Durham photos

Finally got round to taking my camera for a walk.

This is the History Department

Onion News: Archaeologists Unearth Lousiest Civilization Ever

I think every archaeologist has felt like this at some point...

Naas

While pillaging my old university notes for some help in putting together my new teaching course, I came across a forgotten poem I wrote when I was 23, living in Ireland and evidently going through my W. B. Yeats phase.

Naas, winter 2003

Her senseless mercy shines upon you still
And tempers time and grief with pins of joy;
None but the purest heart would dare employ
That snare of kind and poisonous goodwill.

The worried walk away from beauty's sight
Is set with foreign voices faintly heard.
Into the fog a line of lanterns blurred
Warms the sleeping stillness of the night.

Then rise and face the winter's silver dawn
That over mist-strewn fields pours,
For crowds of stars and mountains are yet yours:
A lover's balm for pity's gentle thorn.

I think we can all be forgiven for turning to poetry once at some point in our lives.

OH NO

The front cover of Saturday's Daily Express:

Turns out someone in London overheard some Algerian guys talking about the Pope's visit, thought it sounded suspicious and reported it to the police, who arrested a bunch of people and searched a bunch of properties.

The police said it was standard procedure to take such reports seriously, but that they had no other indication of a plot. The men were held overnight but haven't been charged with anything yet. The Vatican said it was unconcerned by any of this. According to a brief follow-up story published on the Daily Express website today, "a Met Police spokesman last night said the investigations had ­finished without the discovery of anything significant."

Sounds like a damp squib, all told. Of course the Daily Express could just wait to see if anything concrete actually does turn up, but why waste a good old reactionary, xenophobic headline that might sell a few more papers?

Tabloid editors are horrible people and they make me want to cry.

I must be getting old

This is a long ramble, so I've divided it up into sections, like a Kit Kat.

I

For the past week in my new, unfurnished home I’ve been living through a novel double-experiment: having no chairs, and having no internet. In order to obtain either, I’ve had to come to my new office in the university, or pay the cost of a cup of tea in a suitably equipped café. Of the two deprivations neither has been pleasant, but the latter at least has been beneficial.

The lack of convenient internet access, unlike the lack of chairs, was also premeditated. I’ve been increasingly troubled for quite a long time by the intrusion of the world into private life via the devious means of the Web. (The name of which, if you pause to consider it, does sound rather sinister, like a great space-net dropped on the Earth by a race of malevolent alien slavers in order to capture humans for their intergalactic meat farms. But I digress.)

This growing worry that our society is becoming too dependent too quickly on this new technology, coupled with my natural aversion to crowds and clubs of any sort, has led me, now that I have the free choice, to delay having broadband installed in the house. I somehow feel that it is important to wean ourselves from the tightening embrace of modern technology just as toddlers must eventually be weaned and taught to walk on their own feet. For what infant has ever written a great novel, or led an army into battle, or (Jesus Christ excepted) ever accomplished anything of note, supposing we can agree that wailing at every slight discomfort and continually soiling oneself (and others) do not rank among the noblest achievements of the human race?

In a similar way the presence of the internet in every corner of life threatens to keep us infantile: dependent, amused only by novelty, increasingly incapable of concentration and independent thought. It teaches us not to think, but to parrot and recycle, to cut and paste, to hyperlink; curiosity becomes something to be sated with the click of a mouse, not through a slow and difficult search which leads us to places we never intended or expected. I’m thinking of this now especially because in a few weeks I’ll be teaching my first batch of 18-year-old students, and I’m expected a hard fight to get them in the library reading actual books.

II

I’m too young to be a trenchant technophobe, but I’m also old enough to remember a childhood spent in the uncertain dawn of the digital age. We bought our first home computer when I was nine, I was making computer games with my friends at fifteen, and at university I first grew acquainted with the World Wide Web, like me a child of the 80s which reached maturity in the late 90s (in August 1980, as I was busy being born, Tim Berners-Lee was busy fathering his pre-WWW ENQUIRE software experiment at CERN). I got myself an email account and a mobile phone, and joined MySpace, then Facebook, as the fashion demanded, which were followed by accounts on last.fm, Spotify, XBox Live and I don’t know what else. The internet is the miraculous tool of a thousand uses, an all-pervasive, ever-adapting pocket knife, the defining technological triumph of our age, and I’ve recognised and exploited its benefits as much as anyone.

But when a tool starts to determine how we think, feel and behave, we change from being controllers to being controlled. Like all cults, the cult of technology succeeds through giving the illusion of freedom and the security of acceptance. And we are fast approaching a decisive juncture, if we have not already passed it. Witness a recent TED lecture by tech-guru Seth Priebatsch entitled ‘The Game Layer on Top of the World’, where he predicts, surely correctly, that whereas the last decade saw the steady construction of social networks which bound us ever more closely together (Facebook being the obvious winner), the coming decade will be about the exploitation of these networks through game theory - that is, through the subtle manipulation of our behaviour in ways that advertisers and social scientists have known about for years, but which Web-based social networks have allowed to become exponentially more powerful.

