The Juggling Cat

Yesterday evening after nine the cat brought a vole into the hallway. We've been here so many times before and Clare had intentionally left the hall light on. The cat was swiftly ushered into the house while the vole was shooed outside. Another life saved.

As a consequence, we decided Shadow would be put out that night despite the forecast of Monsoon weather. Who says we're all heart here? When I got up this morning - it was lashing down - I could faintly hear his little cries outside. He flipped through the catflap as I entered the hall and I let the sodden creature in, dripping a trail of water behind him.

I rubbed him down with kitchen roll - no sense in him soaking the furniture - and he scampered off for his breakfast. That reminded me that I wanted to tell you about his recent vole-juggling.

Yes, Shadow has taken to juggling the voles he catches. He sits in the hall, usually at the bottom of the stairs and flips the vole from paw to paw, cocking his head alertly as he strives to keep it aloft. Meanwhile the vole adds to the circus atmosphere by squeaking at the top of its little voice.

Normally I would go for a video of this performance, but with Clare shrieking "Save the vole!" I am normally too busy trying to catch the little rodent pursuant to releasing it safely outside. So no video, but I have put together the little simulation pictured below.


In deference to vole protection laws and to preserve its privacy and anonymity, the vole has been whitened out.

Security

Once upon a time there was an elderly woman (who we shall pretend was not my mother) who answered the phone to a plausible caller claiming to be conducting a security audit. Believing him to be from the local police and anxious to improve her home arrangements, this woman answered the caller's detailed questions and found herself agreeing to a home visit from a representative. To further sugar the arrangement, the visitor would bring the gift of a free shredder (!).

The appointment was fixed for yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m.

Naturally once the phone had been put down, the lady smelled a rat. She dialled 1471 to get the caller's number but BT's talking robot informed her that the number had been withheld. So she called the local police.

They were helpful and reassuring. Yes it was almost certainly a scam and no, he probably wouldn't come. Lock the door, put the chains on and don't answer.

As it happened, I was in Bristol yesterday to visit this lady and I was sure he would come around. If your business is conning your way into old people's homes to steal stuff, the business model does depend on making the home visits.

I arrived shortly after 2 p.m. and hatched a plan. When the 4 p.m. caller arrived I would ask for his business card (DNA evidence!) while filming him on my camera phone. If he made an excuse about not having a card on him ('They're at the printers, I ran out. Sorry mate!') I would hand him a pen and notepad and ask him to write the details so we could check (DNA again!).

I would then say we weren't interested and close the door. If he resisted - how could he get past the chains? - we would call the police and nab him red-handed.

As a plan, it seemed not only foolproof but also one with a high probability of obtaining a conviction. Our nervousness increased as we sat chatting in a desultory fashion, watching the clock approach 4 ... and pass it.

He never showed up.
_____

Previously around 3 p.m. there had been a knock on the front door. I pulled it a scant three inches open on its chains to see a freckled youth in an Oxfam bomber jacket waving a collecting tin. Seeing the chains he did a big double take and said

"It's only Oxfam, mister. Not the gas or electricity!".

No doubt he regularly sees people in mortal fear of the debt collectors.

"Not today, thank you," I said and sent him on his way.

This and That

1. We were in Wells yesterday viewing a house and this morning we made an offer. We're waiting to see if it is accepted.

2. Cheque for £40.25 sent to our solicitors for a duplicate copy of the NHBC booklet which we cannot find in our files.

3. Clare's first TMA came back (AA-100) and she was thrilled to get 72%.

4. Our move-date is still scheduled for December 4th, which is two weeks away. This is now beginning to affect daily life. We're running down food (leading to some curious meals) and debating how much of our furniture and other household baggage should be taken to the dump.

5. My story "Entanglement" was rejected by Interzone. I'm disappointed but not surprised as rejection comes to everyone. Clare loyally reckons it's because the story is not sufficiently SF: I rather believe it's because it's not sufficiently well-written. So, all failure is a growth experience, right?

"If God is dead ..."

Prior to the Neolithic revolution, it is believed that traditional hunter-gatherer societies had proto-religions whereby animals, plants, rocks, the wind, the moon, the sun were all seen as having a spirit-aspect. It was in the nature of such societies that they were small kinship groups managed by a charismatic leader: the social function of such religions was really ‘magical environmental management'.

The advent of the Neolithic revolution in both its farming and herding aspects introduced the problems of scale. Populations rapidly grew beyond the scope of traditional, organic leadership where the leader was able to know everyone. This required the codification of law, ritual and morality. But how to make such impersonal social rules stick?

Make them the dictate of a supernatural super-chieftain, with an earthly bureaucracy-priesthood as enforcers. Thus the pastoral civilizations of the Middle-East created the Abrahamic religions (‘The Lord is my shepherd') while the more settled farming communities of South and East Asia produced the rigidities of Hinduism and Confucianism. Even Asian egalitarian reactions such as philosophical Taoism and Buddhism soon became encrusted with the priesthood-bureaucracy and attendant rituals.

