Jonesieblog

I take part in a weekly email quiz.  It’s very informal, running simply using a “reply to all” mailing list, with the winner setting the next week’s quiz.  I often come last, whilst my wife often wins.

I can’t understand why I do so badly - I know loads of stuff! I guess I do badly because the stuff I know is mostly obscure and/or technical.

Here’s a case in point:  I noticed whilst browsing the BBC radio site that there’s a program about William S Burroughs coming up soon.  The tagline is “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”  I don’t suppose many folk would recognise this quote, but it jumped off the page at me - I know who is supposed to have said it first, and could write a small essay about its influence.  If this comes up in the weekly quiz then I’m laughing

[I know the quote as "nothing is real, everything is permitted"]

Stumble it!

The main thing I have learned on this journey is that if you aren’t governed by fear you can live truthfully and you can find a kind of beauty. If you are inhibited and fearful you will live a prescriptive existence. But once you get beyond the hedonistic first impulse of that philosophy you find that you need to focus on something wider, more permanent and beautiful and valuable. That’s what I’ve learned. I think “I want to do something worthwhile”.

Can you guess who said that?

Stumble it!

I was out for a pint with my good friend Jim last weekend.  He’s from Anstruther, a small fishing village directly opposite us as we look across the Firth of Forth from North Berwick.  When I say that he’s from Anstruther, I don’t just mean that he was born there.  His mum and Dad were also both born there, all his uncles and aunts live within a 10 mile radius of Anstruther, and he is not aware of any ancestors that come from anywhere apart from Anstruther.

I can’t begin to imagine what it must feel like to be so connected to a particular place (and to the fishing industry that was the lifeblood of the village). My Dad was from Mid-Wales, with parents from Mid-Wales and Shropshire, and my  Mum is from Bradford in Yorkshire.  I was born in the South of England and have lived in Scotland since 1983.  Unsurprisingly, I struggle to answer the question “where are you from?”!

Of course, the scattering of my ancestors last century is happening to my friend’s family now - he doesn’t live in Fife, and his wife is not from Fife.

I wonder how common it is now to have such solid roots in one town or village?

Stumble it!

Pure nostalgia - here’s an imperfect list of my favourite albums since I began listening back in the late ’70s.

Stumble it!

This morning we were supposed to turn off our computers, as the school link to Haddington was getting switched to a broader pipe - “you’ll get to the bottleneck quicker” Alan C joked!  I ignored this request, but unplugged by machine from the network.  Call me arrogant if you will, but it made no sense to me that I had to have my desktop machine switched off even if it wasn’t connected to the network in any way, so I kept it on.

This meant that I found myself working on a computer without access to the Internet.  I rarely travel with a laptop, so Internet-free computing is something I have not experienced for years.  It was very strange!  The inner dialogue was something like: dum dee dum - OK, I’ll just - Oh, no, I can’t check that.  Right, I’ll do this instead - this is going fine. Ah - I wonder if - oh no, I can’t check that.  Hmm - OK, here’s something I can do without the Internet.  The work I did on some Geogebra files was productive in the end, but it felt very odd indeed to be without the Web at my fingertips.

Stumble it!