archives

September 2003

September 28th, 2003. Things I Have Learned This Weekend

The things I have learned this weekend include:

The town is filling up with students again, and with this year's batch of freshers. The bus into town stopped outside 38 South Clerk St - where me and Ben both lived at different times, in our university days - and we could see them moving into the first-floor bedrooms. The pillars in front of the door were tied with balloons.

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September 24th, 2003. Think of the children!

Latest News: Microsoft to shut down Internet

Seattle-based Microsoft Corporation has announced that it will be shutting down the internet, due to intolerable levels of abuse.

"When our Great Helmsman invented the Internet at the age of seven," said a company spokesman, "he invented it for one purpose: to make him the richest person in human history. Sadly, too many people nowadays are abusing the purity of his vision by using Internet features for free. Shutting it down is the only way forward."

"Using the Internet without giving money to Microsoft is very dangerous to your children," the statement continued, "because if you do, we will have them all shot. Giving us more money is also the only way to protect your computer from bugs and viruses, and will mean we can afford to create high-quality software." When asked why they couldn't just write good software to start with, the spokesman refused to comment.

"The Internet will shortly become unnecessary," the spokesman said, "as we are due to release Microsoft (TM) Religion XP (TM), enabling our customers to show their support for their family by pledging every last penny to us, in return for the right to worship Bill as a living god. Giving the Dear Leader more money is the only way to prevent Internet abuse! Do it for the children! People who don't pay up must all be paedos too!"

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September 22nd, 2003. Maybe they were just studying the grass closely

At the weekend I visited a pub just round the corner from my flat, and was quite surprised to find it occupied by an entire subculture of people who have (like me) moved from Lincolnshire to Edinburgh. I told them that one friend of mine moved the other way, from Glasgow to Louth, and was met with raised eyebrows and shocked faces.

On the way home from the pub, someone suggested we should walk across the middle of the Meadows, rather than following the paths. "I was walking across the Meadows at night," said Guy, "and saw this shape that looked like a bench. Then, it started moving! Then, part of the bench started getting dressed." Five minutes later, of course, we almost tripped over a couple on the ground in the darkest part of the park.

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September 20th, 2003. Open The Box!

Or: The Panacea Society, Part 2. (part 1 is here)

The Panaceans are rich, and always have been. From the start, the attracted well-off, middle class followers, and as time went on they built up a pot of bequests which was invested in Bedford property. Their wealth also helped them acquire various relics and possessions of Joanna Southcott. Their holiest relic is one of the possessions she left behind: her Box.

Joanna Southcott's Box is, it seems, the inverse of Pandora's. She left strict instructions for the box's opening, which must occur in the presence of 24 (I think) Anglican bishops. Octavia (the founder of the Panaceans, if you'd forgotten) extended these rules, making them complex and strenuous: the full Panacean box-opening ceremony will, if it ever happens, take several days. Once the box is open, though, all the world's ills will be cured, problems solved, suffering ended. And so on.

When they first started, the Panaceans put a lot of effort into telling people about the box, and the wonderful effect opening it would have on the world. They put adverts in newspapers, and put up posters everywhere. The Box seeped into the national consciousness; it even appears in a Monty Python sketch. The Church of England, though, didn't seem impressed. The Panaceans maintained a guest house specially for 24 bishops to come and stay in, but they never arrived. Eventually, the Society gave up its advertising campaign, but they still live in hope that the box will be opened one day. Nowadays, they make do with writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury every year or so. He doesn't seem particularly interested in it.

Of course, the Panaceans might not have the box at all. In the 1940s, a magician called (I think) Harry Price claimed that he had the real Joanna Southcott's Box. He opened it, in Hastings, with a couple of bishops who presumably were feeling a bit bored that day. It contained lots of little bent-wire puzzles, which is entirely plausible: Southcott liked to give puzzles like those to her followers. The Society say his box was a fake, of course, and that they have the really real box in a secret hiding place. In any case, the Opening won't have any effect if you're 22 bishops short, and omit all the extra ritual that Octavia insisted on.

Next time: we finally get round to the Society's holy water which will cure anything. Stay tuned for prayer, pinking shears and eternal life!

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September 19th, 2003. Arrr, me hearties!

Ahoy there! It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

We've been trying to think of the rules for a pirate-themed party. This is what we came up with:


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September 17th, 2003. *cough*

The cough is getting better, but it's still lurking. I've been comparing cough mixtures: swapping the treacle mixture (Veno's for Dry Coughs, if you're really bothered) for Benylin. I was pleased to see that Benylin has an alcoholic strength of about 5% - mine's a pint, then.

