Biology of the Worst Kind

Every Little Hurts

Obviously I had no intention of going, but The Poet set off and I cheered him on from my sofa in the solitarium.  It was the Stop Tesco Opening in Mill Road March, yesterday.  Mill Road, I learned, is called 'the most multi-cultural street in Britain' by The Telegraph - in what tone I can't say.  And I live directly off it.  It is a very fine road, full of shops selling ingredients for, or the food of every cuisine under the sun, well, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, American, New Zealand; and bicycles, old fashioned hardware, electrical bits and pieces, organic this and that, as well as booze, printer ink, computers, electronic music stuff, toys.  There's a mosque, a couple of chapels, and a new age bookshop.  And Tesco has just discovered a triple fronted vacant shop to begin the ruin of it.

But my foot doesn't walk half a mile without pain, I've got a streaming cold that's refused to go away for a week, and as well as being entirely idle, I've got an aversion to crowds, actually an aversion to more than three people on the street at the same time.  I've avoided demonstrations, though mostly they have my whole-hearted blessing, since that march on Grosvenor Square in 1968 (was it?) when they got the horses and backed us up against the trees in the square and I was anyway speeding and it was all a bit much quite honestly.

But the drums and whistles of the Mill Road march could be heard all the way up in my solitarium.  Really great drumming, and I'm a sucker for anything with a powerful beat.  After about half an hour, I couldn't bear it, and headed off down the road, just like one of the rats in Hamelin, inveigled by the Pied Piper towards the river Weiser deep and wide.  And there I was on my first march for 40 years or so (OK there were a couple since). 

Actually, the march had just reached the top of my street when I got to it, and the proposed Tesco site is about 100 yards away from it, so to say that I marched would be stretching it.  I found The Poet, who waved me towards him in the crowd of a good few hundred.  I got there in time to hear the man from Al Amin, grocer and post office, make his speech and to  cheer, though I declined the placard The Poet offered me, even though it said  'Every Little Hurts'.  We reminisced with a couple of friends about the old days of throwing ball-bearings under the horses' feet to unseat the police, but decided that animal welfare considerations over rode such behaviour.  Anyway there weren't any horses, there were community police officers who for the most part were taking photos on their phones - not for the records, like they used to - but to take home to show their mums.  And then the crowd gradually dispersed to do their Saturday afternoon shopping in the deli, Al Amin and the co-op, or have a coffee in the Black Cat Cafe; the dreadlocked, the pink-haired, the grey haired and the bald went their amiable ways.  And, unless Tesco have not been cowed and continue their vile plan to ruin our excellent street, I have had my quota of exercise and activism for another forty years. 

PS Toolbar Manhaters

PS:  It's worth taking a look at Wayne's comment in the previous post, for another take on my MetaFilter dissatisfaction.

Toolbelt Manhaters - A MetaFilter Mystery

Sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel because it turns out it never got invented in the first place.  An object lesson over on these two MetaTalk  threads of MetaFilter, about which I wrote an LRB article  recently.  The subject is whether or not men dominate the space and how they do it.  I got involved reading a conversation started by a post about a flasher.  Women were talking about their experiences.  Very rare to see so many women involved in the comments.  Suddenly the thread wasn't there any more.  The moderators had deemed it a bad post, which always overrides a good discussion.  So I was told when I set up another post on the same topic which was deleted because it was 'making a point' and that isn't what MetaFilter was about either.

My mistake.  I didn't remember that you have to accept the rules of a place when it isn't collectively run.  But the complaint threads developed, and women began to say how uncomfortable they felt with the 'boyzone' talk, and some of the men fought back with talk of zealots, how women always make victims of themselves instead of getting on the right wavelength...oh god, all that stuff, decades and decades gone by, and there it all is.  Someone suggested I was having a fit of the vapours (and the thread is headlined 'Hysterics') and when I objected was told that it was a joke, ironic, dontcha get it. 

