Allantide

There are a lot of festivals associated with this time of year. But in the fantasy Westcountry of my childhood, the 31st of October was always celebrated as Allantide (or Nos Kalan Gwav in Cornwall but the Cornish always insist on being so Cornish). Every Allantide, every child would be given a large Allan apple to shine and put under their pillow (and possibly eat, I never ate mine, I can't stand apples). 

I suspect that Allantide is just not a very marketable concept. With Allantide, the rules were as strict as if they had been designed by the Chinese Communist Party: one Allan apple per child. No more, no less. No room for market expansion. Allan apples are in season just before Allantide - so parents could literally just pick them off a tree. So when the big supermarkets were picking an Autumn festival to push, Guy Fawkes and Halloween had a distinct advantage. 

Guy Fawkes' Night is good for a market economy. Think of all those dad's old suits that have been stuffed with newspaper and ignited. And fireworks cost a bomb. Fortunately, there are now laws in place to prevent the current generation of British thirteen-year-olds indulging in the time-honoured tradition of letting fireworks off in park bins in memory of the man who tried to blow up the monarchy in 1605. But, what do they do instead? They buy a red plastic trident and demand Haribo from such neighbours as aren't too scared or elderly to open the door at night.

The marketing of Halloween (especially Halloween decorations) is a triumph of the free market so great as to make every anarcho-syndicalist (even the pommophobic ones) want to crawl under the covers and polish an Allan apple. Supermarkets literally sell the unsellable at Halloween.  There must have been a marketing meeting once where the question was asked: What are we going to do with all these giant orange squashes that don't taste of anything?

Pumpkin carving with the NRA

Halloween tat of terrible quality is manufactured in third world factories and then shipped in vast quantities to England where it is brought by parents responding to pester power from children responding to weeks of hype on television. Unlike Xmas decorations (which are usually just about of sufficient quality or expense to be kept in a box in the attic until next year) Halloween decorations are cheap bits of ugly plastic vaguely formed into a bat or spider or ghoulish mask all festooned with fake cobwebs and the only thing that can be done with them once November comes is to throw them all away and start the whole ghastly process again the following year.

I'm approaching what I imagine to be the limit of your patience, so I'll save 'Fancy Dress' until next year.

Oh and... Happy Sauin to my sole reader on the Isle of Man! (Probably Jamie).

Ranting about work (part 2)

This is my fiftieth post! Hard to believe, isn't it? Thanks everyone who takes the time to read me. I know from the blogger stats that my most popular posts are the ones where I bang on about things that annoy me at work. So, here you go... 

Everybody should be familiar by now with my views on ice (see earlier posts Ranting about work (part one)and On ice (and ice cream) if you are in need of a refresher) but it turns out there are other things that piss me off about working behind a bar. I made a mental note of some of them so that I could share them with you and you can stop doing them. Here are three:

1)Your average barkeep is on his feet for eight hours a day, walks upwards of six miles a shift, sells his labour power for little more than minimum wage and spends a lot of time sober around drunk people. If you notice he is not smiling - why not tell him to cheer up?

2)It may occur to you while you are at the bar that your friends may want a drink also. A good idea in this situation is to wait until your footsore bartender has poured your drink and then (and only then) shout across the room to find out what Fred wants. Once Fred's drink is standing next to your own - that is the best time to ask Deirdre what she wants. Repeat for each subsequent round. Try to make sure your barman has tilled the order before adding to it. Before paying, wander off to double-check you remembered everybody and get sidetracked into a conversation about Norwich City football club.

3)If you have played a game of pool in the last fortnight you will probably want to share a shot-by-shot account of how the frame was won. Your friends may wander off but - don't worry! - your limping underpaid sober bartender is being paid to stand there and listen. Don't forget to include lots of confusing counterfactuals in your story. "If he'd gone for the red by the top corner then he would've freed my yeller, so he took the long red along the cushion - missed it - and snookered himself!"

All this sarcasm's given me a headache.

Relatively Speaking

Sometimes I think insufficient love is given to Galilean Relativity. Ever since the Special and General Relativities became so fashionable in the early 20th Century, I don't think simple old Galilean Relativity has been getting its due. And I intend to remedy that today.  

Asked by a journalist in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity, Mathematician and all-round smug git, Arthur Eddington is reputed to have replied, "Who's the third?" I like to imagine that the next question the journalist asked was: "How did you manage to wangle a two year trip to New Zealand to study an eclipse at a time when all of Europe is engaged in bloody war and can I come with you?" 

