baroque_mongoose

Yesterday I got involved in a lengthy discussion about abstract art; and, to be honest, I'm still as befogged as before.

When I tell people I don't get abstract art, they automatically tend to assume I don't like it. That's not quite true. Some of it I really can't be doing with at all (let's just say I'm rather surprised that "Jackson Pollocks" hasn't made it into Cockney rhyming slang yet), but a lot of it is fine. It's pretty patterns. I like pretty patterns.

However, that is where it stops, for me. And I get all these people telling me very earnestly that it's supposed to be conveying some emotion, which apparently it does for them. Someone even tried to explain to me in terms of emotional reactions brought about by changes in the colour of the sky. And I said, yes, I get those all right, but I can't translate a reaction to a change in the colour of the sky (a known natural phenomenon which means something definite) into an emotional reaction to squiggles of paint on a canvas. To me, the two don't relate in any way. I had to tell them that I do not have an emotional reaction to squiggles. I am squiggle-blind.

Then some helpful soul informed me that it was perfectly all right if my brain preferred literalism to metaphor. That's absolutely correct, except that... no, it doesn't. I like metaphor. I get on very well with metaphor, and I use it all the time. But, and this is the crucial part, the metaphor has to mean something. To take an example from my recent book, if I were to tell you that Morto (one of the characters) has gone up in the world, you'd all know exactly what I meant; it's a very commonly used metaphor, so common, in fact, that you don't even think of it as a metaphor till you look hard at it and realise that Morto isn't physically rising into the air. But if I said something like "Morto is a salamander on the draughts board of the universe," you'd reckon I'd been drinking. Wouldn't you? Because there's no context here. It looks a lot like a regular metaphor, but there's no clue to tell you why Morto is like a salamander or what he's doing on a draughts board, or even why a salamander would be on a draughts board in the first place. It's just gibberish. (Yes, it really is gibberish, not some kind of particularly opaque metaphor. I just pulled out the salamander and the draughts board at random.)

Oh, and another thing. Apparently abstract art isn't necessarily intended to communicate whatever meaning the artist decides it has. One party in the conversation said that if she painted a blue-on-blue abstract to express the fact that she felt sad, and someone else looked at it and it made them feel relaxed, that was fine. I said that in that case it all seemed rather solipsistic: what is the point of deciding a piece has meaning if the piece doesn't communicate that meaning, or communicates an entirely different meaning? It makes the meaning, if there is one, relevant to nobody but the artist. I didn't get any clear answer to that one except that that's fine. Well, actually, no. Not with me it isn't.

So I decided to test my understanding. I said, "All right. Let me check I have this right. Suppose I create a pretty pattern, with no other intention but to create a pretty pattern. Suppose I then create another, quite similar, pretty pattern, but this time I decide in my head that it has some kind of meaning. I don't need to tell anyone what this meaning is, or even that I've decided it exists. Are you then saying that the first piece is just a pretty pattern but the second one is abstract art?"

I didn't get an answer to that one either.

This is all highly frustrating. I'm not for a moment denying that other people see something in abstract art that I don't; but I don't understand the rules (and, no, it doesn't help at all to be told that there aren't any - obviously there are rules of some sort, if only to determine what is abstract art and what is a pretty pattern, but they're just not acknowledged). Even so, from where I'm standing it still all feels a lot like a case of the emperor's new clothes.

I think I'll go and make a pretty pattern.

The book is now edited (that was a much quicker process than I expected, but of course I wrote it pretty fast, and writing things quickly means that there are going to be fewer inconsistencies because you're able to keep more of the detail in your head), and it is up on AO3 as promised: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78488436?view_full_work=true I need to warn you that there is strong language (not *too* strong - there are some words I can't even bring my characters to use - but definitely a lot of words that I wouldn't personally use, because Glodric's real-life counterpart actually does swear like a trooper. I have, in fact, toned him down a little for Glodric.) There is also not a great deal of combat, so if fight scenes are your thing you're probably going to want to move on to the next fanfic.

And so, of course, now that it's all finished and sorted out, I'm thinking about the story as a whole, including a number of possible spin-off narratives (probably shorter). Morto is definitely going to have some more adventures. So is Jillythacket. Then there's a situation from the past that we find out about very close to the end of the story; I originally put that in to explain why one of the main characters needs psychological healing, but it occurs to me that that situation might have quite a lot of other ramifications, too. A story is really never just one story. It's always a part of a whole nest of interlinking ones.

