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May 2001 |
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Sunday 6 May It is a whole week since I came back from America, and my sleep patterns are only now returning to normal. Last night was the first time that I did not wake up in the middle of the night, and today was the first day that I did not doze off at some time. I meant to post another entry about the trip, but I somehow didn't get round to doing so. So here is my somewhat delayed postcard from Berkeley:
The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, pronounced "misery") is located in a spectacular setting on the ridge of the hills above Berkeley, with a view down past the Lawrence Hall of Science to the town of Berkeley and across the bay to the Golden Gate bridge directly opposite. You can't see the bridge in the picture because of the mist rolling in from the sea. In fact, when I took the photo I could see the tops of the towers of the bridge above the mist, but that doesn't show in this low resolution picture. You can barely even make out the Bay Bridge on the left of the picture, which should be quite clearly visible. I spent most of the week up on top of the hill. There were many old friends at the conference, and also many younger mathematicians whom I had not met before. When I was introduced to one of them, from Japan, he said that of course he knew me, from my mathematical papers and my book, but that I did not look at all like what he imagined. He was too polite to tell me how I differed from the image that he had of me, though. As you would expect of me, I had to get away from human company from time to time, and after lunch I went for walks on the trails in Tilden Park, which lies just behind MSRI. Each evening, Marc and Jan gave a dinner party for some of the conference participants. They were glad to have me staying with them, with the rental car, so that I could help to ferry the guests to their house, and back to their hotels in the town afterwards. Other than that, I spent the whole week at MSRI. It was an interesting conference, but I would have liked to have the opportunity to stay longer and to see some more of the Bay area.
Last night there was an excellent documentary on Channel 4 entitled Queer and Catholic, presented by a gay man who had at one time been a Dominican friar. It explored the ironic contrast between the Roman Catholic Church's official line that homosexuality is "an orientation towards an intrinsic moral evil", and the fact that very many of its clergy are gay. In an interview, the Rector of St Mary's Seminary in Cleveland, Ohio, estimated that over 50% of the seminarians there were gay. He wondered why God was calling so many gay men into the ministry, and speculated that some young men who find that they are not attracted to girls take this as a sign that they may have a vocation for a life of chastity. Later, in the all male atmosphere of a seminary, they often discover their true orientation. Some of the anecdotes about life in the Vatican seminary in Rome made me wonder whether it should really be called a semen-ary. The Rector of an English seminary, St John's in Surrey, admitted that he had to give his students regular warnings against camp behaviour, and that they were under strict instructions not to call each other by female names. Later in the programme, there was a segment about a chat room for gay priests, with hundreds of participants world-wide. There was also a moving video of a gay wedding. The only response from the church hierarchy was a comment by the Pope that a gay pride march in Rome was "an affront to christian values". The presenter concluded with the question "How can gays and lesbians stay in the catholic church?" His answer was that their influence would undermine the church's whole theology of sex, challenging the dogma that sex is only acceptable in the context of a marriage where it may lead to procreation, and leading to a situation where the church would have to accept homosexual relations and also contraception. He admitted that there is no chance of this happening while the present pope lives. But he thought after that, the whole house of cards of the church's sexual teaching would collapse. I am not nearly so optimistic. I don't see any likelihood of the church hierarchy changing its ideas for another generation at least.
The whole weekend was warm and sunny in Leeds. That is enough of a rarity to be worth recording in the journal. It couldn't last, of course, and today it is cool and damp again as usual. On Saturday morning, we went for a walk in Golden Acre park and then sat on the terrace by the café there, enjoying their delicious home made scones. Apart from that (and the usual Sunday morning trip to the supermarket), we spent the whole weekend at home in the garden, lazing around on the patio. Who knows, that may be the only time we see the sun here this summer. Stephanie and François came over for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon. They live in a little house in Headingley that doesn't have much of a garden, and they like to come to visit us when they feel the need for a bit of space around them. We take advantage of this by getting them to house sit and cat sit for us when we go away. The cats were pleased to see them yesterday, and so were we. I hope that I wasn't too blatantly drooling over Fran. He is the most mouth-wateringly attractive young man. The only useful thing I did all weekend was to oil the garden furniture. We have a wooden bench and table that have not had any maintenance for years. My excuse for this is that it is never dry enough for me to be able to oil them. But on Saturday I felt that I could neglect this chore no longer. I had not realised that the wood was so thirsty. It absorbed well over a litre of teak oil, and it looks as though it could still do with another litre. I often write a journal entry on Sunday evening, but this weekend I was preoccupied with a little internet project, which you shall hear about in the next entry.
