gamboling.co.uk

Who takes a hole punch to a restaurant? Well I do. Not all the time obviously, but certainly sometime. I have one with me now and I’m in a restaurant.

Certainly the sentiment, “who takes a hole punch to a restaurant” was one felt by the waitress who took my food order. When I pulled out the paper I was to file a look of genuine relief went across her face. What she had thought I was planning to do with it is beyond me.

You see I like to do my filing on the move. And my writing all out in the open. And so it creates some odd situations.

One day everyone might catch up with me but until that happens I will keep getting these looks every time I wield my hole punch in public.

How do the blind dream, I wonder? Obviously there are two kinds of answers to this question depending on if the individual ever had sight or not.

If not I imagine they have dreams where they sense things through touch, smell and all the rest. It seems obvious.

But maybe it’s not like that. You see I dream in a very unusual way. My dreams are like an audio book. I see nothing but hear myself describe it. It’s because of a problem that I have with memory.

I can never remember anyone’s name and I can never remember what anyone looks like when I can’t see them anymore. These are just some examples of the fault not the fault itself. Another is the way that I dream. And if it doesn’t seem like these things should be connected to each other then I should probably explain how they are.

In general there are three kinds of memory. Short term, long term and another type which has lots of different names but for now I’ll call unconscious memory.

Now imagine you’re having a conversation with someone. All of the conversation is being held in your short term memory but some of it is being transferred, if the information seems important enough to your long term memory. The information usually goes in in pairs. So you get soandso likes fish. You don’t copy the entire conversation just the important stuff.

But the thing is that you don’t copy “Michel likes fish” you copy “soandso likes fish”. And you also copy “soandso is called Michel”. And “soandso looks like…” well whatever they look like.

So far so simple. My brain seems to be very good at copying such things into my long term memory. I can remember all kinds of random stuff that I may have been exposed to only briefly.

So where’s the problem you may ask. Well it’s getting the info back out again. I have very slow visual comprehension, by very slow we are only talking microseconds longer than average but it’s enough. My brain is so concentrating on delivering me the information that I can’t usually deal with retrieving from memory something like a name at the same time as recognise who they are and all the other things that happen when I first meet somebody. However my memory will let me do things like pick up 11 hours later exactly where I was in the last sentence, without having to read the first half again, and finish it.

So how do I ever remember names you may ask. Well generally I don’t except a small circle of people. These people have entered into my memory via a different method, this mysterious “subconscious memory”. This memory is all the stuff that you just take for granted. The kind of memory where things stop having names but the name is the object. They become automatic.

Imagine a small bowl which has little grooves in the lip of it. When you first see it, that last sentence is how you would describe it. But once you see somebody use it, it becomes an ashtray. With objects and things this is quite an easy process and one which we did, in the main, in childhood. But it also happens with people. After a while people stop being “oh he was that guy who… what was his name?” and instead he becomes Paul. This process takes longer for me too but does enable me to remember some people at least. Also it’s handy for if anybody ever accuses you of objectifying them. Show them this and they’ll soon realise that it’s a good thing.

Interestingly this odd section of memory is also where prejudices are stored. If you don’t consciously think about it then it’s stored here. But most names are stored in long term. Just most people can access these bits of their long term memory better than I can.

The connection with dreams is simple. In visual dreams the part of the brain that deals with the images is working flat out, you see things very quickly and digest later (it is believed). My brain can’t really deal with this so just doesn’t bother (or it can’t express directly what it saw). Blind people, of course, may very well have underdeveloped visual areas of the brain – I don’t know.

So yes, how do blind people dream? I suppose I’ll have to ask somebody who is blind and see if they’ll tell me.

I’ve been a bit behind with my articles recently. This is mainly because I’ve been very busy. “What”, I hear you ask, “kind of excuse is that?”

And you’d be right.

I have recently been working for money. An interesting step for me. But much more importantly for gamboling.co.uk I’ve been desperately trying to finish a play. This has now occurred and while normally it’s been possible to update the site and write other things at the same time on this occasion things were a little bit different. Partly this was a because of the work business and partly it was because of a concrete deadline. I had to finish by a certain time and this, in an od itself, offered me some wonderful opportunities. I was able to spring clean my entire flat just while avoiding doing it. But the one thing I was unable to do as write articles for gambolling. Because I would have felt very guilty writing a gamboling article when I needed to be finishing the play. Somehow I didn’t feel as guilty scrubbing the toilet.

Anyway it is done now. It is called At Play and is available on request.

I recently included as a series of articles my diary from a few years ago (I wonder if you’ve remained stripy or if)

The diary was from a particularly odd time for me. A time of great happiness and great sadness.

I’m not sure if that’s not what it’s all about. The fact that we are more prone to notice other people when we are happy or sad means that times of strong emotion in both directions seem to go together.

We seem to love situations where there is an ending or a resolution but at the same time we tend to have situations where we actually get what we desire. Only through death do we get a final conclusion. The thing that seems missing from every story. The ending to which you can never do justice.