I've also been thinking about the main themes, and quite a strong one is the nature of courage. To look at my four main characters, you would initially think that Glodric and Reinart were a good deal braver than Kerian and Lindith. Glodric is a natural leader, grumpy, impatient, somewhat irascible, but with a softer side that comes out now and then, and deeply loyal to his friends; Reinart is a very cool customer with a pragmatic approach and a habit of taking a subtle rise out of pretty much everyone. Nothing fazes Reinart. And then you have the diffident and terminally modest Kerian, who is the most famous bard in the world and doesn't handle that very well, and Lindith the quiet cleric who suffers terribly from motion sickness.

And yet it turns out that Kerian is actually the bravest character in the book, regardless of whether or not he himself thinks so. He's already been inside the tower once, where he saw something that was enough to make anyone lose their nerve (and Glodric freely admits he'd have lost his, too, in that situation), and he says, that's it, he's not going in there again; but later he does. Very unhappily, but nonetheless, of his own free will (nobody even expected him to do it, let alone tried to force him), because he realises that he's the logical person to do it. It takes the other characters to tell him that, actually, that is not only brave, it's heroic. Courage isn't about not being afraid. It's about being afraid and doing what you need to do anyway. In a sense - though this isn't explicitly brought out in the story - Kerian is a great deal braver than some gung-ho hero who enjoys the adrenaline rush brought on by a bit of danger; that sort of hero has nothing to overcome.

I was a very fearful child. I was, after all, always taught to be so, though I don't think that was anyone's conscious intention. Nonetheless I remember being very upset when I read C S Lewis talking about courage as the essential virtue. He said that without courage it was impossible to practise any of the other virtues; and I thought, in that case I have no hope. I was still assuming that courage was the opposite of fear.

It's been a very welcome discovery that, in fact, it isn't.

I finished the book yesterday. It's longer than The Hobbit.

So the next job will be the final edit; I need to sort out a few little inconsistencies and tidy up a few things along the lines of "actually, you wouldn't need to use [high-level spell X] to do that, because you could use [lower-level spell Y] and it would be better for the effect that is specifically wanted here" and so on. There are also a few little character things that need bringing out; I realised, belatedly, despite not having consciously written this in, that one of the NPCs was developing feelings for one of the party. (I'd always intended that another NPC would develop feelings for another of the party, but I hadn't quite planned this one.) And when all that is sorted out, there will be the lengthy and tedious business of getting it all up on AO3... in chapters, because although AO3 is pretty generous when it comes to file length limits, I'm pretty sure this would still make it fall over if I tried to post it in one fell swoop. I may even put up each chapter as a separate post so that people don't lose their place, but I'm not sure about that yet; the existing system for dividing longer works into chapters may still make sense here. (On the other hand, I'm not sure if it allows chapter titles, and I do want to keep those. So if it doesn't, I shall definitely be posting the chapters individually.)

Inevitably, I've had questions about whether I'm going to publish this. I have made several attempts in the past to publish books and got precisely nowhere. Now, I know for a fact that there are worse writers out there than I am who have not only got published, but done so repeatedly; and I don't know, but I do strongly suspect, that there are considerably better writers than I am who have never been published. Publication is not really about how good you are. It's much more about who you know. And, while I know a lot of people (and very fine people most of them are, at that), I am pretty sure I don't know anyone who knows how to get published. I do know people who know how to self-publish; yes, well, I did that once. I still have a novel sitting on Smashwords somewhere. It's never sold a single copy.

So I think I just have to accept the fact that everyone likes what I do but nobody wants to pay me for it, because that's how it's been for my entire life. I shall put it up on AO3, and a lot of people will be entertained, and I'll get a lot of nice comments because I always do, and that will be that. I suppose the way I could look at it is that I'm being supported by the State in order to add value to the world in ways that other people can't, or don't want to, pay for. Obviously I don't just mean the writing there. I basically give away a good deal of my free time in quite a number of ways.

It would be nice if someone would actually pay me to do a job; but nobody wants to do that, because there are very few employers who view working from home as a necessary adaptation for some people, rather than as a perk for the employees they don't want other companies head-hunting. I know a few people who work from home, and in all cases it is a perk. Which is fine; but I don't have a choice other than to work from home, and nobody is going to give a "perk" to someone who's just joined the company (and if they did, I would expect considerable resentment for being treated above my station). Disability discrimination in this country is illegal, but you'd really never guess. It's so easy to get away with it that almost all employers do as a matter of course.

It doesn't really matter. Nobody is going to stop me doing my best to make the world a better place. In this case, it involves entertaining a few people and making them laugh; and, when you think about it, you can't really put a price on that.

This may be a short entry. I'm fighting off a bug today, I think; it's the only explanation that comes to mind for why I horribly overslept and still feel as if I haven't had half enough sleep.

