Two good things

1. This woman is just amazingly strong. Watch at least as far as from about 0:19 to 0:35 as she reinvents the push-up/pull-up in the scariest way possible. Also the music is good -- it's Running, by Paranoid Breaks.


2. I also really like this song and its Raeburn-influenced video. It's generally pleasant to watch and near the end there are ponies.

80s pop video tropes

Because I was a kid in the 80s they seemed pretty normal to me. Recently two (2) pop videos have reminded me of them. Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines involves the eponymous blue-eyed pop star interacting with ladies' bodies with all the raw sexuality of an early George Michael video. It's quite possible that this is because he actually likes women. It's weird to watch a pop video which simultaneously makes you like the pop star a lot less for being in it, and a bit more for being clearly so uncomfortable. Pharrell on the other hand is obviously fine with all that "I'm gonna split your ass in two" stuff.

Feminism by the way is in big trouble. Actually let's not even use the word feminism here, it means different things to different people. Gender relations, and consequently the possibility of people having healthy relationships with those around them, are in big trouble. Things may actually have got worse since the 80s in this regard -- I've been getting involved with trying to encourage girls to program, which I'll blog about at another time, but I keep coming across seriously depressing statistics.

On the other hand John Newman, of Rudimental fame, is clearly the Rick Astley de nos jours. He looks like a fresh-faced under-nourished sixteen-year-old and sings like a man who has encountered all the troubles in the world. It's a good song. I remember people claiming that little Rick Astley couldn't possibly be the source of that deep voice but I haven't heard anyone say that about John Newman so maybe some things improve in this world.

An rss-reader and two songs

Google Reader dies on Sunday. I think my preferred substitute is The Old Reader.

I feel oddly uncomfortable about liking the latest Arctic Monkeys single -- they're not usually my sort of thing. The lyrics have an excellent end-rhyme-without-scansion thing going on.

Have you got colour in your cheeks?
Do you ever get that fear that you can't shift the tide that sticks around like summat in your teeth?
Are there some aces up your sleeve?
Have you no idea that you're in deep?
I've dreamt about you nearly every night this week
How many secrets can you keep?
Cause there's this tune I found that makes me think of you somehow and I play it on repeat
Until I fall asleep
Spilling drinks on my settee

It reminds me of John Fuller's Valentine, which is the only respectable modern love poem I can think of. Here's the actual music:


Anyway this is more my thing: the Pet Shop Boys celebrate dance music, with dancers wearing amazing Minotaur hats. When this album comes out I will probably have this track on repeat for a week:

Books catch-up

I think I haven't posted about any books at all so far this year. I haven't been reading as much as in previous years, which I think is because my job involves so much thinking. And I'm doing a lot of rereading now I've got my books unpacked -- Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Hilary Mantel, I love you.

January:
I read David Mitchell's sleb memoir, Back Story. Now, I like David Mitchell. He's funny and sensible, and when dealing with politicians he can be pretty acute in a Jon Stewart sort of way. What I learnt from this book is not to read the autobiographies of comedians, especially if I like them. It becomes clear as soon as he gets to Cambridge that he is exactly the sort of student who made Cambridge much worse for me both when I was an undergraduate and when I was a teacher. I loved theatre as a sixth-former, and went enthusiastically to lots of productions. By some point in my second year Cambridge amateur dramatics had completely killed it for me as an art form and I have never been able to take it seriously since. David Mitchell is not just the sort of person who killed it for me, he may have actually been one of those involved, since he was in the year above me and recounts how he auditioned for and took part in huge numbers of productions throughout his time there. The other side of the coin of his enthusiastic am-dramming was his avoidance of all work and actual learning. (He seems to have got away with this by tapping into some intra-fellowship antagonisms at Peterhouse, perhaps unaware that it would have been more impressive if he could have got them to present a united front against him.) This brought back memories for me of how frustrating it was trying to teach students who still took a school-like attitude to university and acted as if evading teaching was somehow a clever thing to do. I had one particular student, also at Peterhouse, who used to really annoy me by skipping my third-year Anglo-Saxon history seminars in order to rehearse for a student production of The Rocky Horror Show. He was a fool to miss those seminars, which were really good because all the other students were really really good. Anyway, now I have to avoid David Mitchell for a while on screen and in print, in the hope that I will forget the annoyingness of this book and go back to liking him. After all, who isn't a bit of an arse as a student? But I shouldn't have read this book.

