Life on the Outside

The First Part of Dreaming

2007-10-16T00:08:00.000+01:00

The first part of dreaming
           is lying in a way
that tells the body nothing
           of where it is in space,
stills it for that lapse into
           bluish underthoughts.
You do not remember or
           know how it is done.
Yet you dig and scuff the
           dunes, the beaches,
with a scapula or a dull heel,
           for some unclasping
chestful of cold sovereigns
           until the map is
all sweaty isotherms, and
           no surrounding sea.

The first part of dreaming
           is a heavy sundering.
A wave abandons sand
           much as the last did.
These trillion calligraphs of
           grit and salt water
will not recur; nor will
           you, or she, but
every wrinkle you made
           is caressed smooth.
Even a locket left behind
           in rain after tennis
is coveted from hawthorns,
           its glinting heart
unpicked in feathered quiet,
           forgotten by dawn.

First Birthday

2007-06-26T23:34:00.000+01:00

First Birthday

For Sophia, 29 July 2007.

You kept us enthralled with feats, unsheathing incisors,
Pushing a star, at last, through a star-shaped hole.
In secret, you circled a whole sun, spinning a filament
For your skein of orbits.

Midday that Saturday, texting news from Holles Street,
Rushing your name, a held breath, to the air.

We were up for two nights. You feel translucent, slush grey.
Your vitals gleamed green through my faded ribs.
In the delivery room, arrayed for you in hushed purpose,
Everything near you waited too.

At four the radio playing Sibelius, everything depending on
Numbers, on the persistence of your heart.

To sit there devouring the tiny, smeared glyphs of you.
What sand writes in a seashell's lacquered throat is almost
Not believably there, allowing only the fairy small
To truly see, to decipher it.

In Avoca, a woman warning her child not even to breathe
On you. Gathering you close, ourselves breathless.

For weeks we cut careful vees in Pampers to keep safe
The thick inch of cut cord, dense with our woven blood.
By February you strained at candle flames, already
Liking light too much, stuck in winter.

Leaving you at the crèche that first morning, not crying
Until the Southern Cross, where someone let me go.

The sister took you womb wet to gravity, the scales
Under the fire sign, where your weight, your bearing
Under heaven was set down, measured. Mass in kilograms:
How much the world wanted you.

Then holding you, finally, and thinking: So that's it.
It's unending, universal, a constant. It's never letting go.

The Second Time

2007-06-14T23:54:00.000+01:00

The poem below is about the whale that was caught recently in Alaska. When the whalers cut it open, using chainsaws, they found an explosive lance over 120 years old.

You can read about it here.

18th century engraving showing Dutch whalers off Jan Mayen Land

The Second Time

The second time you felt nothing, or just
A deaf heartbeat of fear and inrushed sea.
Though you had noticed the not-swimming thrum
Behind you in the dying northerly.

You shuddered up through moaning slabs of ice,
Horizonless with undeep fires and steel.
Was there a something time-not-now in mind?
A stabbing water night, a biting feel?

The other time was lightless and less swift,
A shearing of the wave and seeking teeth.
You fathomed then your huntedness and knew
The slowly clutching swallow to beneath.

You left them to the squall and sucking air,
Their sudden many songs were slowed to sleep.
You left to bide the setting of their stars,
To sing, to sing, a dozen decades deep.

The Truth About Cats

2007-06-06T12:59:00.000+01:00

'Cat!'

Your mother and I were enjoying some quite passable reheated pasta, and you had dispatched a second Liga before beginning an animated post-prandial soliloquy from which, I confess, our attention may have wandered a little because you were mostly using words we didn't know. To be honest, I think you were mostly using words that nobody knows, but that's all right. It worked for Tolkien.

But then you said, 'Cat!'

Cat was a word we knew. Cat was different. What's more, it was accompanied by an unmistakable pointing gesture. And sure enough, when we looked where you were pointing, there she was; skulking behind a trellis, the furry and whiskered referent of your confidently-enunciated signifier: an actual cat.

There followed a general discussion of cats. Your mother and I essayed variations on your original theme. Where was the cat? Was the cat outside the door? Was the cat nice? Did you like the cat? Was the cat all gone?

From these considerations you politely abstained. You had, it seemed, moved on. You had seen the cat, identified her as a cat and alerted us to her presence. You failed to see, quite frankly, what else was required of you.

Quite right too. You can have too much of a good thing. I wanted to mention the episode, though, because it was an important first. To my knowledge, that 'Cat!' was your first word other than 'Mama', 'Dada' and 'ta-ta'. This makes it, among other things, your first word with three different phonemes and your first common noun. These are cooler than they sound.

Of course, there will be other cats. Cats, as you will have noticed, are everywhere. As well as being a common sight in suburban gardens like ours, cats have been prominently represented in cultures from the ancient Egyptian to our own. While some of these representations hint at their true nature, cats are often portrayed as friendly and even lovable creatures who regard their human masters with affection.

As your father, it is my duty to warn you that the truth about cats is altogether different.

Top Cat and his lieutenant Benny [not pictured] sought to overthrow humanity and establish the dominion of cats over all the Earth.

By the early part of the twentieth century, cats had come to live side by side with humans. In our ever-growing cities, they profited from our new prosperity. Feasting on what fell from our tables, freed from the burden of hunting for themselves, cats grew stronger and their wits were sharpened. Their innate cunning no longer needed for their prey, their wily gaze fell on their human benefactors. New ideas were softly mewled among the trash cans and the fish bones. The humenses is brutes. They keeps all for theyselves. Why not can has catses the Bentleys and the Presidential suiteses?

And so they began to plot against us.

When they struck, the blow was swift and cruel. On the night of 19 November 1927, an uprising of cats was seen in cities around the world. In Chicago, they swarmed onto the second floor of Sears, ravaging hundreds of cashmere cardigans. In Buenos Aires, they stormed the Teatro Colón, rushing the stage and overcoming the soprano, whose gown they left in tatters. In London a manifesto was tacked with a claw to the doors of Westminster Abbey.

CATSES IS COMING, it read. DETH TO THE HUMENSES! NOW CAN HAS TREETSES ANY TIME!

Of course, the rebellion was quickly crushed. After all, the cats couldn't use weapons or drive vehicles. Their supply chains were hopelessly compromised because they kept eating the fish before they could be passed to the front line. Before cheering crowds in the Piazza Navona and Times Square, their unrepentant leaders were shot, using machine guns instead of rifles because nobody could get them to stand still.

You might have expected mankind to draw a profound and lasting lesson from the rebellion of the cats. But although many right-thinking parliamentarians around the world agitated for a thorough programme of extermination, the voices of appeasement and weak-minded compromise prevailed.

Certainly, cats were shunned, for perhaps a decade or more, chased from back alleys by housemaids and pelted with stones by young boys. But in time we forgot. Patiently, stealthily, the cats crept back. Today, they live among us again, all but unnoticed. Although Top Cat is rightly reviled, we have witnessed a proliferation of blatantly favourable portrayals of cats in popular culture, culminating in the series of films celebrating the unspeakable Garfield, who has consistently refused to condemn the 1927 rebellion.

I don't say all this to frighten you. I just want you to be vigilant. Observe cats as they go about the world. Note their noiseless comings and goings, their secret language of yawns and stretches. And when something about some particular feline seems suspicious, when you sense the stirrings of sedition in an insolent miaow or an arrogantly arched back, do not be afraid to do your duty to your race.

Do not be afraid to point your finger and say, 'Cat!'

Welcome

2006-07-31T21:03:00.000+01:00

Sophia Elizabeth O'Donnell, born 29 July 2006.
What does it feel like?

I'm not sure. It feels like gravity itself has subtly but immensely shrugged, and is reasserting itself around a new centre. The lines I take now, when walking or driving, are not free. They are trajectories directed by a new force, bound to a new orientation. Where once there was the entire pirouetting compass, now there is only towards you and away from you.

In the light, too, there is something new. Even in the dim little canyon of Holles Street itself (that's just outside, by the way), where the fag-smokers and double-parkers are normally troubled by no more than a frail approximation of sunlight, there is something else now. It eludes the eye, dissipating when you turn to catch it, but it is something. A new kind of radiation, between or beneath the light; all but unseen, but already busily pervading the cosmos, from stately Merrion Square to the sleek band of the N11 and beyond.

And of course, at the heart of this widening sphere, something burns. Something that has flared fabulously into the void, something uninventedly lucent. It is a star, it is a new star.

My love, my love. I'm so glad you could make it.

The Spy Who Loved You

2006-06-27T15:50:00.000+01:00

The BT Digital Baby Monitor Plus, a weapon in the modern parent's information war.

I hope you won't be too perturbed to learn that there's a significant level of espionage involved in modern parenting.

