Category: Personal

Year End

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, via Maria Popova

Happy new year. Maybe, just maybe, although I can’t see how, 2024 might just be better less bad than the one ending. We’re all going to have to try pretty hard though.

Time to burn the dying year down and start again.

Exam Prep

Me to eldest child: Good luck with that physics exam today. (Joking) Remember – everything reduces down to the Schrödinger equation in the end, so that’s really all you need to know anyway.

Child: Would that be the time-independent version, or the time-dependent one?

Me: Err…

Child: Relativistic or non-relativistic formulation?

Me: Just do well in the exam, please.

Poem

A couple of years ago, in response to a challenge from one of my children, I wrote a poem. It’s not a good poem, and even a Vogon would be embarrassed by it. But nevertheless, a poem it is. A while back I found it tucked inside a book and, since there is unlikely to be a follow-up, immediately thought I should expose myself to ridicule by posting it here. It’s really bad.

Poem

For those who can’t read my writing:

Plato, in the cave,

Watches the firelight shadows dance.

And dreams of Wittgenstein

In the trenches

Lit by flickering phosphorus flares.

Neither of us know what any of this means,

Do we?

No, he says, but at least

We tried

See?

Time and Memory

Your child fusses with his uniform for a few moments, then goes around to the back of the car to get his bag. You watch him walk away across the car park towards the school buildings. He looks back only once and gives a gesture that might be a wave. You rest your chin on the steering wheel and watch him in the bright, cool autumn day with the leaves on the ground and try to fix the moment in your mind. It occurs to you that in a few decades time, when they are both grown and gone out into the world, you’ll remember moments like this. And then you think: what will it feel like to have carried such memories over such a distance? And then you realise that you’ll also remember thinking about that too: the anticipation of an understanding not then available to you. Time is so strange. The child is gone and you drive away to your work and the world’s new day.

Yiota

Today I am remembering my old friend Panayiota Pastra — Yiota to everyone — who died a year ago today.

We met when we were neighbours in Walley Range, Manchester, in the mid-nineties. She was a postgrad student at UMIST and I had been working for software companies in south Manchester for a couple of years. We would often sit in her flat drinking Greek-style coffee and just talking. She took me to bars where there was good ouzo and you had to shout over the noise of crowds of Greek people good-naturedly arguing with each other. I took her up Mam Tor on a very windy day. We cooked meals for each other (badly I’m sure, for my part, and expertly for hers) and she introduced me to Robert Frost.

When she moved to Glasgow to do her PhD, I drove her there with all her possessions. I visited a number of times before she moved on again to France, and then back to Greece. And we kept in touch over the years; first by letter and then in that strange, disconnected way that the internet makes possible. She went on to become a highly-regarded academic and teacher, eventually moving back to the UK. Then she told me she was ill, and a few email exchanges later she was gone. She left a husband and a young family.

She was a good and brave and dear friend at a difficult time in my life. And then a more distant but no-less important internet friend for a large span of my adult years. I miss her.

Yiota in Glasgow in 1997