Priebatsch, standing on stage, is the archetypal prophet of the digital church: young, healthy, hip, with a pair of wraparound shades propped on his head, a Princeton drop-out (as he is fond of reminding us) who evidentally does not play by the rules - except of course he does play by the rules, merely a different set, the rules of game theory, which he promotes with almost creepy enthusiasm and seems to take for granted we also will follow. Judging from the mindless applause of his audience, he is quite right. And if you think you’re not already the plaything of game theorists, think again: anyone who regularly plays Farmville or uses any kind of retail loyalty card has already lost the first fight, even if they were unaware it was being fought.

III

Concerned voices have been echoing around the Web for the last few years. The other week Teknofobe (a deliberately ironic nickname, I should note) told me about Nicholas G. Carr’s new book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, which I’ve since ordered and await eagerly. As far as I can tell without having yet read it, Carr is vexed chiefly by the cognitive effect of excessive internet use on the brain, and it seems that there is some scientific evidence for the rewiring of neural pathways even among relatively light internet users. Whether the overall implications are good or bad, I have no idea. You could probably also detect the rewiring of neural pathways in people who played gin rummy for an hour a day.

My own concerns are personal and instinctive, and found some resonance in a recent essay by Hal Crowther entitled One Thousand Years of Solitude. Unlike me, Crowther is an unrepentant technophobe: he damns the growing obsession with social connectedness and talks melodramatically, but with genuine feeling, of hives, cocoons and electronic slavery, of the internet as Trojan Horse and Gorgon. His is the parting shot of a dying, bewildered breed of pre-internet writers and thinkers: ‘If you’re offended or threatened,’ he laments bitterly, ‘console yourself with the impotence and rapid extinction of my kind.’

Yet he has a point. Solitude - not just physical solitude, which is irrelevant in the age of Blackberries and Twitter, but true, unwired social solitude - is becoming rarer and more precious by the day. I can’t deny that the sci-fi nerd in me likes the idea of a hyper-connected society of ease and plenty, a futuristic utopia where everyone is linked by beneficent technology and we all skip gaily towards a horizon of Tweets and rainbows.

The anti-social loner in me, however, long ago came to loath the banality of continual Facebook updates from people I hardly know, and even from people I do, when I would not trouble them to reveal such mundane facts and observations even if they were sat two yards from me and I was in a particularly friendly mood. The critical thinker in me is repelled by the ways in which total connectedness encourages group-think, and the internet, far from encouraging independent thought amidst mutually constructive dialogue, can just as easily become an echo chamber for a thousand isolated tribes of bigots and fools. The libertarian in me fears the seductive embrace of a virtual network which is founded on data-mining technology and by necessity regards human beings as nothing more than a collection of digits to be shunted around and manipulated en masse according to the models of game theory. The leftist in me fears the fact that this technology already lies in the sweaty hands of a global plutocracy.

IV

The internet is a tool. We should no more let it determine our thoughts and actions than we would restructure our minds according to the uses of a Swiss army knife. Let us decide when we need to use it, and then use it, and then put it away, and not have it pipe itself into every room of the house every minute of every day. I confess it makes me nervous to think of a life without broadband wi-fi at home, where I have to walk 20 minutes to my office or to a wi-fi café if I want to use it. On the other hand, I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life in such impoverished circumstances, and the fact that the prospect of doing without the internet makes me so nervous is perhaps the only reason I need to go ahead. If I habituated myself to it so easily, surely I can de-habituate myself too, hopefully before it’s too late.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the potential of the internet, not least because it allows me to post such long ramblings as this to my audience of literally a dozen or so readers (few in number, but treasured, except for Vlad, who represents the most devious and spiteful depths of the internet community, and everything that is wrong with the modern world). Yet as much as I love the potential of the internet, I also love the potential of a printed book to encourage deep reading and slow, active engagement in what I read without fear of distraction. For that matter, I love the potential of a bottle opener to open bottles, but I don’t keep it always in my pocket. If I did, it would be indicative of a serious addictive problem. And there’s the crux of it, and the reason why I shall try to continue to deprive my home of the internet.

Although I will eventually buy some chairs.

House and Housesteads

This is my mascot at the kitchen window. I was going to put him at the front of the house but I was afraid people might think I was some kind of flag-waving nationalist, and I'm never going to make that mistake again.