I swore for years I'd never get my ears pierced. I reckoned there was no need, as I could wear all the earrings I wanted without going to the trouble. I had quite a lot of earrings when I was at university, my favourite pair being painted wooden ones in the shape of a couple of colourful parrots. Those had screw-on fittings, which are really the best non-pierced arrangement you can have, because you can adjust the grip minutely; the sweet zone between "so tight they pinch" and "so loose they fall off" is not a large one. And, being made of wood, they were pretty light, so I had them for quite a few years till I inevitably lost one.

It is quite hard to get screw fittings. Most non-pierced earrings have clips, which are difficult or impossible to adjust. During the intervening years I had a number of pairs of clip earrings, and most of those were on the tight side, so I couldn't wear them for more than a couple of hours at a time. I'd have to put them on just before I went out in the evening, then take them off again as soon as I got out of wherever I was going. When I later discovered magnetic earrings, I thought all my problems were solved; but no. Magnets are just as capable of pinching as clips are.

Some time around my sixtieth birthday, I thought "blow this - I'm having them done". I like earrings and I was just fed up with all the hassle. Getting that arranged turned out to be a bit more awkward than I thought, but in the end I had them done at H Samuel in Cambridge. The only thing was, I really didn't know what to expect. I'd been told so many conflicting things about it that I was completely confused.

Well. The first thing I need to say here is, if anyone tells you it doesn't hurt, that is not quite true. It doesn't hurt much, and it certainly doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as you'd think it ought to. It does hurt a little, but only very briefly. I've had far worse injections. So after the chap had done my left ear, I said, "Oh, that's fine. Not bad at all. I don't need a break - you can go ahead and do the other one." So he did, and then we were chatting quite happily for about five minutes and then...

You know how my blood pressure is liable to tank under stress? The combination of not knowing what to expect and a couple of (albeit mild) physical shocks turned out to be a bit too much for it. "Er," I said. "This is a bit embarrassing, but do you have anywhere I can lie down?"

"Sorry, no."

"Oh. Right. Well then, I shall just put my head between my knees for a little while..."

And there it stayed till I stopped seeing interesting fractals. The chap said he'd had two people who'd actually fainted, and I was not quite the third, but it was a close thing. I'm not the only person with the weird glitchy blood pressure. Fortunately, the friend who'd brought me was a doctor, so if I had fainted she'd have known what to do!

My nice new studs (little red CZs) had safety backs, so I had been assured I'd be fine sleeping on them; however, I sleep exclusively on my right side because of Sibyl, and that, it turned out, wasn't at all comfortable. So I jury-rigged a kind of split mini-pillow; the two halves were held together by a strip of fabric, keeping the gap constant, and my ear went into that gap so it wasn't under any pressure. Later, after I was able to take the original studs out, I was a bit worried about taking my earrings out at night for a while, just in case the holes closed up. I eventually graduated to a kind of tiny knitted bag, double thickness, with a "handle" just long enough to loop over my ear, providing enough padding to stop the back of the earring from digging in anywhere. The things they don't tell you.

Now, of course, it's fine. I just take them out at night and put them in the following morning, and I can wear dangly ones, so I almost exclusively make my own. (I also have them for sale, but only within the UK, overseas shipping being complicated to deal with and in some cases problematic.) I've designed a few different styles.

And, yes, I can make them with clips. I haven't forgotten the people who'd rather not get their ears pierced!

There are D&D characters around who are inclined to solve most problems by killing someone. That type of character is known in gamer circles as a "murderhobo", and it's a mercilessly accurate description. While I have no problem with the term "murderhobo", I am more inclined to pigeonhole them in my own mind as "Clint Eastwood characters". Clint Eastwood was notorious for playing jerks in films who thought they were the hero; I was once induced to sit through The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which I did not enjoy, and my reaction at the end was "he's supposed to be the good one?!" I was told that, actually, pretty much all of Eastwood's protagonists were like that. He was a good actor. I just didn't like watching him.

The advantage that "Clint Eastwood character" has over "murderhobo" is that it's a little bit more specific. These D&D characters, generally speaking, have a good alignment. They don't kill simply for the sake of it (that's what evil characters do). They kill because they think they've got a good reason. If you're the hero, you obviously get to kill the villain... don't you?

