never let me go

I'd originally started to write this post a few months ago when the Kazuo Ishiguro story called 'Never Let Me Go' was running as a movie on television. I read the novel quite a long time ago but only saw the (similar) movie recently, and then watched it again on Monday as it's flittering around again on Sky.

I think when it was first on movie release it didn't get such good reviews from the critics. Contrastingly, I found its slower pace and surprisingly accepting attitudes of the main players made for quite an interesting thought piece. The main character behaviours are just not as one might expect.

The premise is a sort of alternative state of Britain, which has made some different scientific discoveries and has developed clone humans to use for spare parts.
Instead of setting it in some sort of Total Recall/Bladerunner/Terminator-esque world, we have English boarding schools, quaint farmyards and seaside homes.

Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield play Ruth, Kathy and Tommy - three young 'donors' who have been raised through the cloning process via a special school and are on the paths to their own destruction, yet accepting it in a surprisingly calm manner. I won't relate the whole story here, suffice to say their paths are quite intertwined.

There's a few more science fiction type stories that deal with the ideas of this novel, but I was reminded by its contrasts of the scenes in "O Lucky Man" when the Malcolm McDowell coffee salesman stumbles into a science research project which involves experiments with people and animals.

It's like the ideas in "O Lucky Man" with its altogether more jarring story have morphed into something both more genteel and also industrialised. A kind of erosion of the sensibilities.

Both stories play around with the role of the state and in the case of this novel and film there's the inevitable commercialisation of the processes involves, which ominously become more production lined for the successors of Ruth, Kathy and Tommy.

in which i make a few accidental holes in the wall

A few domestic chores today, including the removal of a cupboard, which is off to a new home. The room it has been in also contains a deceptively large sofa which disguises its size by cunning stripes.

It reminded me of when we'd originally moved the sofa into its position in an upstairs room. It fitted the room fine, but didn't like our staircase on the way.

After more than an hour of trying to twist it around the bend in the stairs, I finally made a hole in the wall to allow the extra few centimetres it needed to twist around.

I can remember that we had a party a few days later and I'd had to hang some temporary artwork in an unusual place to hide the hole.

We said at the time that if we needed to get the sofa back out, we'd probably have to dismantle it.

Let's say that today's cupboard was moved with no trouble, but a short test run of exiting the sofa was much less successful. It means we'll need to do a spot of redecorating in the stairway, although today's holes were seated by accident and are somewhat smaller than the one when the sofa was moving in.

Meanwhile, the sofa is back in its usual position. The blue stripes will survive a little longer.

staying away from the key lime pie

The last 2-3 days I've been quite busy with work and some of it has spilled across into Saturday. Actually, there were some things I needed to do yesterday evening as well, although I'd set myself 8p.m. as the cutoff point.

Alongside it all I'm still keeping to my cycling plans and managing to hit the targets I've set. When I started I wanted the majority of the targets to be achievable, so I might have set a few of them too low, although truthfully in the first week of my plans I wondered if I'd be able to keep to it.

There's a mixture of factors affecting the weekly outcomes which include whether I'm at home, access to a functioning bike, whether I've got other tasks piled up and so on. I've realised that there can always be reasons why I can't do something, but its probably better to cultivate the positive mind set. After all, except when its slippery I do enjoy the cycling.

So, just for fun, here's a few of my recent completed goals, which get tracked by the little gadget on my bike.

I'm partly putting them here so that I can look back in a few months to see whether there is any difference, which could be to do with the weather, my workload or any manner of things.

If I look at the goals critically, I can see I should probably crank a few numbers north, but at the moment I think I'll stick with my overachieving.

And no, I didn't eat the cream cake at the top of the post. Although I know someone who did.

jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Well, they say that Jackdaws are harbingers of rain, so maybe the UK drought is about to end. This bird and it's mate were strutting around looking opportunistic earlier today.

I'm inclined to think they are more interested in shiny things than in telling the weather though, because I also spotted a red admiral fluttering around and a blackbird had decided it was time to fluff its feathers for a February sunbathe.

wine, railway arches and helicopters

Wine with a friend, in the railway arches, across the bridge from my main current work area in Westminster.

We'd both noticed today's increased police presence, hi-viz jackets, emergency services and helicopters around central London, linked to the events unfolding across the river in Aldwych.

It was the rehearsal of an emergency tube station terror scenario, one of the unfortunate necessities in preparation for the Olympics, as the countdown continues and London starts to change, just a little, every day.

trouble every day

I've been watching the TV seeing Greece sliding into the water next to traders hedging the Euro and politicians continuing to dither. Meanwhile the 'work-habit' scheme which removes benefits is being dropped by retailers and has pushed the Syrian tanks to fourth listing.

Things like the British fuel price hike and drought have been pushed out based on all the Category 1 news.

A very old Frank Zappa song won't leave my head.

almost advertising

I know, its a sort of advertisement. But it will be good.

in which a couple of MacBook Pros get bigger disks

A small task during last weekend was recovering the disk on a silver keyboard MacBook Pro. It had been to the Apple Store and the Genius there had said it was unrecoverable and that the machine was out of warranty.

I had a quick look and realised that the disk had also been reformatted (Erased) so we effectively had an empty machine.

But it was late so I abandoned thinking about it.

Then, the next day I was walking along an unfamiliar street and happened upon a Maplin's store.

