Bus

Monday evening, I was a little late getting out of work, as I’d had to finish a last-minute rush job. I usually have about ten minutes wait at the bus stop, so I still thought I had time to nip across the road to the Co-op and pick up some bread and a pint of milk. And I would have, except that I got stuck in the queue to pay, behind an elderly gentleman arguing about his paper bill. As I got to the door, the bus was starting to pull away from the stop.

Now the traffic on Mount Pleasant Road was at a near standstill, as it often is in the evening, so I thought I might make it to the next stop ahead of the bus. I was really a bit too tired to want to make the effort, but I got across the road and down to the roundabout by the Steam Wagon, ready to cross Lancaster Road and make my dash.

The bus was inching across the roundabout, stopping and starting, when there was a very loud, very sudden bang. I no longer needed to run to catch the bus because a car had already caught it. Just a little ding on the back corner, and the car appeared virtually unscathed, but the bus had to stop and the bus driver had to go out and get the car driver’s details and take photos of the (very minor) damage.

I wasn’t sure of the etiquette of getting onto a stationary bus in the middle of a roundabout while the driver was out of the vehicle, but I didn’t hesitate long, and he seemed happy enough about it – especially as I was the only person (now) on the bus who had seen what happened. He took my details.

The car driver seemed remarkably casual about it all — put his head around the door, saw a passenger he knew and chirped “I hit the bus!” as if it was a great joke. The bus driver, on the other hand, was very shaken, and nervous. I did my best to be a Calming Influence. After a long delay, we got going. The driver said he was going to call into the bus garage on the way to town to report the damage, but I think he sensed that the passengers were getting restive, and changed his mind.

I was very relieved when I finally got to my front door. And very glad I’d already bought the milk, as Marks and Spencer, my usual last-minute shopping place, was now closed for the night.

No moral to this story, except that public transport often lends a little extra colour to my day. I wonder what this morning’s journey to work will bring?

In Which We Learn What Sue Does on Thursday Mornings

A few weeks ago, I was at a meeting of the Friends of Shrewsbury’s Borough Museums. (A group about to get a name-simplification, as we’re no longer a borough these days, but that’s beside the point.) This meeting was an update on the progress of our eagerly awaited museum-to-be. This is the careful conversion of the old Music Hall in the Square into a place which not only provides much more space to display our treasures than the present museum, but reveals and incorporates the old buildings that were hidden inside the Music Hall complex: a medieval mansion and a fine Georgian assembly room among them.

The new museum is still two years away, but the staff at the old museum are engaged in the massive task of documenting all its stored pieces in preparation for the move. At the Friends meeting they appealed for more volunteers to help with this. As I’m only working part-time at present, I thought it was about time I got involved. So I offered my services, went to a preliminary meeting where everything was explained, and a couple of weeks later I spent my first morning in the attics of Rowley’s House (the present museum – which is still open for business, folks, and worth a look around). That first time I was unwrapping and re-wrapping swords and pieces of armour, cudgels, billhooks and a broken set of stocks. The next week, the rusty metal and wood gave way to a box of Roman bone objects – mostly hair pins, with a smattering of counters and some bits of metal keys and one very fine spindle-whorl. Everything has to have  its new number, its old numbers, its description, condition and some other essential facts recorded onto a catalogue sheet. Its photograph is taken for the record, and then it is carefully returned to the store.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on the next stage of the job instead. Sitting in an office at a computer, inputting records off the catalogue sheets into the new main database in conjunction with any further information about the items that I can find on an existing database of the Roman collection. There’s a lot of Roman material in the museum attics - a remarkable amount. The vast majority of it comes from excavations and finds at Wroxeter, the old Roman city of Viroconium, a few miles outside of Shrewsbury.

The database work is a little too like my day job to be quite as interesting as the cataloguing stage. But it needs to be done, and if there is no other volunteer there to work with (cataloguing is a two-person job), I’m happy to help by tapping a keyboard instead. I get to read about the items and see the pictures, and I’m learning a lot. Maybe next week I can get back to the thrill of unwrapping more forgotten treasures in the attic. Thursday mornings are fun.

