Rambling Ad Rumpo

News Day

2008-07-16T02:58:00.000-07:00

More metaphysical speculation from Lily today. As I was walking her to school this morning:

LILY: Daddy?
ME: Yes, my love?
LILY: Does God have a surname?
ME: Well, no.
LILY: Why not?
ME: He just doesn't.
LILY: But what were his Mummy and Daddy called?
ME: God doesn't have a Mummy and Daddy.
LILY: [boggled] Doesn't he?
ME: No.
LILY: So where does he come from then?
ME: He doesn't come from anywhere.
LILY: But Jesus has a Mummy and Daddy.
ME: That's right.
LILY: What were their surnames?
ME: [Looking up to see the school in the very far distance] Ah, here we are at the school.

Usually these discussions are punctuated with my cautious iterations of 'that's what some people believe anyway', which is my athiestical version of insha'allah; but there didn't seem to be a place in which I could insert it in this conversation. Perhaps I should have answered her question with: 'yes he does have a surname and it's Henderson.' That might have satisfied her. Or if not, ('God Henderson? Really?') I could have said, 'yes ... his surname is God' which would inevitably have lead to 'so what's his first name?' and I'd have been forced, like a chessplayer struggling to match the moves of a grandmaster, into some shift like 'Desmond. His full name is Desmond Charles God.' Probably best not to go there.

Manhattanhenge

2008-07-12T02:36:00.000-07:00

I had no idea there was such a thing as Manhattanhenge, but I'm glad to discover there is.

Meanwhile I'm pondering this picture, and trying to work out whether the monkey is firing the pistol, or just saying 'BLAM BLAM' with its monkey-mouth. It's a puzzler.

Silence Day

2008-07-10T04:54:00.001-07:00

Apparently. What better way to celebrate than by sitting silently and watching this, the single sweetest thing ever captured by TV and memorialised by the internet?

Lily's bedtime story for the last week or so had been The Pilgrim's Progress (a trimmed, modernised version with copious colour illustrations ... this one, indeed ... which is just as religious as the original: Lily loved it all, I have to say). We finished the book last night, which provoked the following in-depth discussion. ['Mummy's nanny' is Rachel's grandmother who died a few years ago at 101; 'your nanny' is my grandmother, who died earlier this year at 90].

LILY: I think the Golden City is heaven.
ME: I think so too.
LILY: Does everybody go to heaven?
ME: [treading, as ever, super-cautiously when discussing such things] Everybody who's good. That's what some people believe.
LILY: But what about if you don't have your scroll?

[note. the scroll is the modernised version of Bunyan's certificate, which, as I'm sure you'll recall, is needful to get into the Golden City: "I turned my head to look back, and saw Ignorance come up to the river side; but he soon got over, and that without half the difficulty which the other two men met with. For it happened that there was then in that place one Vain-Hope, a ferryman, that with his boat helped him over; so he, as the other I saw, did ascend the hill, to come up to the gate ... but he was asked by the men that looked over the top of the gate, Whence come you? and what would you have? He answered, I have ate and drank in the presence of the King, and he has taught in our streets. Then they asked him for his certificate, that they might go in and show it to the King: so he fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none. Then said they, Have you none? but the man answered never a word. So they told the King, but he would not come down to see him, but commanded the two shining ones, that conducted Christian and Hopeful to the city, to go out and take Ignorance, and bind him hand and foot, and have him away. Then they took him up, and carried him through the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill, and put him in there. Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gate of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction" A lovely note to end on, I've always thought.]

ME: I'm sure what matters is that you're good.
LILY: Nannies are in heaven. Mummy's nanny and your nanny. Do you know what they're doing?
ME: I don't know.
LILY: Playing chess.
ME: [Surprised, since neither woman in life had the remotest interest in the game] Really?
LILY: [airily] Oh yes. There are lots of tables, and everybody plays chess all the time. I don't think nanny [not sure which one was meant here] is very good at chess. But that doesn't matter in heaven. And there is a dog house next to heaven, and you know that dog that Gigi and Grandpa [my parents] had? He's in there.
ME: That's nice.
LILY: Daddy?
ME: Yes?
LILY: You know I'm scared of flies?
ME: [Since it's true] Yes?
LILY: Why am I scared of flies?
ME: I don't know. Flies can't hurt us, you know.
LILY: They lay eggs in food and water and the eggs become maggots.
ME: They don't lay eggs in water.
LILY: But they lay eggs in the rubbish bin. I wish we didn't have to have a rubbish bin.
ME: But then we wouldn't have anywhere to put our rubbish.
LILY: I don't know why I'm scared of flies. I mean, I know they're lovely.
ME: Lovely may overstate it.
LILY: But they're animals, like other animals. But I'm not brave.
ME: Yes you are!
LILY: No, God gives everybody something they're good at, and I'm not good at being brave.
ME: What are you good at?
LILY: I'm good at being funny. So if I say something to somebody at school and it makes them sad, like "you're silly!" and I see they're sad, then I will say something funny instead like, "oh no! I meant I'm silly!" until they laugh.

