You know how to whistle, don't you?

As it wasn't freezing cold and/or p1ssing down with rain yesterday, I thought I'd treat the wife to a walk.  It's important to keep the magic alive like this when you've been married since the last hurrah of britpop, as we have.

Sometimes we jolly down to the coast of Essex or Kent on our Sunday constitutionals as Mrs O grew up on the coast and gets the yips if she can't dip her trotters in the briny once a calendar month.  But we decided to give the Thames Estuary a swerve yesterday as when the weather is half decent, the less-agreeable denizens of the capital head off there en masse and make a holy show of themselves and generally despoil the environment.  I know one isn't supposed to kowtow and amend one's plans to accommodate ruffians like this, but to tough it out and go for a stroll down there anyways would have constituted a massive Pyrrhic victory.

So it was then that we stayed in town and walked up the Thames path from Greenwich to town.  Clearly all of this walk was conducted on Her Majesty's highways, so we set off with scant equipment: a pair of flips-flops each, a loaf of bread and a block of Gruyere.  And this proved to be ample.  We are rather unusual in this regard, Mrs O and I, as most walkers tend to pack tonnes of gear before leaving base camp.

I've never understood people's obsession with kit for walking.  I mean, all you've got to do is place one foot in front of the other until you've reached your goal.  I do all my walking in civvies.  The only concession I make to "kit" is that I'll wear trainers if the mileage means the walk might exceed four hours.  Other than this though, specialist equipment brings nothing to the table.

I suppose people buy this stuff in order to protect themselves against mishap somehow, a kind of secular GORE-TEX amulet, if you like.  But most wouldn't recognise this as the reason; they'd probably explain to you at heart-breaking length why you simply must pull on a pair of £400 trousers to walk across wheat field in zone 6 of a Sunday.

Part of the Thames Path in south east London also doubles-up as a cycle path.  Cycling is particularly poorly served by "technology" (by which I mean injection-molded plastics plus marketing).  This is due to its perceived status as a sport.  And sport requires kit.  That's why people (i.e. men) put on lycra onesies and irridescent goggles to ride to Oddbins.  But utility cycling is walking to bike racing's running.  If you're not racing, you don't need a carbon fibre bike.  Honestly...would I lie to you?  I would, but not about this.

equipment overload

Look at me I'm vendredi...

It's Friday.  And as is customary at the end of the working week, I sprang from the nuptial bed with a song in my heart and a smile on my chops.  Also, as is Friday's wont, I was cream-crackered after a long week at the coal face of nebulous office brouhaha.

It just goes to show that mood is subjective and a fickle mistress to boot.  Had today been a Tuesday, I'd have been massively disheartened by the leaden feel in my limbs and brain as the alarm rang out.  So one cannot ascribe mood to the objective material conditions one is in.  No, it's the perception of those conditions that counts.  All I need to do then is harness the Friday ambiance and shoehorn it into the rest of the week.

When my sisters and I were children, we subsisted almost exclusively on boiled potatoes.  This is par for the course for those of us lucky enough to have been blessed with Irish lineage.  But like youth, boiled spuds are wasted on the young.  We absolutely loathed them.  One day I occurred to me as I chased another tattie around my plate, hoping an eagle might swoop down and finish it for me, that chips were basically anorexic boiled potatoes with tans.  We of course adored chips.  I suggested to the sibs that we recreate the chip experience by pouring vinegar all over the offending potatoes.  Moments later, fat chips were born.

We couldn't get enough spuds thereafter.  The only downside to this arrangement was that my urine had to be buried in the garden because it was corroding the lead pipes in our Victorian plumbing.  Still, it was worth it.  I eventually extended this idea to putting Andrews liver salts in our still orange squash.  It tastes delicious, but makes you catastrophically bilious, so we had to knock it on the head.