I'm still working on the next Panacean article - this isn't going to be one of those two-part things where I never finish the second one, I promise. It will be coming.

There's lots of other things I want to say, but they're all just half-formed thoughts at the moment. Sometime I might try putting them all into words.

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September 14th, 2003. Ultimate Cure

Bleurgh. I feel ill. Not ill enough to curl up in bed asking for sympathy, but ill enough to feel bleurgh. Ill enough to have to pause everything after five minutes for a coughing fit. I went out and bought cough mixture, and was pleased to find it tasted of licorice. I read the label, and realised that this was because it consisted solely of dilute treacle. "What I need," I thought to myself, "is a panacea."

Which reminds me: I keep meaning to talk a little more about the Middle England cult, the Panacea Society. Mentioning them the other month brought in lots of search-hits, and they don't seem to have much of a web-presence themselves; so I may as well tell you a little more about them.

The Panaceans revere a very English prophet, Joanna Southcott. Much beloved by the Georgian newspapers, she wrote books and books of prophecies that she received by automatic writing. Building up many followers, she eventually announced that she was pregnant, and that the child would be the new Messiah. As she was a virgin in her 60s, this seemed a little unlikely, but various eminant doctors confirmed her gravid state. Clearly, the birth would be miraculous.

As the pregnancy took well over nine months, public opinion became polarised. Doctors started to reverse their diagnoses. Eventually she announced she was going into labour, and promptly died. Her followers were prepared for this, though, and expected her to rise again after three days - a little unoriginal, you might think. When the body started to get a bit smelly, though, they agreed to an autopsy. It showed absolutely no sign that she had ever been pregnant.

To the Panaceans, though, it's very clear what actually happened. Southcott did give birth, to a spirit child. This spirit was not incarnated for several decades; when it was - and when she discovered her true Messianic identity - she changed her name from Mabel to Octavia and founded the Panacean Society.

Octavia quickly identified the site of the original Eden: Bedfordshire. Like Southcott, she wrote many books of prophecy, which also show that Bedfordshire will be the only place to survive the forthcoming apocalypse. She ensured its safety by travelling round the county, burying squares of holy linen at a 12-mile radius around Bedford. When the apocalypse happens, Jesus will return to earth, and live happily forever after in a nice Bedford semi that the Society have bought and redecorated specially.

I'm going to leave them here for now, but there's more to come: immortality, space travel, more holy linen, Monty Python, and the panacea itself. Right now, I'm going to go home, glug more treacle and have a nap.

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September 11th, 2003. Eppur si muove

I started off drafting a long, serious post for today. All that remains of it, more or less, is the title. Everything else I could say has no doubt been said better by other people, elsewhere. In summary: in the past two years, people have started wars. Thousands of people have died in them. Thousands of people have died in accidents, killed by cars or by natural disasters. Have as many remembrances as you like; but never forget that nonetheless the world moves on.

On a different note, things are a bit tense at the Tat Emporium at the moment. Our New Employee, T, started a few days ago. We're supposedly in parallel jobs, but he has many, many more qualifications than me - given that my main qualifications are in precision hole-digging, that's not too hard. I get along with T personally with no problem; but I feel awfully paranoid when The Boss and The Marketing Guru are always trying to bring him into every conversation, and listening more to what he says about everything. Maybe they're just trying to make him feel part of the team.

Anyway, at a meeting we've just had The Boss seemed to think I was throwing up objections to everything. Every time I said anything which wasn't a hundred percent in agreement with him, it was an objection. My card has been marked as 'not a team player'; after the meeting, he took me to one side and said I have to think about the way I'm behaving. And, of course, we have to have another buzz-word-filled meeting tomorrow afternoon where I have to say: "I'm sorry; you're right about everything; I need to Change My Ways," and so on. The fact that I don't agree with everything in meetings is a Mission-Critical Problem, you see.

Why can't everything be great at once? As soon as there's blue sky on one horizon, there's a nasty dark cloud on the other. My only comfort, I suppose, is that the world's always moving.

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September 8th, 2003. Little things that crop up in conversation (in other words, a diary entry)

I've seen a few trailers, now, for a new TV series called QI which starts this week, featuring Alan Davies. I couldn't help thinking: does he now only do shows where the music is by Camille Saint-Saëns? The QI trailers have 'Fossils' from Carnival of the Animals; the theme from Jonathan Creek is Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre. I'm sure there must be a pattern emerging.

