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

Just come back from a weekend away with the Quakers. Interesting place - a large mansion house built in the time of Henry VIII (the one with all the wives), now run by a religious community.

With a small child, times away are never as relaxing as you would like and son got himself into mischief with another littlie, who was egging him on (the pinched a key from somewhere, but couldn't remember where). After that, he had to be accompanied by an adult at all times.

Did some singing while I was there, which I always enjoy doing. Himself enjoyed himself - he didn't want to come home.

Work tomorrow and putting things into crates, as we are finally moving office (well, we will be on Thursday).

Had a look at your writing on 'The case of the sauteed sailor'. I liked the idea of the psychic at the martial arts funeral. What's a speed bag, BTW? Is it a kind of sports bag?

Klezmer - Jewish music. Mentioned, but didn't go anywhere. How many chapters do you write on average? Have you an idea of the storyline? I seem to remember you make it up as you go along.

Oh yes, back to getting home. Some kind soul has demolished my gatepost. Looks as though they backed a car into it and drove off - no note saying 'sorry and here's my insurance details'! Pooh!

We also did a workshop on body movement and physical expression, which was interesting, looking at congruency of intent and body language and doing exercises with pushing space, aggression and supportive movements.

The facilitator ended the session with a couple of video clips including a heartbreakingly poignent one about a chap who wanted to connect with people, but was doing it in a disfunctional way. His speech and body language was all wrong and he pushed people away that he wanted to connect with. It was quite painful to watch.

Sounds like an Asperger's person.

Speed bag is the little one that looks like a tear drop that hands at about face level and is on swivels or tethered top and bottom to snap back when you punch it. A boxer and a martial artist's bit of exercise equipment.

Klezmer...hmm...I'll have to look at the context.

Yes, first draft is always off the top of my head.
I have no idea where it is going.

Stormed last night such that I was going around checking windows and found a big gap in the daughter's window right by her bed. Glass has been cracked since the painters were here, but I didn't realize that there was a piece missing and that a big jagged hanging bit was there.
I yanked the jagged bit and taped up the window with a garbage bag.
Not a clue from the kid.
Had to remove all of the spousal unit's toys from the kitchen sink window. Rain and wind doing a dance and blowing things around, including some of her plants.

The Klezmer reference was to the musical quality of the woman's voice.
There is a distinctive sing-songie feel to the Yiddish accent of someone who sings Klezmer...similar to the cantor's enunciation of a Psalm or the "Song Of The Twelve Princes" from that time Moses struck the rock to bring forth water, only he did it arrogantly...
Oddly enough, tradition says that rock rolled around the wilderness after the Israelites and served as a kind of Holy Water Cooler...whenever the Princes sang their song...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/world/onyourstreet/msdanny1.shtml

you might find this remotely interesting.

Sounds like your house has been leaking like the proverbial sieve.

I have a couple of Klezmer CDs. A friend introduced me to them (I think) - seems to range from really jolly stuff to sentimental and longing (what the Germans would call Sehnsucht) - the English word isn't nearly as atmospheric. (Mods - Sehnsucht = longing) Actually, there's tragedy as well.

One day, I'll have sound on my computer so I could have appreciated the link better.

I'd not heard about the rock following them around. Holy water cooler .

Funnily enough, when I got into work, I found a colleague had had a nasty accident and a near escape. Her boiler overflowed with scalding water and her ceiling came crashing down onto her bed - about five minutes after she got up! She could have been scalded (She read a report about someone else that had happened to who got 80 degree burns and died.) or crushed - the metal tank was teetering at the hole in the ceiling. Apparently, it's made a huge mess. By comparison, my little incident is a mere nothing.

When I spoke to the the facilitator about that particular clip, she said that body language training (theatrical training) could help. The problem with the bloke was that his approaches were too sudden (in yer face) and staccato and his gestures were dissonant (pointing fingers, etc) and he talked, talked, talked. No space for the other person, no listening. It made me feel quite tearful.

I think I know the speed bag as a punchbag.

I have a problem with staring.
I focus quite strongly, sometimes while thinking about something else.
But people seem quite surprised that I pay attention to the colors and patterns and the design of their clothing or their glasses or shoes...
I would have thought that that was why they were wearing them in the first place...
or, maybe it's because I'm male...
It took me years not to blurt out the first thing that came to mind when someone spoke to me.
If it had been a while since I last spoke, I had a backlog to unload, and if you were the first person I spoke to after after the dry spell... take notes or pull up a chair.
I'll have to pay more attention to my gestures. I haven't looked at them in years. I was on camera then, on tape.

