To blog or not to blog

And now, in ‘Other News’….

Seasonal News:

Life moves on with relentless repetition and I have little to report beyond a few observations. Advent is upon us. It used to be that Advent heralded the start of Christmas planning, but we have been bombarded with festive TV ads since the end of summer.  Maybe it is no coincidence that Advert and Advent are but a pen stroke away from each other.  I saw a billboard yesterday which insisted I should “Get him what every man wants this Christmas: A DeWALT power stripper”.  I presume this to be some sort of erotic performer who comes with her own batteries. Can you really Power Strip? Is it the exact opposite of Power Dressing? I didn’t realise I wanted one, but apparently I do, if the advert is to be believed. I don’t know where we’d keep her. Do they need feeding? And what if both David and I get one each this year? We don’t have the bedrooms. Please don’t get me one for Christmas – I really couldn’t cope with the lingerie.

In our Gardening Section:

We’ve been tackling a few outdoorsy jobs over the last few weeks, tidying and making plans for next year.  We have had some of the lawn dug up to give us a bit more viable growing land for veg. It needs to be left now over the winter to allow the frosts and rain to break down the soil a bit more,  although I am fighting the temptation to put in a few things now – Garlic can be planted to over-winter – but I shall listen to advice and leave the plot alone for now.

The spring bulbs I planted in tubs are all way too ahead of themselves – yesterday I added a layer of peat to try to protect them from the forecast frosts, but they seem to have shot too soon – which is always a problem!

We’ve cleared and tidied the shed. How much rubbish had we accumulated? Anything remotely physical is still really hard work for me and takes ages to do, but over the course of two days moving things round like one of those sliding-tile puzzles, it now at least has a semblance of order.  I hate having to rely on other people to help with jobs I used to take in my stride, but David is a good lifter, shifter and general pack mule.  Of course, any such job just throws up a list of other chores that need to be tackled and this one certainly delivered on that promise. So, in true “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” style I can now report that following the discovery of a noticeable dribble, we eventually got felt up on the shed roof! Well, not strictly roofing felt, rather a rubber membrane to keep out the rain, but that doesn’t sound as rude.  Or maybe it does? We grappled with some rubber to protect our tools? We took protection to keep our dibbers dry?

I’ve sprayed the paths too – to clear some moss and get rid of a slight build up of algae – the last thing I need to do is fall on a slippery path, so hopefully this treatment will work. Failing that I could crush up, dissolve and spray some of the hundreds of left-over pills I have in a cupboard upstairs – they seem to kill pretty much any and every possible lifeform so I’m well equipped for biological warfare, albeit more of the Kim and Aggy variety than the International Terrorist model. Maybe I should just use a squirt of lemon juice and vinegar, which seem to be their standard arsenal against all things slimy.

Health and Medicine:

Speaking of biological warfare, I’m due my Swine Flu jab today, after what seems like a ceaseless battle with my GP’s surgery. They really have no idea how to organise themselves. They didn’t even have me on their list, even though I qualify on at least four different grounds. I didn’t have the right flag apparently. I didn’t know I was supposed to carry one. They have had the vaccine for a fortnight but couldn’t work out how to go about distributing it. Hopeless. Every other surgery in the country seems to have managed. Even the concept of inebriation in an ale house is beyond them, let alone the ability to arrange the metaphorical gathering. They don’t know their acne from their eczema, their aphasia from their epilepsy and indeed, quite probably, their arse from their elbow. If I went in complaining that I had acute angina they would probably call a gynaecologist!  I go there every time with the lowest possible expectations, which they consistently fail to meet.  All they have to do is stick a needle in my arm. Am I hoping for too much? If I don’t blog again for a few days you’ll know they messed up and injected me with Domestos or some such delight. They probably have the most swine flue-resistant nurse’s chair in the country where they have missed the patients completely!

International news:

I have to report that sadly Chinese-Woman-Over-The-Road has left, taking her unmentionables with her. You may find her Chinese Crackers coming to a bedroom window near you. The Avenue seems a somewhat duller (and essentially less ethnic) place without her daily display of dazzling dainties but I’m sure some neighbourhood will learn to love her laundry as much as I didn’t.  I have seen evidence of Extremely-Old-Chinese-Man-Who-Is-Probably-The-Landlord popping in to check post, absence of squatters and continued structural integrity.  There have been occasional Curious-Visitors-With-Clip-Boards poking around.  I’ve not taken to the look of any of them. I believe I should at least have some say in the contents of the knickers to be displayed in the window opposite our lounge; squat, fat, Chinese and female falls a long way from my preference.  It is possible to take the concept of a chink in the curtains a bit too literally!

Speaking of all things  Eastern, there was a programme on TV the other day which featured Chinese identical twins. I have to wonder, how could they tell? Don’t they all look the same any way? It’s a repetitive redundancy at least!

In our Science and Technology section:

It is good to note that the large Hairdryer at CERN has been turned on again. Not only is it working now, but it has already started to break records (as well as particles) – according to the BBC –

“The LHC pushed the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.”