D&D is a great game, but unfortunately it's rather easy to give it problematic ethics. (Of course, the game doesn't actually force you to do that. While it is quite black and white on the surface, there's enough wiggle room to allow you to play a much more nuanced and properly thought out ethical system.) So, for example, most of the races tend to certain alignments. I have no problem with undead being invariably evil; anyone who deliberately creates undead is going to be a pretty unpleasant character to start with, and so they're not going to make non-evil undead (although, having said that, the main plot driver in the book I'm currently writing is a vampire who inexplicably turned out not to be evil). I have rather more of a problem with "everyone from this [non-undead] race is evil", or indeed "good", for that matter. It seems to negate personal choice (and, again, undead don't tend to have that). Granted, if you look carefully, you can often find exceptions; drow (a subterranean race of elves) are normally considered evil, but then you find that there are some good ones who tend to escape to the surface to be safe from their evil kindred, and they usually worship a Chaotic Good goddess called Eilistraee. Gnomes are normally good, but according to one of the rule books "evil gnomes are as frightening as they are rare". But still, it's a little bit dispiriting to go through the Monster Manual and keep finding "Alignment: always [X]", whatever X may happen to be.

And then, to return to our Clint Eastwood characters, there's a big question mark over what it actually means to be "good" in this game. Generally speaking, evil characters are the most straightforward: they'll attack anyone they can for the sheer hell of it (possibly literally). That includes one another. Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil cannot stand each other, whereas Lawful Good and Chaotic Good can usually work pretty well together. The devils of the Nine Hells of Baator and the demons of the Infinite Layers of the Abyss are constantly at war. The only way those two types will work together is if it's for mutual advantage (my Chaotic Evil archlich has a powerful Lawful Evil vampire as second-in-command, which does work well for both of them, though they don't appear to like each other very much). Neutral characters will generally side with good characters when the chips are down, unless the evil ones can give them a good incentive not to do so, because neutral characters are more concerned about just getting on with their lives to best advantage, and they know the good characters won't randomly attack them. One of the major elements in my current story is both sides trying to pull in the neutrals as far as possible, which leads to some interesting times in the moral middle, as it were.

But good characters? In D&D, that's more complicated, and the way I see it, the bottom line is "do you kill evil characters just because they are evil, or do you not kill them unless they have actually done or are about to do something evil, and if so, how evil do their actions or intended actions have to be before you make the decision to kill them?" My personal opinion on this is that if you kill anyone just because they have an evil alignment, you're actually no better than they are; and this, obviously, has real-life ramifications. It's very easy to decide that you're the good guys and the other lot are the bad guys, so therefore anything goes; and it never even occurs to you that they've come to the equally valid conclusion that they're the good guys and you're the bad guys, so, again, anything goes.

Seriously. No, it doesn't.

In my story, the archlich and the vampire have taken over an abandoned tower in the middle of a wood; as the story goes on, the protagonists find out more and more about this tower in several different ways, and quite late on in the story they discover it has a lot more basement than anyone realised. And this basement is full of drow (as mentioned above) and duergar (who more or less are to dwarves what drow are to elves), who are all either creating or recording spells, forging armour and weapons, or doing military training. It seems very clear that the archlich is planning an attack against the nearby city. So some bright spark says "we could bore a shaft through from the river and flood out the basement levels, end of problem."

This is where your classic Clint Eastwood "good" D&D character goes "yay, perfect!". Mine are not cast in that mould. My characters go "ehhh... we may possibly have to do that as a last resort, but let's see if we can avoid killing well over a hundred people who haven't actually hurt anyone yet, though they're probably planning to". And then someone else points out that there is probably going to be another exit at some distance from the tower, because these folks aren't stupid. There is great relief all round. The exit is duly located, and only when the protagonists are satisfied that it does indeed exist do they go "right, yes, this is good, we'll flood them out, that'll get them out of the tower; then we'll shepherd them back to the entrance to the Underdark [the subterranean level whence they came], and when they're all home again we'll block it off". They will kill the archlich, but even for the vampire they have a plan that doesn't involve killing him. I was really delighted when I came up with that one. He's an arrogant blighter, like most vampires, but he's also a very interesting character.

As a GM, I absolutely will take advantage of all the flexibility I'm allowed (which is a great deal). I will mentally strike through that word "always" every time I see it following the word "alignment". At the moment I'm replacing it with "mostly", for cultural reasons: if orcs, as a culture, worship an evil god called Gruumsh, then evil traits will be valued in orc culture and so most orcs will tend to be evil, but not all of them. Some of them will rebel. Similarly, it's not hard to imagine a criminal dwarf who is outcast from their community (dwarves worship the Lawful Good god Moradin, and tend towards that alignment). People - well, living people, anyway - get the option to think for themselves. I'm thinking of having one of the goblins gradually change her alignment as she realises that it's better to work for someone who both cares and pays than to work for someone who - as she succinctly describes the vampire - doesn't care but does pay.

It's not all black and white. You don't always need to kill the villain. And if you think you do, maybe you should take a long hard look at whether perhaps you are the villain.

I spent a significant period of my life looking for a tenor.