I've only once been video'd with the intention of looking at the way I present myself, and that was in a work context. (Oh, I've just remembered a second one - again in a work context, but it doesn't add to what I'm saying)

I was being interviewed and I was quite relaxed - I'd crossed one ankle over the other knee, which I didn't remember doing during the interview.

I have a friend who was video'd interviewing a young woman. She was wearing a low cut top and every time she leaned forward, my friend stuck his pencil in his ear! It was a nervous reaction.

How are you getting on with the Sautee'd Sailor? I've just had a couple of entries recommended - Mindfulness and Yoga Nidra.

Quakers in a Henry VIII mansion....
What's it called, so I can find it?

I've had trouble with getting onto the site for a day.
Apparently I wasn't the only one.

The detective story is hanging until I can think of the next hook.
I need a gimmick to run toward.

I'm daily grinding away at the novel, interring it into the computer and scraping it into a second draft at the same time.
It's taking longer to edit it than it did to write it.
You wouldn't believe how hard it is to lie for 365 pages...
two or three pages a day was a triumph. Sometimes the page would just sit in the typewriter for a week with one sentence on it and I would get the next idea at work or while I was half-asleep.

There is a running joke in the publishing industry and the writer's workshops about the folks with the unpublishable finished novels sitting in drawers... But I have read some of the published stuff and I have occasionally taken a book that I paid for and torn it in half, it was so bad.
I think, despite the pretensions of literature, that some of the most cathartic and mentally healthy writing will never get published, because it only means something to one or two people in the world.
Thus, forcing us through classical literature to all read something that has meaning to only five or six is a waste of time, when we could be writing our own books...

It is merciful that I do not realize how silly or awkward I look all the time. Otherwise I would not have so much fun.
I know people look at me funny.
That's okay. I think they look funny, too.
I am out of sync with the world because I don't need it. I have my own world.

Here's one of those stupid questions that doesn't go away:
If martial artists are so, um, efficient, then why haven't they changed the face of war. Why isn't there a bunch of silent men on each side swiftly pummeling each other until a victory is declared?
Why all the guns and rockets and bombs, if the "martial arts" are so, um, efficient?

I cranked out two more issues of AGG/GAG over the weekend.
One of them will hit the Post this week.
John says the other will be used two weeks from now.

It's called 'Hengrave Hall'. I'd never heard of it before, so I don't think it's particularly famous. It was built by a mercer (wool merchant), whose descendants rather wanted to forget about their mercantile origins. It's close to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Very pretty it is too.

No, you weren't the only person having trouble getting on site. I complained via the Aceforum and was told it was due to a server problem (but not the BBC's fault!?).

I've never been inclined to write a novel. I haven't really the imagination for one. I'm sure I could write decent non-fiction if I chose - I suppose that's why I spend time in PR.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there weren't thousands of scripts for books that people have written or not finished languishing in drawers all over the world.

I find sometimes that writing a journal is very helpful. It helps distill the day and put things to rest. It's a bit like meditation. You can then move on from whatever has been troubling you. It's more often things that trouble you than good things, really.

Two articles. I'm impressed.

No, not articles. Issues. I'm slapping together some of the actual issues now.
I write a little predatorial to put it all together, but the articles are one's I've selected.
It's like editing a tiny magazine.
I forebear including my own writing normally. I coerce JWF into putting my stuff into his issues.

I'll see what I can find about Hengrave..

What did it smell like? Doesn't old brick (I'm assuming) have a nasal aura? Maybe it is just me. I don't think I've ever been around a building older than the middle 1700s...

Actually, many novels are thinly fictionalized journals.
Many novelists keep a journal while working on novels and some scholars find the journals more interesting than the book.
Of course, if the scholars were busy scribbling away on their own screed, they wouldn't have time to be fascinated by any one else's discarded ideas...

And of course, there are those, who believe that too many books have been published already and they'll never get around to reading them all, so why are books still being published...?
I think there should be a moratorium on publishing books until I get mine paid for...

(From memory) Hengrave Hall was built by William Kitson (surname definitely Kitson, I think the forename is correct.

No, it didn't smell old. In fact, apart from the rather splendid chimneys, which are placed round the outside of the house and are amazingly decorated (swank, I think, showing that he could *afford* so many fireplaces) other features would have convinced me that the house was not as old as that. For instance, the house has corridors. The house is built on a square, with a central square courtyard and a corridor runs though the house, so that you can follow it right the way round. Apparently it was added to in later times (Victorian, I think being the last).

Thinly personalised journals? Yes, I can believe that.

You're right about the number of books being published yearly - it must be an astronomical number, I think, so I have some sympathy with your position. I have a large percentage of them in my house!

