Butterfly Effect

I was reflecting on one of the many butterfly effect moments today of my life today. I am on a course at the moment with other social workers and as usual we were whining. We discussed reorganisations and I remembered that in one of these reorganisations I was one of two workers in the borough given my third choice of team to go to. And thanks heavens I was.


Due to that I met my very good friends Lorraine Thompson, Emily Rouse, Becky Thompson, The boy Dave etc. But most importantly I met Angela Fletcher. I say this not to denigrate my colleagues mentioned previously. But Angela introduced me to Phoenix Theatre Company. 


Without Angela I would not know the redoubtable Michael, Emma and Sean, the elfish sprites Hannah and Jodie  and the truly, truly unique Jessica Hackett (if you've never met her your life thus far has been but a rehearsal). I would probably never have wrote Sleeping Beauty as I would have had no-one to write it for. 


And the thing is I would not have really felt the poorer because I would never have known. I would have walked past them in the street having no idea that I was missing out on some of the best people in the world. I don't grieve now for the people I never met or the paths my life would have taken if I had been sent to West Bromwich as I had asked. How can I ?


It makes my head ache a little thinking about all this. In the time I have wrote this I have thought about other such butterfly moments that came and went without me realising it. 

Books

Quick round up of books I have read recently.


Songbird


I think Sebastien Faulks is close to be my favourite author ever. In a quick space of time I have read three of his books and they have all been brilliant. Songbird is supposedly his masterpiece. I liked it a lot. The story was cleverly constructed jumping forwards and backwards in time; between the pre war idyll, the hell of the war and the nearer present day where the suffering of the trenches has already become ancient history.


The relentless day to day horrific reality is brought home perfectly. However much you read it it is still completely unimaginable the horror of knowing the certain death that awaited you on the blow of a whistle. It also beautifully tells us the story of what witnessing such carnage does to a man. 


I was particularly moved by the scene where one of the soldiers returns to England and is staggered to find how normal life is there. How he wishes for bombs to come and kill them all. Having said all this as much as I enjoyed it I like Engleby more.


The News Where You Are


This is the second book by Catherine O'Flynn. Her first book was What was Lost which I truly enjoyed, a good story with great internal dialogue from people out shopping at a shopping centre. It had a good storyline and kept me guessing all the way.


The News Where You Are is a less surprising in terms of the fact I worked out where it was going fairly early. However the journey was superb. Once again she has populated the story with interesting, instantly likeable characters. It is also a book about decay and death which appeal to a maudlin fucker like me.


The final thing I love about the book is the fact it is set in Birmingham ! So few books/films/tv shows are its a delight to find one that is. And she clearly loves and 'gets' Birmingham in a way only Brummies can.


Notes on a Scandal


Loved the film and on a lot of reflection I decide that I like the film slightly more. The Cate Blanchett character is less worldly in the novel and she fails to break free of Barbara's clutches in the book, becoming dependent on her in the end. The ending fits the books characters perfectly. 


Ultimately the film wins out in my affection simply for the performance of Judi Dench. What an actress that woman is.


The Invisible Man


A great classic book and well worth the read. I love the writing of this era with HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose  Lost World I also read recently. They are well worth the investment in time.

Why Channel 4 is the new Daily Mail

Stephen Fry wrote in one of his newspaper columns years ago that the Daily mail was the very worse of the papers. Because while the Sun may be more offensive at times at least it was honest about what it was. A tabloid; where as the Mail left room to pretend it was a serious paper. It seems to me that the same thing has happened with Channel 4. They have become a channel for barely disguised freak shows. Five do this also but at least they know they are trash.

I wrote previously here about my deep and abiding love for Big Brother. So I am not somebody queueing up to slag them off on that score. The programme that has provoked my ire is Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

The producers of the show would have you believe that this is a show whose aim is to promote a better understanding of the Traveller community. That's a phrase you hear a lot on the programme, 'The Travelling Community' as though they are one homogeneous bunch who all strictly adhere to the same norms and behaviours. Bollocks. I'm part of the English community but I have my own views on things. I imagine Travellers are exactly the same.

What the show really does promote is the chance for us to voyeurs on the lives of the people. You can almost hear the producers giggling in the background in evident delight at the next curious , you our eyes, thing that one of the participants does. They should drop the pretence and get Dave Lamb (to those who don't know the acerbic commentator of Come Dine With Me) to narrate it.

And the poor taste does not end there for Channel 4. There is the show about the exploration of modern myths about self image. This is another shitfest involving putting shallow, fame hungry young women with people with facial disfigurements. Again this is presented as some kind of hard hitting exploration of the vacuousness of our society and its obsession with beauty. When what it really is is a chance to watch pretty girls feel uncomfortable around people with facial disfigurements. I just hope they drop the final pretence and in the last scene have the people who are disfigured stand around the pretty girl chanting 'one of us, one of us, one of us...'

Science

I have been thinking a great deal about Science of late. I got an audio book from the Library recently called 'Why e=mc2 (and why we should care)' by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. It's a wonderful book. Unfortunately though I only truly enjoyed the first two and a half of the six discs. I understood, for the first time, concepts like there being no such thing as absolute motion and what the speed of light being constant really means. These are by no means minor achievements for me.

But eventually we moved on to space time and though I could understand some of the concepts I couldn't pretend that I really understood it in the way that I did in the previous chapters. I think I may have to accept that I have reached my limit of understanding of this subject. 

This is not something that depresses me really. I have enjoyed the journey to get to the point where I understand a lot more of the universe than I did. The wonderful thing about science is that it opens your eyes to the world you live in. It may sound odd but at times when I feel low I look around and remind myself that everything I see and cannot see is made of atoms. The air, the trees, my fingernails, the bus and for reasons I can't truly fathom this remarkable fact seems to cheer me up. Just how wonderful the world is I guess. Science opens that knowledge up to me in a way I think few other things can.

So what if I don't understand space time. Science is hard but worth the journey. I love the quote from Niels Bohr which goes 'that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said to them.' Its nice to know that Science has the power to confuse bewilder and inspire even Nobel Prize winners.

Anyway enough science. I have final rehearsals for a panto tonight and need to apply some Newtonian laws to some custard pies into the faces of my fellow actors.