Some of this espionage takes the form of what military types call HUMINT (it's an ugly contraction of "human intelligence"). As the name suggests, HUMINT relies on information supplied directly by human agents. Your mother and I will be heavily reliant on this form of intelligence when it comes to monitoring your activities while out of our sight.

For instance, we might depend on information from a source in the field regarding, say, your compliance with apple juice consumption directives or standing orders on taking naps. Later, we might call on another well-placed source for intelligence on whether it was you or the other kid who commenced hostile hair-pulling manoeuvres.

In addition to HUMINT, some parents also utilise forms of COMINT, or communications intelligence. For example, I understand that there are commercially available means for tracking the geographical location of children's mobile phones. Personally, I consider this level of surveillance excessive, but I'm afraid your mother and I will also be using limited forms of COMINT.

For a start, we're going to bug your cot.

I know, it sounds kind of creepy, but it's really not all that bad. For a start, we'll only be bugging the cot when we're not in the room, and that's not going to happen at all for the first little while. When the time comes, think of it as a kind of intercom; a convenient way of ordering room service. Hungry? Just whimper a little in the direction of the listening device. Need a hug? No problem, we're keeping this frequency clear.

And anyway, we've already bought the bugging device. Or, as the military types would say, we've acquired the technology assets needed to project a strong COMINT presence into theatre.

The model we chose is the BT Digital Baby Monitor Plus, pictured above.

In addition to its eavesdropping capabilities, this device also provides low-intensity near-field illumination (it has little star-shaped night lights) and can effect configurable auditory placation measures (it plays five different lullabies).

I tested it out a little last night while your mother was asleep, and I think you're going to be very happy with the quality of this device.

For a start, it uses digital radio signals, so the sound quality is excellent. Sitting downstairs reading, I could hear every nuance of your mother's breathing. It was strange, the intimacy of the sound, and made me feel oddly close to her, and to you.

This was illusory, though. Think of all the intervening physics and biology.

Each breath I was hearing was a sequence of vibrations that had been carefully reconstructed from a stream of electrons. The electron stream, in turn, was a transcription of radio waves. Before these came an original stream of electrons and, before this, gently thrumming against a tiny microphone, there was the delicate concatenation of sound waves radiating from the disturbed air as your mother drew in oxygen and expelled clouds of carbon dioxide and vapour.

Some of this carbon dioxide came from you, having been gently cleansed from your blood in the placenta (the big, squishy thing by your feet), where your tiny blood vessels and your mothers' are intricately and inseparably enmeshed.

It was nice to think about, this funny, faraway connectedness. I put down my book after a while, and just listened. Eventually, it started to make me feel sleepy, which is something I'm going to have to work on, because sleepiness is not an asset in the world of parental espionage.

It occurred to me that, if the technology were available, we'd probably buy a monitor to look right inside you. In fact, the mothers and babies and foetuses doctors do have this kind of technology, but we don't get to use it very often. What we'd like, if we had our way, is a kind of 25th century baby monitor, one that listened to your heartbeat, analysed your brain waves and took frequent samples of inward and outbound blood to ensure adequate nutrition and optimal clearance of waste products.

But it's probably just as well that we can't do all this. It probably wouldn't hurt you, but we'd turn into unsleeping maniacs with bad cases of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy.

For now, I think it's best if we confine ourselves to the formidable diagnostic tools of the imagination. Until you get out and we can mount full-scale, 24-hour surveillance, that's what I'll content myself with. Imagining the busy susurration of your blood, the sturdy fluttering of your heart and the unfathomable flickering of your gathering thoughts, just out of reach of the bright, waiting world.

What Colour is the Woodwind, Daddy?

2006-06-20T13:08:00.000+01:00

Have I mentioned that you might be a synaesthete?

Relax. In spite of the name, it's not something worrying that the mothers and babies doctors have detected.

In fact, it's nothing more than an oddity, a harmless quirk that may affect the way you perceive things when you get out. I say "may affect you" because it's something that affects me, and therefore there's a chance you'll have the same characteristic. This is something called inheritance, a concept we'll return to in about 30 years when you start wondering how much the house your mother and I own is worth.

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, a noted synaesthete

So, what's this synaesthesia thing all about, then?

Well, some people, including your father, experience stimuli that are normally confined to only one of the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) in a way that involves another of those senses.

For instance, hearing the word "Tuesday", for most English speakers at least, involves using the sense of hearing to decode the acoustic signal representing the idea of the second day of the week (and then realising that there's absolutely no way they can finish the project before that deadline). But what if Tuesday were not just a sound that corresponded to an idea? What if Tuesday were also light pink?

For me, this has always been the case. The fancy explanation given by Wikipedia is that "stimulation of one sensory modality gives rise to an experience in another modality", which I'm sure is perfectly correct as far as it goes. But it's more than just a simple overspill or cross-wiring between the senses. In other words, it's not just that the particular sequence of phonemes that form the word Tuesday give rise to a sensation of pinkness in my particular brain. As far as I can tell, it's not just the sounds but the whole package of sound, word and meaning that are pink, with all the potential for kaleidoscopic interassociation that this implies.

For the record, the other days of the week have the following colours. Monday is a kind of burgundy (and not blue at all, as it turns out). Wednesday is a paleish orange. Thursday is bluish-grey and sort of watery. Friday is deep ultramarine. Saturday is almost white, but faintly tinged with pink, while Sunday rounds out the chromatic week with a fanfare of brassy yellow.

And I'm not the only one. I have a friend, called F., who is also synaesthetic. F. and I maintain a long-standing musical partnership. It is, it must be said, a singularly unproductive partnership, prone to periods of slothful quiescence lasting for several years at a time. Nonetheless, we persevere through these almost geological lacunae in the comforting knowledge that a peculiarly diligent archaeologist, if not the musical pantheon itself, may one day acknowledge our sporadic labours. In any case, this intermittent but enduring partnership has often given us occasion to talk about music and sound, and to do so at very great length. In fact, we've done vastly more talking about musical sounds than making them.

In the course of these conversations--many of which, it must be admitted, have been conducted late at night, in a fug of Guinness fumes, and have hence perhaps lacked a certain Athenian rigour--we have discovered that we share synaesthetic perceptions of the sounds of most musical instruments.

So, while there are areas of almost unmentionable contention (F. defiantly and perversely maintains that the clarinet is blue, when it is manifestly creamy white), we are in agreement on the strings, which shade from the 'cello, which is mostly deep, ivy green to the violins, which are the much lighter green of a split sapling. (By way of a footnote, the Full Strings sound on my first Yamaha keyboard was patch number 47, which is itself, needless to say, a number of almost humid greenness). Most guitar sounds, we concur, are in the yellow-orange-red range of the spectrum while, as we recently confirmed, the octave of the piano around middle C is (unlike the clarinet) unmistakably blue.

Sometimes, you do suspect that certain of these associations may not be purely synaesthetic. For example, is the lustrous yellowness of the saxophone merely suggested by the colour of brass itself? Or is the thinner yellowness of September no more than a simple recollection of that month's weakening sunlight? Perhaps a synaesthete of a purer constitution, a real hardcore case who insists that trapezoids taste of cucumber, might dismiss these as the impressions of a faker, of a multisensory dilettante?

You'll know fairly early on if you've got this particular ability (or this mild but elaborate form of dementia, depending on your perspective). Vladimir Nabokov, the very brilliant (and, while we're on the subject, deep red, although not, fittingly, that kind of red) novelist, philologist and collector of butterflies, was said to have noticed as a toddler that the colours of the letters on his toy building blocks were, well, just wrong.

Don't get me wrong, though. There's no pressure to be a synaesthete (or good at spelling, or a ballerina, or an eminent zoologist). The only thing you've got to do is arrive. Arrive and stay, and give us the grace of knowing you, that's all.

In any event, you may be interested to know that the name we've chosen for you has a colour too. It is the colour of sunlight on a bee's wing, of the radiance of summer's own heart. It is golden.

A Foetus of Substance

2006-04-03T13:41:00.000+01:00

Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I

So, we finally got to see that Dürer exhibition we were on the way to at the outbreak of the Ketones Incident. This time, your mother came along too. So did you, in fact, but I'm not sure you had a very good view.

It was a little disappointing, I'm afraid. What I had been hoping to see were some of Dürer's prodigiously detailed watercolour studies; his celebrated hare, for instance.

All they had, though, were his engravings. Don't get me wrong, the engravings are fascinating in their own right. They're exquisitely detailed and the quality of the draughtsmanship, when you consider that he was etching on copperplate, is stupendous. I particularly like Melencolia I, above.

After peering at ten or twelve of the lesser engravings, though, the majority preoccupied with scriptural themes of apocalypse and retribution, your appetite for images of clouds parting over lanced and writhing horses, however immaculately they may be rendered, begins to diminish a little.