I grew up hearing primarily operatic tenors - not just heavy operatic tenors like Pavarotti, but the lighter ones who did things like Gilbert & Sullivan; and I always preferred the lighter ones, but for some reason none of them was ever quite what I was looking for. It took me a fair while to realise that was what I was doing, but some time around my late teens or early twenties I realised I'd be listening to someone singing and thinking "he's good, but it's not him". Eventually I found an Italian one who was very close; he did an album of Neapolitan songs which I listened to a great deal at one point, but, since I no longer have the album, I can't even remember his name. All I remember is that he was nearly right, and for quite a while I thought he was the closest I was ever going to get to this elusive ideal.

But then I got to know the excellent Porthos, who, among his many other talents (and he's quite the polymath, is our Porthos), is a very good semi-pro countertenor. He was a member of a large ensemble that used to perform now and again in St Albans - I think it wound up quite a while ago - and so I went down for one of their concerts. And, as he was driving me over to St Albans (since he lives a fair way from there), he said to me: "Oh, by the way, I think you're going to like our tenor soloist. His name's [redacted] and he's a bit special."

Never a truer word.

So I settled myself in the audience (I had a good seat, since obviously I was early), Porthos disappeared off round the back to join the rest of the ensemble, and eventually the concert started. It was well over twenty years ago now, but I can remember it as if it were yesterday. The four soloists came up onto the stage. Three of them were tall, elegant, and self-possessed, just as you'd expect; but the fourth was this little bald bloke with wispy hair, and he looked as if he really wasn't quite sure what he was doing there. And I thought "oh... is that the star tenor?"

And then he opened his mouth.

Before he'd sung more than a very few notes, I was completely stunned. This, without question, was The Voice. The one I'd been patiently waiting to hear all these years. And not only was it an intrinsically beautiful voice (to my ears at least; most people would agree with me, but he does have a very distinctive timbre and there are a few people who don't like it, which is fair enough), but it was a voice with pinpoint control. I had never heard anything else like it. I was already quite amazed by what he could do by the time he got to this one particular line, but he had more to show us. The line was something to do with "hot and cold and moist and dry".

He put a different, and totally appropriate, tone colour on each of the four adjectives.

He and Porthos were chatting away quite happily after the concert. I'm not normally overwhelmed by anyone, but I couldn't do much more than stand there and stammer "that was amazing". And Star Tenor beamed from ear to ear and went a little pink and said "oh, thank you, you're very kind", as if he really wasn't anything like as good as I thought.

After that I really needed to hear more of this bloke, so I started looking for recordings, only to find that he was on so many that I couldn't possibly decide which to get. So, nothing daunted, I tracked him down online (eventually finding him via another ensemble with which he was associated), and e-mailed him to ask which of his many recordings he particularly recommended.

Apparently I'd asked him a difficult question there, because he doesn't really like the sound of his own voice. But, if pushed, he would concede that [X] and [Y] had been well received, and possibly also [Z]. So I bought all three of them and loved them, and e-mailed him back to tell him so. [X] is still one of my all-time favourites, though I've bought many other recordings since then.

We clicked. It's not just a common interest in early music and off-beat sense of humour, though those do help; but the better I got to know him, the more clearly I realised that I was dealing with someone of astonishing integrity, and to be honest that's far more of a draw than even "the voice I'd been looking for all my life". If he hadn't been who he is, I have no doubt I'd still be listening to his recordings, but I probably wouldn't still be in touch with him. But, as I've told him to his face, I came for the music and I stayed for the integrity.

I am deeply fond of all three of my Musketeers. But that's why he, of all of them, is my best friend.

When I've finished the baby hat I'm currently knitting, I'm going to teach myself brioche. You'd think I'd know how to do that already; but somehow it hasn't been on my radar sufficiently for me to decide to learn it. Recently that has changed, especially since I found out what kind of fun two-colour effects you could get using it. (On the whole I hate doing colourwork; the effects are glorious, but even by my standards it is extremely fiddly. This appears to be a lot less so.)

Needless to say, my mother refused to teach me to knit, no matter how much I pleaded with her to do so. I think there were two separate things going on here. The first was a general reluctance to teach anything to children, because she had important grown-up things to do and teaching children was the school's job; but, more specifically in my case, it was already clear that I was very academically bright. And my parents had made up this rule that if you were academically bright you couldn't be good at anything else; therefore I was obviously going to be rubbish at knitting, and if I was going to be rubbish, what was the point in wasting important grown-up time on teaching me?

Fortunately, there was a lovely lady at school by the name of Mrs Langhorne, of blessed memory. She wasn't a teacher; she was the school secretary, but in those days school admin was not an onerous job, so she was able to come into the infant school classes and teach sewing, knitting, and crochet to anyone who was interested. I tried all three, though I soon decided that, while crochet was all right, knitting was more versatile because you could get better coverage. Crocheted items tended to have large holes. (Of course, had I gone on to learn more, I'd have discovered that it is perfectly possible to crochet a garment that doesn't require anything underneath it to spare one's blushes; but by that time I knew how to cable, and there was no stopping me after that.)