I found this pot in a charity shop and was instantly smitten. Not only is it perfect for storing teabags for easy access, but it can be used to reflect my inner mood. For example, if I hear some good news, such as that HBO have given the green light to a 5-season remake of the 90s sci-fi cult classic Babylon 5, I can have the pot like this to express my joy.

If, on the other hand, I hear some bad news, such as that HBO have decided not to give the green light to a 5-season remake of the 90s sci-fi cult classic Babylon 5, I can turn the mug around to express my anger and sadness.

I also went up to Hadrian's Wall today. The last time I went I was 17 and cycling the length of Britain with Dunk, and we stopped one night at a Youth Hostel near the Wall and in the evening I walked up to take a look at it, was disappointed to find that it was the size of a garden wall, and then pulled a calf muscle to boot. This visit was better.

Here's a text exchange I had with Mithraea, who shares my reasonable infatuation with all things Roman. (I apologise in advance for the obscenities, but it was an emotionally charged moment for both of us.)

TARQUIN: I'm sending you this text from hadrian's wall. I am literally standing right on the actual fucking wall with a boner the size of the parthian empire.

MITHRAEA: That is totally fucking awesome. I hope you have your gladius out and your helmet too. Marcus Aurelius would be proud!

TARQUIN: I am stabbing every scotch person i see.

MITHRAEA: I hope you scream "remember mons graupius!" at them in latin as the blade sinks in.

New job

I just arrived in Durham for the start of my new job. Dad and I came in two cars loaded with books, I met the estate agent and received the keys, and then decided to make tea, quickly realising that this was no mean feat without a kettle or pan to boil the water. Then I remembered I had my camping cup thing, so the disaster was averted.

After dad left I stood about the house for a bit because I don't have any chairs yet. Indeed I don't have any furniture except a little coffee table, which actually functions very well as a stool, so between the coffee table and my boxes of books perhaps I won't need to buy any chairs after all. After a while I grew bored of sitting on my coffee table, so I decided to go and look for a supermarket, following the faint rumours I had once heard of a Sainsbury supermarket at the north end of Durham.

And by god, the rumours were true. Not only did I find a Sainsbury, but it was the largest Sainsbury I've ever seen, and it was besieged by a whole damn retail park with about a million different shops. Since I'd brought practically nothing with me except clothes and books and CDs, I ended up filling the car with stupid household crap that nobody really needs, like a couple of little bins, a box thing to put towels in, a bag of dishcloths, detergent and a dustpan and brush, et cetera.

I bought a cheap set of cookery knives in a vacuum-packed plastic case, and when I got home I realised I didn't have any knives or scissors to cut the case open with. The only thing I had that could cut it open was a corkscrew I'd also bought, but the corkscrew was fastened up with plastic ties that I needed a knife to cut. This is a rum pickle and no mistake, I thought. I was eventually able to liberate both knife set and corkscrew through the use of brute force, which proves that sometimes violence is the only solution.

LOL

Possibly the worst comedy sketch ever written.

Possibly the best comedy sketch ever written.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XX

A mighty army of literally scores of soldiers clad in gleaming armour was arrayed before the foreboding walls of Suno, the great capital of the Swadian kingdom. The city’s defenders bristled on the ramparts like the spines of an immense hedgehog made from steel, its towers and gates rising from the earth like huge cliffs of stone, banners and flags fluttered in the breeze like enormous scraps of cloth on sticks.


Asgarth surveyed the scene before him, his heroic jaw square with determination and lack of fear. “We shall storm these walls and raze this fair city to the ground, and the Swadian curs will run from our blades like lambs fleeing the deadly scythe of the shepherd,” he breathed.

The men around him quivered with fear as the attack trumpets sounded to signal the start of the assault, but Asgarth felt no fear. “Come, my loyal band of warriors,” he triumphalised. “Charge!”

They clambered as a single great mass onto the ladders they had propped against the city walls, storming up to the ramparts as men fell left and right to arrows of the defending archers and fell screaming to a horrible death below. The air was filled with the stench of blood and sweat and piss, with body parts flying everywhere in confusion, detached from their owners for the rest of time, and steel flashing in the bright sunlight as it sliced through arms and legs and faces.


But it was to no avail. The ramparts held as the attackers fell into great carrion piles below the walls, heaped bodies of men who mere hours before had laughed and joked and loved as only men can who know that the hour of their death is near. “Retreat!” cried Asgarth, his tunic claret with the blood of his foes, seeing that the situation was hopeless. He ran down the ladder and back to the siege positions, only to see that everyone in his entire warband was dead.


“This is bullshit!” screamed Asgarth with a fury that shuddered even the distant mountains, and he decided to retire from adventuring and romance and go and find a quiet teaching job in the distant land of D’Urhám instead.

FIN

Eluvium