England lost in the World Cup this morning (our time). The match started at 7.30 am and going to work, the roads were amazingly quiet. I got youngster to breakfast club and we scored shortly after I arrived. Big cheers from everyone. People got in late for work, having watched the match. We went to the pub at lunch time (today was the day we moved offices) and the sign outside our pub was 'God Bless America - USA for the Cup'. They lost to Germany. Thank goodness I do not have my sense of nationality tied up in a football team!

Sports...
Y'know the last time I had any interest in sports was Saturday before last when I was playing volleyball in a backyard with a buncha men in the twilight...
I'm not very good at it...neither were they, but...well, it was entertaining in a way that I don't think watching it would be...

Anyway, I just had the inspiration I was looking for for the Sauteed Sailor (by the way, I have no idea what that means, it just sounds good.)

I was reading something else, "In the Forests of the Night" by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes...one of my daughter's books, and it came to me and I ran in here and typed it into Notepad before I forgot it.

Yes, some woman was on the tube yesterday talking about the fact that the date some show had set her up with was stunned by the shelves and floor towers of books in her house. She said,"I'm an academic! Books, books, books." My wife was watching, too, and she looked at me and said,"But you are not an academic."
I said," Yes, I am. Continuing Adult Education, the Academy of Me. The Me Memorial Library, too."
She said,"That's not funny. You're just a packrat."

Hohum.

I think the fireplaces are to show that he could afford the luxury of burning that much wood at a time. Poor folk had to make do with small fires and body heat...I think.

http://www.hengravehallcentre.org.uk/history.htm

I'm wondering about that Saxon tower...

http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/hengrave.htm

I'm also wondering about the concept of "reconciliation".

And the Christian habit (others do it, too, but we're not dealing with them) of sprinkling worship sites across conquered territory and then declaring them refuges from the local, um, demons...

Bear with me, I'm just thinking out loud.

Suffolk.
Religion.
Royalty.

Reconciliation.

Catholics.
Secret Catholics.
A church made out of a Saxon tower...
A private mausoleum made out of a church...
Royalty...seeking to change the religious orientation,
and bought off with a jewel... (now, we know that since meat once meant any food, the word jewel could have meant any expensive pretty thing...like a silver or gold something or other...)
that allowed rites to continue while lesser beings were forced to play along...or else...
Catholic nuns receiving the property that was for so long furtively catholic...
Quakers holding a retreat involving yoga at a Catholic enclave...
Wow!

Y'know what I think? Sound's like a good site for a Wilkie Collins-like Gothic Mystery!

...sorry...that just slipped out...

Catholics, Cromwell, Quakers, Yoga,
It's enough to push you over!
Everything boundary that you thought
was sacrosanct,
has melted into a lump and sank,
to bottom of the depths
of cooperation,
so that every thing that
once upon a time
propped up a nation,
has given way to the
next and the next and next,
so the doctors of each
successive operation
have used the tools
of their enemy's
contemplation
and the will of the Lord,
regardless of the denomination,
rules over all,
to the bigot and demagogue's
consternation.
Thus, out of priviledge and politics,
fear and frustration,
comes previously un-hoped-for
promise of reconciliation.

uh...I have dishes to do...

Oh the wonders of the internet. I'd not seen the site, and yet here, in a short while, you can see where I've been with pictures and a map.

In one of the rooms, there appears to be a window on the outside that you can't get to from the inside. The nuns don't know of any priest holes, however it sounds quite likely that there were some. Queen Elizabeth I stayed there, you know, leaving the family considerably poorer than before she arrived.

Sauteed - from the French meaning to jump. Normally a way of cooking things which you fry quickly in a frying pan, using only a smally amount of fat. Sounds like your poor sailor meets a hot and sticky end?

Had another poke around the Suffolk Churches and Hengrave Hall sites. It struck me that it would have been nice if I'd thought to look to see if there was information about it before going.

One of the nice things about Hengrave Hall was that we got to meet people from different meetings - we really only know people who go to ours.

In retrospect, I considered looking to see if there was a site for Charney Manor, where we went last year and two years ago. Bingo!

http://www.charneymanor.demon.co.uk/

A lot smaller than Hengrave Hall, it's in Oxfordshire. A really nice place to be. Our meeting goes once every two years. It's a bit like Hengrave, without visiting speakers. There are spiritual workshops (considering aspects of faith) and leisure workshops, like Scottish Dancing.

At Charney, we do some of our own catering and all the clearing and washing up, whereas at Hengrave, this is done by the community.

Washing up, what washing up?

The idea of living in a community is fascinating.

I was looking at a site which gave information on how to find a suitable community just recently - can't remember where though. It had lots of interesting information about what types there are, whether you have to bring capital into the community, what type and amount of work you will be expected to do, children, education systems, etc.

Go search.