My mother, seeing that I had managed to learn to knit anyway and enjoyed doing it, now decided that I should be encouraged. She had a very odd way of doing it. She bought me a set of needles (and a useful but rather ugly bag to keep them in), some yarn (which was quite nice), and a pattern for a tank top giving two options. And I was initially delighted, and foolishly told her which of the two I wanted to knit.

Ah. Bad move. That one was not allowed. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I had to knit the other one, and if I was found trying to knit the one I preferred, I would be punished. I didn't like the one I was supposed to knit, so, not surprisingly, I never finished it.

I was not given a reason (you didn't give children reasons - that was Bad; they had to obey unconditionally), but I think in hindsight I knew what it was. The one I preferred had a little bit of neck shaping. My mother was afraid that if I knitted that, I would get stuck, and then - horror! - she would have to help me.

Now, she was not a bad knitter herself. She knitted us quite a number of jumpers, because at that point it was cheaper than buying them; I don't know if she ever knitted a dress for either of my sisters, but she did make me one when I was about six. It was pink, but not unpleasantly sugary - it was a sort of dusty rose colour, which I could handle. And it stretched. Great Scott, did it stretch. I must have been nearly thirteen by the time we finally decided it was now too small (and, unusually, I was allowed to unravel it carefully and crochet with the resulting yarn; my mother must have been in a particularly good mood). But she mainly did stocking stitch and rib stitch, with just occasionally a very simple lace pattern. She never learnt to knit in the round, or to cable, or anything at all beyond confident beginner level.

Somehow I managed not to be put off knitting altogether by the tank top experience. I moved on. I learnt new techniques. In my late teens I knitted a huge (and very warm) jumper in blackberry stitch, to the complete astonishment of my mother, who'd never tried anything so fancy herself. Not long after that I taught myself to cable, and that was it. I'd always wanted to do that, and once you knew how, it was so simple after all!

I taught myself a bit of design, too. After all, that was just maths when you got right down to it. I designed myself a V-necked slipover with fancy cables; it had to be a slipover because I couldn't afford enough yarn for a jumper, and I used acrylic because it was cheap... and that was horrible stuff at the time. You didn't use acrylic if you could afford anything better. It would pill as soon as you looked at it. Thankfully, they've improved it enormously in the last thirty years or so; it's still cheap, but now it's a much better quality yarn.

And, eventually, I designed a hat. I am extremely proud of this hat. It is, of course, cabled; it is knitted in the round; and no matter how hard you look, you cannot see the jog (which, for non-knitters, is the step-up between one round of stitches and the next, and it's very hard to disguise if you're knitting, say, stripes). That's because I very carefully put in a few little irregularities at the start or end of some of the rounds. I have never put this pattern on the market, and I have given it to only one person (Online Best Friend, but for one thing she's in .nl and for another thing she hates knitting cables, so I don't imagine she will knit very many of them). Therefore, there are very few people in the world who have a hat to this design, and - unless they're in .nl, of course - you can be absolutely certain that I knitted it.

I made one for my mother.

Because of course I did. big grin

A-level chemistry was a ton of fun in a bun. I didn't plan to take it any further; what I would really have liked to have got into was particle physics, but I genuinely couldn't see that anyone would ever let me use the extremely expensive equipment that was required for that (expensive stuff was for other people), and so I chose to do a maths degree simply and solely because it didn't need any special equipment. Yes, I had an incredibly low opinion of myself at the time, but don't blame me for that. I'd been taught to have it for my entire childhood.

But the chemistry was interesting and a good diversion, especially since it was regularly enlivened by the misadventures of one of my classmates. His surname was Pringle, and his father apparently wrote occasionally for a well-known BBC TV series; be that as it may, he was ridiculously accident-prone, especially during chemistry lessons. It wasn't that he was stupid. He was just so ham-handed that, in any chemistry lesson, you could pretty much guarantee he'd manage to melt the end off a test tube, explode something, or at the very least get a completely unexpected result from his experiment. To be fair, he actually wasn't the one who managed to spill a beaker of pentane over the lab bench and then accidentally set fire to it, almost taking his eyebrows off in the process; that was another bloke, and it almost certainly was the deciding factor regarding why he got the sixth form prize for maths and I got the corresponding prize for physics and chemistry, when we were both neck and neck in both subject areas right through the sixth form. I'd rather have won the maths prize, since that was what I was going to do the degree in. But hey. Pringle, incidentally, grew so notorious that his name became a verb (as in "oh dear, I'm afraid I rather pringled that one up"). I occasionally wonder idly what happened to him.