Tanabata

2008-07-07T04:25:00.001-07:00

I'd find it hard, were I Japanese, not to leap out of bed this morning, throw my arms wide and go: 'ta-na!' But a busy few weeks it's been, and no mistake; weeks that have included my birthday, a stint being filmed lurking at Richmond Lock by the Discovery Channel talking about subterraneaniana, more specifically Voyage au centre de la Terre and Bulwer-Lytton's daft but weirdly influential The Coming Race; and watching the series-finale of Dr Who with Rach and Lily. (At the moment when the second iteration of the Doctor was generated, naked, from his own severed hand, my six-year old daughter sang out: 'oh no! we'll be able to see his peeenis!' Of course we couldn't.) All very exciting. Then there was this discussion of Swiftly, which is fascinating. Perhaps wrongly, I found much of what was said strangely gratifying (eg. Duncan Lawie in the comments: "Roberts books are by turns fascinating and infuriating" ... thank you!). I'm finding it hard, though, not to let the points raised inflect the process by which I work through my final revision of Yellow Blue Tibia: if intelligent critics (and all four of those who engaged in the Torque Control discussion are unusually intelligent critics) comment on my work, I feel it behooves me to take what they say seriously. Then I wrote a 2000-word article on L. Ron Hubbard for this project, and the end of term has given me the time to add a few things to this project (I like the 26 June entry particularly, I must say). All fun.

Icelandic National Day

2008-06-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Icelandic, but not Swedish national day. I'm just back from a three-day stint in Sweden as one of the guests of honour at Swecon. Had a splendid time: Cory Doctorow (the other GOH) being a fine and dandy fellow, and Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian SF Fans (who were in attendance) lovely to a man/woman. Some genuinely interesting discussions happened. A shame my visit coincided with Sweden losing 2-1 to Spain in Euro2008, but you can't have everything.

Blessed Meriadec

2008-06-07T10:17:00.001-07:00

Took Lily to see Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull: a big-old perspex skull, and a fairly boneheaded movie overall, of course, but it passed the time. More entertaining than the fillum, for myself at least if not for the others in the cinema in our immediate vicinity, was Lily's habit of speaking in a clear, penetrating voice, either to ask questions ('who's that?' 'how do they get the skulls to be long?', 'why is she doing that, daddy?'), pass comment ('that is like Scooby Doo, except that Scooby Doo isn't so yucky'; of the door to the alien inner sanctum: 'I think that looks like a crab. Don't you think think that looks like a crab daddy? Don't you daddy? A crab daddy' and so on) and towards the end to call out, loud and strong, 'Daddy can we pause it please? I need to go to the toilet.' When I explained that one cannot pause the cinema, she said 'oh.'

As for the film, meh hardly seems enough by way of reaction. Me-ee-eh, perhaps. The main problem, I thought, was that it assumed our affection for the characters and the whole film; it didn't earn that affection, the way the first and third movies did. We were just supposed to think that Indiana Jones was automatically marvellous as soon as he popped up, although he comes over in this installment as frankly charmless, not to say reactionary (growling 'I like Ike' and so on). It is a film that believes it is enough simply to put before our eyes a character from one of the previous Indiana Jones films (or, in two cases, photographs of characters from previous Indiana Jones films) for us to melt in ecstasy. It also suffers from the Pirates of the Caribbean syndrome: stringing loosely together a number of (admittedly efficiently mounted) action set-pieces--graveyard fight, car-chase along cliff edge etc--and doing nothing more than this. There was not only no overall logic or coherence to the plot, there was no shape or filmic trajectory of any kind. Characters swapped allegience willy-nilly; exposition happened in brief illogical bursts as if nobody could really be bothered with it ... the mystery hinged not once but twice on simply redefining key terms of the mystic prophecy: 'when the prophesy spoke of his birthplace we must remember than the Mayan word for birthplace actually means grave!' Say what? 'The prophesy promised gold, and there isn't any gold, but we must remember that the Mayan word for gold actually means wisdom and advanced technical knowledge'. No it doesn't! Shut up, already!