There are a handful of men who are agreeing that the ethos is bad, and fighting their corner, insisting that women claiming they find it hard to participate ought to be listened to.  It's a proper discussion, dismal in places, but as clear a description of how not very much has changed since the Seventies as can be got.  The discussion that eventually is being had is the upside of MetaFilter, just as, it seems to me, the privileging of 'best of the web' posts over debate is the downside.

Worth looking, if you're feeling strong.  But I think I've done with the site.  I'm 60 years old, and it's too tiring (actually shocking) still to be told that a discussion by women about their experiences of being flashed is 

like manna from Heaven for the toolbelt manhaters that roam Metafilter with a fried chicken leg in one hand and Camila Paglia's panties in the other. More succinctly, it massages their prejudices.

Playtime

The truth is I'm besotted by technology.  Actually, the truth is I love toys.  I like diminutive objects that do clever things.  Computer software has all the nooks and crevices of a dolls' house, tiny drawers that slide in and out and have minute working models of kitchen implements inside.  I only liked toy cars that had doors that opened and steering wheels that turned.  I adored a doll that pee'ed into a nappy after being given a bottle, not for any innate maternal pleasure it gave me, not so I could nurture my faux baby, but because of the one thing one thing following another, and the fact that I could set it in motion.  It worked like a real life object, but wasn't.  It was a trick.  A delight.

So I finished the novel and celebrated by giving up on the horrors of Windows Vista and migrated to an Mac.  A thing of beauty, and best of all it's toytown, though a bit dinky, even for me.  I hate the dock and its little bouncing icons - but I've discovered Quicksilver and my fingers are beginning to flick my applications into life.  What it means is that I've had to spend days learning a completely new system and discover all kinds of new software.  My happiness/craziness quotient runneth over.   I've got no knowhow, you understand, everything about software is just beyond my comprehension, except that bit by bit I begin to see what it does, and  just glimpse slightly how it works, how it's organised and what I can make it do. 

Databases thrill me, but are so fathomless I feel like I've been shipwrecked in a wilderness.  The fantasy is that I can put all information into my machine and it will link together to surprise me with the oddest connections.  That's a toy brain, really.  I can't get my head around the multiplicity of Tinderbox , though I think it's probably just what I want.  DevonThink  is remote and massive.  VoodooPad is wonderful and magically wiki and Journler looks to me almost just right, like the baby bear's porridge, though I have to make the magical connections myself. 

I want a word processor that pulls together notes, research, lets me play around with text and makes patterns.  Scrivener does all that with knobs on, and opens two different windows at the same time.  But Jer's Novel Writer (call it like it is) lets you make marginal notes, though you can't have a notecard view.  So much to play with.  Though the truth is that I know Word so inside and out it's virtually invisible and exactly what's required to writing.  But I want something new, that does things that make me go 'Oh' and 'Ah'.

I don't seem to get bored with looking at software.  I haven't done a stroke of work, just buried myself in methods and organisation on the optimistic assumption that I will actually get round again to doing some writing with these tools.  In fact, it's like my mobile phone, I'm not really interested in getting phone calls, I want to set it up and play with the options.

Does this mean I should have been a software designer?  Maybe.  I could just sit around and doodle patterns that make things happen, or seem to happen.  But I haven't got the math, or the logic, to put it very mildly.  Yet there's a hankering for investigating structure, for playing with things that appear to perform a clear task when really it's all done with smoke and mirrors.  Actually, that's quite like human beings and all that overt social and mental  existence which turns out to be the result of an underlying system of proteins.  It's also quite like being a writer.  Or a writer like me, at any rate.  I've never been terribly interested in telling stories or inventing what they call rounded characters.  For me, writing is much more about making shapes, fitting disparate things together, finding out about the workings of seemingly inevitable behaviours.  Or perhaps, I just should have been a geek.

It also means that I've got two redundant Window's Vista laptops.  I could flog them on ebay to defray all this expenditure on new software, but I'm rubbish at packing parcels.  Any suggestions?