Protesting about being allowed to protest.

Islamic fundamentalism as I understand it is a threat to western society. But as with most issues, we shouldn’t judge without making an effort to understand. And I have to admit, after a recent protest in London, pictured below, I feel rather more encouraged about their intentions than I used to.

Firstly, some of their anger is clearly based on a simple misunderstanding: I’m sure a quick chat is all that’s required to point out the ridiculous hypocrisy of loudly and visibly decrying the existence of free speech by the chap in the centre of the photograph. After all, only a genuine idiot would protest about having the right to protest. So that’s good. Easily cleared up.

Also, at first glance I thought the placard on the right of the picture was announcing the arrival of the “fanatics”, which didn’t sound at all promising and would be a genuine cause for concern, but I was wrong. Evidently at some point over the next few months or years we are going to be visited by “the Fantastics”. I don’t know who they are, but I think they sound like fun:

Death, maps and books

I have spent the past year or so watching more costume dramas than is probably healthy, and yet healthy is exactly how it has made me feel. All these depictions of 18th and 19th Century England have served to emphasise what an absolute pain in the backside it must have been living in an age when people died at the drop of a hat.

Today, if we go two or three weeks without hearing from a particular friend, the worst we are likely to assume is that they have lost their phone or are busy with work. 150 years ago there was a very real possibility that it would be because they were dead. People died all the time.

And of everything. They died of colds. They died of fright. They died of toothache. They died of headaches. They died of broken hearts. It must have made it hard to make plans, and I would imagine the phrase "if I’m still alive" was used a great deal more than it is nowadays.

I write this having just returned from the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition, which was predictably ace. There were more women there than I had expected, as I’d always presumed maps to be a peculiarly male interest, in the same way that directions and preferable routes from A to B via C are a default conversation topic for all men struggling for common ground, so to speak. I went on my own because I had presumed nobody else in their right mind would have fancied it, but it now turns out that there would have been several candidates had I only had the strength of my convictions. Mind you, if I’d gone with someone else I wouldn’t have felt as comfortable spending half an hour playing with the big magnifying glasses they had for enlarging the computerised copies.

Yesterday was a victory for second-hand bookshops over common sense, as I bought the following:

A history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote,

A Short History of Africa by Roland Oliver

Martin Amis’ the Moronic Inferno,

Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World about the SF earthquake of 1906,

I Shall Bear Wintness a jewish memoir of nazi Germany by Victor Klemperer

Sebag Montefiore’s gimungous biography of Stalin,

For Love and Courage, a collection of First World War correspondence from the front,

Collected stories by M.R. James,

and something called Within the Context of No Context by George Trow, which looked amusing.

And all that because we happened to “pop in on our way past” a small bookshop with 5 minutes to kill on our way to afternoon tea. I don’t know where we’ll shelve them, and I’ll be lucky if I’ve read that lot before Christmas. On the plus side, at least the 21st Century has given me a decent chance of living that long.

On Dreams and Socks

There's only one thing for it. We'll start with a description of a recent dream, and see where that takes us. I should clarify though - I tend to have what's left of other people's dreams. The ones nobody could be bothered having or that would be too confusing to tell anyone else about.

We were experiencing some sort of environmental catastrophe whereby the weather got worse and worse, and that was about it. Set in my hometown of Aberdeen (thus rendering the incredibly shit weather perfectly plausible), the lowest stratum of cloud was shooting across the sky super-fast and the wind was creating a deafeningly loud whistle, all of which looked and sounded impressive but in the context of the dream was bad news. My Dad got his hands on a rocket launcher but I don’t remember how that was going to help matters.

It was faintly disappointing to wake up and find that in fact my father hadn't tried to save the world by firing missiles at the weather.

If I could order dreams in advance, then tonight I would have a long and vivid dream the moral of which would be unavoidable - Always pay attention to what happens at the bottom of your legs if you put your socks on after you put your trousers on. Because this morning I did not pay attention and arrived at work with one trouser leg tucked into my sock.

So all the way in to work this morning I was one of those people that you see on your way in to work in the morning, and you look at them, and you think "come on mate, make an effort".

And with that, he finished his first ever blog entry.