Zap. Oh, it’s so butch! It is no coincidence that Hadron is an anagram of Hard On. It even has its own website – http://www.lhc.ac.uk/ which is suspiciously out of date. Maybe they haven’t bothered updating the website because they know something we don’t know…

Clearly the suggestion that the Collider was destroying itself from the future has failed to deliver on its promise though – well, not yet anyway. I was thinking about that and realised there was a basic flaw in the theory. The idea was that the LHC would create a Big Bang ‘event’ similar to the start of the Universe and in doing so would destroy our planet, so, a future version of it had come back in time to prevent the experiment ever happening. But, IF the experiment worked, then there would be no survivors to live into the future and come back to stop the explosion. If it didn’t cause ‘the end of the world as we know it’ then there would be no need for anyone to pop back and scupper the device. Non argument. Logic wins the day. I’m coming over all Vulcan!

Actually I was thinking about this time travel business a bit recently and came to a conclusion about temporal paradoxes. They only exist when there is time travel into the past. If the direction of travel is only forward then no paradox is created. It’s as soon as someone goes backwards that your head starts to hurt! Let me try to explain.  The simplest paradox is the idea that if I travel into the past and kill my grandfather, I will then not be born and won’t be able to travel into the past to kill my grandfather. But if I travel into the future, then so what? I could possibly meet an older version of myself there, but that’s OK. A bit weird maybe, but not a paradox as such. If I killed a future version of myself, well, that is just tough, and the end of his timeline – who is to say that isn’t what was meant to happen anyway?  This of course assumes that the current me stays in the future timeline. As soon as I come back again I would have the knowledge that, in the future, a me from the past would try to kill me and I could avoid being in that time and place. Which could then mean that the present me, who travels to the future, didn’t kill the future me, and maybe didn’t return to the present, so that the present me would know in the future that the past me was trying to kill me! Simples.

If I travel back in time
And kill my own grandpa
He would not have a child one day
To marry my dear Ma

They would not bear a son at all
If they were not alive
And I’d not come into this world
Time travel to contrive.

But if I travel forwards
And meet a child of mine
When he has grown much older
And seen the passing time

Then we could live quite happily
No paradox created
I’d be much older than my child
But still we’d be related.

I could kill my son one day
In the future years ahead
Who’s to say that’s not his fate
That I live when he is dead

But if I travel back again
To this time which is my present
I could tell my son of this
and make that future obsolescent

I could tell my son the date and time
That I will cause his death
And he can change his plans that day
And not breath his final breath.

But then I’d not have killed him
So could not have known about his fate
Nor travelled to this timeline
His future to relate.

So the paradox is created
Only on the backwards trip
Remember that, dear reader
If you invent your own time ship

So to all those esteemed scientists who say that time travel is impossible, I say, maybe it is possible, but only in one direction (We do that already of course – and I defy anyone to prove that we experience time at a steady rate or that each of us experiences time at the same rate as the others. It’s all relative, as Albert would tell you). And before anyone shoots me down with a barrage of quarks (that’s a Hadron reference there – cos I like gets phisiks an science stuff and everything  innit and don’t never say I doesn’t cos that’s lame an shit and anyway I got a note.) I know that Quantum Theory has a different take on things (ie at every decision point, every option is both available and taken and it is only the observation that determines the outcome). So maybe in another timeline the Hadron Collider did blow up and destroy the Universe. I didn’t see that coming. And I did.

Let me tell you the story Schroedinger’s cat
Kept in a box, all alone the pet sat
A lid on the box hid it from view
Along with the cat were some instruments too
A radioactive compound was placed by the pet
And a Geiger counter, its decay to detect.
The compound decayed at a very slow speed
An atom an hour, and thus we proceed
Attached to the counter, a can full of acid
Which does not a thing when the decay is placid
But when an atom from the substance decayed
Into the box the acid is sprayed

Because we can’t see it, and thus we can’t tell
The cat in the box could be dead or quite well
But Quantum Mechanics tells us in fact
That both possibilities exist for that cat
Because we can’t see it, both options exist
Until observation, when one choice becomes fixed
So the act of observing determines the state
And once we have seen it we have created its fate
The cat was fictitious but I’ll let YOU decide
If at the end of this poem it was dead or alive!

I’m thinking that maybe I should write to CERN though and tell them that there is a sure-fire way to ensure the safety of the planet, if they can just invent the necessary technology. Every sci-fi fan knows that all they need to do is send an inverse tachyon pulse through the main deflector array at a modified photon torpedo, creating a stream of chronoton particles that can then be slingshot around the sun, travelling back in time, with instructions of how to build a main deflector array through which to send an inverse tachyon pulse at a modified photon torpedo.  Just like that. Magic. And as Arthur C Clarke famously prescribed: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Er – does that mean that Paul Daniels and Derren Brown are from the future? Heaven help us!