February:
I read nothing new in February, I just reread things by Muriel Spark, Robin Hobb, and Elinor Lipman.

March:
In March I went on a Charlaine Harris True Blood reading binge. The books are much less dark than the TV series -- in particular with regard to Lafayette and Tara. I suppose when they made the TV shows they thought that a series set in Louisiana should have more black characters, but it's odd that the black characters take the brunt of the trauma. Also I read more Pym and Spark.

April:
In April I mostly reread Kage Baker. I love you, Kage Baker. I also read Marian Keyes' new book. I think this may be the best book I've ever read about depression. Go Marian Keyes! I really love you too.

May:
I read very little in May, but it was of high quality. I reread my favourite Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos, and also A.S. Byatt's amazing The Children's Book. Really that is such a tremendously good book. I also read The Black Count by Tom Reiss, a biography of the novelist Alexandre Dumas' mixed-race father. This is a pretty amazing story. As a youth he was sold by his own father, who later sent for him and made him his heir. In post-Revolutionary France prejudices about race were all shaken up, and Dumas became a very successful general. Napoleon didn't like him, and it was Napoleon who eventually brought back all the racist laws. The novelist Dumas clearly idolised his father, whom he lost when he was just four years old. It's easy to see how this sort of idolisation contributes to the flatness about humanity which makes Dumas' books just great stories. But the thing that really amazed me was the contribution of the French monarchy to the American revolution. I tend to avoid both revolutions as depressing examples of the swift perversion of good motives into awful events (which sometimes seems like humanity's defining characteristic). So I always thought of the statue of liberty as a gift from France to America to say thank-you for the idea of being down on kings. Perhaps everyone else already knew this but the American revolution would probably not have happened without the wholesale support of King Louis XVI. By opening up another front for the British Navy -- essentially a front that consisted of all the coasts and oceans of the world -- they divided British forces and gave the Americans the extra space they needed. Which makes the whole "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" thing look not just rude but stupid. The French got essentially nothing from this expensive war, and although they probably largely did it just because annoying the British was something they enjoyed, there's some suggestion that young, not-very-bright King Louis actually liked the idea ideologically. (Paris fashion embraced the idea of "insurgents" and came up with crazy things like lightning conductor dresses, with wires trailing to the ground, in honour of Benjamin Franklin.) So one of the last acts of the Bourbon monarchy was to help set up the American republic. Then again, because of my ignorance I had always thought that the bankruptcy of the French state which led to the French revolution was due to the extravagant lifestyles of the nobles built on the work of starving peasants. But however much silks and jewels cost, they can't compete for sheer crazy expense with a war. French support of the Americans emptied the French treasury, opening the way for the initially reasonable revolution and the Terror that followed. The American revolution was like one of those epiphytes that feeds off its host and then kills it.