Now, spoilers. The Soviets go to great lengths to retrieve the body of an alien from Area 51. Why do they do this? They already have several from their own crash sites. Then, when the body is briefly displayed there's a slit at the back of the head, indicating the skull has already been removed. What? Why? The skull is enormously powerful, and the body is useless without it; so does that mean that contemporary UFOs (such as crashed at Roswell) are piloted by a wholly boneless breed of ET, engineered thuswises by the aliens to obviate the danger of us obtaining their ossi? Are they not bothered about the many other skulls lying around South America? Anyway, having the body but not the skull, they have no choice but to get Jones (why?) to go to South America and find the skull archaeologically.

The backstory, if I reconstruct it correctly from having seen the fulm, is that a Conquistador discovered the thirteen alien skeletons inside the Mayan pyramid. How he got in (since you need a crystal skull as a key to open the chamber) isn't clear. Once inside, though, he grabbed one skull. Nothing more, just the one skull; and away he went. Then, on the way back through the jungle, he died, and the skull was sort of stuffed underneath his mummified corpse--by whom we know not--like pyjamas under a pillow. There it lay, this fantastically valuable artefact, where nobody noticed it for many centuries. Then John Hurt discovers the skull and removes it. Then the skull drives him mad. Then he puts it back under the mummy. Then Indie pulls it ought from under the mummy and carries it (and John Hurt) to the Mayan pyramid. When the skull is reconnected with its crysyal spine, the aliens all come to life, thirteen crystal skeletons morphing into one fleshly ET, and the Mayan pyramid turns into a giant spaceship and flies away. So, it was just waiting for the skull to be returned, was it? In which case. why didn't it fly away before the Conquistador stole the original skull? Were the ETs good, or bad? What on earth was going on?

On the plus side: I enjoyed the very brief cameo from Jim from Neighbours, barely even trying to disguise his ozzie accent; and also the cameo from Janitor from Scrubs. J-men cameos went some way to redeeming the film.

Sophie Roberts' birthday and Feast of Vladimirskaya

2008-06-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

Last week, school half-term, was spent in a rented cottage in Devon with my family, in the sense of (a) my wife and our two children, and (b) my two sisters and their husbands and children. Six adults, seven children aged between some months and ten years. Fun, if tiring. But from now on, I realise, work will be relatively relaxing compared to the sheer exhaustion of holidays; that's what having kids means. At one point my youngest sister said, in the voice of Yoda: 'unlearn the scrotum feeling.' Don't ask me to explain it, because I cannae.

In other news: today my editor and friend Simon Spanton addressed third year creative writing students at Royal Holloway, University of London. He gave them the key. The key, I tell you. Now they have all the answers.

141st Day of the Year

2008-05-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

I have just this minute done the final spellcheck on the now-completed third draft of Yellow Blue Tibia. It's in a state, I think, to send off to my editor, to see whether he likes either (a) it, or (b) the cut of its jib, or (c) both. Of course there's the chance that he'll like (d) neither. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

It's a strangely melancholy business, I find, finishing writing a book. There's a sense, almost, of something having died. Perhaps its the Platonic ideal version of the book, the one a writer holds in her/his head prior to actually getting down to it, that has passed away; gobbled up, like the fat cattle being devoured by the lean in Joseph's Dream, by the actuality of what is embodied on the page. On the other hand, I suppose it's permissable for a writer to hope that this death is actually the lean cattle being devoured by the fat; in which case I should probably mourn less. (Ach, those poor lean cattle! Still, look at this big healthy boojummy cow that has taken its place!) Another possibility is that what I mourn is simply the process of writing itself, always the most enjoyable part of the whole process for me. But that's just foolish; even assuming (a), (b) or (c) above, there will be plenty more writing to do, in reaction to editorial suggestion, rewriting, polishing, copy-editing and such.

The book, now that I have finished, turns out to be (i) thriller-y, (ii) science fiction, (iii) about science fiction and (iv) about science fiction writers, who, in my textiverse, possess unique talents. It's also about Communism. That's kind-of implicit in (ii), (iii) and (iv) there, I'd say.

In other news: I cooked an admittedly homely, pastaesque meal for my wife a couple of nights ago and as she sat down to enjoy it, with a warm smile upon her face, she said: 'this looks like something the Twits might eat.' Praise indeed.