How, then, to convince the old brain that Monday is just like Friday?  Hmm...I could try and recreate the routine of Friday for it.  This introduces problems: of a Friday I normally scoot home and start eating and drinking like a condemned man until fatigue overwhelms me and I pass out on the faux-Persian rug in the front room.  Good form dictates that I remain motionless in this prone position until dawn and then climb into bed for a hour or so.  Doing that on a Monday would spell disaster for my capacity for paid work.  No, that won't do.  Perhaps I'll join the Quakers.  They seem a contented bunch - not hysterical, like your evangelical Christian - but happy with their meagre lot.

Today's cryptic bingo number: Game GIs confused by little Edward reversing (7,3)

It's for charadee

A friend of mine is undertaking a trial by exercise in June this year to raise money for a children's charity.  It's a worthy cause.  And just as well too because what he's proposing to do boggles the brain.  He is cycling from London to Paris in twenty-four (count 'em) hours.

It's 280 miles all in, and in a sadistic piece of scheduling par excellence by the organisers, the first tranche covers the 100 miles down to the coast to catch the ferry, leaving 180 French miles to be covered in one go on the final leg.

My friend is a relative novice in matters cycling if his blog is anything to go by.  This is just as well.  Anyone who's done any distance cycling at all remembers the first one well.  You set off with the best of intentions, full of vim and anguished anticipation.  Five hours later you're in a dark place.  No matter how diligently you eat and drink or how well you pace your effort, the horrors seep in.

It starts with seemingly inexplicable extremes of mood and physical discomfort.  For no apparent reason, you'll suddenly feel nauseous and tearful.  Moments later you find yourself singing to the hedgerows as the spirit soars.

The secret is to be aware of these peaks and troughs and what causes them.  The body is trying to protect itself from your idiocy - and quite right too.  If you have an iron enough will, it is more than possible to kill yourself on a bicycle.  Because the machine supports the rider's weight, there is no "wall" that simply stops you in your tracks when the tank hits empty, as is the case with runners.  You need, therefore, to detach yourself from your emotions.  Acknowledge them, yes, but do be fooled into thinking you must do as they implore.  It's important in (near) extemis to reassure the body that you know what you're doing, and that you will allow it stand down ante mortem.

This is the kind of caper James Bond used to get up to when he was being imaginatively tortured inside a hollowed-out volcano in Fleming's books.  He used to have a mental cell that he would retreat to to ride out the physical maelstrom.  It's easier said than done though...particularly when the leather saddle you're sat atop turns out not to have been sufficiently broken in after twenty minutes' cycling, as happened on my last marathon undertaking.  I couldn't sit down for a calendar month after that one.  I had to pretend to colleagues and friends that I'd given up sitting for Lent.  I'd actually given up castor sugar.

...still, what doesn't kill us and all that.

Because it's there...

I decided today that the life of the jobbing office-Johnnie-about-town needed spicing up, so at lunchtime instead of wandering aimlessly around the environs of Canary Wharf with my snout buried in a Graham Greene, comme d'habitude,  I thought I'd jump on the DLR, and take him to Greenwich for an hour.

Okay, it's not exactly white knuckle stuff in terms of distance and culture shock, but a cee is as good as an ar, as they say.  And so it proved to be.  

The weather, when I reached my destination, was shithouse (what rotten luck, 'eh?), but I was determined to make the best of it.  I ducked into the Waterstone's there, found a comfy chair and ploughed through a couple of chapters.  And very convivial it all was too.

My wife and I chunter down to Greenwich at the weekends now and then.  It's usually rammed to the gunwales at times like this, and can be a bit of a chore to be honest.  It's like being at a festival, but without bands and tempura - i.e. diabolical.  

The absence of my best girl by my side also added a tinge of sadness to proceedings, but that's the quintessential point of travel, isn't it, to challenge oneself?  Generally, we scoot straight home apres-G and dig out the sherry, and I did rather miss the ritual when the time came to head back to the office.  I had to make do with the half truckle of brie and bottle of port that I'd hidden in the stationary cupboard instead.

Stupid boy

Louis Theroux's back on goggle box.  I've a strained relationship with Louis.  His subject matter is interesting, and the production values etc. of his shows are very high, but he's such an incorrigible twat.  