June:
I've had a mixed reading month so far this June. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies is fully as good as it should be. I also really enjoyed Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, though in a mildly exasperated sort of way. As a writer he has a lot of chutzpah. He's good enough to carry it off, though from time to time you want to say, really, who do you think you are? Because you're not Pynchon. Dark Matter, billed as an adult book from YA-author Michelle Paver, was spooky enough but I could not for the life of me see why it wasn't a YA book. There's some great YA stuff out there and I don't mean the term YA pejoratively, and this had a sort of simplicity about humanity which works better in that market, I think. Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife blew me away. It's a novel based on the life of Laura Bush which I put off reading for a long time because it's a novel based on the life of Laura Bush, but eventually I gave in to all the good reviews. It's quite uncomfortable in places, maybe in a similar way to We Need To Talk About Kevin but less overtly so. I liked this, from when the heroine is considering getting a divorce: "Even putting up with him might be easier than not putting up with him -- being the beleaguered wife, propelled forward, given a sense of purpose, by my troublesome husband." That seems unfortunately true to life, to me. Disappointing, however, were two books by male British authors who I think are actually friends in real life. I was quite enjoying David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet until it swerved off into bizarre and unnecessary Orientalism that I actually found quite offensive. Oh those fiendish Orientals! The paperback I read came with an essay at the end in which Mitchell congratulates himself on having written historical fiction, which is OK, you know, because the Anglo-Saxon chronicle has some dragons in it and is therefore clearly historical fiction too. David Mitchell, you did not write historical fiction, which is and always has been a perfectly respectable genre in no need of justification from you, you wrote a trashy romance. Lawrence Norfolk's John Saturnall's Feast was likewise not half as interesting as its author clearly thought it was. It too is essentially a trashy romance, in this case of the flourishing genre Civil War romance with some cod English rural paganism baked in. Both these novels are the sort of thing that I read voraciously and casually when I was a teenager, and I might have enjoyed Norfolk's at least if I had come across them in battered old copies in a charity shop. But these are both by big hyped male authors, reviewed in all the review sections, and talked about on pretentious American literary blogs. If Maria McCann had written one of these, and Norfolk or Mitchell had written As Meat Loves Salt, it wouldn't have made a difference to McCann's fame, and Norfolk or Mitchell would be hailed as having produced a masterpiece. I like the trashy romance genre and I'm not saying that men shouldn't be allowed to write one, but to do so and then pretend that you've done something interesting and groundbreaking just shows up your profound ignorance. Boo. No more Mitchell for me, but I'll read the next Norfolk in the hope for a return to his original crazy, Pynchon-Chabon style form.

Two (2) things I love

1. I love that although it has been quite warm for just a few days today at Exeter bus station I overheard someone complaining about the "heat wave".

2. I also love this track by Giorgio Moroder:

He's 73 years old!

A few things

1. I think it's quite interesting what this whole "Internet of Things" thing says about the human mind. We like to represent the abstract with the physical -- we like symbols that are more than just symbols, and are in some way actually are the thing they mean. I quite want this little printer that makes flipbooks out of gifs, even though I know both the printouts and the camera would just be more junk in my house.

2. Charlie Stross wrote something interesting about spimes a while back, pointing out that it makes a difference whether the spime was started on the internet or in what the kids call meatspace: "my cat is a spime, but she was instantiated via another cat". I like Stross's blog enough that some day I may revisit his fiction.

3. Fuzzy rainforest caterpillar looks like Donald Trump's toupee

4. There are some good weather maps on the Met Office's website. Go to the five-day forecast page -- click on "Get detailed forecast" in the 5-day forecast box on the front page, or try going straight here. (This will give you the chance of rainfall as a rough percentage, by the way, which is a bit more grownup than the usual pictograms.) Then click on the Map tab at the top of the table of information. You'll get a map with tons of different options available as radio buttons down the side. My favourites are: temp. map; cloud and rain; and surface pressure. The cloud and rain are based on satellite imagery (though of course the forecasts are predictions of the satellite imagery). For surface pressure you might need to zoom out to a UK-wide rather than a local perspective. If you click on the play button underneath the image it will improvise an animation by showing you a series of images -- it might have to do one cycle slowly before it has them all loaded up, depending on how good your broadband is. I do like to watch the Atlantic warming up the Cornish peninsula, or a band of frontal rain sweeping across the nation with little bubbles of cumulus behind it.

