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I’ve perhaps been unfair to Oxfordshire at times – I’m not hugely drawn to flat landscapes, but of course Oxon isn’t all flat. Last night H and I went for a marvellous, and very restorative, cycle through what for me is ‘proper’ countryside, rolling, woody and clucking. There was more than just clucking: as well as muntjacs, we saw a herd of alpacas and, best of all, a fleet of piglets came running across their field to see us.

A week or so ago M and I went to the Rollrights, too – another inevitably uplifting megalithic site, largely unspoilt, surrounded by cow parsley and views.

H and I went to Walsingham a couple of weeks ago. I found it fascinating as a theological voyeur. The whole place turns on a series of fictions.

These began in the 11th century, when a Norman lady claimed to have a vision of the Virgin Mary – ever after known as Our Lady of Walsingham – and endowed a priory as a result. The truth is that at the time, there were no viable sites for humble Brits to go on pilgrimage (and weren’t until a troublesome priest in Canterbury was despatched). It was simply a marketing exercise by the church – which clearly worked brilliantly until Henry VIII sent Cromwell’s Dissolving Formula across the country.

Next stop is 1896, when a Catholic woman, Charlotte Boyd, bought the ruined 14th century Slipper Chapel and restored it, and suggested a pilgrimage to visit Our Lady (OLW) in her new home.

Jump now to the 1920s and 30s, when Anglican vicar Alfred Hope Patten secured land to build an *Anglican* shrine. It’s an extraordinary place – typical 1930s architecture, and beautifully done, though also startlingly mawkish.

While building it, they found a mediaeval well, which has since been used (along with rumours of healing properties) to bolster the sacred credibility of the site.

I suppose I’d be hard pressed to say what I would regard as an *unconstructed* site for pilgrimage, but Walsingham doesn’t even have some bones. Now legions of rotund sexagenarians travel from far and wide, all in fealty to an 11th century illusion.

A trip to the Design Museum, for the splendid You Are Here exhibition. A festival for geekish poring. Along with the inevitable Tube map delights, highlights for me included:
- Adrian Frutiger’s Symbols and Signs – Explorations foldout chart
- The works of Richard Saul Wurman, Otto Neurath (hurrah! my old chum Basic English) and Annegrete Moelhave
- John Adams’ 1679 map of road distances between UK towns and villages
- Joseph Priestley’s invention of “charts of biography”
- the unlabelled maps comparing metro networks across the world

Much Googling to be done, frankly, and much else of interest besides, but:
(a) no catalogue!!
(b) as J pointed out, er, didn’t the design of the exhibition (not to mention the dreadful Design Museum website as H has already observed) somewhat let down the premise. A major missed opportunity, given that the structure of the exhibition itself was so blurred.

I also discovered the works of Edward Tufte, which I shall be tracking down, especially his essay about PowerPoint being the death of reason, a long-cherished philosophy of mine.

I’ve decided that the time has come to explore and explain something, if only for myself.

On occasion I’ve described myself, both glibly and half-seriously, as a ‘High Church pagan atheist’.

High Church
I grew up in a fairly standard CofE environment (one parent a staunch believer, the other a staunch unbeliever) and am pretty familiar with it still. I love old churches and their atmosphere, and sometimes the CofE seems like a sanctaury of sanity for its broadmindedness and Englishness. It never fails to amaze me that our culture has embraced Christianity at all, sometimes, and I always get a weird feeling when I see serried ranks of old ladies chanting about ‘Gilead’ or ‘Nazareth’ or ‘Bethel’ and so on. What these dry, middle eastern places mean to our verdant culture is a mystery to me – but I’m getting ahead of myself – but there’s a comfort in repetition, at least. I’ve no time for evangelical churches, on both philosophical and aesthetic grounds. If it’s gotta be church, it’s gotta be highish (though, er, not Catholic, thanks). I think the sonorous mystique of some Latin, a whiff of incense and a tone of seriousness have a lot to offer the soul.

pagan
If I were to believe in anything, the genius loci wins hands down for me. I think churches offer a contemplative balm which is truly valuable, but nothing compares to a walk in the woods or a stride across a moor or a leap across a stream or the surge of a hill. I’m absolutely with Wordsworth here: One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Our culture here is rooted in paganism, which in some sense feeds materialism, which is both good and bad – the middle eastern death cult of Christianity has been here for a long time, but has never really grabbed the nation’s soul, I think. Our churches inhabit sacred sites of yore, our Christmases hijack Yule. I bet more people have Christmas trees than go to church.

atheist
I can’t really bring myself to believe in any non-material consciousness. God in all His glorious manifestations reeks of us, not of heaven. He should shave with Ockham’s razor. And much as I love the idea of nymphs and fauns and dryads and fairies and elves, they too remain in the ideosphere for me. If you want an explanation of the world, rationalism is the only way forward.

