December 2004

Monday 6 December

At this time of year, the Sunday papers are full of book recommendations for Christmas, lists of "best books of 2004" and so on. I have made a list of those that I want to read, but I probably won't be buying any of them just yet because I prefer to wait until they come out as paperbacks a few months after their hardback publication. This is not because I am a skinflint. It's true that I am always reluctant to open my wallet wider than necessary. But the reason I prefer paperbacks is not that they're cheaper. It's just that they are lighter and easier to handle. So most of the titles on this list will have to wait a while before I get to read them. Of course if anyone wanted to get me one of them for Christmas I wouldn't refuse it. But I don't expect this to happen so I haven't opened an Amazon wishlist. Here's the list as it stands at present (in no particular order).

◊ Colm Toíbín: The Master.
◊ David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas.
◊ Rodney Bolt: History Play.
◊ Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty.
◊ Adrian Mitchell: The Shadow Knows: Poems 2000–2004.
◊ Bob Dylan: Chronicles: Volume One.

Of all the dozens of books reviewed recently, the most striking title is Midnight in Some Burning Town (by Christian Jennings). The subtitle of this book is "British Special Forces Operations from Belgrade to Baghdad" and that pretty much describes what the book is about. Not the sort of thing I'm likely to read, but the title is so wonderful that I read the review, which mentioned that the title is a quotation from a poem. I did a bit of research, and found that it is actually a misquotation. The phrase in the poem is "midnight in some flaming town". Why would the author and publisher change it in such an unnecessary way? The only reason I can think of is that the average British reader would be likely to take "flaming" as an expletive rather than a literal description.

Anyway, the poem itself is quite stunning, just about the best war poem I have ever come across. It's called "I have a rendezvous with Death". The author is Alan Seeger, an American who was educated at Harvard, where this photo was taken, and then went to Paris to join the French Foreign Legion. He was killed in the First World War at the age of 28. I had never heard of him. Perhaps he is better known in America than in Europe? Here is the poem. It has a prescient feel to it, almost as though it is describing modern warfare in the Middle East rather than the battlefields of WW1.

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Alan Seeger, 1888–1916.

Saturday 11 December

If you have any interest in major engineering projects, take a look here. The Viaduc de Millau is to be officially inaugurated by President Chirac on Tuesday, and opened to traffic a couple of days later. It will carry the A75 autoroute on its way from Paris to the Pyrenees, bypassing the notoriously congested town of Millau in the Massif Central. The roadway crosses the River Tarn at a height of 270 metres (885 feet), making it the highest road bridge anywhere in the world. The viaduct spans the entire valley, supported on seven huge concrete piers, the highest of which is taller than the Eiffel Tower. Like that other elegant but expensive project the Concorde aircraft, it is a Franco-British project, designed by the British architect Norman Foster and built by the French construction consortium Eiffage, which has links back to Eiffel himself.

I saw one internet forum where people were criticising the viaduct for spoiling an attractive landscape. But from the pictures I have seen it doesn't look as though the environment will be spoiled at all (quite apart from the fact that a historic town will be freed of its traffic congestion). In fact, an imaginatively designed bridge can often enhance a landscape – think of the Golden Gate bridge, or the Sydney Harbour bridge. I think that the Viaduc de Millau is spectacularly elegant as well as being an extraordinary engineering achievement. Anyway, the project seems to have the strong support of the local people.

The viaduct strides across the Tarn valley

To convert 270 metres to feet when writing that entry, I used the Google calculator. I don't know how well publicised this has been. If you haven't used it, it's well worth experimenting with. Just go to Google in the usual way and type "270 metres in feet" (exactly like that but without the quotation marks; you can spell meters in the American way if you must) in the Search box, and click on the Search button. Instead of giving a list of links, Google will display the result of the calculation. It can cope with all sorts of units. For example, it has no difficulty with the physicist's standard test question "What is the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight?" You can only defeat it by using fairly obscure units. If you ask "How many firkins in a hogshead?" it will revert to providing a list of links (though as it happens, the first of those links gives the answer to the question). It is biased in favour of US units, as you might expect, but it gives the correct answer to "how many litres in an imperial gallon?"

You can also use it for purely mathematical calculations such as "2*3+4^5-6/7". It understands trigonometric functions (using radian measure), but it does not know that "cos(pi/4)-1/sqrt(2)" is zero (it gave me the answer 1.11...*10^(-16)). It will even cope with complex numbers: try asking for "i^i", and compare the answer with "e^(-pi/2)".

Oops, I was forgetting there for a moment that this isn't a math class. I must be getting withdrawal symptoms already. I gave my final class of the year last Tuesday, and I don't have any more teaching until September.

Wednesday 15 December

From today's Guardian:

Pool of light

It has a pool table, computers, sofas to lounge on, and a generous smattering of surly teenagers sloping around, all shaggy hair and angry skin. But this is certainly not a typical youth club. The kids who come here, some as young as 12, are gay. To them, the club is a sanctuary in a confusing and often hostile world.

"This place is like a lifeline," says David, a softly spoken 15-year-old who resembles a young Billy Idol with his spiky hair and torn T-shirt. "It's the one place I can come and totally be myself and not have to worry about what people think, or about people judging me."

The rest of the story is here, and it's well worth reading. If only every town and city had such a place.

Thursday 30 December

Liz has left, to see in the New Year with friends in the south, and so I have the use of the computer again. For the week that she was here, we seemed to be entertaining visitors almost every day. For Christmas Day I roasted an excessively large turkey, most of which is now in the freezer, to be used up slowly over the next few months. On Boxing Day Lorraine and David were coming for dinner, and I bought a whole salmon to poach for them. But David had a dose of flu and Lorraine had to come on her own, so half the salmon also went into the freezer. On Tuesday it was our turn to host the annual parents' evening, for which Mary cooked an excellent coq au vin. Then yesterday Nathan and his new wife Catherine (whom we hadn't met before) came round to lunch and helped us consume most of the remaining coq au vin and some of the leftover salmon.

But these festivities and scenes of over-consumption were intercut with days of ever more horrific accounts in the media of the dreadful tsunami in the Indian ocean, reminding us that 'in the midst of life we are in death'. For all the advances of science and technology, mankind is still very helpless in the face of nature's disasters. All one can do is give, and the response to the Disasters Emergency Committee shows that millions of ordinary people are willing to give generously (much more generously than their governments) to help those in desperate need across the other side of the world.