Shumble...

Adorable rubbish.

I work in IT… and Sonic.

• Prepare for rain at all times, otherwise it is too late
• Check if your tent has poles before leaving
• Hoodies don’t dry
• Festival Brothers is still fantastic
• Sometimes bands get huge because they really are very good - Coldplay and U2 I am looking at you
• The stone circle is great at night, and even better on a sunny day
• There is such thing as a double piggyback
• Moonshine is disgusting
• West country accents are great
• Sleep is not necessary, but is rather useful
• One Day Like This by Elbow is still the perfect summer song
• Nempnett Thrubwell is probably the best place name in England
• How It Ends by Devotchka is still one of the greatest songs ever
• Mark Thomas could change the world if he was just given half a chance
• I quite like Kesha
• Live wrestling, at any level, is amazing
• It pays to learn where you parked

Astronaut in the making

Bank holiday building work

“Forget about the astrologers charts with their constellations and planets moving in and out of this house and that house.  

Go into a real observatory and look at the Milky Way.  Or go out into the country in a moonless night, just lay on your back and gaze at the stars.  

The heart stopping site you’d see, is a hundred billion stars, spinning through an expanding universe at a speed of a million miles per day.”

~ Prof. Richard Dawkins

The Baby Harry

Street party!

Something I wrote for the Panic website:

So, Royal Wedding fever is here, and everywhere you look there is wall to wall coverage of the ‘big day’.  Like it or loathe it, it is very difficult to escape the wedding, and it is also fairly difficult to escape people’s opinions of the big day.

There are three fairly distinct camps people fall into on the subject: those that are terribly excited, have put up their bunting, baked a victoria sponge and are getting their trestle tables ready for the big party; those that are disgusted at the attention the whole affair is getting, and that are planning republican demonstrations, who will be flocking to the streets chanting ‘viva la revolution!’; and those that, quite frankly, couldn’t really care less.

It is interesting, however, the number of people in the latter category that are creeping into the second…  I know a number of people who, when asked, would say they have no real interest in the royal family or the wedding itself.  However, many of these same people have been invited, and will be going, to ‘Anti-wedding’ parties.  It seems that being against the wedding is the fashionable thing to do these days, whether you are bothered about it or not.

I, myself, fall into the latter category, and will be at a traditional street party in the afternoon.  I am not  royalist, I take very little interest in the royal family (in fact about as much as I take in any celebrity) however I feel no need to try and claim I am against two people getting married.  The wedding itself means nothing to me - if two people I have never met and have no interest in knowing choose to get married, then so be it; I have no opinion other than that I hope they are very happy together.  However what I am looking forward to is everybody that lives in my road coming together and spending the afternoon out in the street, having fun and getting to know one another.

I do not know any of my neighbours, and this will be the first time I have spent any time with any of them.  My nephews will be coming over for the occasion and it is set to be a lot of fun.  It isn’t a statement on the monarchy, reform or birthrights - it is a gathering of people over a single event that, no matter what anyone says, is meant to be a joyous occasion, at a time when community is often invisible and everyone lives in their own bubble.

One could say that the anti-wedding parties are, in fact, similar, in that they are more about having fun and getting together than making a point about the wedding itself.  However it seems clear that people are almost embarassed to say they will be tuning in, even out of interest, or that any sort of gathering is anything but a protest against the event.

Walking to work this morning I noticed several streets with bunting between the houses, and a number of street parties being planned.  It reminded me somewhat of the World Cup finals where, for a few (often very) short weeks, the country comes together over a single event. It seems somewhat unfortunate that for an occasion such as this, the majority of ‘fence sitters’ tend to align themselves in the anti camp, almost for fear of being mocked, rather than embrace a celebration over something which, at the heart of it, few people can really take issue with.  The wedding, after all, is not a coronation.  It isn’t a celebration of the monarchy or an endorsement of royalty it is, well, a wedding.

I am off to find a union flag tie and ‘Wills 4 Kate’ tshirt…

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994