High Church pagan atheist
But an explanation of the world isn’t the only thing we want. We want comfort, a sense of connectedness, of pattern and of meaning. I think the answer to this is metaphor, and life would be hideously impoverished without it. God is a metaphor (a ‘comforting fiction’ or ‘foma’, as Kurt Vonnegut has it) which is useful to many, many people. Greek gods and Druidic spirits are metaphors, too, to explain our own behaviour or the environment we find ourselves in. In many ways, I find polytheistic or pantheistic theologies a lot more sensible than the one-stop-shop of monotheism. But they are all different ways of telling stories through the long dark teatime of the soul. I think Don Cupitt’s take on Christianity is the right one, although I would never call myself a Christian: while I believe it offers people powerful metaphors, I think other views offer better metaphors.

And don’t get me started on Buddhism.

I’ve been a fond reader of Utne for some time now, though occasionally I pass it by on account of the twee folksiness it can slip into. But there’s always something interesting. And I was pleased, while in the States, to pick up a copy of Cosmo Dogood’s Urban Almanac from the same stable. I like the idea of this: our lives are so citybound that we need to find an awareness of nature from within the metropolis rather than necessarily expecting to escape from it. Here in Oxford I have Port Meadow only yards away: but try stargazing there, and it’s compromised by the sky being orange.

The almanac has all kinds of daft lore in it, and lots of celebratory ideas. Again, there’s a bit of twee new agey stuff, but it’s a good idea, and one in harmony with a lot of things that Common Ground are into. In fact, I may tell them about it. (I’ve just discovered the latest site connected to them is a celebration of corrugated iron buildings!

Oh for more time to dwell on this sort of stuff, but I’ll *try*.

I’m not sure that LA is really my kind of place – but but but. It has the MJT (though the website can hardly do justice).

Think Sir John Soane’s museum on those candelit Tuesday nights. Think Dennis Severs’ house (though I *still* haven’t actually been there…). Now forget all that and think Borges and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Think Voynich. Think Serafini. Now forget all that and bloody well get on a plane to LA.

The MJT is too good to describe, but suffice it to say it is an incredibly atmospheric coup de theatre, a satire on all museums, a confounding of epistemology, an aesthetic delight, and it’s next to a carpet warehouse.

This is definitely the best ‘museum’ I’ve ever been to, and I wish I had the money to set up something similar but different in Oxford. Give me a few million, someone, and I won’t let you down.

On Friday, I finally got to see The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

If you don’t know, I’m a Peter Sellers nut, and probably have about 15 of his films on video or DVD (plenty more to go…), plus lots of audio. I openly acknowledge that (a) a huge percentage of his output, or his directors’ output perhaps, was dreck (b) he was a complete shit of a person. But.

In many ways it’s a good film, though by no means a great one. Good things, of course, include a very plucky performance by Geoffrey Rush, and a great supporting cast, and some game quirks such as the bits where various people in Sellers’ life transmute into Rush (an attempt to capture the spirit of all those films where Sellers, and Alec Guinness (his hero) before him, played numerous roles) and talk to camera. But.

Rush frequently captures the mannerisms of Sellers well, and if you squint, you can see the man. He also has a good pop at some silly voices, but at heart I think he’s the wrong man for this job (who the right man is, I don’t know, or modesty forbids ho ho). His normal voice, for one thing, is far too deep and growly – Sellers had a very hard voice to capture, and distinctive largely for its nondescript quality (with an affected twang of the d?racin?), in the same way that the ‘ordinary’ voice of someone like Rory Bremner is, well, ordinary. I could never quite let go of it being Rush, alas (plus no amount of prosthesis can disguise Rush’s glaciated face).

And the mugging to camera – why? If you’re going to have an element like that in your film, surely the point is to ‘stylise’ the subject’s life in some way, with some ‘theory’ to interpret their behaviour. No such theory was ever offered, really, even in the relationship with his mother Peg, which was only sketched with the broadest brush. Sellers’ family music hall background was ignored.

It seems the whole aim of this film (it must have been secretly backed by bitter Blake Edwards) was simply to say ‘Peter Sellers was a complete shit’. It’s absolutely true that he treated everyone in his life badly in one way or another, but the film never attempts to engage in any depth with why this might be, and the idea of him as a ‘child-man’ is nodded at without any sense of making it a real way to think of him. As ever, the real Peter Sellers remains elusive.

What saddens me most, really, is that for all its accuracy in biography and the extreme and appalling moments of selfishness in his life, the film fails to capture the positive side of him at all. It showed audiences smiling happily at his performances, but failed to make its own audience smile as they could have done. There is no sense in which this film is a celebration of Sellers’ remarkable talent.

