My memory is shocking – experiences do not live on in my brain to be faithfully recalled like a film (or even radio) documentary of my life. No, they melt away, or melt together, or merge with dreams and imagined conversations. But mostly, they melt away, leaving me with a world-view shaped by my experiences but unrooted and unreferenced to the events that gave it this shape.

My CERN diary

It would make sense, then, for me to keep a diary. I have tried a few times, and it has never quite stuck. But when I was at CERN, I kept this diary and I’ve been reading it tonight and I’m ever so glad for it. I wrote in it often at first and, naturally for me, the entries tail off towards the end of my time there, although there are a couple of bonus entries from when I was back in the UK.

Some excerpts from August 2005 are below – apologies if they are excruciatingly dull (did I use that phrase in my last post as well?). I’m mining them for any nuggets I can transfer into the Discreet Dictionary – the first original entries for quite some time.

17 Aug (eve): First day that I’ve had three square meals. Trés bien. Looks like I’ve got a room at Mme Gerber’s – we discussed it over homemade limonade. With me on the first floor will be a Greek Professor who when not working at CERN is worrying, OCD-like, over the state of the bathroom. He also likes peace and quiet.

19 Aug: Thinking about my dissertation … but I keep thinking in French. Now don’t get the wrong idea – I haven’t suddenly become fluent. But I do sort of think on the edge of translation: the border between English and French.

20 Aug: I’m in the Promenade de l’Observatoire, above the Musée de l’Art et Histoire. Me and the pigeons (Tauber, in German). I hope these pigeons aren’t usurping the cute little sparrows that I’ve seen in the city…. I mean, it’s a great place for wandering unseen, unobtrusive. But it all seems a bit random, unstructured. The M. of Art and History was a labyrinth of uncluttered rooms … but what did it all amount to? I’m going to be a stranger here for 2½ months.

26 Aug: It’s nice to hear from Sophie as often as I do, through texts, emails, and soon letters. I do really miss her but in a way, it’s good to have these experiences to look back on – or it will be. I think I should have been less whiney and more ‘romantic’ when I wrote my letter. Still.

27 Aug: It’s the weekend and I have no idea what is happening in the Test match. Sophie called last night slightly drunk but none the worse for it. I, on the other hand, was very bleary, waiting for sleep to catch onto the fact I have nothing to do here except work and my dissertation.

28 Aug: I think I’m a writer, really. This dalliance with exhibitions is all very well in an intellectual curiosity kind of a way, but I think I’ll earn a living mainly through writing. Maybe!

28 Aug: I don’t know whose, but somebody’s infinite wisdom means there’s a triathlon taking over Geneva on the one day I wanted to walk peacable around the shore of the lake. The world and his bike have turned out, not so much to watch or cheer, but more to run or ride sympathetically on the footpaths. So many cycles: shp would have a field day.

28 Aug: I’ve reached the World Trade Organisation, who have a suspiciously drab building. Although, to be fair, all the buildings I’ve seen on this walk so far have been isolated boxes with tiers of rectangular windows and nothing of character beyond stolid matter-of-fact functionality and a sort of distant or covert elegance.

28 Aug: I’m in Chambésy, I think, which is still Geneva, I hope.

28 Aug: What a fucking nightmare: having walked the whole way back to the station, I’d just missed the train home so I went looking for a bus-stop. Forgetting, of course, that I only had a 100CHF note. Well, no problem, I thought, I’ll just potter along route 9 until I get a chance to get some change. But it’s Sunday bloody afternoon and everywhere closed at 2pm. Eventually I reach a little newsagents. I spend a little while looking for Le magazine litteraire (no luck), considering the Economist (too pricey), and eventually plumping for a bottle of Coke. The shopkeeper’s face! A hundred? No, I haven’t got change for a hundred. A fifty, maybe… So I’ve been pottering along the motorway ever since. I passed a sign that suggested Meyrin was 4km away (2½ miles – an hour at most), which would be fine, I suppose, if I hadn’t already spent three and a half hours walking round the lake and back. There probably was an easier solution, but I appear to be in full hedgehog/ostrich mode.

A page from my CERN diary

28 Aug: A Swiss brass band strikes up. ‘My Way’. The drums are a little loud and the piano solo uncalled for but this is Sunday night in Meyrin and no one’s complaining.

31 Aug: For two days in a row, now, my cutlery has been magnetized. Is this the truth about CERN? It’s just physicists sharing an in-joke…?

