gamboling.co.uk

Although it probably doesn’t seem like it the title of this post makes sense. In fact it makes, in a way, more sense than most sentences.

The other day I mentioned auto-antonyms (here: Why different species can’t mate) and after doing so my father asked me what “Literally dusting” would be. As literal and dusting have two meanings a piece how many meanings of the sentence would there be? The answer is four meanings from two words.

And after that we started discussing how complicated we could actually make the sentence. We worked out that for each two meaning word we added we were doubling the previous number of options. Here’s how the options work visually:

And then we just started adding words. Now the sentence we ended up with does make sense, not necessarily at first perhaps, but it does. And fine has three meanings to boot exquisite, small and just good enough. Which means that “Literally overlook fine hard dusting custom run trial drive time” has 1536 different meanings. Which is pretty good going.

Some days you’re just luckier than others (as I was talking about the other day: Some days). And on Saturday this week I went to visit my cousin who lives down near Bath. It was going to be a long trip six hours in total of travelling for six hours of visit time but then it was just one of those things that you have to go and do sometimes. It was their housewarming, their husband’s birthday so a visit was in order. Anyway I thought, I’ll get a chance to catch up on some reading on the train.

So off we went to the station, Katherine and I were running a bit late. But so was Pete, we got to Clapham Junction and a train just magically pulled up, we made up the time and got to Paddington with plenty of time to buy the tickets and some food. And this is where the first thing went wrong of the day. Because of some confusion about how we were going to be getting down there (car or train) we didn’t buy any tickets until we got to the station. And once we went up to the machine the tickets were 45 pounds each! So £135 in the hole we went to the shops to buy some food. The rest of the train journey was fine, and actually quite enjoyable. That’s right we were being lulled into a false sense of security. In fact this security went on all of the way through the party at my cousins house. It was fun, there was good conversation and food. So it was time to leave, all we needed was a lift to the station. The journey to the station should have taken twenty minutes, but…

it took…

two hours. There was some kind of mysterious “cars driving into Bath convention” going on. Loads and loads of traffic and no seeming problem at the end of it. After about an hour and half we had to get out of the car and start walking. We’d missed two trains. And once we got out of the car and Dominic had turned around and went back home two things happened. It started raining, and there was suddenly no more traffic.

Pete suddenly said, “One of us is unlucky today who is it”?

To which I replied that it must have been Dominic and that the traffic had moved around now to block him on the way home.

Which seemed funny at the time but clearly it wasn’t true. So we headed off to the station in the rain and started following the signs to the station. But because we were on a ring road the signs were taking us the way that the cars are taken to the station. Katherine at one point said that surely we must need to walk through the town centre to get to the station but there were no signs in the town centre so we followed the road signs. And by the time we arrived at the station thoroughly soaked we could tell two things. First that we’d walked around the whole of the outside of Bath, and second we could see the place that we’d started from from the station and what had taken half an hour would have taken five minutes.

Well we got to the station and as luck would have it the train we thought we’d missed was running late and was still stopped at the station. Excellent we thought. Lets get on this one. However the train was broken, so then we had to get on a train on the other platform that then had to swap positions with the other train. Finally we were on a train and it started moving, after fifteen minutes it suddenly stopped and started going backwards. And another fifteen minutes later we were…

back in Bath train station.

Then another ten minutes later we finally left the station and headed for London. It had taken us two and a half hours to leave Bath!

After we got back to London we were walking back to our house. It was so late that the back entrance to the train station was closed so we had to walk around from the front and under the railway bridge. In the six years that I’ve lived here it’s something that I’ve probably done once a week without incident. But today, today something, some force, some something, needed to tell everyone that it wasn’t our group that was unlucky, but that no instead it was me – Alex.

How do I know it was me and not say Katherine or Pete?

I’ll tell you how. Because as I was walking under the railway bridge a Pigeon shat on me. And I’m not just talking a small amount either, oh no.

Massive white and brown runny gobs of crap all over my shirt. And then as I turned to see what it was the biggest bit of white shiny poo slid right into the middle of my crotch. Yes dear reader it looked like I had become a bit too excited.