To understand General Relativity you need to wrap your skull around ideas such as four-dimensional curved spacetime and the equivalence of gravity and acceleration. Even its predecessor, Special Relativity, requires you to suspend intuition so far as to imagine that the Speed of Light is the same for all observers no matter how fast they are travelling. But Galilean Relativity is so simple and intuitive that I invented it when I was Fourteen.

I mean, I didn't get credited with it or anything. It's not called Finnginnian Relativity because obviously Galileo Galilei got there first in 1632 (at the age of 68!).  

Late developer Galileo Galilei

I had never heard of Galilean Relativity, when, travelling on an escalator on a school trip in the mid-1990s, I felt compelled to remark to my companion: "How do we know we are moving? We might just be staying still and everything else is moving past us." "Finn," my companion replied, "That sort of comment is precisely why you are never going to get off with any girl ever."

I saw immediately that he was right and resolved to keep all my relativistic thoughts firmly on the inside of my head from that moment on. 

Years later, I read about Galilean Relativity and how early modern scientists had realised that the question, "Are we moving?" has no meaning unless a reference frame is specified. "Is everything moving relative to my static position on this escalator?" is equally as valid a question as "Is this escalator moving?"

These days, I'm not so self conscious, I'll just go ahead and talk about Galilean Relativity and if nobody wants to listen... well... that's what this blog is for!

Lord Finnginn

My girlfriend needs more space. Literally. She's working from home today so I have been banished from my usual blogging spot at the dining table, so she can have room for all the notes, coasterless cups of tea and banana skins that are essential in a hard day's working-from-home. 

I'm more productive when Charlie's around, because I'm terrified that she thinks I spend all day napping and watching Millionaire Matchmaker on ITV2 plus one. Whereas everyone knows that I get up early to go for a jog around the park to clear my head ready to add a thousand words to that day's project. Alright, that's not strictly true. But I am limiting myself to one nap per day (two if I rise before 10am) and I only watch daytime television if I'm ill (and hangovers count as ill).

Most of my time is split between reading and staring out the window thinking about stuff. Uppermost in the chamber of my mind this week has been House of Lords reform. I've long been an advocate of a second chamber filled by lottery. I call the idea democracy from a Greek root meaning rule of the people. The current system of appointments is absurd - the House of Lords is filling up with party donors. Buy yourself a peerage. But did you know that two appointments per year are put before the Prime Minister by the House of Lords Appointments Commission? And any UK citizen can apply! Seriously here's the link! 

It gets better - last year only 400 people were nominated or put themselves forward. Four hundred applicants - two peerages. 200-1 odds of becoming a Lord! I intend to put myself forward forthwith. The pay is £300 a day! - On a good day I earn, what, thirty quid?

This evening, when Charlie asks just what the hell I've been doing all day? Instead of saying: "I read 200 pages of Barber's Myths and Legends of the British Isles" or "I spent two hours playing online chess and decreased my Elo rating by 78 points"; I will be able to say: "I applied for a peerage." 

Conjectures and Refutations

Karl Popper taught David Miller who taught John Collins who taught me. It's like Papal succession. So I'm sure Karl would have been pleased to hear how I recently applied the Principle of Falsification to an area of frustration in my own life.

The Principle of Falsification is a much misunderstood solution to the Problem of Induction. So we're going to need some background here but, please, bear with me, I promise I'll be brief.

The problem of Induction asks, 'how the hell can we know anything for certain?' and everybody since David Hume, who first articulated the problem, has basically come to the conclusion that we can't. Popper, too, is in the 'we can't' camp but he points out that what we can do is rule things out.

Regular readers of this space will know that Charlie, Spike and I recently moved into a new flat. It was not long before we noticed a melancholic melody emanating from the back wall of the kitchen. A sort of high pitched 'brrng whrrrlllrrrng brrrng' Spike didn't seem too bothered by it, but it was seriously annoying the human occupants. What the hell kind of weird music were the neighbours listening to? It was a musical sound but it wasn't music. There was no way that anybody would listen to that noise for pleasure. So, like good Popperians, we abandoned our initial conjecture and decided that it must be the neighbours' kids playing some repetitive computer game. However the noise continued at intervals all through the night. So that seemed unlikely too.