Ducks in the summertime

I've gone to my parents' house for the long weekend, mostly for IKEA-related reasons. This Easter my father, whom my mother says has never quite got over being an 11-year-old boy, went a bit crazy and bought huge numbers of fertilised eggs to hatch out. Also his silver pheasant has been laying a lot, and he's been hatching those out too. As a result we have a pen full of adolescent chickens, quails, and runner ducks, a pen full of silver and golden pheasants which are about at the older child stage, incubators full of turning eggs, and a set of six silver pheasants which hatched out yesterday evening. This morning I helped my dad move them from the incubator into a cardboard box in his study, because he's done his back in. They really are amazing when they're that little, with long legs and big feet which must have taken up a lot of the egg space, and scrawny bodies which join the legs to bulgy-eyed heads. They peep and peep because they want something. When I put my hands down into the cardboard box to put in a water-dish (mostly filled with stones, so they don't drown themselves) they immediately decided that my hands were what they wanted. I sat there for about a quarter of an hour with six sleepy chicks piled onto one hand; if I moved at all they would fall off and then scramble back on making loud noises. Eventually I managed to persuade them that the space under the heat lamp was a better bet, once it had warmed up a little. But what particularly charmed me was that in this time one of the chicks hopped down from my hand, ran off to a corner, relieved itself, and then ran back and fell asleep on my hand again.

Of course it doesn't do to get attached. This is sort of one of the big problems at the heart of being human -- you shouldn't get too attached to many things, but then if you're not attached to anything how alive are you? When I was eleven and had just started a new school I remember deciding that the answer was not to love anyone or anything (I was also experimenting with not believing in their existence, having come across the word solipsism goodness knows where). I tried really hard for a few days but found that it just wasn't possible. (I was a strange child but then again I think probably most children are strange, really.) Out of those six chicks, will three make it to adulthood? Others will die casually and unexpectedly of stupid things, or nothing. When I got here on Thursday evening my dad took me out to see the pen of younger pheasants. They have two heat lamps, but they do not necessarily have the sense to go under the heat lamps when they are cold, and one was lying stiff in a corner, in just the place where my father had found one dead earlier that day. I saw its eyelids flutter when another chick trod on it, so I picked it up and warmed it with my hands. It felt quite dead at first, but I took it inside and it started peeping and moving more. This was the point at which I wondered whether I had done a cruel thing, because it wasn't able to stand up alone, and it occurred to me that it might not regain the use of its legs. My mother said that yesterday morning all the chicks were running around happily. Two died during the day. I don't know if mine lived or died, but at least it isn't stuck there crippled, waiting for my father (or more likely my mother, who is tougher) to euthanise it. Nature is bloody depressing sometimes.

On the other hand, an actual wild duck decided to nest by our pond this year. She found herself a spot where she was so well camouflaged that you could look right at her for a while without seeing her, and she hatched out eight ducklings on Tuesday. My parents put an old polystyrene surfboard, with an improvised anchor, in the middle of the pond so that they have a retreat from the local cats, foxes, and badgers. We expect she'll try to take them to a bigger piece of water at some point, but an attempt she made to leave on Thursday went badly wrong when one of the ducklings managed somehow to get stuck in a ten-inch-high empty flower pot. My parents heard the duck quacking and quacking and went out to see what was wrong, so they were able to rescue the duckling. She hasn't tried to leave again since.

Every now and then the drake turns up. My father represents this as him visiting his family, but it's hard to be sentimental about ducks when you've seen Ze Frank's True Facts about the Duck.

What I have been doing lately

For the first five months or so in my new job I was learning so much stuff all the time that it was utterly exhausting. It made me feel vulnerable but also young in a good way. I had a lull of a month or so and now I'm back to the same thing again. I don't think I have ever had a job where I've had to learn so much all the time, and think so much so consistently. All the jobs I've had as a post-doc have had at their core a sort of glorified data-entry, and any thinking I've done has been either for my own research (when I could find time for it) or very problematic because it involved getting my superiors to see that they were wrong. I'm glad I made this change but it's not what I was expecting. I took it for granted that I would have my exciting M.Sc. year when I got to learn new things, but that that would be my last chance to do thinking-learning for a long time (perhaps until I do a theology degree when I retire). Of course I realised I'd have to learn lots of new things in a job but I thought it would be along the lines of learning new procedures or software packages, like learning to use Powerpoint -- something you learn without thinking. Instead I'm learning things like Design Patterns, which are pure logic, and very hard. I assumed that I'd get good at my job eventually and then it would be boring, but it looks like maybe there will always be new things to understand because there will always be bright people out there coming up with new programming languages based on a particular logical insight, or new frameworks which handle particular problems through doing something unexpected and very clever. I find this wierd to think of. And I feel a bit like a sixth-former again, when I was doing two Maths A-levels and regularly coping with things right at the outermost stretch of my understanding.