I mentioned this at the pub last night, in between all the other rubbish we were talking about as usual. "I wonder what comes up," said Iain, "if I type 'gravy porn' into a search engine?" "I'll mention that on my blog," I answered, "so I will!" Iain, for some reason, is a magnet for drunk women wearing hats. They flock to him. Their eyes follow him around the room like homing aerials.

Later, when the pub was closing, we went to Opium. Opium is cheap. That's probably the only good thing you can say about it. The music is the type that makes my ears bleed at normal volumes, played very loudly. On the other hand, it is cheap. And, as it happened, it turned out to be a very good night. Even with bleeding ears.

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September 6th, 2003. Stone circles: a personal opinion

Since it appeared, I've been meaning to write about this news story: Manchester University archaeologists have discovered yet another stone circle at Callanish (or Calanais, if you prefer the Gaelic spelling) on Lewis.

Discovering a new stone circle at Callanish isn't that surprising, to be honest; it's like discovering more archaeology near Stonehenge. There are already about five or six known stone circles in the area, and there are probably more to be discovered. When the stones were erected, the Callanish area was farmland; since then most of the area has been covered in two or three metres of peat. Even the main circle was partly engulfed by bog. It was dug out about 150 years ago, but if you look carefully today you can still make out the tide-line on the stones where the 19th-century ground level was. Additionally, sea level has risen a metre or two since the Neolithic; it would be surprising if there weren't more stone circles at Callanish which have either been washed into the sea, buried by peat, or just pulled down so the stone could be re-used.

For me, though, the interesting part of the story is the idea that the stones were quarried. They're clearly made of local stone, and might even have been carved slightly; but generally they would have been a nightmare to carve, let alone quarry. The stone they're made of is called Lewissian Gneiss, and it's one of the least carvable stones you can think of. If you want to dig through gneiss, the way to do it is: 1) get lots of dynamite 2) duck, because when it blows there's no way to guess which way the bits will fall. It's very, very hard and it doesn't fracture nicely. If you try to carve it with steel, the steel wears away before the stone does.

Because of this, there isn't much carved stone in the Western Isles; not local stone, at any rate. There's a carved standing stone at an extra-holy spot on Taransay, but that's an exception. Buildings are made from natural boulders. Gravestones were just uncarved marker slabs, until people could afford to import nice chunks of sandstone. Neolithic field walls, built at roughly the same time as the stone circles, were built with whatever stones were at hand, ranging from pebbles to boulders.

I'm wondering what evidence there is for these stones being found in a quarry. How were these people quarrying? What tools did they use? There's an ancient quarry marked on the OS map about a mile east of the main stone circle - is that the site we're talking about? Why is that site described as a quarry? (Actually, information about that will be on the RCAHMS website; but I'm too lazy to look for it myself right now.)

Update, October 11th

I've just put some new photos online, and a couple of them were specially chosen to illustrate this post. Both were taken in the summer of 1999, whilst I was researching my MA dissertation.

Callanish I

This is Callanish I, the best-known of the stone circles, and the largest megalithic complex in Scotland. As it's at dusk, and from a low level, it doesn't show you much of the layout of the circle and avenue, or the texture and colour of the stones. It looks nice, though.

Cross-Slab, Taransay

This is the carved cross-slab standing stone on Taransay mentioned above. It's located at one end of a raised mound which is some kind of ruined building, and traditionally was believed to be a very early monastic chapel. If it was a chapel, and it was laid out like a typical church, the slab would have been standing right in front of the doorway; but the only way to prove or disprove the ruin's origins would be by excavation. Before taking the photo, I rubbed grass into the carving so that it would show up better on the photographs - without that, the carving is very hard to see unless lit at just the right angle. The ruined building is the raised ground immediately behind the stone.

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September 3rd, 2003. Whatever did I do without you?

Finally, after many, many months, I have a computer at home again. Woohoo!

Of course, all I have to do now is work out how to get the phone reconnected. I've not had any solicitor's letters from BT for a while now, so I'm assuming it shouldn't be too difficult.

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September 1st, 2003. Flyer Watch (part two)

Yes, more of them...

Right, it's September now, and the Festivals are definitely over. Next year, though, I've had an idea. A fake show! I'll hand out flyers for a non-existent show of some kind, at a non-existent venue, in a non-existent street. If anyone asks, I'll say that the handing-out of flyers is a valid piece of performance in itself. Really, though, it'll just be me having fun.

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