Post Xmas salutations

I hope you had a great Christmas, wherever you're reading this from.

I did.

But now I'm even fatter than usual.

Just watched Team America and Napoleon Dynamite. Now I understand what my mates were yakking on about with "I'm so ronery" and the like. But I think I'll have to see Napoleon again to tell whether it was funny or not. Unsure.

Narnia on Boxing Day was great, though. Almost too schmaltzy but not quite. The battle scenes were actually pretty impressive but no blood. Which is probably a good thing for the kiddies. But not for blood-thirsty adults.

Lots of cool presents. Great times at home and with my cousins. Even made a snowman (first of the millenium) by the sea today. It were massive. I'll try and get a picture up...

And a few days to relax will be extremely good before the carnage of 2006...

See you then!

A different story?

A solitary trumpet blared defiance out across the hillside.

A dozen pipes of some description or other answered, but their lack of harmony or timing left the gesture hollow. It was the smaller force that were cheered by this display, perhaps due to rather than in spite of the massive odds that faced them.

Bjorn was still hidden behind his uncle's spare shield that he could hardly lift. His foster-brother Niall had told him to stay behind the shield until he could smell the fetid breath of the foe. These were Niall's last words before an arrow had burrowed savagely into his unprotected stomach, condemning the Irishman to a horrible and slow death.

Bjorn could still hear the slow, supressed wheezing from Niall a few feet away from him. That all too human sound unnerved him but was an excellent and inescapable reminder to hold his urge to look over the shield in check, lest he get an arrow in his guts too. Around him the other Gall-Goidel were anxious - the Irish arrows had stopped coming, but that meant an attack or a trick to their battle-hardened memories.

Halfdan, Bjorn's uncle, was whispering to himself as he methodically wrapped a tattered old brown rag around his helm and forehead. All the warriors there knew that this was the closest thing their little band had to a talisman. It was the flag of a British war-chief, long since ruined by being ritually dipped in the blood of their fallen enemies. There was now no way of telling what colour it had originally been, or what noble Latin words had been emblazoned upon it.

The Irish pipes had begun again, this time seemingly behind them, where the slope of the hill was shallower. The mist prevented Bjorn from seeing any of the foe, even when he dared to peep beyond the barrier of the hill. Halfdan seemed untroubled by the fact that they now appeared to be surrounded, and gestured subtlely at two of his senior warriors who moved their shields to cover the small band from the rear.

Bjorn was fumbling with his drawers and was about to relieve himself when a horrific wailing began through the sea-grey mist around him. Thoughts of urination left him and he drew his other weapon, a long Aenglish Seax-knife, designed for gutting a foe beneath the shield or poking at unprotected eyes above. His smooth hands trembled slightly, and his pee escaped to soak his thighs and clothes.

His friend Ragnald leant over to him and muttered: "Now it is time to for your knife to sing as loud and as keenly as the Irish voices now shriek."

Bjorn coughed and gulped at the same time.

A really Short Story

The air inside his door shivered patiently, humming with the unfiltered and unsorted debris of his body. It had been undisturbed all day, wafting itself in layers, with the heavier matter descending to the fuzzy earth of the carpet, and the lighter items spiralling upwards only to be caught on the outstretched arm of a sweater, where they now lay side by side with dust mites and the scent of stale tobacco.

The cold had ensured that the solitary window to the room had been unopened for months now. No fresh breath of cleansing air, no external current to disturb the layers of dirt and dead skin. No touch of the winter sun or of the morning dew. No natural light or lunar beams. All controlled, all enclosed, silent.

Were he not to come back one day what would happen to this room? What would happen to the dust in its slow war on form? What would become of the miniscule colonies of life in the room, hidden beneath carpets or locked within the many levels of the mattress? Could the room take on an identity of its own - an ecosystem or a battleground?

Just as the stale air of the room began to demand answers to these questions, the occupant returned.

The patterns and eddies of the air were broken asunder as the door opened. The pools of light and dark behind the curtains were mercilessly crushed by the cruel flick of the ever-suffering light switch. The rug, which had been seeking to expand itself to fill the indentations made by shoes in the morning, was smashed flat in several places again by the weight of the boot.

Its own patterns, patiently constructed over the day, fell away. The silent structures of the solitary room were again replaced by the tyranny of man's laws and habits.

But the room knew no other law. It could not rebel, and did not elect its representatives. In fact, it was hardly alive at all. Hardly.