Most of our public exams were run by the rather alarmingly named Joint Matriculation Board, which sounded like a piece of equipment used by a particularly over-enthusiastic physio; however, A-level chemistry, for some reason, was Nuffield. And the Nuffield syllabus required that you did a project, which you could choose from a set list (I think there were about half a dozen options). Almost the entire year did food science, because it was, basically, noddy; we'd already covered most of the work in O-level biology lessons (there weren't very many of us in the chemistry group who hadn't got a biology O-level). And I looked at the list and thought "I am not doing food science, because it is, basically, noddy. I should like to do metallurgy, because I have never done any of that and it sounds a whole lot more fun."

I was the one person in the entire year who did metallurgy (or, indeed, anything at all that wasn't Easy Food Science Option). Fortunately, I already had a reputation as an anti-Pringle. I'd never broken or damaged a single piece of lab equipment, I was known to be dexterous and careful, and my experiments worked the vast majority of the time. So they just let me do it unsupervised. I'd arrange to come into the lab during the lunch hour, they'd leave the stuff I needed out for me, and I'd get on with it.

Nobody would ever let sixth-formers do that these days. I doubt they'd even let undergraduates do it. I was making alloys from cadmium and bismuth, polishing the samples down, and studying their crystalline structure under a microscope. Of course, they did have at least some basic regard for safety; the book told you to do your melting in a fume cupboard, which, naturally, I did. And I, being a cautious type, had read up on the metals I was going to be using and discovered that cadmium is bloomin' toxic and you do not want any contact with it at all, so as well as my regular lab coat I also provided myself with a pair of elbow-length industrial-spec rubber gloves, which I wore all the time I was in the lab. I was also extremely careful about how I cleaned up. I wasn't going to expose anyone else to metal dust containing cadmium.

On the whole, I have to say I'm glad that safety measures are a great deal stricter now. Most sixth-formers fall somewhere on a scale between me (ultra-cautious, to the extent of doing my background reading before handling unknown substances) and Pringle (enough said), and I wouldn't want to see most of them handling cadmium.

Nonetheless... I'm still really grateful they let me do it.

My mother wouldn't teach me to cook, because I was a child and would therefore obviously make a mess, which I would equally obviously not be competent to clean up so she would have to do it. This continued to apply all through my teens, regardless of the fact that I objectively didn't make a mess doing other potentially messy things; there wasn't a thing I could do about it. My mother just had a very low view of children and that was how it was, and she didn't appear to be able to differentiate a sixteen-year-old with very obviously excellent fine dexterity from a regular three-year-old. Of course, there was also the fact that teaching children anything at all was a nuisance, and you did it only if you absolutely had to, because that was what schools were for (other than, of course, to get the children out of the way while you did Important Adult Things). But, in any case, I learnt to cook very fast when I got to university, and became pretty good at it, at that.

Although I wasn't allowed to cook, I was fascinated by the processes involved. Cakes, for instance, were quite amazing. You mixed ingredients in a bowl and got a sloppy batter, which you then put in the oven and out came a cake. How on earth did that come about, and how had it been discovered in the first place? I asked my mother, but she had no idea. Then there was meat; I knew it was very difficult to cut raw meat, but once it was cooked you could cut it with a table knife, and those weren't very sharp. Raw potatoes, too, were pretty solid (and apparently poisonous, at that), but once they were cooked they were quite soft, safe to eat, and delicious. Exactly what was going on here?

So when I was eventually told I was going to do something called Domestic Science at school, I got really excited. At last, I thought, I was going to get proper answers to all these questions, since they clearly were scientific ones. Whatever was happening when you cooked food, it wasn't some kind of magic, since it was repeatable and more or less predictable; things might occasionally get slightly burnt, but you still knew that if you put the batter in the oven for a certain time at a certain temperature, you would get a cake and not, for instance, pastry.

Alas, I did not get the answers; for that, it turned out, I had to wait many more years, until I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter (published by O'Reilly - it isn't cheap, but I have just managed to replace my former copy with a second-hand one at a much more reasonable price). "Domestic Science", as it turned out, wasn't what it said at all. It was just cooking, and not even very good cooking at that; mostly, to the great disgust of my mother, it involved putting dishes together from pre-packaged ingredients. I recall her being very cross at being asked to provide me with a packet of pre-made puff pastry. She thought the school should be teaching me to make puff pastry myself, despite the fact that a) almost nobody ever does that these days and b) I don't even really like pastry. (I have never made pastry of any sort. Why would I? I can find plenty of other stuff to make that other people like and that I also like.) There wasn't even a little bit of basic theory involved - nothing about why frying seals in flavour and boiling doesn't, for instance, or why steaming is better than boiling in terms of both flavour and nutrition. Nope. It was nothing more than "this week we're going to make X, here is a list of the ingredients you will need, your parents are expected to provide them". It was a tremendous disappointment, and I learnt absolutely nothing from it.