It seems that Bryan and Matt have taken a fancy to my house. They have been devising nefarious stratagems for transporting it brick by brick to Kansas City. That's all very well, but I have to point out to them that there are difficulties in this. An essential feature of the house is the shrubs that grow up it, and I fear that these would not survive the move to the extreme climate of the American midwest. The cydonia (or quince) under the family room window is full of bright orange flowers at present. The winter jasmine to the right of the front door has finished flowering for the year, but the wistaria over the dining room window, which looks completely bare, is in fact full of buds and will look spectacular in another week or two. On the far left of the house, the two pyracanthas have grown so that they now totally surround the sitting room window. In the autumn they will be covered with red berries (until the birds eat them). There is another pyracantha at the right hand edge of the house, and that still has a few of last autumn's berries on it. So I regret that it will not be possible to have the house shipped out to the great plains. However, by way of a compromise, I am willing to make a generous offer. I hereby license the use of the design and style of my house as the basis for a (Sim)house for (Sim)Bryan and (Sim)Matt. However, this licence is subject to a restrictive covenant. Namely, the (Sim)licensees shall at all times maintain the said property in a neat and tidy condition, ensuring in particular that all dirty laundry is put in the laundry basket and not left lying on the floor and that dishes and glasses are washed or put in the dishwasher as soon as they have been used. And the garden furniture shall be regularly oiled.
Wednesday 16 May Happy birthday, lobo solo! This journal is three years old today! On 16 May 1998 I wrote the first entry and posted it to the GeoCities site. At the time I was apprehensive that I would soon run out of things to say, and that the journal would not last very long. But three years is a long time in the online world, and here I am still finding something to witter on about several times a month. Of the journalling friends that I made in those early days, only Bruce and Mickey are still regularly updating. Many other journals have come and gone during that time, and I think it is something to be proud of to have survived that long. I decided to get a birthday present for lobo solo, in the form of its own domain name and a hosting service free of popups or advertising. So, as you will doubtless have noticed on your way here, this site is now located at http://www.lobo-solo.com/ Please update your bookmarks and links accordingly. Don't forget the hyphen in lobo-solo. (I was not able to get the domain name lobosolo.com, without the hyphen. This has already been registered by a company in Miami, although they have not used it for a web site yet.) There is a snazzy new email address to go with the new site: The actual content of the site is scarcely altered at all, the main change being that I have redesigned the links page. But beneath the surface there are several technical changes, which have kept me busy during the past few weeks. For a start, I have reorganised all the files, so that images and journal entries each have their own folder. This has meant that I have had to change many of the internal links. It would have been a horrendous job to do this for the entire journal, so I have left all the pre-2001 archive on the GeoCities site. Next, I have tried to tidy up the html coding. At Bruce's instigation, I have used a style file to control the format of the journal pages. This should save me some time when I write a journal entry, because the style file looks after the format of the page and there is comparatively little work needed to convert the plain text of a journal entry into html form. The idea of a style file is that it describes the desired format of a web page in such a way that it should look the same on all browsers and operating systems. (If you only ever use a single browser, you would be surprised to see how very different the same page can look on a different browser.) But paradoxically, style files can lead to an even greater disparity of appearance of a page on different browsers. This is because most browsers, apart from the most recent versions, are not good at interpreting style files. I found it a laborious and frustrating process getting the style file for the journal set up in such a way that it looked right on Netscape, IE and Opera, and I am not sure that I have succeeded. If you find that this page looks worse now than it did on the GeoCities site, please let me know, either at the new email address or (preferably) on the form below. Even if you don't have anything particular to say, I would be very grateful if you would send me a short message on the form---I have had to re-write the perl script that processes the form, in order to get it to work on the new server, and I would like people to test it to make sure that it works right. I am very grateful to Bruce for helping me come to terms with the basics of style files, and for all sorts of other technical advice. But I am not entirely persuaded to join his campaign to promote the Browser Upgrade Initiative (see his entry for May 8). Web pages that comply strictly with CSS standards look so crappy on older browsers that I would be embarrassed to inflict them on any of my readers. In any case, I doubt whether I have the competence to achieve strict standards compliance even if I wanted to. Anyway, I hope you like the new site, and I hope that I'll still be writing here in another three years from now.