Radio Day in Russia

2008-05-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Survey, via.

TECHNOLOGY
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
Fairies and flowers.

Q. How many televisions do you have in your house?
Two.

BIOLOGY
Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed?
Right for everything except handling a knife-and-fork.

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
No.

Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted?
Exercise weights.

Q. Have you ever been knocked out?
Never.

BULL*OLOGY
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
Just the day? Not sure that narrows it down enough. After all I already know in which century I shall die, and can have a pretty good guess of which decade.

Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to?
I'd put in more, or even more, Rs.

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
Blue, sadly.

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item?
Yes.

DAREOLOGY
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
Dollars aren't much use to me what with the current exchange-rate, I'm afraid.

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
No.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000
Are you kidding? I'd pay that money for a cure of the blog-bug, to free me from this laborious activity so I can spend my time more productively.

Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000?
Well, yes.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1000?
Can I have a beer afterwards? Or a glass of milk?

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
No. Besides, the idiom is wrong here. If I take a person's wallet, then I have their wallet. If I 'take' their life I have nothing, and the world has less than nothing. 'Lose' a life, would be better.

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket?
Nowt.

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
It's a good movie, but it's not actually a good movie. I'm a serious Elvis Costello fan, and I'm ambivalent at what they did with the name.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
Both, in different parts of the house.

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
I stand. I believe you stand as well.

Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own?
I do not own a pair of flip flops.

LASTOLOGY
Q: Last person who texted you?
I don't own a mobile phone. Hurrah, shout it from the rooftops!

Q: Last person who called you?
My sister. On the LANDLINE, HURRAH!

Q: Last person you hugged?
My wife, before she went off to work this morning.

FAVORITOLOGY
Q: Number?
7. I take a Renaissance view of this matter.

Q: Season?
Summer.

Q: Color?
My favourite would be the spelling 'colour', with the u in it as nature intended.

CURRENTOLOGY
Q: Missing someone?
No.

Q: Mood?
Pretty good today, actually. Thank you for asking.

Q: Listening to?
Kate Bush, The Dreaming and Moby Grape this afternoon. I'm about to cue-up Squarepusher on my mp3-player right now, actually.

Q: Watching?
Telly is rather underwhelming at the mo. Though I'd prefer not to miss the next episode of Lost.

Q: Worrying about?
Writing.

Q: Wearing?
Trousers, a short-sleeved shirt with a monkey on it.

RANDOMOLOGY
Q: First place you went this morning?
Kitchen, kettle: tea-makng at half past five. I know! Half past five in the morning! Babies won't be reasoned with, or persuaded.

Q: What can you not wait to do?
Be patient.

Q: Do you smile often?
I do smile sometimes, yes. Why do you want to know?

Q: Are you a friendly person?
As friendly as an Englishman can ever be, I suppose.

May Day

2008-05-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

Spring. Mmh.

Last night I was at the 08 Clarke Awards to watch an evidently chuffed Richard Morgan win for Black Man. Afterwards to a very pleasant Chinatown restaurant to sit at a table with (careful now), if you'll excuse me the name dropping (down with that sort of thing): Joe Abercrombie, Roger Levy, Harry Harrison, Paul McAuley, Geoff Ryman, Chris Wooding, Vole Pogrom, Morgan himself, Steve Baxter and others. Excellent chat. Paul gave us a head's-up on the Iron Man movie, which he has already seen, and ran through his 'man of a thousand voices' portfolio of regional accents, which was terribly impressive. Steve put a brave face on the double whammy of not winning the Clarke, yet again, and Liverpool losing to Chelsea 3-2 (4-3 on aggregate). His brave face, luckily, is a fine face. Personally I'm toying with the idea of starting a petition to have Baxter given an honorary Clarke. If seven nominations is not enough to earn this, then I don't know what is.

In other news: I gave Roger Levy a tiny pair of trousers, and Joe Abercrombie was apparently also at the table, although since I'm not exactly sure what he looks like, or indeed who he is, I can't vouch for this absolutely.

Earth Day

2008-04-22T12:17:00.001-07:00

[Cuddling Lily] She: 'Your neck smells of ... beef. And sugar.'

Zimbabwe Independence Day

2008-04-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

[This evening's episode of 'Lilies say the funniest things!!' is, for reasons of scheduling, and for one night only, being replaced with 'Sometimes Lilies say the most nightmare-provoking things']

Lily at the dinner table: 'Captain Hook has an ulcer on the middle of the end of his tongue. And he poohs screaming poohs.'

