h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm just utterly consumed with guilt.

Vicki had posted a particularly nice post earlier on that thread and because of the email I read all her friendliness as something calculating. The email was pure poison I see now. Particularly as I'm quite mentally vulnerable at present because I have huge problems sleeping.

Honestly the whole thing is like a 'horror' to me. It was really the email that precipitated things.

I can't believe how I could read things all wrong. Except I'm pleased that in the height of my paranoia I had a strong instinct that Vicky was for real and a good person.

It's difficult when your sense of reality is often a bit shaky.

I just so hope Vicky is okay, I can't rest until I find out.

BTW to make clear the email wasn't from 3dots, someone else.

I think a big problem for me is that I posted 3dots thing so quickly after the earlier very nice reply of Vicky's on the thread, because I'd misread something really lovely.

That's what I'm so enraged about. Seeing something lovely as calculating. In my moral world that is criminality of the worst kind.

Oh, I never suspected 3dots to have sent you the email

Criminality of the worst kind: maybe you're being a bit too emphatic here. After all, you were misled and made a mistake but, most important, you recognised it as a mistake and you are not trying to wriggle your way out of it. This is the honourable course of action, and some very positive feature you have (which I mentioned already once).

It doesn't mean that the mistake doesn't matter or didn't happen, of course, or that it won't hurt. But what would be criminal would be to pretend otherwise.

I don't know what to add without sounding corny

Yeah I think some of my problem is the way my mind works I interpret things in one way and then can switch to read everything in a different way. Like 2 separate realities. It's a bit freaky. So I spent half the night trying to decide which reality was the true one. Not much overlap.

We bipolars are a weird lot.

It's probably worse for me at present as I'm sleeping so little.

Thanks for talking things over Toy Box.

Hello there, are you feeling better today?

Hi Toy Box

Yes lots. firstly that Vicky is fine and that I'd blown that thing up to huge proportions in my mind. That's a common symptom especially with lack of sleep. It can be quite frightening. Talking with you yesterday helped hugely. Cool calm kindly sanity you reasuurred me with, exactly what the 'pychiatrist' would order

Thank you.

And secondly I got a proper nights sleep at last thanks to the zopliclone. Goodness that helps. All the defences in my mind are much more there again.

I won't push things too much for a couple of days though.

Okay a little light hearted relief here, after all the recent angst.

We're back in the equitorial rain forest in French Guiana. What's that we can hear? Surely not a cow mooing in a field in England on a summer's day?

Yep. That's exactly what we are hearing. Except the mooing is being done by the Cow bird. Seriously there is this bird that sounds *exactly* like a cow mooing. Surreal or what? There you are 50 miles from civilisation, in the midst of primeaval green hell, thousands of miles from Europe, and you could swear that just over the ridge was an English field with mooing cows.

I can't tell you how uncanny it is.

That's a proof of intelligent, albeit lazy design: re-using the same sounds in environments where you hope no-one will notice

And thanks for posting! I was wondering when to nudge the conversation up again

Mooooooooooh!

Oh no worries, where I'm concerned, there's bound to be a load more angst just around the corner; and still vast quantities of rain forest anecdotes to get through....

Tell me more about yourself Toy Box. Any old thing will do.

I have a terrible memory in general, although I will remember the darnedest things. In the old house of my grandmother there used to be a very particular smell which I remember and experienced again only once ever since (some soap my mum had bought). I cannot think of the house without remembering the smell (That, and the floorboards in the living room )

It seems many of my memories are triggered by smell. In my current flat, there is a little cupboard (a small room actually), which once smelled like another house of my grandma, coincidentally.

Sounds like you had a smelly grandmother

Yeah smell is very emotive. Apparently the part of the brain which registers smell is closely connected with emotion. Hence all the money spent on researching and developping perfume.

Smell memories are extra special and emotive.

School corridor/polish smell gets me. I still feel a bit scared if I suddenly smell that. Like I'm a little kid in a place of authority.

Not that I was especially well behaved at school.

I was very much a rebel.

How dare you



I think you had mentioned things like classroom adventures before

School corridors indeed, they don't smell like the rest of corridors.

And one of the best smells is Scottish pub When I first went to Edinburgh my friend there had a pub / restaurant and the smell still drives me crazy To the point that, if I enter another pub somewhere else with the same smell I will tend to stay and have a beer (There is one in my hometown actually, which I wouldn't go to otherwise.)



That's a good example of chemistry triggering an electrical reaction, isn't it? The smell of school making you feel a bit scared?

Speaking of scared... Was it actually scary in the rain forest? I don't mean that it could have felt like a walk in Hyde Park of course: surely you had to be careful, and it seems to have been emotionally intense (what about the smells there btw?), but was fear one of them? Apart from that moment when you heard a cow, maybe

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It is important to explain the context first, as it is as you said an alien environment. Otherwise I might just imagine any warm humid forest with large spiders and poisonous darts, which is a somewhat romanced vision I guess. Especially the poisonous darts

How long did you stay there by the way? And why did you go there, what were you assisting with (if this is not too much of an indiscreet question)?



It must be difficult finding a balance about what sort of documentaries you show. It is nice to have some of them brushing the less fluffy bits under the carpet, but you also need enough of the real stuff because, well, just to show the real thing too. Lest people might go there thinking of a nice holiday and turning out not to be fit for it.

>I was there assisting someone who was studying seed dispersal in the virgin forest.< See post 10

I was there about a couple of months. It was meant to be longer, but I could no longer cope with conditions in the forest. When I came home I was medically depressed for a while.

You couldn't really go on a nice holiday to true virgin forest. Another reason Attenbrough always irritates me is that whenever he presents a programme featuring rain forest, he always appears to be standing in a 'clearing'. In reality they are very few and far between in real equitorial rainforest. That's another reason true virgin forest is difficult to cope with because you spend all day in a perpetual greenish/grey gloom. When we used to go onto the river to travel to another part of the forest, I always had the shock of my life by the sudden overwhelming intensity of light. It was always wonderful to get onto the river. Naturally that's the only way to get anywhere, because there are no roads or tracks in the forest. To go anywhere on foot takes ages because you are hacking your way with your machete, through all kinds of fern vergetation. Some of it quite unpleasant because of the'thorns' on a some of the large ferns.

But, how did you end up assisting someone in such a study? Nobody ever offered me to do this (I never looked for it either, nor would I be able to cope, probably).



A greenish-grey light, that sounds like Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movies! It is still impressive to stay there for a few months.

Because my first degree when I left school, was in biology. It's a while ago now.

After university, I had this obsession about going to the tropical rain forest. Partly I think, because I craved 'intensity'. It also fascinated me intellectually that relatively so little was known about it. Also the complexity of the system far exceeded anything in the temperate regions.

2 or 3 years after collge, I heard about this big conference at Leeds University about the rainforest. I managed to get myself accepted to attend. I made contact with two academics doing research. A Dutch guy and a Canadian. The Dutch bloke offered me an assistantship for his research in South America. I accepted. The irony was that after I came home, there was a letter from the Canadian offering me a position to assist him in his research in the rainforest in Papua New Guinea. I liked him much more than the Dutch guy. I often wonder how different things might have been if I'd gone there instead. I was in such a state of trauma when I got back from French Guiana, that I couldn't think of going to PNG.

On such small things, our lives turn.