The other thing I've done in recent years which has been right at the outermost stretch of my understanding is my edition of the Anglo-Saxon Charters of Wilton Abbey. My original plan was to give myself a year to settle into this job and then pick that up again and finish it off -- I still have the introduction to write, which will be fun, and all the indices of things like Greek loan-words to produce, which will be very hard. I do really want to finish that book. I feel mildly apprehensive about whether I have the brain capacity for both.

So, anyway, I still feel like I'm in the middle of a massive transition in my life, when I had expected that by now I'd feel like the transition was largely made. This job is not what I expected -- I think it's better, but I still feel a little disconcerted. I'm so glad I changed directions: to be honest I am a little bit in love with the idea of myself as someone who can be part of both worlds. If I'd gone the Computer Science route as a teenager (for a while I was certain that I was going to go into Artificial Intelligence and make neural networks) I wonder if I would have spent the last year doing an M.Phil. in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic? And marvelling at my new-found permission to think broadly (and cynically) about things pertaining to humans? I hope I would have.

Tie-tie

I went to my first hackathon this weekend. It was quite interesting. I was going to blog about it but I'm exhausted. Instead here's the one-minute version of that Daft Punk song:

Go Daft Punk! I think listening to this on repeat for a few hours might revive me enough to get off the sofa and microwave some lasagne.

Zurich

I met up with some friends in Zurich over the weekend. In some spare time before the others arrived I went to see the Grossmünster, where Zwingli got his Protestant on only a few years after Luther. It reminded me of a regret I have that in my time at Corpus Christi, which has an annual sermon to commemorate an otherwise forgotten John Mere, I never once managed to get off this joke (pause for effect): "Mere Commemoration? Sounds positively Zwinglian!" (pause for laughter)*

Zurich is remarkably expensive. There are no Starbucks in Rome and my friend who lives in Rome holds that this is a bad thing, so we went into one of the many Starbucks in Zurich to get her a chai latte. I got a small Americano, e.g. just a shot of espresso with some hot water, and it cost nearly four British pounds. Also a small bottle of water at the airport cost £3.75, but that was after security, when all bets are off.

Zurich feels rather small for such a well-known city. It is well provided with waterfowl, and also with large placards to help you identify said waterfowl. The shops all close on Sundays, which is a blow if you were planning to pop into a Coop before you leave and spend all your spare francs on ChocoFresh. I was addicted to ChocoFresh when I lived in Italy.


Luckily my friend from Rome brought me some proper Italian biscuits, which I have been sharing around at work. In a bit of a blow to my career as a Java programmer I found out today that the official rules for doing Java documentation include "Avoid Latin". Admittedly they seem to think that "a.k.a." is Latin, but they specifically say you can't use "viz.". It reminded me of a friend who was trying to force his email to auto-generate Subject lines for replies which started "anent:" instead of "re:". Anent is a good English word while re is not only Latin but from the fifth declension, the worst of all the declensions. He never managed it, and frankly it wasn't likely that he would, since he is a musicologist with little interest in computing. Now I am more connected to computing things maybe I should try to bring his dream to life.

* It's a joke about trans-substantation, and you should admire it like you would admire a dog walking on its hind legs -- "it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all".

Things I have learnt recently

1. If you want to start a conversation with the other programmers at your workplace, leave a Game of Thrones DVD box set visible on your desk.*

2. But when you put said box set into your bag and see it nestling next to the fifth volume of Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms you will feel slightly dirty. I can just imagine what Augustine would have to say about sexposition.