A momentary lack of precision

So my last few posts (apart from the one on E v I) have been a little too practically informative. Just to reassure you (me?) that the point of this blog is not to chronicle reality and package it up into neat little bite-sized stories.

However, having said that, I'm not sure I can postulate a viable alternative. I'm not sure what this blog is actually for.

But I'll be making an attempt to provide less reportage and more analysis and thought.

JOKE:
What did the computer screen do on January 1st?
New's Year Resolution

Shocking lapse of input

OK.

Quite a lot has happened.

Executive Summary

After Faithless :
Dinner with family
Office Carol Service featuring yours truly on Djembe and singing Bass
Office Pantomime with your truly appearing with Djembe (again) and flaming trousers
Flew to Latvia (Saturday 10th)
Dinner and mad sandbox-based Reggae raving
Dinner and insane Riga-wide bar roaming nonsense
3 am Pelmeni (which is not a restaurant but a Latvian ravioli)
Got up as my cousin came back to the hostel to fly back to UK
Back to work
Eurostar to Brussels (while the Council budget negotiations were going on)
Meeting at the Commission - 16 Member States
Hit the town
Bilateral at the Commission
War museum in the park
Back to London
Meeting at the DTI
Synthetic Culture with the newbies (mental)
Christmas shopping (Saturday 17th)
Christmas party in Lewisham
Back to work

All this from 7-18 December.

Mental.

Latvia and Brussels were great. Two very positive pro-EU experiences despite my natural scepticism. Met lots of cool like-minded people and had a lot of fun. But boy did I learn a lot.

And boy am I knackered!

Introvert (I) vs Extrovert (E) ?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch
This prompted me to think further about my I v E tendencies. I remember when I did Myers Briggs (in Putney, I think) I was E. Dad was surprised about this and was similar to me except for this distinction (I was ENTP).

Reading this article (I linked to it via Neal Stephenson's site http://www.nealstephenson.com/) I questioned my own understanding of my personaility. My assumption was that I was an I that gradually grew in confidence to become more E. I think this was partly due to the (societally-derived?) assumption that E was better than I.

Now I think that I have a strange set of joint I and E tendencies, and that I vary quite substantially between them. I clearly do a lot of my thinking by talking, and derive many of my views and ideas from interaction. But I also need quite a lot of space (maybe due to lacking siblings?) and will frequently go and sit down away from others during a party, for a while.

I also feel very drained after the 3 days of meetings (another one at DTI this morning) but enthused about the project and my own ability to contribute.

this set of circumstances has led me to consider whether the I/E divide is perhaps the right way to think about these issues. Perhaps it could be usefully split into other binary considerations which might help explain the dichotomy discussed above:

Leader v Follower
Decision v Discussion
Interaction v Contemplation

And I'm sure I could think of some more...

Riga

Sitting in the Profitcamp in Riga Old Town.

What an amazing town. Art Deco dripping from every pore.

And so cheap. So... cheap.

I am currently being persuaded to go to somewhere called Pelmini. I am unsure. But it seems plausible...

Incitement Live

Come

Play

My

Game

Inhale
Inhale
You're the victim!

Faithless Live

Faithless
Originally uploaded by Dark Hunter.

So, strangely enough it was back to Brixton for the second night running to see Faithless with the Las Tinajas crew plus Zed.

We were SEATED up in the circle which seemed very odd to start with but was brilliant - I could see the light show, hear the music and actually watch Maxi Jazz leap about in a way that his e-tweaked tired face utterly belies.

Also meant I could dance in my own space without killing people. Although there was an ever-present hum of the fear of death by plummetting. I think this added to the experience.

Opened with INSOMNIA and closed with a brilliant SALVA MEA. With a brutal and well-received WE COME 1 in the middle.

Awesome. Probably the better band of the two to see properly. And I was still shatnered from the Prodigy.

I'm still shattered, but not shatnered, today.

"And I need to get some rest"

Prodigy Live

Prodigy Live
Originally uploaded by Dark Hunter.

OK, so I didn't take this picture, nor is Keith able to pull off such poses anymore, but I did go to see Prodigy for the second tour running at Brixton with Dave on Monday.

It rocked. I raved. Others bled.

It was mental.
BREAK AND ENTER
THEIR LAW

What a start! I was almost wiped out after the mosh pit I started during Their Law got really messy. O-ho!

On and on came the hits - they played pretty much the lot.

Amazing.

But Oh boy did I pay.