This says something important about the role of religion as a necessary and effective social glue. In the unequal societies of feudalism (and Asian variants) such glue was all-important and came with real and bloody social sanctions. Latterly with capitalism, with its dissolution of traditional social relationships and increasing living standards, the social glue aspect has come to seem less important (the United States with its ethnic diversity and individualistic ethos as usual being the exception).

It is relatively easy, Dawkins-style, to prove the absurdity of a supernatural agency, given the lack of any direct evidence and the inconsistencies of the revealed sources. The decline of a religiously-based code of acceptable conduct is harder to manage. At the bottom of an atomised, depersonalised civil society tribal 'gangs' spring up, defining everyone else as 'other'. Who wants to live where 'everything is permitted'*?

Life under the yoke of a ‘monopolistic’ authoritarian religion can be pretty benighted and oppressive. Life in the absence of common standards of decency is pretty nasty. Perhaps we need diversity, competition, a market in religions?

Er, isn’t this pretty much what we have in the US today?

Well, maybe with more regulation then!

And did you mean just for the underclass?
_____

* cf. "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoevsky.

Off to Vancouver

Adrian (in the hat) and his friend Graham left for the winter skiing and snowboarding season at Sun Peaks in Canada this morning. The Vancouver flight takes off at 1.25 pm from Gatwick and it's then ten long hours before arrival at 3 pm local.


The winter season ends next April.

Bath and Wells

Yesterday as projected we did Bath (184 mile round trip).

My never-very-high hopes for Bath subsided further as we navigated the dense traffic to a very expensive car park at The Podium next to Waitrose (it passes that test of course!). A traul through the estate agents confirmed we are officially too poor for Bath. To live in the city would cost £millions, while a home in the surrounding villages carries all the commuting freight of the traffic congestion and parking difficulties.

OK. So we went to Wells. And what a difference!

Wells Cathedral

Wells is small - human-scaled, quiet and utterly beautiful. The Cathedral, shown above in bright sunlight, abuts to the market square below.

The Market Square at Wells

Then there's the old palace with its moat which we barely had time to register. We looked at one property three minutes from the Cathedral which would have been wonderful except for the constraining interior layout: a near miss. We're back later this week to view another property so at least we have the location we wanted.

And if we lived there such delights as pictured below would be just a few minutes walk away.

Mass in B-minor

Disappointing Dorset

Yesterday saw us in Dorset in the latest round of our search for a new home. This now has added urgency as our moving date looks to be somewhere around December 4th.

We started in Crewkerne, a pleasant Georgian market town with a Waitrose at its heart. A Waitrose! Surely the mark of where we would like to live. We decided to adopt the Waitrose house-search strategy - check locations in the South-West where Waitrose has stores and search around there.

Sadly, Crewkerne came to naught. The problem is the usual one we have seen elsewhere – location. Out-of-town properties sometimes look OK in the brochure, but inevitably they are placed in a broader landscape of strip-development along too-busy roads. Or they’re a claustrophobic inset in a new estate-development incongruously abutting something much more ramshackle and agribusiness-oriented. Or else there's an auto-racing stadium half a mile away, mostly used for banger racing which the estate agent unaccountably failed to mention.

As the weather turned and the rain lashed in we drove on to Lyme Regis. One of the estate agents there told me that in the Lyme area there were few properties corresponding to our requirements (three bedroom detached with garden and somewhat secluded location). “Most of the housing stock is either small terraces in the town, one or two bedroomed,” he said, “or much larger estates in the country. Out of your price bracket I'm afraid." Yes, they had some good stuff for £1.5 million but nothing at all for us.

On the way back, driving the A35 in the hills towards Dorchester we saw the oddest weather phenomenon. A ferocious wind from the south was battering the car while overhead the clouds scudded like smoky locomotives. We were on the southerly side of a deep valley: high overhead a black, jet-stream-like cloud-tube assembled and stretched the miles over the valley to our left before seeming to touch-down on the far-off hillside. It was very spooky.

After more than 200 miles of fruitless driving, we finally got home exhausted at 4.30 p.m. to prepare for a pre-booked evening play at the Andover Lights. "Under the Greenwood Tree" by Thomas Hardy is a slight work and Dorset Corset were playing it for laughs. The rustic characters were complete imbeciles – not wholly plausible - while the romance between one of them and the comely and educated school mistress Fancy Day seemed especially unlikely. We didn't stay for the second half.

Clare's new plan is to look for a property in the delightful Georgian town of Bath. Something will have to give, I wonder if it will be the garden?

Dorset

An early departure tomorrow morning to Crewkerne (mentioned in Jane Austen's Persuasion I think) as a base for Dorset house-hunting. Clare has finally seen some properties we like enough so tomorrow will also be our first viewing ... we have hopes.