How Far We’ve Come

 Back in June, I started this blog, thanks to the Shift Time Festival’s ‘Blogging Project’ workshops, which provided a blogging expert to show a bunch of beginners the basics and patiently answer our endless questions – Thanks Pete! Last week, I was passing-on the benefits of that short course and my eight months of hands-on experience to someone who has recently started blogging and who wanted a little help. I was happy to do that, and delighted to find that I could answer almost all his questions without trouble. A good sign of progress – but read on.

Back in September, just five months ago, I wrote about a trip I made to Birmingham to visit a friend. I’d planned it almost like a major military campaign, with Google maps and bus timetables. I’d needed to do that, as I was still coming out from the effects of thyroid deficiency and I was still struggling with planning and organising things. It turned out to be an aborted visit, as my friend had not been able to be there to meet me, but considering how tired the trip made me, it was just as well – I wouldn’t have been good company for long. However, it was a total success in terms of achieving my plans, a small tactical victory that was a huge boost to my morale, and assured me that I was getting back to normal.

It was this same friend, Graham Higgins, who’d asked for help with his blog; and last Friday’s trip was the same journey I’d made in September – this time with Graham at the far end of it. He’d also heard about my small guitar, and wanted to see it, so the guitar came too and we spent at least half the time playing through old songs. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to play along with someone else. It was a most enjoyable few hours. Unlike September’s journey, last week’s trip required no meticulous planning. Even allowing for the fact that I’d made the same trip before, I took it so much in my stride and was so relaxed on arrival, that I could see how much extra progress I have made in just those last five months, how much my confidence has come back again. Which is very encouraging news in itself – but read on.

Not long after I’d made that first trip to Birmingham, Graham had been diagnosed with a serious heart problem, an aortic dissection. So serious that it’s usually first picked up at post-mortem. At the end of December, he underwent heart surgery at Selly Oak Hospital: a seven-hour operation to replace a heart valve and line the aorta. Six weeks on from that, I was expecting to meet someone frail and still very convalescent, muddled in mind, very soon tired. I didn’t. He looks well, vibrantly alive, as full of ideas and intelligent responses as ever. He amazed me by frequently nipping up the stairs to get things, playing guitar and ukelele, singing, cooking lunch and finally accompanying me on the walk back to Stirchley and the bus at a speed that had me scurrying to keep up (and both of us talking nineteen to the dozen – we trotted past three bus stops rather than break off the conversation). All this in just six weeks – and I thought that I was doing well!

I won’t talk more about the operation here – the man has a blog, and can tell you about it far better in his own words. (Graham’s blog is under redevelopment, don’t be surprised if you encounter painters’ dropcloths and stumble over stepladders at this link.) All thanks to the doctors who spotted the problem and to the surgical team that fixed it so successfully.

Think of this, next time you wonder whatever happened to the future we used to read of in science fiction: it’s here, doing impossibly complex medical procedures as routine. (Think of this, too, next time you hear someone indulging in the national sport of moaning about the National Health Service, which provides such exquisite, time-consuming surgical work without charge.) Think of this – and just look how far we have come.

Strings attached

When I was a child, I wanted to play the piano. My father was a fairly good pianist (he also played the accordion in a morris side when I was very small) and I was encouraged to take piano lessons as soon as my hands were big enough to manage the keys. I kept trying, I kept getting a little way and no further. The lessons continued for years, but despite all the encouragement I could wish for, all my genuine desire to play, all the practice that I put in and all that the music-teachers could do for me, I was unable to master the instrument. I would get reasonably fluent with one piece of music, and then have to start again, from scratch, with the next one. It was utterly, utterly frustrating. Everyone assumed that I simply wasn’t trying or didn’t really want to get anywhere – phrases which I heard in many classes at school: sport, dancing, anything involving much writing. I was told these things so often that I assumed that they were true and that I really must be lazy.

By the time I’d been in secondary school for a few years, I was starting to see some patterns in the things I couldn’t do. (Spotting patterns and grasping systems is something I’ve always been good at.) I could tell that I wasn’t ever going to win with the piano, but I had some hopes for being able to do a bit better with a guitar. It was less ‘two-handed’. I’d recently managed crochet although I’d totally failed with knitting, and I felt that the difference between the guitar and the piano was rather similar. My parents didn’t want to waste money on a guitar, thinking that I’d give up on it soon after I got it. So I borrowed a ukulele from my best friend’s brother, and struck a deal with Mum and Dad: if I could manage to get a few tunes out of it before my birthday, they’d buy me a guitar as a present. I did, they did, and the nylon-strung, student-size guitar became a huge part of my life and a good friend for the next thirty years.