So, er, anyway. I think it *is* a good film, but clearly created in a spirit of loathing for its subject. Contrast Man in the Moon, another biopic of an intensely irritating, selfish and demanding comedian, which nevertheless makes you go away with sympathy and a smile.

But for general readers, the entertainment lay in the fact that the sound went two-thirds of the way through watching it, in Oxford’s remarkable Ultimate Picture Palace, closely followed by the picture, leaving 12 people (count ‘em) looking around the auditorium, at each other, and at glimpses of a white haired old gent in the projection room, somewhat baffled. The owner of the cinema has completely disappeared. I took the opportunity to annoy H with a couple of public Clouseau gags, and shone my bike light up at the projection room. Eventually the owner appeared and the film was rewound to the wrong place, then back to the right place for us to watch loads of it again, and eventually we got to see all of it, if not quite in the order intended. Marvellous.

Hot on the heels of last week’s news about alcohol bearing health warning labels, I’ve come with a system for fast food.

Naturally, labelling is impractical because the packaging isn’t always suitable and is often (a) discarded (b) eaten in confusion or by preference to the moose meat beneath.

So, what we need to do is enforce name changes for the products themselves. Permit me to demonstrate:

- ‘a double cheeseburger and medium fries, please’ becomes ‘a double by-pass and medium angina, please’
- ‘would you like to go large?’ becomes ‘would you like to die young?’

and so on.

This system might well be then applied to cigarettes, too: ‘a packet of Mild Emphysema’, say.

Alcohol is more tricky. Ideally, for example, ‘cider’ would become ‘Students’ Blood’, ‘Fosters’ – ‘Vomit’, ‘Old Peculiar’ – ‘Beardy Huge-Gut’, or some such. The trouble is, these all sound like real ales anyway.

Right, I really must log off the SadDweebyBastard and get on with some work.

I regret to say that I can’t quite recall what started this. (That’s a lie: it was listening to Marty Feldman’s ‘whack’ song again, and then giving it an exciting canardine twist.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Google Quack Count. Thus, in terms of numbers of results:

quack = 424,000
quack quack = 220,000
quack quack quack = 225,000 (er, eh?)
quack quack quack quack = 217,000
quack quack quack quack quack = 217,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack = 217,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 221,000 (huh?)
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 221,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 220,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 217,000

Alas, Google is limited to 10 elements in the search, so that’s all you can have. So we can’t, er, work out how many quacks it takes to googlewhack. Ahem.

(I think the weird periodicity here may be something to do with the ‘Google dance’ – different Google servers give slightly different results when you access them; and I suppose it suggests anything more than two repetitions is treated as exactly two.)

It’s very gratifying to see the top line in the results of the last one in the list above:

“News results for quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack - View today’s top stories”

Click on the link, and it then says:

“Did you mean: quack duck quack duck quack duck quack duck quack quack”

Glorious.

OK, we need to get serious about this. If we want to see the Law of Quack Quotients in play, we’ll have to use quote marks. Thus:

“quack” = 424,000
“quack quack” = 33,000
“quack quack quack” = 7.970
“quack quack quack quack” = 2,170
“quack quack quack quack quack” = 679
“quack quack quack quack quack quack = 1030 (bit of a popular classic, this one, clearly)
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 607
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 357 (5th hit is ‘I like ducks’*)
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 298
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 246

There does rather seem to be an almost inexhaustible supply of quacks. The top hit in the last in the list, in fact, boasts 504 quacks – it’s at http://www.catharsis.org/index.php?mode=show&section=quack

I’m sure you’ll find it helpful to see the Quack Quotient illustrated graphically:

The second hit from the 10-quack search – known hereafter as q(10) – is here, showing that the webquack is clearly in common currency.

I say ‘hereafter’ – but of course, I must lie down now.

(PS. If you extend ‘quack’ to ‘quaack’ and so on, you do eventually get to just 1 hit: from ‘quaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack’, in faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaact. Rather alarmingly, the title of this hit is ‘And you wonder why me and Helen are mad’.)

The July issue of British Archaeology magazine has an article claiming that the Long Man of Wilmington and the Cerne Abbas giant both date only from the 17th century.

I admit I only skimmed the article, which was about things like remnants of brick, but I find this astonishing. I understand that the origins of these figures are hard to pin down, and that clearly much restoration or alteration may have taken place over the years – but what seems the strongest reason against the 17th century theory for me is their aesthetic.

The article rather lamely suggests that the Cerne figure’s priapic state is some sort of satire against Puritans or whatever – but I can’t really believe that someone in that age could have got away with such a stark image. And why, more importantly, would they have given an aesthetic with such an ancient feel to it? The Wilmington figure is weirder, less appreciable within a context of artistic development, perhaps, but the Cerne one in particular just doesn’t look like something anyone would have created in the 17th century.

Perhaps I’m just disappointed and defensive because I want to believe these sites really are ancient. But I still do.