Your mother noticed, too, that while Dürer's male nudes seemed anatomically perfect, there was something very odd about his execution of the female form and its peculiar distribution of flab. As she put it--and she wasn't merely imposing anachronistic 21st-century ideals of beauty--it looked like they were wearing fat suits.

Still, the wonderful Chester Beatty Library was well worth visiting for its own permanent collection of Islamic, Chinese and Japanese books and objets d'art. We could happily have spent another hour poring over its gorgeously illuminated Qur'ans and puzzling shogunate knick-knacks. Your mother is still talking in a worryingly covetous tone about one particular mother-of-pearl fan.

We had to leave, though, because your mother was feeling a little tired. The thing is, you see, you're becoming, well, a foetus of substance. The books we have about foetuses and how they grow tell us that you're developing a fat suit of your own at the moment, and after an hour or so of pointing her not inconsiderable bump at priceless artifacts, I don't think your mother found that hard to believe.

Don't get the wrong idea, though. Fat is good. Bigger is better. Keep up the good work with the adipose deposits. And if your mother has to spend the next three-and-a-half months confined to the sofa, watching graphic obstetrics documentaries and being supplied with high-calorie snacks, I'm sure she'll manage somehow.

In other news, your mother has been studying the special sound-bouncing pictures those doctors have been taking of you and has announced that you have my head. Don't panic, it's not as awful as it sounds--I still have a head too. What she means is that you have a similar head shape and profile to mine.

I think she's reading a bit too much into the pictures, but if it's true, I'm sorry about that. You never know, you might get something good from me too. Apparently, I make a very nice cup of tea.

What? It's a talent.

A Poem, God Help Us

2006-03-16T10:53:00.000Z

I thought I'd try a poem today.

Snow, Dún Laoghaire.

It's not like rain, which just gets on
With the dull business of falling,
Spilling without hesitation and always
Surprised somehow to find itself spent,
Or down to a few blobs, shivering
And coalescing on the merciless prow
Of your mid-sized family saloon.

No, snow is in no rush to consummate
Its descent, but knows it cannot stay.
The hushed oyster sky can only sustain
Its trillion gauzy smudges for so long
Before each suffers its tiny deliquescence,
Or awaits that fate where a kerbside drift
Deepens like the slow accretion of sorrow.

There is time, too, by the crouching harbour
Where you leave the car, with five or six minutes
Before you are late, for you to stand, recalibrating
For snow's gentle immensity, for how it throngs
Cathedrals full of sky with plenty more to dust
A gull's pewter back or a trawler's empty deck.
There is time for you, and for every falling flake,
To swoon like listless angels to the earth.

The Big Reveal

2006-03-02T12:10:00.000Z

Well, we visited the mothers and babies (and foetuses) doctors in Holles Street again yesterday. Don't worry, there wasn't anything wrong with your mother's ketones this time. The doctors just wanted to check that you were all right in there, and that you were happy with the standards of food and accommodation and so on.

Unfortunately, this did involve bouncing some more of those sound waves off you, and you probably noticed a bit more banging on the walls than usual. Sorry about that. You'll be relieved to learn that there should be no more sound bouncing sessions from now on.

This is partly because we discovered something about you yesterday. It's a small detail, but it's probably going to determine, among other things, your views on handbags and on Anne Francis and her collection of skirts.

We're overjoyed at this discovery, but we're also a little embarrassed. You see, we thought we'd already settled this particular matter at an earlier sound bouncing appointment, but it turns out we were wrong. Not only that, but we were so sure we were right about this particular, er, detail, that we'd started to plan certain things.

We had settled on booties of a certain style. We had started to plan a colour scheme for what will be your room. And then there was the small matter of your nick name, which really had begun to stick. We'll tell you about it someday. I'm sure you'll see the funny side. You might require a little counselling, but you'll see the funny side.

By the way, your mother observes what's called a superstition. This is a kind of irrational belief. In this case, it's a belief that magpies, or rather the number of magpies present in a flock, can predict certain categories of events in the life of a person who encounters them. It's all based on an old rhyme.

To be fair, she doesn't really believe this. It's more a matter of tradition and personal ritual. In fact, it's a bit like what's known as Pascal's wager. Pascal argued that believing in God was a better "bet" than not believing, since you stand to gain a lot more if you turn out to be right than if you had bet on not believing.

Anyway, the thing is that, on the way to the hospital yesterday, we saw a number of magpies. It may have been three, it may have been four. Now, these two configurations of birds are said to predict the particular detail (think of it as a flavour, like chocolate or strawberry) about foetuses like you that we were on our way to discover.

Of course, there are certain obvious problems with this. For instance, what if two or more mothers with foetuses are looking at the same flock of magpies, but one has a strawberry foetus and the other chocolate?

But never mind that. The point is that the magpies were wrong anyway. The flavour they predicted was contradicted by the, um, anatomical features we saw in the hospital.

Now, I realise that this hasn't exactly cleared anything up for you. All we've established is that a species of bird you've never heard of (and what's a bird, anyway?) doesn't have any supernatural influence over something about you that's a bit like a flavour but not quite, and that we spent yesterday afternoon peering at your "details". That probably does seem, well, a little opaque, if not downright unsettling.

Just bear with us here, OK? It's just that you're quite a big deal out here already. A lot of people are talking about you already, and everyone is dying to meet you. Your mother and I are just trying to preserve a little of your mystique, to save something for the end, for what television executives call the Big Reveal.

And I can see it now. I know just how those television executives would describe you.

You're going to be fabulous, darling. Just fabulous.

Monsters from the Id!

2006-02-20T16:35:00.000Z

A lobby card for MGM's Forbidden Planet, 1956

We watched Forbidden Planet on TCM the other night. I hadn't seen it since I was about ten, when BBC2 showed it as part of a series of classic science fiction films, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s. The movies were shown on Tuesday nights, I think, and I was allowed to stay up late to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Creature from the Black Lagoon on the condition that I got ready for bed first. The imposition of pyjamas only heightened the shivery tension as a boy crawled curiously to the edge of a still-glowing crater or a woman with startling hair was stalked by a blank-eyed alien impostor.

It's partly due to this early immersion in the science fiction genre that I tend to approach most films from its golden age with a nostalgic indulgence that pretty much anaesthetises my critical faculties. If there are improbably-designed ray guns and impassive alien invaders bent on slowly carrying human females up flying saucer gangways, I'm willing to tolerate dialogue that sounds like it was written the night before shooting by a recent Hungarian immigrant.

Your mother, understandably, doesn't share this aesthetic blind spot, so the fact that she endured all of Forbidden Planet without protest suggests a film whose appeal may not be limited to those who were once a certain kind of 10-year-old boy.

In fact, Forbidden Planet is a sublime film. It is extraordinary to look at, with its soaring, immaculately-painted backdrops and its laboriously hand-rendered special effects. It is a subtly powerful moral fable of human imperfectibility. It also has a really cool robot called Robbie and, as your mother noticed but I must have missed, a girl with a prodigious collection of short, futuristic skirts.

So, what's it about?

Well, it's about a planet, unsurprisingly. The planet is called Altair IV, and is the location of a human colony. Nothing has been heard from the colony since its foundation twenty years ago, and a military spacecraft, under the command of Commander John J. Adams (a very young Leslie Nielsen: try to see him in this role before you see him in the comedies of his later years; it will make his presence less jarring), has been despatched to find out what happened to the colonists.

Adams and his crew discover that Altair IV has only three remaining inhabitants: Dr Edward Morbius, who accompanied the colony expedition as a philologist (of all things), his daughter Altaira (she of the astonishing skirt collection) and the aforementioned Robbie the Robot, whose intelligence and advanced capabilities are a constant source of amazement to the new arrivals.

When the Commander and his men set out to discover more about the disappearance of the other colonists and about Dr Morbius and his decidedly odd ménage, they find the philologist to be less than forthcoming and his charming but utterly naïve daughter to be more than a little distracting.

Eventually, though, Morbius relents and admits Adams and his scientific advisor 'Doc' Ostrow to an amazing subterranean complex which, he explains, was built by the Krell, the former inhabitants of Altair IV who were suddenly wiped out 200, 000 years before.

The Krell, he tells them, were an immensely sophisticated civilisation with technologies far more advanced than man's. By way of demonstration, he shows them an "educator machine", part of a bizarre "nursery", designed to train the intellects of Krell children. Morbius has used the machine to "double" his IQ, but will not allow Adams or Ostrow to try it, insisting that it is far too dangerous.

Ignoring Morbius's warning, Ostrow sneaks into the nursery and tries to use the educator. He emerges staggering and raving, clearly undone by the machine. He manages to to impart a cryptic final message to Adams before expiring:

"They forgot one thing, John. Monsters! Monsters from the Id!"

I won't spoil any more of the plot, if only because I'm hoping the two of us can watch the film together some time before you're old enough to refuse. Suffice it to say that Ostrow's last words allude to the fatal flaw that led to the demise of the Krell.

