The Set of all Sets

I couldn't sleep last night and, like most people (I'm guessing - I haven't done a poll or anything), when faced with insomnia, I like to think about some of the great problems of analytic philosophy. "Does the set of all sets contain itself?" I wondered. Here is some of my reasoning presented in that most venerable of philosophical forms: the dialogue.

Bertrand: Does the set of all sets contain itself?

Freddie: Yes. Obviously. Otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the set of all sets except itself.

Bertrand: But, if the set of all sets contains itself, the copy of itself within itself also contains itself and so on.

Freddie: wtf! Mind = blown! 

Bertrand: I thought you'd like that.

Freddie: So the set of all sets does not contain itself?

Bertrand: But if it does not contain itself then it is at least one set short and can't really be the set of all sets.

Ludwig: It's a meaningless question. Try counting sheep.

Bertrand: Pay attention Ludwig, he tried that here.

Freddie: He was much better in those days, look it's got a nice photograph and a little poem... 

On songwriting.

Some songs take longer to write than others. The earliest draft of this one comes from a journal I kept in 1999.  Versions of it pop up in notebooks for the next ten years as I revisited and tweaked it. I wrote the final verse in 2009 and did some final editing today. I once recorded an early version of it on a four-track at the Pondorosa in Martinstown. I played the guitar and sang and Phoebe Thomasson played treble recorder. The producer, Jonnyboy, suggested I lay down the vocal track twice to compensate for my natural descant (weak voice) so I got to sing along with myself!

I could hear Andy say

As he hurled his Earl Grey at the door,

"Roll me another joint

'cause I can't see a point anymore.

All the love in my world

Appears to have curled up and died.

Now nobody can know 

The hate I feel so: it's inside."

I could hear Andy yell,

"We might all go to hell anytime."

That, "To like to get high

And to love her were my only crimes.

So roll me a spliff 

And one for later if there's enough.

For now she is gone

From this moment on it gets tough."

I could hear Andy shout 

As he staggered about in the hall,

"I'll cope, I'll get through

I don't need her and you hate them all.

Maybe, it wasn't just her,

Never knew if you were on my side.

All the love in my world

Appears to have curled up and died."

I could hear Andy cry,

"I don't care if I die after this."

Then he calmly explained

That he'd opened his veins at the wrists.

I remember the words -

The last that I heard Andy say

Were, "I'm so sorry bud

'bout the tears and the blood and Earl Grey."

As far as I am aware the recording only ever existed on a minidisc (remember them? My spellcheck doesn't). 

On work

Nothing kills creative endeavour like having to go to work. Ubilol hasn't blogged for months.  Now she's got a proper job, who knows when we will get another sublime piece of artistic prose or a slanted defence of Bertrand Russell's inability to answer a taxi driver.

Russell famously said that there are only two types of work: Moving matter around at or near the surface of the Earth and telling other people to do so. Perhaps, in the 21st Century, there are two more: Rearranging information in a digital format and working in a call centre.

I've spent the last decade moving matter around for money and when my boss left me in charge for two weeks got to experience the horror that is telling other people to do so. I had to take two weeks off to recover.

Now I'm back from my holiday and committed to my new regime of working less and writing more. Just like Bertrand would've advised. 

Fourth of July

Exactly a year ago, my friends Kate and Chris got married. I wrote a poem as a gift to them and performed it to the six people who were still awake at midnight on day three of the party they threw. I thought I'd post it here today as it has a topical title.

A Declaration of Dependence

Geography wed Geography

When the Old World wed the New.

The Old World's got the lineage,

The New World's got the view.

But the waters of the Schuylkill

And the Irwel mingle true.

The Angel of the North wed Liberty,

The Old World wed the New.

History wed History

When the Old World wed the New.

Paul Revere went riding

With Lady Godiva nude.

Walpole slept with Washington

And hilarity ensued.

Dependence was declared between 

The Old World and the New.

Bitter ale wed lager

When the Old World wed the New.

The foaming cream of Manchester 

Came wrapped in a Ribbon of Blue.

When John Smith met Jack Daniels,

He said "How do you do?

I think we'll chase each other now

The Old World's wed the New."

Fantasy wed Fantasy

When the Old World wed the New.

Buffy gave up slaying vampires

To travel time with Doctor Who.

Bagpuss donned his thinking cap

To solve mysteries with Scooby Doo.

Henry's Cat wed Lisa Simpson.

The Old World wed the New.

I recommend you check out the happy couple's blogs (links under their names above). Kate is documenting the progress of writing her second novel. Chris writes the weekly Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure.  

Giant nuclear ape

In an earlier post, I mooted the idea of changing the banner at the top of this blog to better reflect its nature now that I am teetotal, debt free and no longer writing a novel. Okay I lied about the first two and the third is the subject of this entry.