I should probably nuance that last statement.  It's not that he's a twat per se.  It's just that his schtick is this faux-naive persona that drives me crackers.  For example, last night's programme was about dogs in LA.  This, unsurprisingly, required a segue into the world of south central LA's gang culture and, by extension, its strained relationship with the hound.  For hound, read pit bull.

Louis met up with a former gang member who now earns a crust "weaponising" dogs for customers who fear crime more than they fear being eviserated by their pets.  The meeting culminated with a trip back to Mr Former-Gang-Member's modest bugalow in what looked for all the world like one of the shabbier backwaters of Helmand.  In the yard, Mr FGM keeps his fiercist hound; I didn't catch its name, but let us suppose for a mo its name is Edward.

Edward, I think it fair to say, went absolutely spare when Louis and crew hoved into view (I know how he feels).  Luckily for the squeamish, Edward is kept permanently under lock and key in a cage, and wasn't able to "get at" our host.  

Even Mr FGM didn't feel he could trust him, which when you consider Edward had the build and temperament of a enraged hyena was fair enough.  Going straight for the faux-naive jugular, Louis asked Mr FGM what would happen if Edward were released.

"He'd bite you," came the response, "no question."  That's right, Louis, that's no question.

Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks...the ones on your face

We've been having some weather of late in London.  I was up in town on Saturday, shopping for birthday gifts for a 14-year-old boy (good luck with that, by-the-way).  I was mooching through Oxford Circus when a bank of angry-looking grey cloud coalesced overhead and decided it had had enough.

An almighty peal of thunder rang out, which was as surprising as it was alarming because it was a decidedly chilly day.  Here in Eng-er-land, we exclusively associate thunder with extreme heat, i.e. anything over 19 degrees cee.  Shortly after the sound and fury came the payload: a short, but genuinely violent hail storm.  

I hid under the auspices of John Lewis to let the weather do its thang when out of the store rushed several excited tourists, phones in hand, and started filming the downpour.  They'd clearly never seen hail.  And some of them appeared so amazed and befuddled by the experience that I can only conclude that they never even heard of it.  Where on earth could you live to have not heard of all possible weather conditions, even the ones that don't attend in your locale?  As Del Boy once rightly observed: I've got a pair of desert boots indoors, but you don't see me down The Sahara, do you?

I've just finished reading The Mayor of Casterbridge.  I read quite a bit a Hardy in my youth.  Everyone in England seems to do this.  We read it under sufferance.  I'm not sure why.  I supposed because it so beloved of the public exams syllabus setters.  His work is afforded a certain caché, therefore, like Dickens.  I must say I quite enjoyed old MofC.  It's a bit of a curate's egg, but I was genuinely affected by the incorrigible descent of the protagonist.  Sad to witness.

Another Country

I happened across a fascinating documentary last night in BBC4.  It was the harrowing tale of Japan's worst-ever train crash, in 2005.  The material details of the crash were laid out, as one might expect, and there were interviews with several survivors and the families of those who died.

It was all elegantly and dispassionately presented, as good documentary always is.  Any pathos that emerges is wrought from the stories that are told; it doesn't need to be cynically prompted by music, insensitive prying journalism and/or mawkish cinematography.

One of the most intriguing things about the programme was its lifting the lid on Japanese inscrutability.  It's felt that a major cause of the crash was the intolerable pressure that train drivers are put under in Japan.  Timetables are cut several times a year, and extra stations commissioned to accommodate the insatiable demand.  But no quarter is given to the drivers, who are expected to magically summon extra speed without compromising passenger safety.

Former drivers spoke bitterly of the quasi-military disciplinary culture of the railways.  Drivers contrive to make their station stops by driving dangerously fast and braking dangerously late.  The results was this catastrophic crash.