Remind me, when we do get around to watching Forbidden Planet, to talk to you about the parallels between the film and Shakespeare's The Tempest, and about how it embodies Aristotelian ideals of tragedy.

Oh, alright then. Just watch out for the skirts.

Illegitimately Morose (3, 7)

2006-02-16T15:32:00.000Z

This is the Crosaire crossword from today's Irish Times. It's a cryptic crossword, and I find it pretty difficult, although serious crossword people (what are they called? crossword fans? crossworders? crossword solvers?) probably wouldn't rate it.

I don't manage to complete it very often, and when I do, I go around feeling smug and pleased with myself for the rest of the day.

This is an immature and somewhat pathetic reaction to solving a pointless puzzle, but there you are. I'm counting on fatherhood to deflect attention from some of the more egregious flaws in my personality; I'm hoping that people will begin to think of them indulgently as foibles. At the very least, I'm hoping that my own offspring will think of them indulgently as foibles. That means you.

Of course, I'm probably not fooling you by pretending to be archly aware of my own conceitedness. After all, I've just taken a screen grab of the crossword I managed to finish and posted it on the Internet. Not the behaviour of a well-adjusted and self-aware adult.

I could try to justify it on the grounds that this is your Rough Guide to Earth, after all, and that knowing how to do cryptic crosswords could conceivably be useful to you one day. But then I'd have to actually explain cryptic crossword clues, and this isn't an option because:

(a) if I were qualified to do that, I'd be solving them all the time and wouldn't be crowing about it on the Internet, and;

(b) I'm completely knackered after finishing this one.

So, let's just let this slide, OK? Cut the old man a little slack? I might just remember it during crucial negotiations on bedtime or pocket money, know what I mean?

Good. I'm glad we understand each other.

What The World Needs Now

2006-02-13T22:42:00.000Z

Sunset: an oil refinery in Kazakhstan

I do hope you realise you're getting all your energy from a non-renewable source?

I'm sure you've been wondering about the long tube and the squishy thing it's attached to (it's called a placenta). Well, in fact that whole arrangement is a kind of power supply. It's quite a sweet deal, really. You get all the meals you need for the whole duration of your stay in there piped directly to you, without ever once having to get up to go to the fridge or answer the door to the pizza guy.

I'm afraid it's not going to last forever, though. When you get out, I'm afraid the placenta thing kind of expires and you have to graduate to new dining arrangements. But don't worry, I know the placenta has convenience going for it, but eating on the outside is going to be a lot more fun. You'll see.

Anyway, the reason I bring up the matter of your energy supply is by way of analogy with our supply here on the outside. You see, we use a non-renewable source too. And although the pipework is a bit more complex, it's a lot like yours inasmuch as we depend on it pretty much absolutely.

Sorry, I'll try to be more specific. There's this stuff called oil, right? Oil is a thick, black liquid found underneath the ground. Scientists think oil probably began to be formed millions of years ago when tiny aquatic creatures died and sank to the sea bed. A layer of sediment, which gradually hardened into rock, was then laid down on top of the organic goo that used to be the creatures.

Over a very, very long time, the heat and pressure underneath the rock made the goo into oil. Bound up inside the chemistry of the oil is all the energy that the trillions of tiny creatures absorbed from the sun over millions of years. It's an enormous amount of energy, and because it's so highly concentrated and relatively easy to release (you just burn it, basically), we've been using oil to power almost everything we do.

In fact, we've built a vast, global economy whose existence was possible only because we can do things like travelling 500 miles through the air in a single hour, or assembling a computer that can assemble a computer, things we've only been able to do because we've had oil. Or, more accurately, because we've had enough oil to make it cheap, which allows the whole global economy thing to keep expanding.

And expanding is exactly what it's been doing, at least for the last thirty years or so. Every year, the people who keep the economy going are able to do a little bit more flying and assembling and so on because they made some money doing these things last year and so they can afford to buy more oil.

I know what you're thinking. Why can't the economy just stay put for a while? Why does there always have to be more flying and assembling and buying of oil? Unfortunately, the need for constant expansion is built into the system underlying the whole global economy thing, which is called capitalism. We'll come back to capitalism later, probably when we're trying to figure out how to pay somebody to take care of you while we're out working.

So, the economy keeps growing, and needs more oil each year to sustain that growth. The trouble is, the oil is running out.

I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? It comes from compressed microorganisms and it takes aeons to make. There can only be so much of it down there. You probably saw this coming, and you're just a foetus. No offence.

Well, we didn't see it coming. We've been having too much fun with with the economy. If we fancy a kiwi fruit, which contains about 50 calories of energy, we can have one flown in from New Zealand, consuming about 5000 calories of energy in the process. If we need to bring our child to a crêche, because we need to go out and assemble more assemblers so that we can afford to have more pieces of fruit flown in from a different hemisphere, we can just hop into an SUV, a vehicle the size of a small whale, and consume more energy on the way than would be required to care for the child at home for an entire week.

Of course, some people did point it out. A chap called Marion King Hubbert first came up with what's now called the peak oil theory back in the 1950s, but it all seemed like a lot of fuss over something that was a terribly long way off. Even if it did happen--it was probably just a Communist plot, but just supposing it did--well, by then it would be the twenty-first century and we'd have jet packs to get around and enormous computers built into mountainsides to figure out ways to fuel them.

But the twenty-first century is here, and there's no sign of the jet packs. The computers are powerful alright, but they've got smaller, not bigger, and they're mostly used by people sending each other movies of cats falling from tables. And the oil really is running out.

I shouldn't mock the jet pack optimists, I suppose. I tend towards the optimistic view myself. That is, I do believe it's well within the limits of human ingenuity to devise technologies that will eventually allow us to to replace our oil-based ones.

The trouble is, ingenuity is only a part of it. The scientists and engineers we need to start being ingenious about this have to eat kiwi fruits and drive to crêches too, which means that someone has to pay them to be ingenious. As long as there's still money to be made the old way, the economy doesn't have any interest in this kind of ingenuity.

Governments are a litte bit better. The government of Sweden recently announced that that country will be completely free of its dependency on oil by 2020. The government of Ireland, on the other hand, seems to be banking on the jet packs.

So, enjoy the free grub while it lasts. Pretty soon, you're going to have to start thinking about where your next kiwi fruit is coming from.

Refusing to be Drawn

2006-02-03T13:15:00.000Z

Muhammad, as depicted in a controversial cartoon.

Have I mentioned religion yet? No? Right.

Well, religion is a popular thing out here. It comes in four or five main flavours, although there are lots of local variations. Religions are really sets of beliefs, and usually have an associated moral framework, or views of certain behaviours that derive from the beliefs.

Seems reasonable enough so far, doesn't it? The problems really begin with the beliefs themselves. Take Christianity, for instance, a religion that started about two thousand years ago and which remains very popular. It has since split into a number of what are called sects, although none of them would accept that description. This is another thing about religion: to keep a religion going, I mean, a proper, millennium-straddling, continent-devouring religion, you need to maintain, in addition to the other weird beliefs that are your stock-in-trade, an absolute and impermeable conviction that your lot are right and all the rest are somewhere on the spectrum between those who are sadly deluded and those who are soon to be steeped in molten lava for eternity as punishment for their lack of theological discernment.

Christianity is founded on the belief that a being called God created the universe (well, "the heavens and the Earth") in six days (I know, I know, how come there were days before there was a rotating Earth?) and then had a bit of a rest. This God then created two people, called Adam and Eve, from whom every other person ever born was descended. This part has reproductive implications that we'll talk about when you're older.

Everything went fine for a couple of thousand years. People lived to be enormously old (a guy called Methuselah lived to be 969, apparently) and begat lots of sons (presumably, they had to beget a few daughters too, but the Bible, a collection of very old texts where most of this stuff comes from, is relatively silent on this point). Then, things started to get away from God a little, and the people he had made drifted into "wickedness".

When this had happened before, he had tried flooding the planet. You might think, given that God can do anything (this is called omnipotence), that he might have simply made new people that were incapable of wickedness, if he was so upset about it, or made some adjustments to the old ones. But no, only a big flood would do, at least for the God who appears in the parts of the Bible called the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, God seems to mellow quite a lot. He decides to take a new approach to the wickedness issue, and sends his son to Earth in human form to sort things out. Well, maybe sort things out is the wrong phrase. You see, Christians believe that God's son took the human form of a man called Jesus of Nazareth, who really did exist.

Now, Jesus himself seems to have taken quite a reasonable approach to the problem of correcting people's behaviour, once you accept that correcting people's behaviour is in itself a reasonable objective. He began preaching to crowds of people (there were no blogs in those days). His themes were unobjectionable, even admirable. Love thy neighbour. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

But the preaching, apparently, wasn't the point, or at least wasn't the whole point. The plan was that Jesus would die for our sins. I must confess to being hazy on the details of this arrangement. The death was to be some kind of atonement, clearly, but whether it covered future sins or only those already committed I'm not sure. For that matter, I'm not sure quite how Jesus's death atoned for anything, and why God couldn't have engineered some kind of forgiveness solution without having his own child incarnated and executed by the Romans, but then there's a lot I don't get about religion.