All I could smell the entire time I was walking home was the incredible smell of scampi!

It was truly a crappy end to a crappy journey. At least Katherine and I got to laugh about it all the way home.

You can read her version of events here: A bird under a bridge

I’m not superstitious. But I know a lot of people who do things which would be called superstitious by any normal person – kind of just in case. And I am no exception. For example people might not walk under a ladder, kiss across the threshold, cross on the stairs and so on. Just in case it kind of might be true.

I’ve started a new one of late which is truly silly. I have days of the week socks (which is turns out I have talked about before:
At any rate today I am wearing on the left foot the correct sock for today and on the right foot the correct sock for tomorrow.)* I now end up wearing pairs of socks, but before I take them out I don’t know which one I’m going to wear. The socks have a day on them and if the day that it happens to be the day that it is then I’m going to have a lucky day. Because I’m an optimist I do not assume I’ll have an unlucky day on the other days. I just assume that I’ll have an even better day on the days when the day and socks match.

Obviously this is madness, and I don’t actually think that there will make a difference. But I do actually go through the process of thinking of it every time I put my socks on. I always check the day of the socks when I put them on. And I never attempt to cheat the system.

But I don’t think this means that I’m truly mad. People think much more crazy things than that. But which is worse thinking that not walking under a ladder makes a difference, or knowing that it doesn’t make a difference but not walking under them anyway?

It’s similar in a way to a phobia, spiders in this country can’t hurt you at all and yet people are still terrified. I think it’s like Woody Allen said, “I don’t believe in God but I feel guilty about it”, lots of atheist’s while actively not believing in God don’t actively go and do things to annoy God just in case.

Gosh that’s a pretty tortuous last sentence. If they don’t believe in God how can they avoid upsetting something they don’t believe in? Well that’s the essential problem I suppose.

Right quick time to leave with a joke, another from Woody Allen: “As the poet says, ‘Only God can make a tree’, maybe that’s because nobody else can figure out how to get the bark on”.

* I seem to have been just as obsessed with
Feng Shui back then too.

Could Astrology actually be true? It seems awfully unlikely but it is – of course – possible.

There are a variety of systems which exist in the world which sound almost laughably silly but help because they make things easier to remember. For example Feng Shui is effectively the practice of furniture arranging viewed as “what would a dragon do”? You might not think that dragons know about the arrangement of furniture but think of it another way. When you sit in a space and you feel too cramped what the arranger has forgotten is that people need space around them, when you look at a room that seems to be broken up and bitty you have forgotten that the room needs a visual sweep and that if you put a lamp in a precarious position you have forgotten that a dragons tail needs space when it goes round tricky corners. In fact it’s much easier to remember the few key rules of dragons and how they work than all the specific rules of style. It’s a form of systemization. It’s kind of like not having to remember exactly how long an inch is but instead measuring the thing with the bit between your knuckle and the tip of your fattest finger – a kind of rule of thumb.

Astrology probably developed in a similar way. People for a variety of reasons will tend to be similar if similar things have happened to them, and similar things will tend to happen to them based on the times of the year that they are born. These could vary from temperature of the child in bed in the first few days of life to being one of the oldest or youngest in the school year. So the stars could have nothing to do with it working or not working they could just be the way that people identify which time of the year you were born.

Actually I’ve never read a horoscope and had it ever come true. I’ve never seen it and said, “oh yeah that’s incredibly spooky”. There is so much generalisation in there as to make it completely irrelevant and stupid. The part that is harder to throw away is the descriptions of your sign. Some descriptions of Aquarius, Taurus etc seem to be reasonably accurate of the kind of people who fit in that group. And I think that part of it is probably reasonably likely to be due to a combination of real world factors as described above (eg. temperature, age oldest to youngest in class, etc).

But I once suggested this to a keen astrologist and she said I was completely wrong. So I asked her for her “scientific” explanation of astrology. Her answer? She said that the human brain gets a real kick at the exact time of birth and that kick is incredibly subtly influenced by gravity. So that even the exact positions of far away stars can affect the way that the child’s brain will grow from that moment on. Sounds unlikely to me but then I suppose – you never know.