What's interesting about this that it foregrounded for the first time for me that the Japanese are just like the rest of us.  That sounds a strange utterance, but I think it's a common assumption among westerners that the Japanese are like polite automatons, or cartoon characters.  They don't really have the same preoccupations, emotions and petty fears as the rest of us.  I never supposed for a moment that they were possessed of cynicism or bitterness.

They've always inhabited this human hinterland for me, the Japs.  I thought for years that, like dogs, they couldn't metabolise chocolate for example.  Turns out they love a Curly Wurly as much as the rest of us.  Fancy!

Your carriage awaits

The telly was on in the office this morning.  We have tellies all over the place, as the hacks in the office need to watch the sport as it unfolds.  It's unusual to see one on the go first thing, however.  

It was tuned to one of those generic breakfast tv shows; you know the kind of thing - an uneasy mix of gilt-edged trivia and hard news.  "After the break, an in-depth macro economic overview of today's budget and a blacked-up parrot from Runcorn who impersonates Smokey Robinson."

Annie Hoose, the prog I was watching was presented by Lorraine Kelly.  I've never met anyone who can find a bad word to say about LK.  She's personable, adept, unpretentious and upbeat.  She's also (and I think I'm speaking for the vast majority of heterosexual men here) extremely sexy.

It's difficult to say why this might be the case.  She's attractive, yes, but not wildly so.  She has a nice figure, but, again, not one that's going to turn heads down the youth club.  There's just something about the combination of her personality and chassis that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

There's something very alluring about this Gestalt combination.  I should say also that I suspect that beneath the playful trivial exterior and stately bearing beats the heart of a passionate adept femme.  Oh, yes, I like to think la Kelly goes like a train when the mood's upon her.  I bet she knows what's-what once hostilities begin in earnest beneath the continental quilt too.  Phew.

Down wit da yoot

I've been pondering a return to time-trialing of late.  That's bicycle time-trialing, not driving around the alps in a two-seater Bentley with a pair of flying goggles and a silk neckerchief.

I used to do a fair bit of this kind of thing when I was younger, not young, you understand, younGER.  I really enjoyed it too.  But then I packed-up, for reasons I can't properly fathom.  Anyhoos, after a 14 year hiatus (Great Scot - has it really been that long?), I feel increasingly desirous of a return to competition.

I've been trying to analyse the reasons for this change of heart.  When you get to a certain point in life, it's important to start scrutinising the motives for your actions carefully, lest ye be acting at the behest of the dread midlife crisis.  When this happens, all dignity is lost.  It's for this reason, for example, that 20-stone bald hedge fund managers take up snowboarding, or leave their wives and move in with teenage Russian slappers.  That, then, must be avoided.

I think, however, I'm mooting this change for the right reasons.  I've kept myself fit, and I do enjoy racing bikes.  Mind you, it's important I keep an eye on matters in case the mania escalates; otherwise I'll end-up buying a one-piece lycra gimp suit, a yard-long aero helmet the shape of a bidet and a five grand carbon fibre bike.  These things, needless to say, are the cycling equivalent of buying Ludmilla a pair of crotchless scanties.

My trouble is that I'm as thin now as I was at 20, and I've kept my hair (nightmare, 'eh?).  It's all too easy, then, to fool myself into believing that I look pretty sharp dressed like an adolescent.

The wind beneath my wings...squawk

I was wandering along a street in Poplar at lunchtime today with my nose buried in The Mayor of Casterbridge when my concentration was disturbed by the unmistakable hue and cry of a domestic budgie.  Despite its winning personality and gregarious nature, the budgerigar is not possessed of a sonorous voice.  Like most members of the parakeet family, it's makes a shrill short squawk in lieu of song.

I assumed initially that the noise was coming from the window of a nearby flat, but it sounded eerily close at hand.  I looked up, and there he was, bright green brer budgie, in the bough of a tree directly above me.  He was looking hither and yon and clambering gingerly up and down, as if looking for his bell or mirror.

I've kept budgies over the years, and, unusually for an avian, they betray their emotions through body language.  This little rotter was fretful.  He was trying to tough it out in front of the sparrows and starlings, but was fooling no-one.

