Tag Archives: life

Guess who’s back on Facebook?

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I don’t know how it happened. Well, okay, I do. A confluence of influences. Influence conflued.

Apart from the general grumpy old mannish acceptance that it really isn’t going to go away no matter how hard I ignore it …

  1. A friend (real-world meaning) whose blog I enjoyed reading, but which hasn’t been updated for months, admitted he’s pretty well given it up and now just uses Facebook. So if even intelligent people regard Facebook above all others, and there’s a whole generation out there who wouldn’t think of looking for me anywhere else, and I am (as ever) poised on the brink of worldwide fame … that’s where to be.
  2. And then another friend (also real-world meaning) tells me he’s said something online that, from the nature of our real-world meaning friendship, I know I’ll find interesting, but it’s on Facebook …

… and that was what did it. I just sort of slipped in. Being a Gmail user, I clicked on his message and found myself being invited to join up through my Google account. So I did. And then it kindly read my contacts list and showed me all the ones who are also on Facebook. Maybe I would like to invite them to be friends? (Well, maybe they already are, so nyah. And in some cases, maybe I would pay money not to be friends with them but I still need them in the contacts list. This is grown-up life, children: the ying and yang, push and shove, give and take, awareness that we live in a world where all is not sweetness and light and it sometimes just pays to smile and be polite – deep, adult concepts a world away from the pimple-ridden adolescents who designed Facebook in the first place. [No offence intended to any pimple-ridden adolescents reading this, who will be real-world-meaning friends and therefore lovely by definition.])

So, here I am. It’s a clean break with the past – a new account as opposed to reactivating my old one. I let the old one get out of control. This one I will keep a tighter grip on and just use as a means to guide people to more erudite pensées such as this. It means I’m no longer the first Ben Jeapes on Facebook … well, technically I suppose I am since that account is still there, just dormant. But anyway. And any former Facebook friends – is there another way of saying this? ffriends, with a silent eff? Well there is now – any former ffriends who want to stay ffriends will have to renew the invite, though I won’t just blindly accept invitations from anyone; there are people I can live without being ffriends with even if they happen to be friends. No offence, just … you know. And if you don’t know, learn.

Onwards with the big adventure … and I’ll try to ignore Twitter. Really, really hard.

Look on my works, ye walkers, and despair

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Beauty on the Harwell campus doesn’t exactly jump out at you, but it is there if you know where to look. It helps if the Ballardian post-apocalyptic nature-reclaims-the-works-of-man vibe presses your buttons, like it presses mine.

Tucked away in the north west corner of the site there’s a network of man-made roads being extremely reclaimed: now useful for tasks like teaching Junior Godson to ride his bike (a few years ago) or just strolling on a Sunday afternoon (us, today).

This used to be Hillside.

The odd modern-ish road sign suggests they were in use relatively recently …


… and indeed (I’m told) up until about 20 years ago this was a post-war prefab residential area. In places the road is all but gone, with only the occasional concrete path leading up to a square clearing of moss in the bushes that once was someone’s home – often with interesting displays of feral ox-eye daisies where the flower beds have burst free of their banks.

[UPDATE: My copy of Harwell: The Enigma Revealed tells me this was once the Aldfield estate, built in 1946 by German POWs. The prefabs were such desirable property that in one case an engineer’s wife stood on the concrete base while the house was assembled around her, in case someone pinched it. They were lovely in summer and freezing in winter, as the walls consisted of two metal sheets with a 4-inch air gap and that was all. A programme to demolish them began in 1986 and by 1991 all were gone. Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs lived at no. 17 Hillside.]
I find it interesting to see how obviously fertile the area is in its natural state. Twenty years after the great plague, Abingdon will probably look a bit like this. Actually, if I was a spaceman who landed here I might conjecture that civilisation had been destroyed by the weird triffid-like thistles that flourish so happily (see foreground, right).
If I was a spaceman I would definitely want to investigate this feature if I spotted it from orbit. It’s the end of Thames Rd in the map above …

… and looks to me like somewhere that the original inhabitants might have used as a launchpad. Maybe they did. Not much to see from ground level, though.

The two-hour lump of cinematic cheese that is Logan’s Run redeems itself with a five minute section where Logan and Jessica come across the post-apocalypse ruins of Washington DC, and marvel at such wonders as an overgrown Lincoln Memorial and Capitol, which unlike the rest of the movie actually look quite convincing. At one point they slosh through a marshy swamp, the camera pans around and we realise they’re wading down the Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument.

(Image (c) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976, and taken from this site, which has many more.)

That’s a bit what it’s like in the top left corner of Harwell. But only a bit. Or possibly a bit like my favourite part of Prince Caspian, where the Pevensie kids explore the ruins of Cair Paravel.

I’m Don Alfonso, I work for Oxo

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To my surprise I’ve discovered exactly the right amount of World Cup to watch to make it bearable. That is to say, about 35 minutes of the last game. It does help the strategy if the winning goal is scored within that period.

Bonusbarn actually turned the TV on. I wandered through, found there were about 5 minutes of a no score game to run and stayed out of curiosity. Then of course they added 30 minutes of extra time. At some point Best Beloved decided to join in with the male bonding too and so we actually watched the rest of the game as a family.

I think it helped that I had even less idea who any of this lot were than I did about our own team. Maybe back in the Netherlands and Spain they’re in the papers just as much as Tall Thick Guy and Little Guy with the Funny Eyes but to me they were just a bunch of even more anonymous than usual quite good football players; though while the Spanish in their dark blue were quite distinct on screen, the Dutch really were just fuzzy orange blobs in the long shots. And it was kind of fun, watching the ref machine gun the orange side with his yellow cards, and amusing myself during the times where everyone stood still and kicked the ball to each other by working out how often the advertising screens changed image (every 2 and 32 seconds, since you ask).

Then someone went and scored, which kind of validated the last 35 minutes when I could have been in bed reading a book, so that was okay. One of the goalies seemed to be in floods of tears but I think it was the one who hadn’t let a goal in. I’m sure it makes sense.

So: Wimbledon down, World Cup down, just the cricket to miss now. Oh criminy, and the bloody Olympics in 2012. Meh.