3. Augustine doesn't half talk about belching a lot. It reminds me of a thing my brother told me about how he and my sister-in-law went to a place in South America which had a religion that was sort of half Catholic and half-pre-Catholic, and they believed that burping was spiritual so they drank a lot of coca-cola before services, and then sat around burping in front of big pictures of saints.

4. They're going to "sunset" Google Reader. Now I'll have to use something slick with pictures in it. Boo! At least some things last:


5. Joss Whedon had made a film of Much Ado About Nothing with Nathan Fillion. Nathan Fillion!

To be honest, the trailer doesn't make it look great. But it's got Nathan Fillion in it! And the whole of the cast of Dollhouse, it looks like. And Nathan Fillion!

6. Here is a comic about how you can do anything you want in life. Go you!

* By the way, everybody thinks that the books were better. I have a theory that programmers read more novels than academics do...

So it's another internet post then

I keep having thoughts I want to blog but they involve complicated things and I'd have to think hard to explain what I mean and not be totally incomprehensible as usual. Instead I am going to post some things I got off of the internet.

Here's an interesting thing about internet currencies. (I work with someone who is one of the programmers on bitcoin.) I think there's a huge difference between in-game purchases of hats, however unusual those might be, and bitcoin, which can be exchanged for other monies. Tuvalu is a place which should have been invented by Neal Stephenson.

I was trying to explain to someone the other day that the internet has made a huge difference to my usage of exclamation marks -- I used to recoil from them with upturned lip but now I find myself using them quite often, and I have a sense that that has become OK. The person I was talking to didn't have a clue what I was on about. But it's not just me, and here a properly articulate person talks about it.

Apparently Computer Science equals Facebook for Dummies.

The bloody BBC wants DRM in HTML5. For goodness' sake!

Men and women are quite similar apparently.

Titles

In 2010 I was annoyed with First Great Western for not having a simple "Dr" option on their website registration, but "Dr (Male)" and "Dr (Female)". I chose the "Other" option as an ineffectual sort of protest. Now I get emails from them starting "Dear Other Rebecca Rushforth". I quite like this. At the same time as freeing me from the crushing expectations of being The Rebecca Rushforth it also suggests that I'm a bit alternative, like one of those sitcoms (Arrested Development, Peep Show, etc) which get low ratings because only interesting people like them.

There used to be a Rebecca Rushforth who played teenage league tennis in America. Now there's a Rebecca Rushforth who is Professor of Ballroom Dancing at William and Mary College, Williamsburg, Virginia. Rate My Professors has her down as "hot". Comments include: "Fantastic class! Professor Rushforth is incredibly easy going and a fantastic dancer!" I think it's quite likely that she's The Rebecca Rushforth, and she seems like she's making a good job of it.

I'm rather less fond of Virgin Media's habit of sending me emails starting "Dear null". It's hard not to feel a bit dismissed by this. But I did just phone them up to sort out a bill and a polite man in India constantly referred to me as Doctor, as in "Now, doctor, can you confirm your email address", or "please wait, doctor, while I transfer you to my colleague". I did like that. I don't go by "Doctor" in my work life. People don't seem to on the whole -- there are quite a lot of people with doctorates around, not just in the science areas, and everyone's very cool about it.

People being cool about PhDs is such a nice contrast to my previous life. It may well be that at some point I get all misty-eyed about academia, but at the moment I find that almost impossible to imagine. I used to quite like the PHD webcomic, but now when it pops up in my RSS feed I love it, because it reminds me of what I've escaped. Also LinkedIn keeps asking me if I know people whose work I used to find it hard to take seriously, and with whom I had to have dull earnest conversations at conferences -- pretending that I don't gives me a beautiful feeling of release. This probably counts as the zeal of the convert. But long may it last!

Some more things

Neil Gaiman has long claimed that Tasmania is wonderful. I just got this email from a friend:

Instead of having wall-labels, MONA, The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, gives visitors a mini-iPad with interactive features. The icon for more in-depth info about an artwork is a cock and balls with the caption "Artwank".

