Long-Tailed Tits

A week or two ago Zoe and I were in her bedroom when she pointed out a flock of small birds flitting about in the chestnut trees in front of our flats.  I immediately recognised them as long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus). We leant against the window-sill and watched them as they 'leap-frogged' each other round the trees, presumably looking for things to eat.  Just when you think you have seen them all, a straggler swoops in from another tree. Flocks of long-tailed tits remind me of loose clusters of stars like the Hyades where most of the members are travelling as a concentrated ball of stars, but there is also a loose association of outliers that are travelling in the same direction.

Goldcrests

This Saturday Liz and Zoe saw a goldcrest (Regulus regulus) in the Reading University grounds.  I remember seeing one back in January, on a frosty morning as I was walking between Farnborough and Frimley.  They seem so tiny that I am surprised that they can survive cold weather.

On Saturday Zoe said they also saw a darkish pheasant-like bird which might have been a female golden pheasant, possibly the mate of the male one they saw in October - it was also on the drive to Foxhill House.  However, they did not get a good look at it before it disappeared into the bushes.

Hip Priest - The Story of Mark E.Smith and The Fall by Simon Ford

The late John Peel has a lot to answer for.  A few months ago I came across three (yes three!) books about The Fall in the Reading Broad Street branch of Waterstone's bookshop.   I thought that Mark E.Smith must have died, or at least have been given a knighthood.  

I first heard The Fall when I was at Leeds University in 1978, on the Peel program of course.  Back then they were very rough indeed, but I was impressed enough to seek out and buy Bingo Master's Break-Out! and Live at the Witch Trials.  I followed them through Dragnet, Fiery Jack, How I Wrote Elastic Man, Totally Wired, and on to Hex Enduction Hour in 1982.  After that, I must have become more responsible, for the only other Fall records I bought were The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (1984) and Bend Sinister (1986).  Then I lost track of them completely for several years.  It was only when I started listening to BBC Radio 6 on broadband that I learned that The Fall, or rather Mark E.Smith and the current version of The Fall, are still active and producing good stuff in 2004.

The key element of The Fall has always been Smith's inscrutable lyrics which are completely unlike anything else in contemporary music.  A lesser, but still important feature has been the driving wall of noise produced by the rest of the band.  The overall effect is best summed up by quoting Danny Kelly's description (NME 1984 Nov 10):

"The wall of rhythm generated by the Hanleys and the great and loyal Karl Burns is huge and brutal.  Craig Scanlon and Brix Smith drill shockingly harsh metal guitars into the heart of the beast.  Where the babblings of the wordSmith used to be a part of an urban guerrilla cell - mercurial, fragmented, chancy - they now find themselves riding atop Krupp's wet dream, a black, invincible war machine.  The noise is crude, cruel, inescapable and authoritarian.  Smith has always been a lucky bastard, chucking his writing bag of words into the music like a carcass into a set of propellers, to watch the result spin off not as gore and offal, but diamonds, a tour de force of inexplicable sorcery."

As well as quotations, Ford's book is full of interviews with many past and present members of  the band, some interviewed specially for the book, others culled from old music magazines and books.  Smith comes across as almost impossible to live and work with, and one has to admire the dedication of Steve Hanley, Craig Scanlon, Karl Burns, Martin Bramah, Kay Carroll, Brix Smith, and the others for sticking with him for as long as they did.  Whenever the band looked like it was getting to be successful, Mark E.Smith would insist on making a new start, for example by changing their record company.  On one occasion Smith apparently fired his whole band because they wouldn't make the sound that he wanted.  A few days later he went and got his ears syringed and found out the problem had actually been in his hearing, not in their playing.  But they stayed because they were in awe of his ability to come up with ideas and words.  Some of this awe comes across in reading Marc Riley's reaction after the recording of 'Iceland' as recounted by Colin Irwin (Melody Maker 1981 Sep 26):

"No, we didn't know what he was going to do either," says Riley in a state of euphoria later. "He just said he needed a tune, something Dylanish, and we knocked around on the piano in the studio and came up with that. But we hadn't heard the words until he suddenly did them. We did 'Fit And Working' on 'Slates' in exactly the same way.Yeah, I suppose it is amazing really..."

As Ford says, once you have been a fan of The Fall you can never escape it: even now when I walk past a pelican crossing and it goes beep-beep-beep... in the back of my mind I hear Mark E.Smith spitting out:

Got eighteen months for espionage,
Too much brandy for breakfast,
And people tend to let you down,
It's a swine.... 
Fantastic life!

Ours is not to look back, ours is to continue the crack.  (Argggh!  I think I had better go and lie down.)

Diving behaviour in a Lesser Black-Backed Gull

While walking with Zoe around the Reading University lakes this morning, I noticed a lesser black-backed gull (Larus fuscus) sitting on the water.  Suddenly, it flapped its wings as if taking off but rose only a few feet into the air and then dived head-first back into the water, almost immediately coming to the surface again.  I saw it perform this trick twice, so it was obviously deliberate.  Maybe it was trying to catch a fish and needed to get a certain amount of momentum to get deep enough to reach it.  After the second dive, the gull then slowly meandered its way around the lake as if looking for something else to dive for, but we didn't see it dive again.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Casaubon, an Italian history graduate, gets a job with a publisher of occult books.  There he helps his two colleagues, Jacopo Belbo and Diotallevi, in assessing submitted manuscripts about the Knights Templar, an order of monk crusaders that were supressed in 1344, but about which conspiracy theories have grown that say they survived as a secret society and control history.  Casaubon and Belbo meet an array of 'occultist' would-be authors, each with their own mad theory.  Madness is piled upon madness; conspiracy theory upon conspiracy theory. Then, for their amusement, Casaubon and Belbo start to invent the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories: it links the Templars, Francis Bacon, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons,  Napoleon Bonaparte, Tsar Nicholas, Adolph Hitler, and has at its heart is a great secret concerning 'underground currents'.  But Casaubon and Belbo are sucked into the madness when the occultists start to believe in their theory and want to know the secret.

This a really biting satire of occultists, occultist thinking and occult publishing.  It is also rather cleverly written and very  funny in parts.