I’ve always liked the Sex Pistols song ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as I find it hilarious, and often actually laugh out loud when listening to it, primarily because of the parenthetical insertion at the end: “… and I want to be an anarchist! (and get pissed). Destroy!” I was talking to my partner about this yesterday and he said the song is about “the lyricist passing judgement on the ‘anarchist’” which seems about right. It’s all about the petty acts of ‘revolution’ (that aren’t really) that might, just maybe, bring about anarchy. Like giving someone the wrong time when they ask. Or holding up a line of traffic!
I think we’ve all committed these small acts of subversion, that of course are utterly, mind-numbingly conventional (and unoriginal).
Mine was buying a Tube ticket (in the days when you had to go up to the window and ask, this was before we had Oyster cards!) at Charing Cross and asking for a ticket to “St Pancreas“. Revolution! Indeed.
The strange thing though is the other week I was buying some other train tickets for London and the guy working at the station at the ticket desk said “St Pancreas”, thinking I had misheard I ensured conversationally that it was said again, and there it was, St Pancreas. Is it a small act of subversion by a railway employee? A way of introducing some interest (and I use the word quite loosely) into an otherwise tedious day? Or perhaps this guy really thinks it is St Pancreas and no one has had the heart to set him straight!
Or perhaps it really is St Pancreas and I’ve been wrong all this time… now that really would be subversive. I’d get out my Tube map and check but I’m too busy starting my own small revolution.
Here’s a poem, a haiku? by Jorge Luis Borges. (Quoted from websites such as this one – “criticism or review” of Borges under fair use as I understand it.)
Since that day
I have not moved the pieces
On the board
I don’t know what this rather short poem is ‘really’ about and I didn’t read for any interpretations. [1] In my mind, it’s a chess board. A parting, not amicable (or not anticipated). A vestigial remainder. That things move on, people move on, but somewhere, you don’t, not quite. A suspension of a state of being, pending a future reanimation, or an indefinite freeze. You don’t know.
Two events. This I believe (if real life were fiction) to be ‘foreshadowing’. An established literary technique. Life imitating art, etc.
I’ve flown twice in my life (4 times if you count the outward and return legs separately); once at the age of six to a European destination (I live in the UK) and once as a young adult (to the USA).
Aged 6 I didn’t have any pre-conceptions and no fear that I recall. As an adult I was terrified. And this was pre-9/11 (had it been after 9/11 I don’t think I would have been able to go at all!). So what had changed?
This is something that’s been bothering me increasingly lately, so (as with any query) I turned to the wisdom of the Internerds and Googled It. And what I found was all the write-ups about “fear of flying and how to conquer it” etc didn’t fit – none of the normal explanations (claustrophobia, vertigo, fear of being idle) seem to apply.
As a younger self I was fascinated and horrified by UFOs and all sorts of other ‘supernatural’ things in about equal measure. Was I credulous? Not particularly: not impressionable, not so much, but inclined to develop my own strange ideas and then for them to take me over.
Despite, or perhaps because of, being “externally” oriented and actively engaging with the world, I often feel like I experience it at one degree of remove compared to most people. Through a window.
I was at one of those “Pay at Pump” getting diesel today in Tesco (what an exciting life I do lead!)
I haven’t yet in 10 years of driving managed to put the wrong fuel in a car (and yet somehow I feel like this sort of statement has a habit of coming back to bite its speaker…) but I have only had this diesel Corsa about a year and my previous car was unleaded so I do always check about 3 times before I start!
Diesel? – Diesel.
Diesel?
Wouldn’t it be good if Tesco/other supermarkets could do a software update on the “Pay at Pump” machines so that the customer could register a preferred fuel (or the system could just ‘deduce’ it…) against the Clubcard number.
Then when you put in the Clubcard, if you lift up the nozzle for (say) unleaded when you normally have diesel, it could come up with an OK/Cancel…
As a younger self I used to worry a lot about mundane details of arrangements in advance of doing something. “How will I know whether that’s the entrance to the underground or just the exit”, etc. A few years before (going back to being a child, now) I remember my Mum talking to my Nan about how she had lost her PIN for a credit card and would have to phone the bank on Monday and get them to send a new PIN. I was terrified! How would I know how to operate credit cards and PINs when I was old enough?
Some time ago I came across the Wordle site which takes a URL or some text as input and outputs a frequency map similar to the one below according to the frequency of different words in the text being queried. (There are various options such as colour, layout, ignore common words such as ‘and’, etc.) Some people also use Wordle to create images of text by directly specifying the words they want to appear in it (and with what frequency), for example to use as a graphical element on a T-shirt etc.
I use the Google ‘search suggestions’ in Firefox quite a lot and in general find it really useful if I am not quite sure how to phrase a question – also it can be interesting/amusing to see what other people are searching for! Today I was looking up “are all funnel web spiders dangerous to humans” as I found a funnel shaped web! (for the record, the internet seems to think they are not and it’s only certain species, which aren’t native to the UK, that are!)
Anyway the list of top 10 “are all…” queries – which I presume are presented in the order of ‘most common’ – presented me with the following:
that it was said again, and there it was, St Pancreas. Is it a small act of subversion by a railway employee? A way of introducing some interest (and I use the word quite loosely) into an otherwise tedious day? Or perhaps this guy really thinks it is St Pancreas and no one has had the heart to set him straight!