31 Aug: You should probably know, if I haven’t already mentioned it, that apart from the first two pages in pen (which I sort of regret now), all my entries have been written with the pencil I stole from IKEA. You should also know that I do not have a pencil-sharpener with me. I have to pick and chew at the end to get any sort of lead at all!!

The original version of my Discreet Dictionary

I have begun the second stage of uploading the Discreet Dictionary. It involves going back through the entries from A to Z adding links to the cross-references. It is a pleasant exercise as I get to revisit some of the earlier entries and, if appropriate, retweet them for those following the Dictionary, given that I only started tweeting the Dictionary at around P.

Today I have updated entries from A to C, replacing the (q.v.) tags with links. Highlights you may not have looked at before include Alchemy and Cow, although I personally love the stark lack of context of Autumn: “Autumn is the correct season for the king’s hair and teeth to fall out.”

While tracking progress during the first phase, I would post here with a heading derived from the entries I had uploaded in the intervening time. That feels less appropriate for the second phase, so instead, I am going to share the notebooks in which I made the original notes that form the basis of the Dictionary. It may be monumentally boring, even off-putting, for you readers, so we shall see how it goes.

At least it makes it easier for me to adhere to part of my resolution for 2012 to put more pictures on the blog…. As for the first part – more forethought – that might follow next time…!

Anyway, the notebook pictured here is the one in which I started the Discreet Dictionary as an attempt to capture random thoughts and organise them so they would be available for future writing. I have huge nostalgia loking through old notebooks, which is probably not healthy, but this notebook started in approximately 1999. Most of the entries have been transcribed unedited onto the Dictionary blog so if you are exploring the Dictionary, bear in mind the callow youth responsible for most of it.

In light of which, I have discovered an entry that escaped the first round of uploading – Banal. As definitions go, it’s not very big and it’s not very clever, but it still makes me laugh….

Life is very full just at the moment. If I have one regret from 2011, it is that I haven’t taken enough time over the posts on this blog. Seldom have I thought in advance what I was going to write, and rarer still are the occasions on which I have taken the time to structure what I have written and to try and make it more than a splurge of idle thoughts. So if I have one resolution for 2012, it is to make a little bit of time for more forethought to go into this blog.

I’ve enjoyed the titles for posts on this blog coming from the batches of words defined in the Discreet Dictionary – often they have resonated with events and given me at least the semblance of a topic to concentrate on. That won’t happen in 2012 – or not as often – so I really will have to plan more.

It will not be easy – hence the need for a resolution rather than a decision, perhaps? But I will try.

Also, more pictures in 2012.

Yours
Michael

Queen Iris

We are in that strange holding time between Christmas and New Year. My workplace is closed all this week, Edie’s nursery is closed, Iris is too young for social appointments and Sophie is chewing her nails off desperate to escape the solemn duties of childcare and festive familial commitments. We are waiting for 2012.

We have clocked up three big Christmas meals so far: dinner on Christmas Eve in Cambridge, lunch on Boxing Day in London, and lunch on 29 Dec in Essex (see left). Not bad going. Each has been very special, in its own particular way.

I have published the penultimate swathe of definitions in the Discreet Dictionary for 2011. My favourite from this batch is Witch, which was written in relation to an adaptation of The Little Mermaid that I was involved with maybe ten years ago. I think it was part of the stage directions, describing the character who takes the Mermaid’s tail and voice: “Pockets, empty then full, empty then full. Fluids frothing forth, foul liquors caged in ice. The witch has the capacity to drown your sorrows; to drown you.”

Christmas is nearly here!

It’s been a few weeks since I posted here. A lot has been going on and I have hardly even turned on my computer in that time. However, a few discreet definitions have made it into the Dictionary, so that’s ok. I wrote my definition of Tuition fees several years ago but it still seems relevant.

Anyway, I reckon there are two more batches of the first swathe of definitions to upload, and they should be done by the end of the year. This means I can start 2012 with a new plan to generate content.

In the meantime, I have been busy in the day job, so you might like to check out my writing on the Wellcome Trust blog as well.