I have been asked since the appearance of my article the other day (LINK: If, as we may assume, weirdness is absolute), what kind of weirdness was I talking about. And in fact, by some, what I was talking about at all.

Well, let me explain. An exact situation where the law of diminishing weirdness applies is with people who have obsessive compulsive disorders. These people have completely fixed weird ideas about, say never stepping on a crack in the pavement, turning on and off light switches, washing their hands thousands of times a day. Or what have you.

To them the ideas seem normal. To others they seem weird. But here’s the twist. Because the people with these disorders believe that what they are doing is normal they think the weirdoes are the ones who don’t do these things.

And this, my friends, is the law of diminishing weirdness.

Sometimes you get that flash of recognition don’t you. That feeling of “I know that person from somewhere.” And seconds later you enter into one of four states.

One possibility is that you stay wondering desperately tying to figure out where you know this person from. In this scenario there are three subsets either you are certain that you know them but can’t quite place them and the annoyance at not being able to remember their name is so strong that you just go and ask them. Or you want to do this first thing but are too embarrassed and can’t or thirdly you aren’t truly sure that you remember them so you say nothing and it bugs you for the rest of your life.

The second possibility is that you remember them and go and talk to them. This is common I suppose but somehow not as common as…

The third possibility. They recognise you and come and talk to you. This, in my experience, is much more common than the second possibility but in reality it can’t be. Because from their point of view they are seeing the encounter as “possibility two”.

Or there is the fourth. And this is quite a subtle one. You both see each other. You both recognise each other. You both remember exactly why you never bothered to keep in touch all these years and so you both continue to ignore each other. The only problem is that I can’t remember anyone’s names. So all of these people get ot go off to their friends and say “you’ll never guess who I saw the other day.”
“Who?” they’ll ask.
“Alex Andronov”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I always hated him.” Or whatever.

The thing is that I can’t do that to them. My conversations go something like this.

“He was kind of short and wore shorts.”
“We were all short and worse shorts. We were at school.”
“I know! This is useless isn’t it.”
“Yes.”

And I know they’re right. It is useless.

Nowadays I write wherever I am. I suppose I’ve just got used to it. Since starting to write the gambolling articles was supposed to be in addition to my existing output I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t just wait until the situation was ideal. I had to write so much more often that I just had to hunker down wherever I was.

But before. Before gambolling I always used to write in cafés. In a select few cafés that I thought offered the right things that I needed.; The most important thing was coffee I liked, then came music that wasn’t too loud. (And not too repetitive. I once had to ask a café not to play Radiohead’s “OK Computer” again. I had been there for eight hours and it had been on a constant loop since I arrived.)* The final thing that was important was the café be quiet enough that I could always get the same table. But noisy enough that I didn’t feel like I was sticking out. And also so that I could steal all their characters. If it’s too quiet I only have myself for inspiration which is all very well until you have to write 260 articles a year.

One of these cafés is very close to where I am sitting now. It was a café I used a lot. And after some years of using it I suddenly noticed something rather odd (other than I was probably addicted to caffeine). That there was a bar over the road called “Fiction”. All that time I’d been sitting there writing fiction with a ruddy great sign over the road explaining what I was doing. And I never noticed it.

* They agreed and put on Radiohead’s “The Bends”.

I would like to talk today about something I like to call the law of diminishing weirdness.

It works something like this. If, as we may assume, weirdness is absolute (ie. Some things are just weirder than others) then we are faced with a problem. Why do some things seem less weird to some people and not to others. The only possible answer is that people get used to things. The more you are exposed to the weirdness the less weird it seems. Hence the law of diminishing weirdness.

In fact a really weird thing can happen when things go too far with this law. Weird thing, after a while seem really normal and people who don’t do them end up seeming, to the naturalised weirdo, well frankly a bit odd.

The blind date is an interesting concept. I believe I may have been on one but I didn’t realise until afterwards.

This might seem a little unlikely unless you include, as I do, meetings of groups of friends with the express purpose of getting one person to meet another person.

I am about to go on one again, not for myself you understand but for somebody else.

You see there is a person, lets call her Cilla, and she has decided to get tow of her friends together. Now I know Cilla and the girl in this prospective couple, but I don’t know the guy.

Now Cilla knows about blind dates and how they work and she believes the best approach is not to get the two together alone and let them go at it. No. She believes that an altogether less pressurised approach is much more satisfactory.

Her suggestion is that a whole load of his friends and a whole load of her friends should meet up and then they won’t notice that everything is focussed on them so much.

Will it work? back for an update soon.

I have decided to work with a running mate on my next novel. It seems the ideal solution.

We have decided that we will complete a chapter a month. Which is probably quite rapid as we both have jobs. I will also be continuing with gambolling and Nick, for it is he, has many projects of his own not least travelling to Argentina and getting married. And these two events are not even simultaneous. The getting married business won’t occur until his return.

The only problem is that I have to pick a novel to finish or work on a completely new one. The rules in the strictest sense call for the latter. But I’ll have to see what comes up.

Anyway I thought you might be interest to know about this and I’ll try and keep you informed.