Back-filling the story, I suppose he must have escaped from his owner's home shortly before I spotted him.  It got me to thinking: there must surely be a heavy-handed cod-insightful lesson one can glean from this episode.

And, indeed, there is: the budgie (let's suppose for the moment he's called Ian) had dreamt of escaping the bounds of his known universe and soaring upwards into the chewing-gum grey yonder of The Isle of Dogs since egghood.  His owner (for the purposes of this article, Mrs Carraway) attended to his needs, both material and emotional, as well as any owner could.  But of late she had become increasingly forgetful.  So it was then that she forgot the close the louvres fully before letting Ian out for his afternoon constitutional.

Mrs Carraway popped to the kitchen for moment to fetch some millet and a kitkat.  At that exact moment, Ian spotted the open window and seized his chance.  He shot out, front-crawled furiously across Narrow Street and nestled in the branches of the first tree he happened across. 

His tiny budgie face was flushed from a mixture of effort and excitement.  Then for the first time he was able to draw breath and assess his new environment.  Sweet Jesus, it's huge.  The scope and animation of the outside world overwhelms him for a moment, and he rocks back on his talons.  This was a mistake, he concludes, a big budgie mistake.  No matter though; he can simply fly back.

He tilts his noggin and turns an eye to the low-rise he calls home.  Oh, no!  There are dozens of flats, each one identical to its neighbour.  Which one is Mrs Carraway's?  Chances are Ian will never find out.

So let that be a lesson to you.  It's better to be locked in a cage in a Peabody flat in Poplar than to be twenty foot up in a Silver Birch tree across the road...in Poplar.  Tell your friends.

Mendacious memories and manners

Tony Benn died today.  I remember seeing him at Queen Mary College, London in the early 1990s.  He was everything the thrusting young ideologue about town could have wished for: insightful, fluent, mannered and absolutely devastating on the stump.  

As must always have been the case when he turned up to speak, the room was evenly divided between his implacable political friends and foes.  This meant he was rounded on a times during the evening.  In response to these attacks, he was at his best.  He never lost sight of the essence of the question, or his logically-rigorous rebuttal to it.  Uniquely for a politician, he never meandered or obfuscated.  And the reason for this was that he divorced his work from his ego.  I've always believed that the transcending of the ego that marks out the true artist, and TB was certainly that.  Incidentally, this is why most the YBAs are terrible: they're always so concerned by the esteem of the public and their peers that you can see their thought processes in the work.  It's like leaving the scaffolding on a building.  It's inelegant and unworthy of scrutiny.

Anyhoo, watching TB was exhilarating stuff, like watching a gifted musical improvise.  We won't see his like again, I'm sorry to say.

The Sun Has Got His Fez On

It appears that Spring has finally sprung in the old country this week.  The weather stunned us all by pulling its finger out.  In a massive about turn, it decided it had had enough of sh1tting down stairrods on the wretched inhabitants of the sodden island and would ease off for a bit.  And very welcome it is too, this wanton act of kindness.

The last six months has been bereft of seasons here.  It's just been a relentless one-act Kafkaesque production of warm-ish drizzle and low grey cloud.  The English are no strangers to sheight weather of course, but even they had had a gut full of this stuff by the end of February this year.  People would laugh ever so slightly too hysterically when the subject of the weather came up.  "Ooh, I expect the weekend will be awful" - cue shrill strained giggling and facial ticks.

But all that's behind us now.  One useful outcome of the battering we've all taken over the last few months is that expectations are at an all-time low.  If the weather broke now, and it didn't stop raining until November (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Eastenders), people would probably settle for that.  "Remember that week in March," they'd reminisce "when it stopped raining for nearly 95 hours?  Great days..."

As Henry Hill observed in the opening monologue to Goodfellas "...everybody has to take a beating some time."  Well said, aitch.