A few bonus musings on Time, however:

1. It is most definitely time to start thinking about what I am going to do when I reach Z and finish the first sweep of the Discreet Dictionary. In truth, I know one task that awaits me – to go back through the Dictionary and make all of the (q.v.) cross-references links instead. It will be fun, and a chance to highlight some of the better ‘definitions’. I saw that someone had found my Dictionary blog searching the web for “What is a theophonist?”: I included mention of theophonist in my definition of “Dreams“, although almost certainly not in accordance with its meaning in any other dictionary. It’s a nice definition though, and worth a read if you have ever liked anything I have ever written in my life. Or in my dreams.
2. I have had a lovely weekend with the family. At the same time, I have had nary an hour to myself in the whole two days (and, by extension, the week). It amazes me that I had the temerity to be bored for whole years at a time when I was younger.
3. I have ordered next year’s calendar from Cabinet magazine: it will have no standard holidays or observances, but critical dates in the history (and limited future) of apocalyptic predictions, paying due homage to the fact that, according to certain Mayan prophecies, 2012 will see the destruction of the world. Rather beautifully, the calendar – the Last Calendar, of course - ends on 21 December 2012, given that that is when the world will end too.

Having broached the Ts, I fear I am too fast approaching a point at which my notebooks run dry and I will be forced to rely on my present day wits to come up with new definitions. It has been fun transcribing the collected literary detritus of my mind to the web – I’m sure it will be equally fun to actually have to pay attention, to be creative, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to be original again.

Net Net contribution

It has been two weeks or more since my last post here and I am no longer going to apologise for such lacunae in my writing. However, it has got me to thinking about whether I will ever be a ‘net Net contributor’.

I lurk, mostly, on Twitter and blogs. My own blog here is inherently solipsistic (well no, but I like the word; it is actually merely introspective) and my other blog, which has a pitiful four subscribers, has potential to be ‘social’ but I am not ‘marketing’ it because I am not sure it is precisely what I want and I am antipathetic to the concept of ‘work in progress’, despite every blog being essentially exactly that.

A snowball, not an ammo dump

My preferred approach to the web is to follow those random trails that come from following a link that a creditable source (ie a friend, acquaintance or admired intelligence) suggests. If the target is pleasing, I will browse it, looking for another diverting link to somewhere else. And so on.

But each stop on this mystery tour is an ephemeral pleasure. Just as in life, the things that please me most are ephemeral, fleeting phenomena that pale as soon as they are pointed out. I strongly, perhaps wrongly, believe that my solitary delight in such things does not stand being shared.

This presents a dilemma. I value online those people who share lots of links – this is the proper value of Twitter, I think. But I rarely do the same. Does it matter? It probably means I will not ever have many followers/’friends’/subscribers. I would like to be a contributor of source material to which others suggest the first link. But for that to happen, I need followers/’friends’/subscribers (as well as contributing material that is attractive to them). Not so much a vicious circle as a closed one.

What’s the point of this introspective, solipsistic digression? The impact of ‘social media’ and/on the future development of the web remains to be seen but there does seem to be an evolving ecosystem of links that are shared between networks of people. What roles are available within that system (or systems)? Are they substantially different to roles in offline society? Are there emerging roles to be claimed – aggregator/ammo dump, perhaps, curator or disseminator? Or even just quiet snowball, like me, acquiring without passing on?

Strategy to success?

A significant online presence is achieved by producing content – original content, or comments on blogs, or tweets or whatever else. Does it necessarily mean producing more than you consume, being a net Net contributor? The quiet, net Net consumer risks fading into the background, or fading beyond even the background, into the faint trail of a mere IP address visiting websites.

I’m not about to increase production of online content for my own part. I do, however, think it is something to consider as we all learn to play our part in new online social networks. I hope that if I follow my natural instinct – to lurk more than comment, to limit my contributions to what I believe worth communicating – I will find my natural role and be content with it. At least I have a snowball’s chance….

Two headstones

On an unexpectedly beautiful autumn’s day, I took a walk through Abney Park Cemetery, the “first wholly non-denominational garden cemetery in Europe”.

I was recently reminded of a curious evening I spent in this cemetery doing a two-hour performance of Collagen in ten minutes, a piece I made with Jeremy Hardingham which was performed only twice.

So I decided to walk through the cemetery today and was taken with how many signs of decay – beyond the obvious – there were. I took some pictures (see below).

When I came home, I added four definitions to my dictionary: Stars, Statistics, Stoics, Story. The first is a little twee thing I once wrote; the second is from a play about water which I have not yet written; the third is a nice set of analogies from ancient Greece and the last is something a friend wrote many years ago – I’ve lost touch with Katie since then, which is to my shame.

It’s my first ever media ‘appearance’ (other than articles ghost-written for other people)! Not sure it’ll prove to be the first of many; much fun, though….