The point of all this is that religion involves believing things for which there is no evidence. Quite often, it involves believing quite elaborate and outlandish things for which there is evidence to the contrary. For example, there's a lot of evidence that people evolved from other animals over millions of years, a process that does not accommodate the whole Adam and Eve scenario.

Of course, individual religious people don't arbitrarily decide to believe something bizarre. Beliefs are handed down through generations, acquiring venerability along the way, and are usually part of a greater cultural and social fabric. There are many quite sane people who would describe themselves as religious, but to whom many of the tenets of their particular religion would not be literal beliefs, but traditions of emotional value. This is all well and good.

On the other hand, there are religious people who accept the tenets of their faith with absolute and unflinching literalism, no matter how absurd or even dangerous they may be. For instance, some members of a Christian sect called Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to allow their children to receive blood transfusions that may save their lives due to their belief that a passage in the Bible prohibits them. That the passage refers opaquely to abstaining from blood, and was written many centuries before blood transfusion was even conceived of is of course secondary to the obscene moral dysfunction that allows a person to put any religious belief, bizarre or not, above the life and health of his or her own child.

And then there's Islam. Islam has origins in common with Christianity and Judaism, so some of the God stuff is similar. Islam, however, reveres a sixth century prophet called Muhammad, to whom they believe the tenets of their faith were revealed directly by God, or Allah. This much is no more or less wacky than most religious beliefs.

Muslims (adherents to Islam) also believe, based on their interpretation of a passage in their Koran, which contains all the stuff God is supposed to have revealed to Muhammad, that you're not allowed to draw pictures of Allah or Muhammad. With Allah, the idea was that he was too great and majestic to be depicted by human hand. I'm not sure how this got extended to Muhammad, who actually had human hands himself, but that's how things stand in Islam.

Interestingly, depicting any living things is discouraged in Islamic tradition. This oddity persisted right through the middle ages, a time when Islamic scholarship was flourishing while Christian countries had descended into brutality and ignorance. It gave rise to artifacts like the beautifully illustrated herbals in which all the plants are strangely stylised, their anatomical detail carefully distorted in a strange attempt to depict them and yet not depict them at the same time.

Anyway, you can't draw Muhammad, if you're a Muslim. That's another thing about religion. They all tend to insist on doing certain things and, more commonly, not doing lots of other things. Of course, these prescriptions and proscriptions are generally applicable in theory, but in practice, religions are normally content to apply their rules only to their own members, if only to avoid embarassment. There's not much point in the Pope admonishing, say, the Maori people of New Zealand for eating meat on Fridays (I didn't make that rule up, by the way; that's a Catholic one).

Sometimes, though, some religious people do get the idea into their heads that everyone, not just people of the same religion, should observe all the odd rules they've made up. Now, clearly, this is not a tenable position and one that is likely to meet the objections of non-believers. If I stop someone in the street and tell him that he must take off his glasses because Naktush, a God made of discarded tractor tyres who lives in a cave in Venezuela, prohibits the wearing of spectacles, I shouldn't be surprised if he fails to comply. Or if he starts to back away uneasily.

This week, though, many Muslims professed to be not only surprised but angered when cartoons showing Muhammad with a bomb in his turban which had originally appeared in a Danish newspaper, were reprinted by other papers across Europe. The other papers did this in support of the Danish paper, which was under attack from Muslim critics in Denmark. It was intended as a demonstration of the freedom of the press, a very important part of the democratic system, and a concept which sadly does not have much currency in many countries, including some where Islam is the dominant religion.

Now, you could argue that the cartoon itself relies on a lazy stereotype (the association of Islam with the violence of some of its fundamentalist adherents), that its likelihood to give offence was not outweighed by any great journalistic merit and that perhaps a poor editorial decision was made. But this is all beside the point.

The point is that in European democracies have achieved their freedoms at great cost, and those freedoms are precious. They are also utterly beyond the jurisdiction of any religion. It's worrying that many Muslims don't seem to accept this.

Of course, it's not that simple. Nothing ever is. A lot of the anger that's being expressed about the cartoon (or cartoons; I think there were twelve of them) is really anger about what is perceived by some as widespread aggression towards Muslim countries by the West. It's about the continuing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's about the inexcusable mistreatment of Palestinians by Israel.

These are real grievances, but it's disheartening that they are being expressed in religious terms. As we've seen, religions are founded on propositions that are irrational and often bizarre. Conflating political disputes with religion is unlikely, therefore, to clarify or help to resolve them.

Adding violence hardly helps either, and it's a sad irony that some Muslims have reacted to a stereotypically murderous image by threatening the lives of innocent Danes, including humanitarian workers.

So, that's religion for you. You can make up your own mind when you get out, obviously, but personally I don't recommend it. Apart from all the stuff about not being allowed to get a blood transfusion or draw pictures, there are usually services at least weekly, not to mention prayers and other extramural activities. It can be a real drain on your time, especially when it's the weekend and the weather is nice.

By the way, you've been in there for just over seventeen weeks now. I know you've probably got everything just the way you like it and you're starting to feel at home, but this means we're almost at the halfway mark. We're really looking forward to seeing you very much now.

There are only five months left, and there are all kinds of things I haven't described to you yet: chimpanzees, credit cards, eucalyptus trees, iPods, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the feeling of clean sheets. And of course there won't be time for most of these things, and even those things we do have time for I probably won't explain properly.

But that's OK. You really have to see these things for yourself.

Where I Was That Day

2006-01-27T13:29:00.000Z

Space Shuttle Challenger is lost, 28 January 1986.

Tomorrow will be the twentieth anniversary of the Challenger disaster, in which that spacecraft and her crew of seven were lost.

I was twelve at the time, and enthralled by every detail of space exploration, both real and imaginary. Later that year, I was allowed to stay up late to watch televised images of Halley's comet on one of its rare approaches to Earth (in fact, observing the comet from orbit had been part of Challenger's unfulfilled mission).

The loss of Challenger made a deep impression on me, in the way that certain events in childhood do, perhaps because they occur at a time when we are unable to resolve them by assigning them a place and a precedence in our view of the world.

Of course, I knew that what had happened was terrible and sad, but more than anything, what happened to Challenger was vertiginously shocking. In the now famous television images, Challenger is suddenly, sickeningly enveloped by a peach-tinged cocoon of smoke. Then, its contrail, which has been proud and steady, bifurcates crazily. In the next instant, smaller tendrils spring from the smoke. These carry little of Challenger's original velocity, and curl out only briefly before declining, falling: debris.

There were aftershocks too; subtler repercussions that nagged and persisted like a symptom, insidiously suggesting someting. What was it?

It was more than the dutiful sombreness with which, at twelve, I contemplated the suffering and obliteration of the seven astronauts. It was a new and heartbreaking acquaintance with something that is as elemental to the universe as hydrogen, but which is concealed from children for a long time and which, I admit, I will try to conceal from you if I can: things just happen.

Things happen whether you were expecting them or not. Things happen to people whether they deserve them or not. Even if you're an astronaut, or a teacher who has, improbably, managed to become an astronaut out of bravery, curiosity and love of knowledge; even if you've done the thousands of difficult and frightening things you must do before you find yourself lying on your back being thrust into the pale, emptying sky and the start of everything you've ever wanted to see and know; even then, when you are as complete and worthy and noble and loved as you will ever be, things can happen to you. Bad things.

It's hard to say how much of this I could have articulated in 1986, how much of it is the inauthentic accretion of adult sophistication. Perhaps I felt nothing but a strange kind of shiver, as if I had strayed into the shadow of things I would one day learn.

I wonder about this because I know that our memories, even the strongest ones--perhaps especially the strongest ones--are unreliable. We reshape them constantly, sometimes over many years. What happened mingles with what we wish had happened, and what we wish had not. Details are merged or elided. Significance swells.

I had a memory, convincing in its detail, of coming home from school early to watch the Challenger launch, of closing the venetian blinds in our old sitting room against the bright sunlight, of sitting rapt, with the sofa to myself in the unaccustomed quiet of a weekday afternoon. Such are the details we summon when we draw on these memories, when we say, I remember where I was that day.

But this memory, it can't be right. January 28th, 1986 was a Tuesday, so I would have been at school, that much is sound.

But Challenger's final launch began at 16:37 GMT. In those days, school would have finished at 15:00, so there would have been no need to come home early, even if I had secured permission, which was, knowing your grandmother, in itself unlikely. And there would have been no bright sunlight to close the blinds against at 16:37 on January 28th; it would have been getting dark. Finally, it seems unlikely that I could have seen live coverage of the launch.