He found out about it from this blogpost by David Byrne of a visit to the place. It does sound pretty cool.

The American Storycorps project is very excellent. I think I've posted about it before. It's a huge oral history collection, and sometimes they animate interesting recordings. This one about one of the astronauts who was on board the Challenger when it crashed went somewhere I wasn't quite expecting. It's very good.


Also not quite what you think it's going to be, and very much worth watching, is this:

I think it's from an old British clips show. Are those the dulcet tones of Denis Norden?

Plus there's another video by that excellent dancer:

Some internet things

I keep intending to write long, meaningful posts about the world and things, but my brain is stuck on Java and how I can't get Eclipse Juno to work. Even if that were interesting I don't have enough articulacy to write about it properly -- I can barely explain my problems to my co-workers. So instead here are some random internet things interspersed with a few small thoughts I had.

1. I love xkcd. There's an xkcd for everything. Here is a very good one which puts really well something I wittered on about incomprehensibly in a previous blog post (see item 2).

2. Watch this super-excellent video, made by a recent commander of the space station on her last day there! It's really very good and strange. There is no up or down! If I were a teacher I'd get my class to watch it.

3. I think this is going to be the year of rereading. I've been unpacking boxes of books which I packed up in 2007. They are full of goodies! I am currently rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which is very excellent. I'm also rereading Gaiman's Sandman books.

4. I find Gays of South London entertaining enough. (Devon is somewhat heteronormative.)

5. One of the things I'm going to post about at some point is weather. I spent last week learning about it. I know why it's snowing! And I can now identify different types of cloud. I know what an occluded front is, and why Britain is so warm (for its latitude). There are tons of really good things about this on the Met Office website.

Reading in 2012

I've kept track of my reading for 2012 like I did for 2011. I read fewer books this year than last (though I wouldn't be far off if I counted unabridged audiobooks). Also of course I haven't counted titles like "Artifical Intelligence: a Modern Approach" or "Head-First Design Patterns". Here are the statistics:

• Total number of books read: 174
• Gender of authors of each book: 91 male, 78 female (the rest are anthologies)
• Fiction vs non-fiction: 136 to 38
• Number of re-reads: only 15
• Number read on Kindle: 100 (57.47%)

It's not been quite such an interesting reading year as last year was. I think this is because so much of my energy has gone into the very tough course and the challenge of moving down to Devon and starting a new job in a completely new industry. I haven't taken so many reading risks, so I haven't had so many nice surprises. But there were a few books I enjoyed more than I had expected: Jerzy Pilch's The Mighty Angel, about a Russian drinker who falls in love, and Vanessa Gebbie's The Coward's Tale, about a Welsh mining village haunted by a terrible mine accident, are both more interesting than they sound from synopses. Pat McIntosh's series of murder mysteries set in fifteenth-century Glasgow is very good, as is Nicola Shulman's Graven with Diamonds, a biography of Thomas Wyatt. Lytton Strachey can really write, and is more interesting than he has any right to be, and Iain Pears is reliably great.

I read some mid twentieth-century stuff which I enjoyed, fiction in the form of Anthony Powell's surprisingly easy-to-read A Dance to the Music of Time, and non-fiction in the form of Nella Last's War and Call the Midwife, both of which took my breath away.

But leaving aside rereads, my favourite books of the year were, in reverse order:

• Austin Wright, Tony and Susan, reviewed here
• Craig Taylor, Londoners, reviewed here.
• Tom Lubbock, 50 Great Paintings, reviewed here.
• Muriel Spark, A Far Cry From Kensington. I seem not to have reviewed this yet. It's about a young fat widow called Mrs Hawkins who lives in a genteel boarding house in Kensington. She works in publishing, and the story mostly follows what comes from her designation of a hack called Hector Bartlett as a "pisseur de copie". This is a seriously brilliant book, and has to be one of the standing classics of the twentieth century.