Now, I don’t want you imagining that I was ever much of a guitarist. I was not. I quite soon hit a plateau and stayed there, but I was happy. Meanwhile I’d finally been allowed to give up those endless frustrating piano lessons. Oh the relief! And I’d also proved something important to myself about my odd limitations, even if I didn’t understand what caused them. Whatever it was, I was sure that it wasn’t ‘just laziness’ or a lack of interest.

When I got to the age for driving lessons, soon afterwards, I didn’t even bother to start learning. I already knew that I’d be in for more tears and frustration and could never drive without the same constant, intense concentration I needed for writing. I would never be safe in traffic: a distraction would render me helpless. People nagged me about not driving, too, especially after the family moved to the country, away from frequent buses and trains, but I wasn’t going to waste money finding out something I was already convinced of.

For some reason (possibly not unrelated to buying a word processor - which turned writing from a slow, painful chore into a newly discovered joy), I stopped playing the guitar regularly in the late Eighties. And twelve years ago I realised how rarely I’d touched the strings since then, realised that there were enough other things in my life now: things that I could do better, could even do well, and gave the battered old thing to a charity shop. End of guitar playing. End of an era.

Except that, recently, I’ve too often felt the lack of something to strum when I’m thinking about tunes, or I have wanted a bit of backing when I’ve been sitting here singing to myself. (Be glad it is just singing to myself – my singing is even worse than my guitar playing. But it makes me feel good to sing, and I live with songs and tunes constantly twirling around in my head, wanting out.) So last weekend I gazed into the window of the nearest music shop and saw something calling out to me. A tiny guitar, a guitar so small that it looks more like an overfed ukulele, but with the proper number of strings. So small that it is almost too small for my fingers, but not quite. So small that it has a quiet voice, a good thing for a flat in a shared block with poor sound insulation. So small that its price tag was within my reach. The last kitten in the rock shop, it looked at me, I looked at it, and I knew that it would follow me home.

I have a guitar again. In the meantime I’ve learnt a new word. The word is ‘dyspraxia’. I first heard it a couple of years ago. If I had any suspicions that I had really been that lazy child who wouldn’t do anything that she wasn’t interested in, if I had still harboured any lingering thoughts that maybe I just didn’t try hard enough to learn tasks, the new word wiped them away. I already knew the way I differed by then, I clearly recognised my inability to automate tasks that most people find easy, but I had never had a simple name for the difference, never had a name to use to explain it to others. Learning the word ‘dyspraxia’ was another moment of sudden and very deep relief.

Reading this back, I hope I haven’t made you think that I am angry about not having my dyspraxia spotted when I was young. (It still rankles a little: the evidence seems clear to me now, and I wonder if my school teachers were not too eager to help because I was so often ahead of the rest of the class in those things that didn’t involve writing or other coordination tasks.) I can’t help wondering what turns my life would have taken had I been given some help – or at least some understanding. But there are no counterfactuals in this life. The person I am now is a product of all that I have been through, good and bad. I like being me, so how can I complain about how I got here? Besides, I’ve had to find my own ways to do things, often found ways to do them quite well. I might never have tried so hard if I’d known that I couldn’t be expected to do them. (I even managed to knit, slowly, when I worked out a method based on the German way of holding the yarn. I’m wearing one of my hand-knitted jumpers as I write this.)

Here I am with sore fingertips again, gradually recalling all those chords left unplayed for over a decade, getting the old red song book out from under the bed (an ancient, battered notebook which lost its red cover in the sixties), working my way through things left unsung for many’s the year (perhaps wisely in some cases) and smiling. Oh yeah!

The Apophysis Conspiracy

When I joined Flickr in 2007, I thought that the photo-sharing website was only for photographs. But I found that it inclued thriving communities of people making other kinds of images, and among these, a good number of fractalists. The fractals were interesting, some of them breathtakingly complex and beautiful, but most of them did not make me want to have a go for myself.

And then I saw some pictures that were different. I discovered that the program used to generate them was called Apophysis. I learnt that it was possible to use it without either a very powerful computer or very much mathematical knowledge. Most of all, something about the look of Apophysis fractal pictures was ‘me-like’: friendly, urging me to come out and play with them. I still don’t know quite what it is about Apophysis that attracts me, but it was love at first sight.