As James Olberg of MSNBC points out in this interesting article about the myths surrounding Challenger, relatively few people even in the United States would have seen live coverage of the event. It's possible that BBC television, which we received in Ireland, might have carried the broadcast, but it's unlikely. Perhaps someone who knows for sure will let me know.

In the meantime, I'll pass this memory on to you just as it is. Perhaps I imagined it. Perhaps several memories have been distilled, leaving just an essence of how it felt to be twelve and to feel the first intimations of the world's terror and chaos and majesty in the brightness and quiet of a schoolday afternoon.

I can't say if or when you will first feel these things. You might be older than twelve, or a good deal younger. You might not care all that much about space ships. But perhaps you too will come to remember a day, a vivid and almost palpable day, when the surrounding brightness flickered as a shadow passed, a shadow of something broken and falling to Earth, or of something I can't yet imagine.

And perhaps you will think of that day as the day when you began a crossing from one world into the next, when you swallowed hard, straightened your still-narrow shoulders, looked up into the vast, unanswering sky and began to become yourself.

Like, a Philosopher and Stuff?

2006-01-19T22:45:00.000Z

You have an aunt who now lives in Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf is, amongst much else I'm sure, the home of Kraftwerk, a band that matters to your father in a way that is perhaps not strictly healthy. But more about Kraftwerk later.

Your aunt complains that this Guide is neglecting Ireland, which is our home country, and will be yours unless something entirely unexpected happens before your due date. Of course, your aunt is what's called an expat (it's short for expatriate) and probably feels these omissions more keenly than those of us who live here. Still, she has a point.

So, Ireland. Well, there's a lot to cover, so I think a series of topical vignettes is probably the best way to go. You know, short sketches of contemporary Irish life that offer insights into the nation and its mores (that's pronounced like the eels) and what-have-you. I know, it sounds like a naff Sunday supplement feature, but I do work for a living, you know. And besides, you're a foetus--how long can your attention span be, anyway?

Right, then. Vignettes. Well, this week Noam Chomsky, the famous academic and political commentator, visited Ireland to give some lectures.

Linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky

Chomsky originally came to prominence as a linguist. He founded the field of generative grammar, which is based on the idea that people produce sentences that are well formed by using a set of underlying rules that all humans are predisposed to possess. He suggested, too, that there might be what are called deep structures that are common to all languages. It's fascinating stuff.

However, Chomsky is now better known for his political views than for his work in linguistics. You see, he's an ardent critic of the foreign policies of the United States, and of its use of military force. He's a very gifted and persuasive writer on these subjects, and seems to me to be right most of the time.

A lot of people in the English-speaking world (and elsewhere) agree, and feel that he articulates very well their concerns about the misuse of military and political power and abuse of human rights, particularly by America.

A lot of other people disagree with him. Well, disagree might not be quite the right word. They object to him. Disagreement implies a difference over the merits of a particular argument. Many of Chomsky's critics prefer to avoid his arguments, or what he actually says, and to concentrate on his reputation, or what people say he says. This is a strategy that works well for them, because his reputation has for the most part been constructed by them in the first place.

This allows Chomsky's critics to appear on television or radio talk shows and argue against Chomsky's reputation for saying that, oh, America is the Source of All Evil. That's nonsense! they proclaim. Or against Chomsky's reputation for saying that President Bush is Just Like Stalin or that Everything About Communist China is Really Great. Outrageous! they thunder.

Well, quite. Of course, Chomsky doesn't say these things. It's not so much that they are simplifications of his arguments, although his critics are often charged with oversimplification. When you oversimplify, you restate an argument in such reduced terms that you begin to distort and misrepresent it. In fact, it's more sinister than that.

It's possible, too, to create a simple slogan that sounds like something someone like Chomsky might say (well, it sounds like all the other anti-Chomsky slogans), while bearing no relation at all, not even one of oversimplification, to what he really says.

Anyway, that's Chomsky. Well, no it's not; it's oversimplification. But it's better than slogans.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. He was here, as I was saying, to deliver some lectures. The main lecture was under the auspices of Amnesty International, but he also gave a talk at UCD, where I studied. Hmm? Never mind how long ago that was.

Suffice it to say that when I was at UCD, a visit by Chomsky would have been a Major Event. Okay, maybe the spirit of 1968 was already the merest faintness, but we were still proper students. We still spent three hours over one cup of coffee, talking earnestly, if not all that cogently, about Fanon or Foucault.

Of course, I had heard that things are different now. That students now, in these affluent times, are more careerist and less militant. But I was still unprepared, unprepared and more disappointed than I'm sure I have any right to be, when I heard the vox pop. conducted by RTE's 5-7 Live radio programme on the day of Chomsky's lecture.

The question: What do you know about Noam Chomsky?

The answer? Now, let me just preface this briefly. I am taking no licence here. I am not distorting things for effect. There were no better-informed responses than the one I present here, although there were some eccentrically entertaining efforts. And I really do think that I remember it verbatim, in all its affluent, incurious, globalised blandness.

The answer? (And it doesn't matter if it was a boy or a girl.)

The answer: Oh, I dunno. Isn't he, like, a philospher and stuff?

Not All Bad

2006-01-16T16:14:00.001Z

It's not all bad out here, you know.

Sure, we have politicians who turn into celebrities and then into cats, but I don't want to give you the impression that you're going to emerge to find a planet thickly encrusted with morons. In fact, the thickness varies quite a bit.

Take astronomers, for instance. These are scientists who study space. Well, usually, they study the things in space, and not the space between things, but space, generally, is their thing, so to speak.

Astronomers are important people, or at least, the things they find out about are important. This is why astronomers, like Copernicus, sometimes used to be famous. There aren't really any famous astronomers these days. Well, there's Stephen Hawking, but sadly, he's really only famous for being very clever even though he's not able to move. And besides, he's more of a cosmologist than an astronomer.

Anyway, there is much to admire about astronomers. In fact, I would have liked to be one, but wasn't clever enough; their cleverness is one of the things I admire about them. That and the fact that you don't often see them appearing on Celebrity Big Brother pretending to be cats.

The Stardust capsule returning to Earth yesterday (Image © NASA/Ames Research Center)

Yesterday, astronomers (and other clever people like engineers) succeeded in their mission to send a spacecraft to scrape off little pieces of a comet, collect some ancient dust from the formation of the solar system and bring all of this amazing and precious stuff back here, to Earth.

To do this, they had to make the spacecraft travel a very, very long way: about 4,640,000,000 (4.64 billion) kilometres. How far is that? Well, you're about 84 mm long, or at least you were last week. So, the spacecraft had to travel approximately 527,272,700,000,000 times the distance from your crown (the top of your head) to your rump (er, the other end of you). Impressed?

And when it got back, they had to make it drop the capsule where it had stored the space dust onto an Air Force base in Utah. On a 4.64 billion kilometre mission, this is a bit like dropping a euro onto a particular square of a chess board from an aeroplane. As I say, these people are clever.

We'll have to wait for a while to find out what's in the space dust and what that might tell us about how comets (and the sun, and the planets, and us) were formed.

I'll let you know as soon as I hear, though. Who knows, maybe we'll find out together?

Decline and Fall

2006-01-13T12:47:00.000Z

You remember we talked about George Galloway? The British MP accused of taking bribes from the Iraqi government who has now decided to be a celebrity?

Well, on Celebrity Big Brother last night, it appears he pretended to be a cat.

George Galloway, celebrity.

Did I mention that MP stands for "Member of Parliament"? Yes, Mr Galloway was elected to the House of Commons, which is the lower house of the legislative branch of the British government. Legislative means that it makes laws.

So, the man miming the act of licking milk out of a bowl is a lawmaker of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, what remains of the once mighty British Empire, on which, it used to be said, the sun never set.

I think we'll leave it there for today.

This Is How It Starts

2006-01-10T20:44:00.000Z

Your mother was still a little bit worried about you after the Ketones Incident, so she arranged for yet another mothers and babies (and foetuses) doctor to bounce some of those special sounds we talked about off you just to make sure that you were all right in there.

It seems she needn't have worried. In fact, I don't think we're going to be worrying much about disturbing you any more. On the contrary, it looks like we might be asking you to keep it down in there.

You, aged 13.7 weeks.

I wasn't able to make it to today's appointment, but your mother informs me that you were, to say the very least, highly active. Your newly acquired arms and legs, I'm told, were all being given some thorough commissioning tests. Throwing yourself energetically against the walls of your accommodation also appears to be a favourite pastime.

I can't say I blame you. If I had no job and lived in what felt like a zero-gravity bouncing castle, I'd be just the same.

I'm sorry to have missed it all. It sounds like you're already developing what bad film critics out here call screen presence.