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas, anyone who might be reading this. It's wierd how intensely Christmas forms its own traditions. In the last few years we've developed one in my family where my mother and I argue about the content of the midnight mass sermon. It was a pretty inane one last night. But heigh ho, that's not really the point. For once I found myself able to let go of that and enjoy being at that service with a group of people whose actions (if not their words) I admire. It's a Christmas miracle!

About a fortnight ago the people who sometimes graze their sheep on one of my parents' fields turned up at our front door with a carrier bag with half a lamb in it. So for Christmas dinner we had a big leg of lamb. It was very delicious. I don't know how far away it had to go to be killed, but it spent its life within a couple of hundred yards from where I am sitting now.

My mother gave me a device for forcing a hard-boiled egg into a cube shape. I feel quite good about this. I gave my grandma a book about her home city of Bath in the Blitz, with pictures from the time next to pictures of the same places now. Bath's blitz was short but intense. My grandma was a young woman at the time, working for the Ministry of Defence. She told me that she remembered her little niece Jenny, who was four or five years old, saying "You won't let them kill me will you aunty?". (We talked to the same Jenny, a self-assured old-aged-pensioner now, after lunch.) I hadn't known that one of my grandma's second cousins was killed together with her small child. I'm not entirely sure now whether the book was a good present. My grandma clearly finds it very interesting, but are the memories it's bringing back still painful? It's hard to tell. I find it interesting to hear about it, myself. I wished I had asked my grandpa before he died -- he was down in Plymouth at this point, which was far more badly hit, and he didn't move up to Bath and meet my grandma until 1943.

Money and value

I have just had a royalty statement, and my Margaret book has earned £42.62 in royalties! I never thought that it would ever pay off the advance, which, although small in relative terms, seemed rather generous to me. So now I am an author who has not lost a publisher money! And I have £42.62 more than I did before. This is the sort of money which feels like it's worth more than its actual amount in pounds and pence.

The wierd thing is that it has sold over 500 copies overseas in 2011-12, far more than it has in previous years. So that's a bit odd.

In non-medievalist news, I have now been a professional Java programmer for just over two months. I am getting a tad more secure about it, though there are still tons of things with which I need to get to grips. I'm really enjoying the wierd feeling that I'm learning a new sort of articulacy! When I'm more settled down with Java I'm going to learn about Aspect Oriented Programming, and also Functional Programming, which seems to be Hot Right Now. I'm probably going to be doing the Sun Java Programmer Certification at work, and I'm going to make a few Android apps.

But I'm still going to be a medievalist again from time to time, I think. I do really want to finish off my charters book. I've started unpacking some of my book boxes labelled "Academic storage", and although I might do a bit of deaccessioning, I don't think I can part with most of them. But goodness knows where I will put them all. Plus it's possible that by the time I get round to anglo-saxoning again all this Java will have pushed all the Latin out of my brain.

Röyksopp

5th December 2012

I'm currently gearing up to moving out of my parents' house and into a place of my own.  I took this morning off and spent most of it on hold to various utility companies.  It reminded me a bit of the death of Princess Diana, when the radio stations all played emergency chill-out music, with no lyrics but a woman doing vocalisations.  I think British Gas were playing Morcheeba, or maybe it was Leftfield -- very '90s.

It took me over two hours to get home tonight because the motorway was closed. My route involved a mile's walk and two separate lifts.  When I got back I found that my parents had taken a bizarre cue from Big Bang Theory and made Sheldon's favourite meal for dinner.  My mother literally explained it as Sheldon's favourite meal.  This is pasta with tomato sauce and chopped-up hot dogs.  I am now feeling guilty for being insufficiently grateful, though it did in fact taste quite bad.  (They had added lots of chopped onions and mushrooms, and I think my Dad may have put some ginger in.)

In internet news, Zoe Williams' article about the Metropolitan Police Force's new assault prevention advice has a link to this truly brilliant list of Sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work. The same website has lots of other good tips, like this handy guide to telling whether a toy is for boys or girls.