"I wonder?" I thought.

They did. They sold inexpensive SATA laptop disks that would surely fit the MacBook.

That way, if I reloaded the software, at least the disk would be a larger capacity and 5 years newer.

This was the earlier generation MacBook with the so-called 'discrete' body. It still looks pretty elegant and without many unsightly screws holding the body together.

Except...there are a lot. Most are easy to remove, but there are also two Torq TR6 in the middle of the back of the chassis. These need a special screwdriver to get out. Or (not recommended) a lot of pressure with a phillips screwdriver.

Anyway, after carefully removing the keyboard I could get to the disk. Another four screws and it was out and the new one swapped in. Put it all back together again and reload Apple's Snow Leopard OS/X and iLife from the Family Edition DVDs.

And ta-da its back like a new (empty) machine - except the original had a 100Gb disk and it now has 500Gb.

I couldn't resist getting a second disk for my 17inch MacBook Pro, which only had 120Gb and now has 750Gb after using superduper to clone the original disk before I installed the replacement.

Bridie Jackson and the Arbour

We were sitting down to eat an enjoyable spaghetti in Gateshead, and had plunked on the new album by Bridie Jackson and the Arbour.

It's a beautiful album of chilled folkish tracks with very atmospheric vocals featuring haunting choral sounds ranging through to an altogether more robust acapella. It's a highly accomplished debut with a talented band playing a wide range of instruments. One of those albums that registers on the first listen and just begs to be played again straight away.

But I didn't have the album when I first heard it and subsequently downloaded it from Bridie's bandcamp site. I consequently had a fresh CD copy waiting for me when I returned home.

It turns out the recording was made at the Sage in Gateshead, close to where we were sitting, and the gig at the end of February is in The Central pub, which is about five short steps from where we were eating the spaghetti. Heck, we are probably the only people to have tested the 'take-away' beer in cartons from the Central, because it's so close and because you can.

But back to the music, here's a super fret-cam of Bridie playing guitar and singing 'Prolong':

And check out the album here:

the machines of loving grace sometimes get flat batteries

Back home today and wondering whether to abandon this week's 40 miles on the bike. Strictly speaking, the week ends tomorrow and this morning's total was zero miles. Most other weeks I have been well over my target (last week was around 76 miles) so I think I could miss a week without wrecking my aggregate numbers.

But it could be a slippery slope (pardon the weather related pun) so I decided instead to go for a spin. It's one of the occasions where my gadgetry could defeat my objective though. Both the bicycle head unit and the speed detector batteries appeared to be flat.

An advantage of a bike is that it's quick to be able to use, but I really did want the telemetry to operate as well. My recent exploits with a Windows PC were partly to provide a quick way to offload the bicycle metrics, from within the garage, as well as to be able to do some clever things with the GPS plots.

The bike and its speedo normally work fine, although the other telemetry can go a bit wrong, usually as a result of low batteries or sensors that I have accidentally kicked and which are therefore no longer aligned.

I'm sure they will get this stuff so that 'it just works', but at the moment it can all still be a little erratic.

Anyway, my false start clocked up 72 feet after about ten minutes of cycling. That was before I replaced the sensor battery. Undeterred, I then went on to cycle 26 miles, so if I can muster 14 more tomorrow then I will still be on track.

Missing an appointment on Mam Tor

Thursday became something of a car day, with the trip back from the North taking a significant slice of the daylight hours.

Last Saturday had been an easy journey north, partly because there were fewer commercial vehicles on the road.

By comparison, even the trip to get fuel took around 30 minutes. The forecourt was packed with cars and then even when I'd filled up, the car in front blocked me whilst the occupants decided to go on a shopping spree in the mini-mart.

Navigating out of the superstore completed the challenge. It had been built on a major thoroughfare, but the traffic lines backed onto the main road in both directions creating all manner of hold-ups.

It was one of this occasions when I found myself mentally composing one of those 'emails to the council' about the way a store had been situated in a manner that created major road disruption. But I soon snapped out of it.

Further into the journey we wanted to take a deliberate detour to look at some scenery. The Peak District won as a chosen route and spent a happy hour or so navigating through the twists and bumps of the area before, on Mam Tor, realising we would now be late for an appointment down south.

We decided that the view from the shivering mountain was worth the inconvenience.

i visit the house of the trembling madness

As well as Betty's, another interesting stop-off in York is the medieval hall which hides a secret pub called the House of the Trembling Madness. There is a sign on the downstairs shop window, but the place looks like a well-stocked off-licence and you have to walk through the shop to a set of stairs at the back.

At the top is a high ceilinged and beamed room as well as the tiny but creatively stocked bar. The oak beams are from ships that sailed over 800 years ago and the original building dates from 1180. There's a need for some ingenuity to get a seat in busy times, but its worth the jiggle to get snug and taste a beer or two and maybe one of the well-prepared dishes, which can include mushy peas and mash and perhaps some ghostly ingredients.

We stayed with the lower octane beers and under the counter scrumpy (although 5.5% was actually quite strong), but there's a range of Belgian monastery beers well into the 9% that would hasten me into the Confrerie van de Roze Olifant, were I to partake.

Beyond even that were a few ultra strong tipples like the 32% abv Tactical Nuclear Penguin which is probably best admired in the bottle.