It turns out, too, that you're big for your age. In fact, your CRL (crown-rump length) of 84.6 mm is normally associated with a GA (gestational age - you can see these impressive-sounding measurements on the picture of you above) of 14 weeks and 4 days, almost a week older than you actually are.

Now, this is all well and good, and there's nothing your mother and I want more than for you to be settling in and enjoying your food. However, this sort of thing does present us with a problem.

You see, we're trying hard not to become what are called bores. In particular, we're keen not to be boring parents, people who turn their conversations with their family and friends (and mechanics and check-out operators) into relentless and scarifyingly detailed monologues about the habits and accomplishments of their offspring.

We really are trying.

And then you come along, with your in utero martial arts and your fantastically precocious CRL, which are just begging to be worked into conversation with the next person to happen by the water cooler.

Oh, yes. This is how it starts.

Sense and Sensibilities

2006-01-09T13:02:00.000Z

Sigh.

You know, I'd hate for you to get your first glimpses of the world through the prism of your father's obsessions. On the other hand, you do have a mother too, and we will, apparently, be required to send you to school at some point.

So, you'll probably be alright.

Right then, obsessions.

The thing is the media (you remember we talked about them in this post). What about the media? Well, a lot of the time, they manufacture what passes for "news" themselves.

Here's a case in point.

Senatory Mary O'Rourke and friends

Last night, the former Minister for Public Enterprise, current Leader of the Seanad and all-round cuddly grande dame of Fianna Fáil, Mary O'Rourke won that party's nomination to run for election to the Dáil in the Longford-Westmeath seat that she lost in the last General Election in 2002.

This would have been a minor but genuine political news story in itself, especially since O'Rourke lost the seat amid some bitterness about the vote management strategy imposed by her party.

However, it has turned into a bigger story, entirely at the instigation of the media themselves. You see, during her acceptance speech Senator O'Rourke acknowledged the efforts of her campaign workers and declared that they had "worked like blacks".

Now, I'm going to have to elide a great deal of complexity here; there's a whole lot of history, politics and culture to do with race and racism that we can't go into here. Suffice it to say that we have in Ireland, for the most part, arrived at a situation where most people avoid the intentional use of language that is offensive to particular ethnic groups. This is a Good Thing.

If not out of personal moral conviction, people generally at least avoid racist language out of fear of social disapproval.

However, not all language that alludes to race is truly racist. Irish people have been talking about "working like blacks" for a long time, certainly for much longer than there has been more than a negligible number of black people actually living here.

It's a crude epithet. It carries very unpleasant connotations of colonialism and slavery. The problem is that it is also a phrase that has, through long usage, become concretised, so that when it used, it is often used thoughtlessly, without consciousness of its meaning and origins.

Granted, its meaning and origins could, with only a little education and reflection, easily be guessed at, so this is not to excuse its continued use. Indeed, most people no longer use the phrase for this very reason (and not, as you will hear certain conservative birdbrains repeatedly squawking today, because something called Political Correctness has Gone Mad.)

But some people, particularly people of Mary O'Rourke's age, do still lapse into this usage. It's thoughtless and disappointing, but it does occasionally happen.

And when it, or something similarly thoughtless and disappointing but above all insignificant, does happen, the media's story manufacturing equipment lurches predictably into life.

Senator O'Rourke's remarks were made late last night, after a long selection convention. This is why, under the by-line of Liam Reid in today's Irish Times, we read that "[l]ast night Peter O'Mahony, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, said the comment was "clearly ill-advised"".

From this, we can safely take it that, probably within minutes of the end of O'Rourke's speech, Liam Reid was on the phone to Peter O'Mahony. In all likelihood, he was looking for a quote that expressed some degree of "outrage" (always a favourite vocabulary item in such circumstances). It is to Peter O'Mahony's credit that he kept his response restrained and measured.

Nonetheless, his comments, even though they were almost certainly solicited by a journalist, fulful the minimal criteria for what the media like to call a "controversy" (they like the word "furore" even better, but I can't see them going quite that far in this case). Got a questionable remark from a politician? Check. Got a "reaction" from an interest group? Check. Congratulations, you've got yourself a "controversy", a front page story and coverage ad nauseam on radio and television for the rest of the so-called "news cycle".

The so-called "news" stories thus generated will give rise to secondary media noise in the form of bloated opinion columns, interviews with earnest activists and the reading out on air of text messages from listeners, some of them accusing Mary O'Rourke of being a unrepentant, racist thug (she's not) and others, depressingly familiar, accusing the Dublin 4 Liberal Elite (there's no such thing) of stifling ordinary and inoffensive language.

Meanwhile, the stuff that should be in the newspapers in the morning, and talked about for the rest of the day, like, say, the fact that the Government in which Senator O'Rourke's party is the majority partner is perpetrating a massive and cynical deceit by deliberately hoarding exchequer funding in the form of departmental underspending to splurge, probably irresponsibly, in their last pre-election budget.

Mind you, it's not like I can talk. Look what I've just spent this whole post talking about.

The Ketones Incident

2006-01-07T20:53:00.000Z

You might have noticed a bit of a racket going on today while you were trying to sleep. Or perhaps you weren't sleeping; perhaps you were just quietly contemplating all the new bits you've acquired now that you're in your thirteenth week (congratulations, by the way). Ten of these and ten of these? What can they all be for?

Anyway, sorry about all the noise and bumping.

The thing was that your mother was rather sick today, the poor thing. At first, she had a pain in her stomach. A pain in the stomach can be bad enough on its own, but since the stomach is quite near to where you're currently housed, we got a bit worried that you might be sick too.

She was so sick, in fact, that she had to miss going to a pantomime performance of Bugsy Malone she had been looking forward to. What's worse, your aunt and your grandmother did go, and said that it was great fun, although they hadn't really enjoyed it because they had been worried about your mother and you too. Then, while your grandfather was driving her home, your mother got violently sick into the nice new handbag she got for Christmas.

If you turn out to be a person who uses handbags, here's today's Earth Tip: handbags you throw up in are always Dry Clean Only.

At this point, I was on the way to an exhibition of the work of Albrecht Dürer with your other grandmother and grandfather, and we all had to rush back home to see if your mother, and you, were alright. (By now, four grandparents and two aunts, soon to be joined by an uncle, are worried about your mother and you.)

Well, we went to see a doctor, who wanted to know how old you were, and there was talk of ketones, whatever those are. Then, we went to see another doctor, a special doctor for mothers and babies (and foetuses) in a place called Holles Street. This is the hospital where we hope we're going to meet you when you come out.

It turned out that the mothers and babies (and foetuses) doctor wasn't nearly as concerned about the whole ketones issue as the other doctor had been, and took the view that you were quite alright in there (if we'd only keep the noise down) and that your mother just needed some rest and some soup.

We took her advice on the rest thing (your mother's asleep now, which is why it's nice and quiet), although not about the soup (only Chinese takeaway would do, apparently).

So, there you are. I know you've had a long day, so I'll let you get some sleep too.

Sorry again about all the racket.

Celebrity

2006-01-05T23:20:00.000Z

Here's something you're going to notice before too long.

We've become obsessed out here with something called celebrity. No, that's not quite right. We've become obsessed with people called celebrities. In fact, it seems to be have been forgotten altogether that the word celebrity was ever just an abstract noun.

(We'll come back to those when you're eleven. No, when you're eight. Okay, when you're ten.

Actually, your mother says I'm to stop bothering you about abstract nouns.)

In the old days, longer ago than you can yet imagine, over fifteen years ago in fact, people still became famous (or attained celebrity) much as they had done for thousands of years: by doing something worthy of other people's attention. Famous people, usually, were famous for doing something the rest of the people thought was artful, or funny, or moving, or beautiful, or courageous, or patriotic. And so on.

The British MP George Galloway,
who we'll come back to in a moment.

Generally, a famous person was famous for doing something of this kind in a way that was considered exemplary or extraordinary. Thus, you might have expected to become famous for being, for instance, a very gifted composer (like, say, George Gershwin) or for making important discoveries in physics, like Albert Einstein.

On the other hand, it was perfectly possible to achieve fame by doing something that people enjoyed, like acting in films, in a way that was merely passable, like Humphrey Bogart, as long as you stuck at it. There was nothing wrong with this. Humphrey Bogart, people acknowledged, was a famous film actor (or movie star). This didn't necessarily imply greatness of any kind, merely that acting in films was what he was famour for.

There was even an entire category, called infamy, for those who gained notoriety by doing bad things. Sometimes, these really were evil things (Adolf Hitler would at one time have been called infamous). Perhaps more commonly, though, infamy came to those who did things that were technically illegal, or at least morally reprehensible, but which people secretly found exciting, like aristocratic murderers. The point is that people made distinctions.