T D M

I'm bored today.  It's a much underestimated affliction, boredom.  It really lays one low.  It generally gets short-shrift from high profile head-shrinkers and dramatists because it doesn't come equipped with the usual eye-catching mental and physically flailing normally associated with mental maladies.  But make no mistake - it's a dangerous foe.  It really takes the joy out of life.

I've been a sufferer for as long as I can remember.  Shortly after I learned to speak, I started haranguing my mother.  I would complain incessantly at her about being bored, and demand satisfaction.  I always had this semi-formed notion that they was a clever workaround to avoid it, like paracetamol for the ego.  But apparently there isn't.  That was a lesson hard-learned.

I don't ever remember my little playmates being like this; they all seemed content enough with a combination of Playschool and Fuzzy Felt.  The sufferer becomes an island in situations like this.  You feel divorced from your peers and polite society as a whole.  They seem to be enjoying themselves, which makes them the enemy.  And this just makes the sorry business of getting on with the rotters and with life itself even more tiresome.

The funny thing is I've always held on to that youthful belief that there is a salve for boredom; I just need to continue the quest for it.  I've worked through umpteen hobbies, drugs, careers, body-modifications, religions and esoterica during this fruitless journey through life.  Nothing yet.  If I should happen across something, however, I'll let you know.  Perhaps half a dozen espressos might do it?

A fool and his money will see you now...

There's *hooge* excitement in the office today as it's the first day of The Cheltenham Festival.  For those of you who aren't au fait with National Hunt Racing, perhaps I should explain.  The Chelt Fest is the premier event for fans of horses that can jump.

Racing is divided between those who like their horses to leap and those who believe that had God wanted horses to leave the ground even for an instant, then He'd have give them massive flaps of skin betwixt their fore and aft legs, much like the flying squirrel.

 Kauto Star

The fact that He didn't (they "reason") makes His intent clear.  Racing fans get really het-up about this shit, really het-up.  What does it matter, frankly?

I'll be honest with you - I can't abide horse racing.  Actually, it's not so much the racing itself; it's the human flotsam that hangs around it like a bad smell.  They're so wilfully unfashionable, and yet they revel in it; they ought to be locked-up.  Your average racing fan makes John McCririck look relatively normal.  Think about *that* next time you're walking past a bookies.  Eugh.

What's the biscuit situation?

I'm working from home today, by which I mean of course I'm at home whilst being paid.  For form's sake, I've had to fire off a few emails over the course of the morning.  The joy of WFH is that you can sit in your jimjams and drink tea, but pretend to yourself that you're aiding the country's balance of payments deficit, or something.

I particularly enjoy being at home during the school day because I'm good at it.  I have the mentality of a pensioner.  I fill my day with domestic tasks, and complete them religiously whilst Radio 4 blares in the background.  By lunchtime I always feel as if I've really achieved something, the exact inverse is true of my time in the workplace, which is filled with nebulous meetings and middle-management brouhaha.

Could you do my back for me?

As I've stated before in these pages, I cycle to work.  To avoid upsetting my workplace neighbours, then, I have a shower in the gym in the office prior to beginning my meagre duties.

This morning, as I was running a little late, I spotted a chap whom I hadn't seen before down there.  So far, so ordinaire.  I noticed he was very tanned, as if he'd just stepped off the plane from Gran Canaria or Florida.  As he stripped off to abulute, I noticed he was tanned all over.  But something didn't look quite right.  His tan was a little too good.

He was the colour of builder's tea from head to toe.  The were no tide marks on him at all.  He was covered in nut-brown skin in all directions.  There wasn't an aperture or crevice on his not insubstantial chassis that wasn't tanned right up to the event horizon.  Presumably he'd paid some unfortunate immigrant to intimately apply the creosote for him.  He was a big chap, and didn't look flexible enough to have slapped it on, himself.  

Are people really so impoverished that they have to do things like this for a living?  It's 2014, ferchrissakes.  Also, what's the thinking behind getting your perineum painted brown?  Is it supposed to make one irresistible to women?  Even if it did, they're not the kind of women you want to introduce to you mother, are they?  Great Scott - people died defending this sceptred isle...and for what?  For the liberty to do *THAT* to oneself?  The brain fcuking boggles at times.

