Sunday 21 September 2014

Jumpers for blogposts



Douglas Blane has accused me of being a poet again, despite the fact that I've only written one serious poem in my adult life. It was about the mild synaesthesia I experience now and again, associating each day of the week, month of the year and number from one to ten with a particular colour. I do it with physics quantities as well. When, at a writers' group I once attended, I intoned, "Volts are green, green as the sea-snakes rippling across my oscilloscope screen..." it was always going to end in, "I'll get me coat." I haven't tried another since then.
Read Douglas's blog yourself to see what he says about someone coming to his door asking him to play football. People didn't come to my door asking me to play football, not because I would  have shunned them in order to write an ode, but because I was rubbish at it. They did ask me to play at other things - I had, after all, invented the technique of punting our pram-wheeled bogies gondola-style with a brush handle - so I was by no means a recluse. But games of skill and coordination, well, forget it. Maybe school would help?
Let’s start at the primary, where once a week we had gym. Someone, somewhere in the universe, might have developed a programme of activities that could have improved the body control software of the puppet-operated-by-a- drunk wee boy, but that someone was nowhere to be seen around Carluke Primary from 1965 to 1972.
It may have done the wee boy the world of good to discover something in school that, along with singing, he was rubbish at. In secondary school, gym had been replaced by PE, which was sometimes physical and rarely educational. We played football rather a lot, save for a brief dalliance with gymnastics and another with basketball. If it was too wet, we went indoors and played crab football. The outdoor games, played on a once-grassy field, required little if any input from our track-suited pedagogue. Perhaps the kindest thing that could be said of our teacher was that he was “of his time”. In the years between attending school and becoming a teacher, I thought of plenty of unkind things, often involving the words “lazy” and, well, you can guess the other ones. Unfair, probably, as he doubtless stood at the side of a football pitch on many a rainswept Saturday, encouraging the boys who had distinguished themselves by not walking about with their arms folded as a 20-aside match went on around them during a scheduled lesson. The Scouts, Wishaw swimming baths, a succession of bicycles and, latterly, the school mountaineering club all played an infinitely more significant role in keeping me healthy than did anything formally timetabled.
I came late to watching football too. It happened round about the time that some of my non-serious poems were published. Actually, and I hope I'm not breaching some kind of professional code here by telling you this, it's a contractual obligation, as evidenced in the inside flyleaves of many Scottish authors' books. When he's not writing manky, mingin rhymes or popping out vanity-piece blog posts, Gregor Steele relaxes by watching Livingston FC, thus proving he's a regular guy and not some arty-farty jessie.

Monday 1 September 2014

Dual boot

A few weeks ago, a work friend's daughter had a bit of a disaster. She was writing up her final year dissertation on her laptop, saving it on a portable hard drive as she went along. The drive crashed and she had no backup. A number of us tried to recover the data without success. A commercial firm failed too, though they thought that they might be able to do it for £500.
As a last resort, I said I'd take it home to try it on my home PC. For reasons I can't quite remember, and which are probably best summarised by the geek catch-all "because we can", I'd made this machine dual boot. In other words, I could start it up in either Windows or the free alternative, Ubuntu Linux.
Trust me, Ubuntu is brilliant and proves that Linux is no longer the sole preserve of the computer enthusiast. There's software out there for almost everything, and it's all free. A bit of research pointed to some file recovery programs. Atypically for Ubuntu, the application I chose had a hilariously bad user interface but it did the job.
I quite like the idea of being a dual boot person. Certainly, when I spoke to 150 odd (make your own jokes) teachers at the Institute of Physics Meeting in Stirling a couple of months ago, I booted into an alternative version of myself, the one that wouldn't rather have been on a bicycle ten miles from the nearest other person.
I read 1984 in 1977. Aged 17, I still doodled motorbikes in the margins of my jotters, but I was greatly affected by the concept of Newspeak. This language was designed to be so restrictive as to prevent dissent by making it impossible to articulate such ideas. It stayed with me, so when the revival of the Scots language began, I was only too happy to be involved. Admittedly, this was by writing about vomiting budgies and dogs with bahookie faces, but I still held dear to the belief that if you restrict somebody's language, you restrict what they can think.
As my adventure in Mandarin continues, I wonder about the effect it is having on me. I don't know any bad words in Chinese, except perhaps "ugly", the most useless word in any language unless applied to an idea. Sarcasm, easily reached for in English or Scots, is outwith my reach in Mandarin.
Supposing I reboot into Chinese one day. What will life be like? That peach is ripe and soft and our neighbours have two cute dogs.