The West Yorkshire Playhouse has a concessionary scheme for disabled groups, under which members of the group and their carers can see plays at the absurdly low price of £3. Mary helps to run this scheme for the Leeds M.E. group. Usually we see an evening performance, but this afternoon the group went to the matinee performance of Arthur Miller's Broken Glass. Miller is not only one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, he is also (in my opinion) a really admirable human being. Not only did he stand out courageously against McCarthyism and write a scathing indictment of it in The Crucible, but also he has never spoken in public about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and the subsequent divorce. He could surely have sold this story for a huge sum, but for him integrity and decency mattered more than money. It's a pity there aren't more people like that in public life. We saw another of Miller's plays, A View from the Bridge, at the Harrogate Theatre a few weeks ago, and I was astonished to read in the programme that Arthur Miller is still alive. His plays are such classics that I assumed he must have been dead for years. But not only is he still alive, he is still writing plays. Broken Glass was written in 1994 when he was nearly 80. The title refers to Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass on 9 November 1938 when Jewish shops and businesses all over Germany were smashed and looted. On one level, the play explores American reactions to this atrocity, through the metaphor of a woman who becomes paralysed on hearing the news from Germany. On another level, the play suggests that the woman's paralysis may be caused by dissatisfaction with her husband, who has not had sex with her for 20 years. At the end of the play, the husband dies of a heart attack and the woman is seen rising from her wheelchair and walking. This is something that makes me a bit uncomfortable, because I can't help wondering occasionally whether something of the sort may be part of the explanation for Mary's continuing all health. But the play also made Mary feel uncomfortable for a completely different reason. She knows very well that her disability has a physical cause, and she feels very threatened by people who suggest that M.E. may be a psychological condition. When we got home, she made some remark to the effect that many people would class M.E. along with hysterical paralysis. "Well yes," I said. "Perhaps if I were to drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, you would suddenly feel liberated and healthy again." "No," she replied, "I think I would have a major relapse." That little conversation sort of cleared the air and made us both feel comfortable again.
We have been having trouble with intruders on our premises. Sometimes we feel as though we are under siege. Mary noticed it first. She has been planting out various seedlings in the flower beds, and she was annoyed to find that some of them had been snapped off. She thought that maybe they had been eaten by slugs, and she put down some slug pellets. But the damage continued. The plants looked as though they had been trampled on. Then she started to find that plastic plant pots from the greenhouse had been taken out and batted around the lawn, as though little kids had been playing with them. More ominously, about three weeks ago she found a cat's leg in the garden. She only told me about this a few days ago. She said that she had found it too upsetting to talk about until then. I didn't like to ask whether she recognised the cat. I don't think she did. At least it wasn't one of ours. By this time we had guessed what the culprits were. Then we started to see them, just occasional fleeting glimpses at first. But then as they grew bigger and became more confident, we saw them every evening. Foxes. Outside our kitchen window there is a small paved area, beyond which some steps lead down beside the far end of the garage to the back garden. Because of the way the ground falls away, there is a small space under the far end of the garage. This is mainly blocked off, but there is a gap beside the top step, and the foxes have made their den inside. There seems to be only one adult, presumably the mother, and there are four very cute little cubs. We reckon that they are about six weeks old. They stay hidden during the day, but they come out in the evening and scamper round the garden causing the damage that Mary had first noticed.
However, having got used to the idea, we begin to see that there are drawbacks. Apart from the fact that the garden is being trashed each night, it is inconvenient that we can't let the cats out of the house except under close supervision. Then there's the smell. I don't have a strong sense of smell. So when I realised that there was a distinctly strange odour in the car as I drove to work this morning, I began to think that we can't allow these visitors to stay once the litter has grown to adult size. Mary phoned the Environmental Health Department of Leeds City Council today, to see if we were breaking some regulation by allowing wild animals to breed on our property. Far from it: it seems that foxes are a protected species in the city, and that we would be breaking the law if we tried to harm them or to smoke them out. They advised us to wait until later in the summer, and then to block up the space under the garage so that they cannot return next year. That is pretty much what we had decided to do in any case. Meantime, we shall enjoy having them as our guests.
My life runs along very predictable lines. If you look back to my journal entries for the last weekend in May for any of the past three years, you will see that I have a meeting in London on the Friday (followed, if time allows, by a brief visit to Chariots gay sauna, before catching the train back to Leeds). On the Monday and Tuesday there is a two day mathematical meeting in Edinburgh. I stay with Allan and Pat in Edinburgh, and if neither of us are too busy then I like to drive up there on the Saturday evening so that Allan and I can go for a walk in the Highlands on the Sunday. So without me having to write anything here at all, you already know how I am going to spend the next five days. The one way in which things will be different from usual is that I shall have a passenger for the drive up to Edinburgh. We have a new colleague in the math dept, who will be coming to the Edinburgh meeting, and who said that he would like to join us for the walk on Sunday. It would have been churlish to say no, so I offered him a lift. You may remember that I really prefer to be on my own when driving. It's part of what I call the lobo solo tendency—the need to get away from other people from time to time. I'm not sure how I will cope with Charles's company for four hours on Saturday afternoon (and another four hours for the return journey on Tuesday). It's not that I dislike him at all. He is quite good company, considering that he is a born again christian. But I consider it a major act of charity that I am willing to forgo my solitude in order to be sociable towards a new colleague. Perhaps he feels the same about me.
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To country folk, foxes are a pest, to be eliminated by any means possible. But in suburbia it's quite different. We are pleased that these creatures can survive in an urban environment, and that we can photograph a fox cub from the kitchen window, just fifteen feet away.