A simple game, complicated by idiots...

I have a new mobile phone.  The old one started developing the unmistakable signs of phone Alzheimer's, and had to be institutionalised for its own good.  Its replacement is the finest model Samsung could provide for five pounds.  That's right, five hundred pee.  Initially, I could scarcely bring myself to look at the wretch, so cheap-looking was it in comparison with the one it replaced.  However, one day in its presence changed all that.

I've always been someone who champions simplicity.  It's usually the most subtle and elegant solution to a problem that proves also to be the most robust.  Complication adds links to the chain, weak ones.  Actually, that's quite a potent analogy I've happened across there.  When constructing a chain, one wouldn't make it any longer than the task at hand demands it be.  Additional links would simply inhibit its ability to do its job properly.  So why would you bother?  That's right - you wouldn't.  *But* this problem-solving Occam's razor approach to design seems to have gone the way of the Bakelite Dodo in our digital age.

It seems the more complicated and diverse the applications to which an electronic device can turn its hand, the better.  And we all just take this change as shorthand for progress.  No-one steps backs from the crash site for a moment to ask: is this device a better solution to the problem than its predecessor?  With phones, the answer is a resounding no.

Take my wife's phone for example.  It's an all-singing all-dancing smart phone.  It does a number of things quickly and well.  The only fly in the chowder, in fact, is that you can't really make phone calls on it.  If the manufacturer had a shred of self-knowledge and/or decency, service-pack 2 would be a loudhailer; it's that bad.  My new phone, on the other hand, excels in this regard.  It's battery lasts for months on a single charge.  And should I lose it or drop it down the karzey by accident, I won't need a bank loan to replace it.

Occam's razor...tell your friends.

Physics? - it's the Devil's work

I've been reading quite a bit of physics lately - specifically Profs Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's rather lovely "Why Does E=mc2?".  It's an admirable and ambitious undertaking, this, by the Britain's foremost chalk-and-board-worriers.  They propose to take a lay reader (Hello!) and bring him or her up to speed with modern physics over the course of 250 pages or so of easy-to-digest prose and maths.  The maths, the geek Ant 'n' Dec are keen to point out, never gets any harder or more abstract than Pythagoras' Theorem.  And this is true.  But, then, that's not really the issue with modern physics, is it?  It's not the maths; it's the mind-bending implications of that/those/them maths that send the noggin into a tailspin in the small hours and cause nosebleeds.

For example, Pythagoras gets dragged into matters to explain Minkowski space-time.  I won't go into the nuts and bolts of MST here because to do so would go well beyond the scope of this blog and indeed my brain.  Suffice to say, Minkowski space-time is a model of the universe that allows us to agree on an objective definition of distances between objects and events in space-time.  These distances are the same of all observers of the two events or objects, so they are useful to physicists.  But, crucially, the Minkowski space-time model does this without rupturing the law of cause and effect.  Actually, it's not P's classical theorem, which *would* upset cause and effect; it's a small variation on it: it's the difference twixt the square's the other two sides, not their sum. 

Any fool can follow the logic of the distances in space-time, then, but this is only half the battle.  The implications of space-time are shattering to the jobbing liberal arts graduate.  Time and distance are relative, and the nothing can outgun the cosmic speed limit, "c".  That's not the speed of light, incidentally; it's the speed of any massless particle.

Don't let all this demi-ranting put you off, however.  It's a wonderfully accessible book.  You just need to read it like a textbook, which is what it is after all.  I find that the more intractable passages and chapters need at least 8 re-readings, and one should leave 10 hours or more between each re-reading to allow the ideas to percolate and fester.  You're not going to tear through this over the weekend then, but when you consider it took the finest minds in history nigh-on three thousand years to concoct all this bullsh1t, then you least you can do is spend a month or two staring at their findings, with your tongue stuck out and your eyes crossed.  No mental pain - no mental gain, and all that.