shroud-like garment, it was as though I had been slightly cheated. Another day of waiting.

Not a frightening dream, but definitely troubling.

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A Lancashire lass?

I sort of knew my mother’s family was from Lancashire. I sort of know, I think, that her father’s family came from Kirkby Lonsdale which sits on the border between Lancashire and Cumbria. Since my mother’s grasp on reality wasn’t the strongest it’s difficult to know of the few things she said about her family what was true and what wasn’t.

Now thanks to the amazing National Trust Names (via languagehat) it’s possible to see exactly how Lancastrian the family was. This map shows the distribution of people with that surname in the UK in 1881:

mother's maiden name 1881

The purple county isn’t Lancashire, it’s what is now part of Cumbria. But the top area in 1881 where people of that name lived was Lancaster, county town of Lancashire.

mmn geographical spread

And the change in distribution by 1998?

mmn 1998

These are apples that don’t fall too far from the tree by the looks of things.

I’ve spent a long time assuming that because there are no other relatives (that I know of) I would never really know much about my mother’s side of my family. By virtue of the fact that her father’s family name was relatively uncommon I now have this unexpected insight into my roots.

Although the picture is slightly complicated by the fact that my grandfather’s parents were not, in fact, the couple who brought him up. They were his grandparents. His mother was the woman he knew until her death only as his much older spinster sister. His father was, apparently, a local vicar whose family name I don’t know. But the fact that his family name came from his mother rather than father doesn’t invalidate it. He was delighted to discover he was a total bastard, something many people had called him throughout his life without knowing quite how accurate they were. (I know this is true because I was told by my late maternal uncle whose grasp on reality was much more reliable than my mother’s.)

How exceedingly romantic (in several senses of the word) to “come from” Cumbria. Could the profound yearning I have to live by the sea, ideally in or near that neck of the woods, actually be genetic? Is this why I have a border terrier? maybe I should have a lakeland too.

But seriously, it’s all rather interesting. I might try to find out what my mother’s mother’s maiden name was.

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Acceptance

Maizy has accepted the inescapable reality of her haircut…

wet iris, cold dog

…although due to the unfortunate climatic conditions she’s still shivering a lot.

Today I went on a wonderful day meditation retreat – Training the mind, freeing the heart: Waking up to each moment. No shivering, much contemplation of acceptance.

Yesterday, after a rather grueling assessment process, I was accepted as a listening volunteer for the Samaritans. All volunteers sign a confidentiality agreement, for obvious reasons. This means that, difficult though it is to believe, I shall have nothing more to say on the subject other than that I am extremely happy.