Cooking for Geeks, however, does have all the answers. That tells you exactly what is going on when you make a cake, or when your toast browns, or even why you can cook with liquid nitrogen (not something I am at all inclined to do, but it's still fascinating to read about). It does have recipes, but it's definitely not cooking for vegan geeks, so I need to adapt most of them (and there's nothing at all I can do about the discussion on how to hack the perfect pizza, because I also don't have a conventional oven - I have other pizza hacks, naturally). I don't think it was out when I was ploughing through "Domestic Science", but if it had been, it ought to have been our textbook.

Of course, to make a good cake, you don't have to know how all the processes work; and I made many a good cake before I finally found out. But even so... the science is what I'm here for, OK?

I learnt Italian specifically in order to translate poetry. Which is, perhaps, not the usual motivation; but hear me out.

When I was at university, someone pointed me to a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I'd never heard of it before, but they were quite right - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Summarising such a long book (it is a pretty hefty tome) is difficult, but I think the best description of it I can give is that it looks at cognitive science from a lot of different angles, together with a great deal of whimsy and humour. A lot of it is centred around Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, but the other two titular luminaries also get plenty of space. There is really nothing else quite like it.

So when I discovered, years later, that Hofstadter had also written a book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, I bought it sight unseen, thinking I was going to get more of the same. Well, I did, and I didn't. Yes, it's still about cognitive science; but this book approaches it first and foremost from the perspective of linguistics, which meant I actually enjoyed it even more than the previous book. It is a treasure trove of language-related delights, from ambiguous newspaper headlines such as "British Left Waffles On Falklands" (they've probably gone off by now!), to lipograms (texts written without the use of a particular letter or letters), to the longest palindrome I've ever seen ("Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."), to cute little computer models for building complex sentences.

But the motif that runs through the entire book is a late mediaeval poem by Jean Marot, the English title of which is "To a Sick Damsel". It's a charming little verse with very short (three-syllable) lines, in which the author wishes the damsel a speedy recovery. And the book contains something like 40 translations of that one poem: all of them are different, and the vast majority of them are brilliant.

Now, that blew my mind. I had always been of the opinion that poetry - well, rhyming and metrical poetry, anyway - couldn't be translated properly; in my defence, the only other translations I'd encountered so far had been terrible. But now I knew it could be done, I was eager to do it... and I felt there was no point in trying to create my own translation of the Marot poem, since that had been so comprehensively done in the book. So I immediately thought of Dante and Petrarch, and set myself to learning Italian.

However, while I was doing this, I found myself starting to think about the Marot poem again, and a translation began to take shape in my mind. I was astonished, but I ran with it, and after a little work I managed to produce a translation which was quite different from any of those in the book, but nonetheless a good translation. My mind was, once again, blown. Then Porthos got some kind of unpleasant lurgy, and, with renewed confidence, I revisited the Marot and did yet another translation, this time for a sick Porthos. That was it. I was convinced. The wells of translation never run dry.

Since then, I have indeed produced translations of poetry by Dante and Petrarch; I have not yet tackled any of the Divine Comedy, the rhyme scheme there being formidably tight, but it is definitely on my bucket list. (Sonnets are more forgiving. The rhyme scheme of the typical Petrarchan sonnet is ABBA ABBA CDE CDE; however, any given English word typically, on average, has fewer rhymes than its Italian counterpart, so I will often bend it slightly to take account of that, and produce a translation with a rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFG EFG - to use Hofstadter's own pun, one ABBA stanza is enough (abbastanza being "enough" in Italian)). It is nothing like as hard as most people think. You do, of course, have to be a competent poet in your own right; but beyond that, it's pretty much the linguistic equivalent of killer sudoku. You're just slotting things into places where they fit. And, of course, there is nothing forcing you to try to rhyme the same words in both languages. As long as the line conveys the same meaning, it's perfectly all right to rhyme on a different word, and indeed sometimes you couldn't rhyme on the same words even if you wanted to because of the language structure.

My spoken Italian, alas, is nothing very special. I have ended up tongue-tied in a shop in Rome because I could not just recall the word for the item I wanted; the trouble is I don't get nearly enough practice at speaking it. Being able to translate a sonnet by Petrarch is a wonderful thing, but sadly it doesn't help you when you're just trying to buy an extra layer because it's suddenly gone unseasonably chilly in Rome.

But it's fun!