'Do you mean,' I replied, in a slow, slightly stunned voice, as I tried to get my head around the image of turds with tiny, open, screaming mouths, 'that his poohs scream out loud?'

'Yep,' she said.

[And to resume normal service] Earlier this same evening, in the bath, I told Lily she had to wash her hair. 'I dwanna wash my hair. ' 'I daresay you don't, but you have to; it hasn't been washed in days and it needs it.' 'Dwanna.' So I dipped a plastic cup we keep handy for this very purpose in the bathwater and poured it over her hair to wet it prior to rubbing in the shampoo. Whereupon she snapped her head round to face me and hissed: 'how dare you?' A surprisingly effective rhetorical tactic, actually.

Fast of the Firstborn

2008-04-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

No fasting from my firstborn: good healthy appetite. We're all back from an environment-befriending mini-break in Bournemouth: three days, very nice. I had my diary all confused in my head, and accordingly have missed a couple of crucial appointments. Bleh. I ought, probably, to keep my diary someplace other than in my head, I know.

Hanamatsuri

2008-04-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

Earlier today:

ME: What do you want for supper, Lily?
SHE: Baboon. [The final syllable here is elongated prodigiously]
ME: What?
SHE: [Straightforwardly] Baboon and soup.
ME: You know what a baboon is, right?
SHE: [Quasi-teenage 'what, are you a moron?' inflection] Yeah.
ME: So how do you want your baboon cooked. Roasted?
SHE: [Horrified] No! Of course not!
ME: Then how would madam like her baboon cooked?
SHE: With a egg on top.

'A egg', like that; not 'an egg.' She was watching Mary Poppins at the time, so obviously baboons were on her mind. She ended up having tomato soup, bread and butter.

Feast Day of Rupert of Salzburg

2008-03-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

Saltburgh. Its Saltburgher inhabitants. Marx and Engels' critique of the saltbourgeoisie. There's a whole, intriguing salt-narrative to be spun from this place. Somebody should write that.

Meanwhile I'm within spitting distance of completing a draft of Yellow Blue Tibia. It's a difficult time for a writer, actually. Spectres leer at you from the edge of your vision whispering that the whole book was ill-conceived in the first place, has been poorly executed and will never work no matter how hard you labour at it. Echoes from possible future reviews crush the spirit. It's partly a function of exhaustion, I know, but I'm getting the sense that most of the middle bit doesn't work. Of course a first or second draft of something often won't work in general terms, and will certainly contain many elements that definitely don't work in specific ways. Redrafting is always needful, and it's possible that I'm only looking at a bit of healthy revision. But it may be that I need to rip the whole middle bit out and rethink from scratch, which would be more time-consuming.

Ramble, ramble. [Friday update: Thursday 'I'm within spitting distance of completing a draft of Yellow Blue Tibia' eh? This morning I started spitting at 8am and by noon I'd spat. The draft. She is ... is done. I'll leave it for a bit and then start spitting again.]

43rd anniversary of Alexey Leonov's first space walk

2008-03-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Back from Paris, where I spent a very pleasant weekend with the people at Bragelonne (La Bragelonne Team, they call themselves, which looks rather franglaisy to me), and chatting nicely with such eminences as James Lovegrove, Raymond E. Feist, Henri Lœvenbruck and Graham Masterton, in between signing copies and doing interviews; all in this elegant shed. Lovely food, and excellent wine too. If only I spoke French, I'd have had an even pleasanter time.

Douglas Adams's Birthday

2008-03-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

Into the second week of jury service now: I've been sitting on a rather emotionally gruelling trial, the details of which, of course, the law specifically prohibits me from discussing. Emotionally gruelling for us jurors; I can't imagine what it's like for the people actually involved in it. What I've discovered is that sitting in a courtroom all day listening to evidence and cross-examination, or sitting in the jury room going round and round the evidence with fellow jurers, is really tiring. Pretty much every evening so far I've come home and fallen asleep for half an hour; it's something to do with the levels of stress. Or the fact that I'm really old. Or a lightweight.