A few days passed and the noise started to invade our every waking moment, it was cyclical and would increase in volume and then suddenly stop. But even when unheard we found ourselves listening for it. Can you hear it, yet? Even Spike, who is usually the most laid back, was starting to feel agitated.

Sometimes you don't know where a hypothesis comes from. Hypothesis creation is the imaginative part of science that doesn't get the credit that is heaped on the logical part. However, suddenly it came to me, the noise wasn't from the neighbours at all. Our new freezer was singing to us. We had a singing freezer. 

When I first mentioned this idea, it was met with some scepticism. But I was taught by a man who was taught by a man who was taught by Karl Popper, so I know how to react when confronted by a sceptical girlfriend and cactus. 'What would Popper do in this instance?' I asked myself. 'He would try his best to refute his conjecture,' I answered myself.

I waited until the sound was in crescendo then reached for the switch and turned the freezer off. If the sound continued then, by the principle of falsification, I would have to abandon my singing freezer hypothesis. If the sound stopped then my theory was corroborated (but crucially not proven.)

The sound stopped. The freezer's 'on' cycle was causing the pipes at the back to vibrate and that in turn seemed to create a feedback loop which caused the sound to increase in intensity until the freezer went into its 'off' cycle (or I pulled the plug).

Now we've filled it up a bit, it doesn't seem so bad, I think the empty box was acting as an amplifier as well.

Work/Life/Balance

I have recently finished my annual fortnight of real work. For two weeks every August, the Boss disappears on an exotic foreign holiday and I get left in charge of the pub. Obviously, the very nature of management is anathema to my anarcho-syndicalist soul and I spend a lot of time worrying about having to ask the staff to do something and have to precede every request with 'Would you mind terribly...' I generally let them finish ten minutes early just so I can wipe down the tables myself rather than ask them to do it. 

The timing of this autocratic interlude was particularly inconvenient as I have just moved into a new flat and I would much rather have been spending my time fussily arranging books into a classification system of my own devising. 

Every time I move, I convince myself that this will be the house in which I fulfill some of my unfulfilled ambitions: reading Being and Nothingness, listening to more classical music and writing a novel. If I had actually started the thousand-words-a-day regime at the time I started this blog I could have written about six novels by now.

Sorry there's no overarching theme to today's entry. Here is a picture of Spike relaxing in the new flat:

Spike and his new friend Lily settling in to their new abode.

On ice (and ice cream)

It's hot in England. By English standards anyway. Has been for weeks. A heat wave. And with a wave of heat comes a tsunami of ignorance about ice. If I have a purpose in life it is to educate people about ice. We have touched previously on reasons why ice preferences should not be linked to the temperature outside.(see Ranting about work (part one)) Now it's time to examine the dual properties of ice.

Ice can serve two purposes: it can cool and it can dilute. The more ice you have the longer your drink stays cool, the less ice you have the faster it dilutes. (Got that? Good. I was worried you were going to ask me to draw a graph or something and I've never learnt to use Excel.) These are the two factors that should be considered when your hot, overworked, underpaid bartender asks if you want ice. How cold do I want my drink and how much do I want my drink diluted? HINT: It's pretty much only neat spirits that need diluting, your cider doesn't. So when your hot, tired, overworked, underpaid bartender, who would rather not be in the darkest pub in Norwich on the hottest day of the year, asks if you would like ice in your cider and you say 'a little bit', he may not be in the mood for giving you a quick lecture on basic physics, he might just give you what you ask for and smirk while you drink your watery cider.

Now, What is the weather like outside? It's hot in England. The sort of weather where you might fancy a White Chocolate Magnum. Well if you do, don't go to my local shop because they have sold out. And if you do go to my local shop and see that they have sold out and think, 'Well, I don't want a Double Caramel Magnum because I don't like caramel ruining my ice-cream and filling up the cavities in my teeth and I don't want a Caramel Magnum because that's the same price as a Double Caramel Magnum and I don't want to feel I'm being ripped off even though I don't like caramel in my ice cream for the aforementioned reasons and I don't want a Magnum Infinity because that's a flavour that's not a flavour (like 'blue' or 'tropical') and I have an aversion to flavours that aren't flavours, I'd better go for mint.' If you do go for mint you'll probably regret it and wish you'd just got a Feast instead.

Apologies to my international readers for the rant about local ice-cream brands. It's hot in England. We're not used to it.