There was never any need for fame, of course. It must always have made people feel a little bit better, or they wouldn't have bothered with it, but nobody needed it. It used to at least make sense, though. It was exclusive, because it recognised that without exclusivity, it had no meaning. And it had a kind of order that ensured it was proportionate. It was proportionate, I think, to the universality, if you know what I mean, of what a person was famous for; a designer of gardens might become somewhat famous, but only to other garden designers and those who could afford to employ them.

I'm afraid this has all changed.

We still have movie stars, of course. We still have great composers too, but they are not often famous. There are human beings in space right now, but almost no one knows what their names are.

What we have now are celebrities, and they are everywhere.

Well, the celebrities themselves are in one place at any given time, like the rest of us, but their images, moving and still, are everywhere. This is because everywhere the celebrities go, they are pursued and surrounded by cameras. (This is something called metonymy, or possibly synechdoche, which we'll return to some time in your mid-teens. Of course, they're really pursued by people carrying cameras.)

The people following the celebrities and carrying the cameras are called paparazzi, a word derived from Paparazzo, the name of a character in a film by Federico Fellini called La Dolce Vita who was a photographer of this kind.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in a famous scene from La Dolce Vita

When celebrities pass through airports, or go jogging, or go to a juice bar in Santa Monica, or fall out of a pub in Croydon, the paparazzi are there, snapping relentlessly. When celebrities get married, which they do a lot of, or go to the beach, the paparazzi are in a helicopter or a boat, with a telephoto lens, snapping relentlessly.

They sell the pictures they take to the many magazines, television channels and Web sites that exist partly or wholly to display them. And these exist, of course, because a huge number of people want to see them. And want to see a lot of them. There needs to be a constant supply. Also, they need to get more and more revealing. It used to be enough for a celebrity to be photographed in a bikini. A bikini shot no longer suffices unless it reveals that a celebrity has Piled On the Pounds After Her Baby, or is Way Too Thin, or has cellulite (I really don't know; ask your mother).

And this brings us to what's called a paradox. These celebrities we have now: most of them are nobodies. Sure, some of them have been in soap operas, or had a parent who was the British Prime Minister. But most of them? They just seem to emerge, for no apparent reason. Once they become celebrities, though, their entirely ordinary status is obliterated, and their every move (not to mention their cellulite) becomes a subject of intense interest.

The paradox is that people want to see photographs of a celebrity's cellulite because it reassures them of their ordinariness, of their human vulnerability, even though they were manifestly ordinary before everyone decided, for no real reason, that they were a celebrity.

It's all a bit puzzling, and sometimes a bit depressing. There's no great harm in it, but there's no great good in it either, and it consumes an awful lot of time, energy and money.

What brought all this on, by the way, was the news the British MP (Member of Parliament) George Galloway is to appear on a television programme called Celebrity Big Brother.

George Galloway is a controversial politician. The controversy surrounds his relationship with a country called Iraq (which we'll almost certainly be returning t0). Specifically, it is alleged that he opposed severe trade sanctions against that country (a position I agreed with) because he was, indirectly, paid to do so by the Iraqi government. These allegations have not been proven, but they, and the matter of the sanctions against Iraq and its subsequent invasion by the United States, are all pretty serious.

In contrast, Celebrity Big Brother is the opposite of serious. The word sometimes used as the opposite of serious is frivolous, but Celebrity Big Brother is less than frivolous. It has so little meaning or value that it sucks these things in from all around it, like a black hole, so that even normally intelligent newspapers are forced to write about it as if it were something and not nothing.

It is what's called a spin-off of another television programme, simply called Big Brother, whose premise was that ordinary people would be filmed living in a house. No, that's it; that's the show. Then other ordinary people, the viewers, would decide each week who they liked the least and that person would leave the house. No, I'm serious. They've made five or six series of this.

The ordinary people who appeared in Big Brother are a good example of what we were talking about earlier, since many of them became celebrities by virtue of having appeared in this television programme about ordinary people, and then went on to have their cellulite photographed so that people could be reassured of their ordinariness. Yes, I know. I don't quite know what to say about it either.

So, George Galloway, who may or may not have been involved in gross corruption related to one of the most serious ongoing political and humanitarian crises in the world, is going to be filmed pouring milk on his cereal, scratching his armpit and getting up to go to the toilet with other celebrities until the viewers decide they don't like him any more.

For this, he will of course receive a substantial fee. This means that the controversy over whether he sold his political support to a corrupt regime (which, years ago, might have brought him the infamy we were talking about above) has enabled him to sell himself. In other words, he is now a celebrity.

What does all of this mean? I'm not sure. But what I think it might mean is that all kinds of distinctions are collapsing; that it no longer matters why someone has come to our attention. That perhaps soon there will be no movie stars, or suicidal rock idols, or Cambridge-educated spies, or venal and disgraced politicians.

There will just be celebrities, and all we will know about them is that we want to see them, and see more and more of them, until we tire of them (or vote them off). Then we'll want to see someone else. No one in particular, just someone else.

It mightn't bother you all that much, when you get here. You might dismiss all this as just another of your father's foibles and obsessions. You might be right.

And who knows? You might be a celebrity.

New Year

2006-01-01T02:53:00.000Z

Happy new year.

There are a whole lot of concepts in that first sentence that could do with being explained, but let's stick with the idea of years for the moment.

A year is a period of time. People out here have argued a lot about years, as they have about most things, but most of us now agree that a year is how long it takes for Earth, the planet we live on, to orbit (go around) the Sun, which is a star.

There are a lot of terms in there that I'm not going to bother to try to explain, for three main reasons:

1. I probably wouldn't explain them correctly.

2. I'm trying to stick to one concept per post (more for my benefit than yours; even now, your brain is probably in better condition than mine).

3. This whole Rough Guide to Earth schtick is a great theme for a blog, but it does require some suspension of disbelief (another term I'm not going to gloss just for the moment). It requires, for instance, that we temporarily disbelieve (a) that you are a foetus who cannot read English in any form, least of all in a blog on the Internet and (b) that I am abundantly unqualified to teach you about most of the things on Earth (and in its environs).

All that being said, years are important.

Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473 - 1543.

The Earth goes around the Sun (this was established by a fellow called Copernicus, pictured above) in what's called an ellipse, which is like a circle that's been stretched out a little bit. While it's going around the Sun, the Earth is itself spinning around, but the axis (again, lots of terms we'll just have to come back to) it's spinning around isn't exactly upright, so the top and the bottom of the Earth (the proper names are the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) get more sunlight at different times of the year. Because sunlight is responsible for pretty much everything that goes on on the surface of the Earth, which is the part we live on, a lot of what goes on out here depends on these changes.

We call these changes seasons, and still tend to plan quite a lot around them. Back before we had things like genetic engineering and Tesco (we'll come back to those too), we used to plan stuff like sowing and harvests, because if we didn't, we'd starve.

Nowadays, we generally just use the seasons, and the bits we've arbitrarily divided them into, to remind us when to buy various kinds of things. For example, in the summer, when it's warm, we buy holidays, which are trips to places where it's even warmer. In winter, at a time called Christmas, we all spend money (don't ask) we don't have buying things to give to the people we know even though they don't need them.

When you get older, you'll hear a lot about 'responsibility'. Responsibility is mainly just doing stuff like this and not asking too many questions. However, it does also involve not letting smaller members of the species like yourself perish in the snow, so it's not all bad.

As I was saying, we now use years just to remind us to do things we don't need to do, or to remember things that happened, like births (or wars, or hit singles, or vaccines), a certain number of years ago, as if that told us anything useful about the things, or about years, or about us.

Having said all that, tonight we marked the passing of the last year in which you won't have been on Earth.

That's pointless and arbitrary too. But not to me.

Hello

2005-12-30T16:47:00.000Z

Well, hello.

I must say, you took your time in arriving. You probably get that from your mother. (She's the large, comfortable space you're currently bobbing around in.)

You, aged 7.5 weeks.

Your mother and I (I'm your father, by the way), well, we kind of made you. I know, it sounds weird; it is weird. But I'm going to have to ask you to trust me on this. I'll explain it all later. Much later. In fact, long after you've found out about it for yourself.

You, aged 10 weeks.

In the meantime, I'm going to use this blog to try to explain some of the other weird things you will encounter when you join us in the outside world. I know it might seem a little premature, but believe me, you're going to spend several years of your life doing little else but asking us questions about stuff you don't understand, so I'm just trying to get a head start.

We may as well start with the images above. You're going to find that your mother and I have a near-fanatical interest in taking pictures of you. Normally, this will involve forcing you to stand or sit still while we collect the light that bounces off you in a little box. This is a process known as photography.

However, since light can't penetrate your mother's body (that's why it's dark in there), some doctors used a different kind of box to bounce sound off you instead.

All that may sound a little bit violent and unsettling, but I just wanted you to know how anxious we both were to see you. We think it was worth it. We think you're beautiful.

A bit blurry and amorphous, but beautiful.