In other news: I'm off to Paris next weekend to hang out at the Paris Book Fair, and the Saturday after (by when jury service will be, I trust, well and truly over) I'll be at Eastercon 2008 for the day. And finally, as part of my plan to turn this blog into my own private version of Kids Say The Funniest Things ... from Lily yesterday. Out of the blue she asked: 'Daddy, you know you have two balls?' (She is fascinated by testicles at the moment, and has been particularly since Danny was born; we have explained to her what they do, and why girls don't have them). 'Ye-e-es,' I replied, uncertain where this was leading. 'Well, what happens if you want to have three children?' Then she added at once, as the thought popped into her head: 'like, how did Sophie and Brian [my sister and brother-in-law] get three children?' This was my opportunity to explain to her that testicles are not conker-like seeds that you detach from your body in order to grow a child, however attractive that idea might be. To set her right in her thinking. So naturally I said: 'they borrowed a ball from one of Brian's friends, I think.'

Finally: Washington Square is a much better novel (by which I mean, a much more interesting novel) than I realised when I last read it, as an undergraduate.

Hinamatsuri

2008-03-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

Lily's antiepileptic hasn't been controlling her seizures very well, so we're trying a new one: reducing the dose of the old medicine as we increase the dose of the new until the old is entirely out of her system and the new has been phased in. But she really doesn't like the taste of the new medicine. 'Dad,' she told me a few evenings ago, 'this is the worst thing I have ever tasted. And,' she added, after a dramatic pause, 'I have eaten ground.'

Seems she and a friend had dared one another to eat some soil, and that had been her previous benchmark for unpleasantness of taste.

5th Anniversary of Blanchot's Death

2008-02-19T23:50:00.000-08:00

There is, literally, a pram in my hall. Rach took both kids into London yesterday for a visit to the aquarium, and on returning she left the pram just inside the front door. On the other hand, I was pleased to read in J G Ballard's autobiography that he credits his entire writing career to the pram (three prams, for him) in his hall.

Saint Scholastica

2008-02-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

The two of us having finished reading Lily's latest bedtime story (The Land of Green Ginger, since you ask) we were discussing what to read aloud next. 'You might like Alice in Wonderland,' I said. 'I've seen the film,' she replied, in a dismissive tone of voice. 'The book is very different to the film,' I countered, 'and has some lovely pictures too. Or there's the other Alice, Through the Looking Glass.' 'Alice and the Three Lucky Lads?' she asked. 'What's that about?'

Brian Greene's 44th birthday

2008-02-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

That's Brian Greene with a terminal e, the American physicist, and no other person of that name. He knows how to relate the conifold to one of its orbifolds. He also understands the flop transition, which is more than I do. And I write science fiction.

Australia Day

2008-01-26T02:31:00.000-08:00

I daresay you think that image was taken in extreme close-up. But not in the slightest. Daniel's head, in comparison with the circular occasional table and the far wall, really is that enormous. Brobdingnagiana!

Now: excavate a deep hole in the metaphorical back-garden of your life, gather the mass of your time in a large container, and then pour it all into the deep hole. That's what having a small child is. Of course it has very many consolations, but long refreshing sleep and lots of time to do what you please are, neither of them, amongst them. Lovely lad.

Otherwise, work is strenuous; writerly commitments are pressing; and I have been called to do Jury Service from the 3rd March, chiz., which, whilst I'm happy to acquit myself of my civic duty, is a pain in the neck at the moment.

Festival in Honour of Pax, Roman Empire

2008-01-03T04:00:00.001-08:00

Spent Christmas at home; New Year in York with family. Exhausted but happy. Whole new year to look forward to, now. There's Daniel, sketched shortly after his appointment with the mohel--an experience which I'd say I found considerably more stressful than he did. There was almost no bleeding, he fed happily five minutes after, fell asleep (see above) a quarter of an hour later, and had healed up entirely within a couple of days. (Well, not entirely ... that would rather defeat the purpose of the exercise...)

Daniel's birthday

2007-12-21T14:57:00.001-08:00

Born to my wife at 5:40pm today (after a fourteen-hour labour) Daniel Charles Roberts; my son. Eight pounds seven ounces; quite a lot of dark hair, very dark blue eyes, and altogether an extraordinarily beautiful child. When the little creature was placed on Rachel's chest I cried. And I never cry.

St Adelaide's Day

2007-12-16T05:11:00.000-08:00

As of midday today the baby has still not emerged. But he'll be out any day now, I'm sure; and while we're waiting here's a sketch of Santa 'Hohoho' Fishmouth and his favourite reindeer to maintain the Christmas mood. He's beardless. That's the modern way. But look! He has a present in his hand! It's for you ...