How on earth did I think, three years ago, that writing a novel would be a good thing to do with a hangover and that it might solve my debt problems? Everybody knows the only way to pay off debts is to borrow more from another provider and hope that your future self will be better equipped to deal with the problem than you are. Hangovers are even easier: just wash down a double dose of ibuprofen with my patented ratio of orange juice and bubbly water and you'll be back down the pub in no time.

Hangovers and debts are BAD reasons to write a novel. A plausible good reason might be that you can't work out how to change the banner at the top of your blog or that you are a self-obsessed pseudo-existentialist with too much time on his hands. As I fit both these categories, I thought it high time I had another go at a longer project. And this time, I thought, just for a different challenge: no time-travel, spaceships or zombies.

You are probably thinking that I have set too hard a task for myself and you're probably right. I'll probably run out of steam and have to introduce an improbable apocalyptic event (supervolcano, anyone?) at about 15000 words, but for the time being my theme is rural decline due to the evils of capitalism (and definitely not the ravishings of a giant nuclear ape created in a secret government experiment).

As an inveterate city dweller who tends to rise at the crack of noon, I am obviously ill-suited to tackle this subject on imagination alone. So I e-mailed one of my contacts in the farming industry (oh alright, my brother) and asked him to describe milking procedures to me in a few brief lines which he duly did and, well, I never drank that much milk anyway and its amazing what they can do with almonds these days.     

Nodding off

I'm something of a champion sleeper - averaging about 10 hrs a day. A casual reader will be able to infer two facts from this:
that I have no children and I don't drink caffeinated beverages. Readers who know me, of course, know that I am just bone idle!


Peaceful lethargy


Spending time in bed
I love days like these
Lying like I'm dead
In peaceful lethargy.
Light a cigarette
Play an old LP
Maybe I'll forget
To get up today.
I have drunk and danced
And taken drugs instead
But given half a chance
I'd rather stay in bed.


Occasionally, however, this very laziness can lead to a seeming paradox: I find myself unable to sleep but unwilling to get up. The classic solution to this is to count sheep. As a child, I remember trying this and not being very good at it. I still don't know if you are supposed to imagine a field full of static sheep and count each one or are you supposed to count them as they move through a gate from one field to a neighbouring one? Both methods have their problems.  In the 'static' scenario - it is very difficult to hold the image in your head whilst you count and in the moving scenario it is very easy to miss one unless you imagine a very narrow gate of the sort more commonly used for humans than livestock. For instance, a sheep could not navigate a kissing gate.

I solved this conundrum by just counting numbers instead. Although after a while I found this a little slow and so started doubling numbers instead.


Slightly off topic, but the highest number in my Penguin dictionary of curious and interesting numbers is Graham's Number. This links to a short description of it that ends with a sort of joke.

On Moving

I recently moved in with my girlfriend, Charlie. Moving house takes longer each time I do it. I don't know why I accumulate so much paper. Always a chance for a good sort out, I finally threw out all my university notes (after a quick glance to confirm my suspicion that I would never need to enlighten myself or others about Bare Phase Structure again). However I can never bring myself to part with old journals, scribbled notes and half finished poems. The reason moving house takes longer each time I do it is that I like to sit down and re-read all of these before deciding that I can't bear to part with them.


Increasingly, this blog has become a place where I like to share these poetic or philosophical musings with my loyal core of followers (Hi!). I should really get around to changing the banner at the top as I haven't been writing a novel for about two years now (although I did recently almost complete a short story about some ladybirds).


My hero, the poet Adrian Mitchell (whom I was privileged to meet on three occasions and with whom I once shared a lift from Bridport to Dorchester) told me that if you ever write a poem for someone you should share it with them. This next, I wrote over a decade ago for a girl on another continent that I fell in love with when I was 17. I found it tucked into a journal of abandoned playscripts and an essay on morality that I appear to have cribbed from Plato.  


A Song for...


When the air was full of music
And the sky was full of stars,
When we sat and watched the Arkansas
And dreamt the world was ours.
When the nights were lit by moonlight
And the days afire with sun,
When we drove up through the mountains
Or to Pueblo just for fun.
When time was an illusion
And hours could seem like days,
When your smile was full of laughter
Or your angry eyes ablaze.
When the room was filled with blue grey smoke
Drawing patterns in the air,
When we stopped and talked for hours with friends
And when no-one else was there.
When we swapped our life experience,
Our sorrows and our joys,
When I think I see your puzzled face
Or hear the softest voice.
My mind is full of memories
Of the times we had back then,
When you reach out - I'll hear your call
And I'll come back to you again.


And in the shadow of the hills,
Beneath your mournful gaze,
I'll hold your hand in silence
And we'll dream of future days.