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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.

I promised this article in a previous one, but I can’t remember which.

Actually no I can remember which, it was (On Sunday night, I was in Euston train station with Katherine and we spotted an unattended bag. ) and this article is about memory. Do you see what I’ve done there? My cunning trick? Well of course you do.

The particular aspect of memory that I wanted to talk about was the retroactive correction. The moment when you realise that everything that came before has to now be reappraised in light of new information.

It’s an odd thing when it happens. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the moment in Star wars Episode VI: The Empire Strikes Back * when we found out that Darth Vader was, in fact, Luke’s father. A key moment that made you want to go and re-watch the previous movie and see if it was now possible to guess this from subtle signs left before that out of context you had missed.

It’s a very fun trick. You can also see it in Return of the Jedi, The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense.

But is it honest? Is it fair? Well in fiction no trick should be off limits I suppose. So why should it be banned? Maybe it won’t.

Actually there is another version of this which is very similar but not quite the same. This is caused by revealing an earlier scene after the main event and thereby changing everything. This is like Memento. Or what would have happened if they were to put a scene in the prequels to Star Wars which changed the previous films.

They seem different because we seem the action. But actually how different are they? The scene where Darth tells Luke that he is his father alludes to a scene where Darth is having sex with Luke’s mother. We just don’t see it.

* Why does this sound much more ridiculous now?

What an interesting thing being colour blind is. We’ve heard about it and we know about it. But all we really know about are two types of colour blindness. Either you can’t see a certain colour or range of colours at all and only perceive grey instead of colour. Or you can not perceive the difference between two different colours and so, for example, you would see both green things and red things as red things.

But there is another type which not much gets done about because, mainly, it doesn’t cause much of a problem.

How do you know that the colour green you see is the same colour green everyone else sees? You can’t know. You could be seeing what everyone else sees as red as green ad you wouldn’t know.

How could somebody explain it to you? If red and green were swapped how could they say it to you?

“Green is the colour of grass”, is something you have been told since being a child. It doesn’t matter if you are seeing a different colour than everybody else as long as everybody calls whatever colour they see when they see grass green nobody will every be any the wiser.

It is, I think, a rather unsettling thought that we don’t just all figuratively see the world differently. We might all literally see the world differently.

Maybe the really angry people see a nature full of what peaceful people call red?

“Don’t touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999”.

This is the suggestion, made by London Underground staff of what to do, or rather not do, if you see a suspect package.

Of course the problem is that they mean something different from what they have written. The easiest way to get a sense of it is to read the phrase out loud.

Some people still argue that the phrase is correct. But it isn’t. The sentence is simply an extended version of this “Don’t do this or that”.

Perhaps the best alternative would be this. “Don’t touch. Check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999”.