Apophysis is a fractal flame generator. This makes a particular family of fractals images, some of which do resemble the pictures one sees in flames or veils of smoke. You can download the program from www.apophysis.org – where you will also find links to experimental and alternative versions on Sourceforge, links to tutorials and other useful resources. Oh, and it’s free. (It’s purely a Windows program. There is a fairly similar fractal flame program available for Macs. It is called Oxidizer and is also on Sourceforge.)

Some people approach fractal art in a very top-down, organised way, telling the computer exactly what to create and remaining very much in control of the design process throughout. What I particularly like about Apophysis is the way it allows me to work alongside it. We collaborate. The program takes a random starting image and offers me a batch of mutations and variations on it. I select from them, and it offers further variation until I come across an image that I want to use.

It’s not purely selective breeding. I can limit the available options, make alterations and adjustments, and run subprogram scripts to change the picture. After I have the rendered image, I can add further processing in an art program, to bring out what attracted me to that image. But however much of my own creative input I add to the final result, my best work feels like a productive conspiracy between myself and Apophysis: the love affair of two years ago turned into a very fruitful marriage.

We have several thousand children so far.

Unnaturally quiet

Back to work today, but a lunchtime start. I went for an early walk. Cold police officers, on cordon duty around the scene of yesterday’s explosion, were patiently answering questions and redirecting people. Half of Mardol is without power, a large area around the Welsh Bridge is still sealed off and gas and electricity workers are busy. There’s a lot of rubble to clear before roads can be reopened.

I was at home at the time of the blast yesterday morning, a quarter of a mile from the place that blew up, but the flat shook as if a car had rammed the corner of the building below me. I put my head out of the window, surprised to see nothing untoward. A few minutes later, when I went out for groceries, I found the town gridlocked and emergency vehicles trying to get through. People in the street said it was a gas explosion and that half the Shrewsbury Hotel had collapsed and the police were evacuating the area. Keeping well out of the way, I went into the Riverside Shopping Centre where I found many shops were in the process of closing. My grocery shopping became a quick dash around Wilkinsons, with a chat with the worried staff who were unsure if they too should be closing. They were waiting to hear either from the centre management or the police.

By the time I returned home, there were air ambulances arriving, many more emergency vehicles, and still traffic at a near standstill. I was listening to Radio Shropshire, which did a good job of sorting fact from rumour as the story emerged. Gradually the traffic chaos cleared leaving a very quiet, very shell-shocked town. It is still unnaturally quiet this morning. Traffic is being kept out as much as possible. I will have a half-mile walk to get my bus to work.

The great relief here is that more people were not injured. The corner where the building blew apart is often busy with pedestrians and cars. Especially on a sunny Sunday morning when parents take their children to the park.

A strange start to the New Year.

In-Between Days

This is a strange time of year. Christmas is over, the New Year not started, and I’m finding it hard to summon up the energy to do anything much. (I’m also worrying about a friend who is having a major operation this week, and wondering how soon I’ll hear how it went.)

The weather’s not been conducive to doing things. Cold and damp. But I had a very pleasant day in Welshpool yesterday, lunching with friends, eating very nice trout with roasted vegetables, and playing Jenga while the rain poured down.

I guess I will be back in the usual weekly routine all too soon. It’s back to work on Monday. But for now I feel up in the air and unsettled.

Christmas Greetings

Time to put this one up, I think. Picture is based on one of the windows at Shrewsbury RC Cathedral on Town Walls. The greeting and good wishes are for you all, whether you celebrate Christmas, Yule, Martian Glimfrogga or some other midwinter festival (or mid-summer festival for the Antipodes, of course). Have a good one! I’ll be offline for a few days, but I’ll be back before the end of the year.

Shining Gently

The Christmas tree went up today. I’ve had this one for ten years, since my first Christmas in the Tortoise Loft.

Letters

According to the stats for Tortoise Loft – The Blog, yesterday was the busiest day ever with 130 views. But not one comment: no opinions, no conversations started, no ‘that reminds me’, no ideas thrown out and picked up on, nothing. A few people do occasionally comment, for which I am grateful, but there’s no to-and-fro, little feedback.

So try this:

The ability to read alters the way we see the world.

Discuss.

Please.