Various Things That Have To Be Thrown Out


Phone My first mobile phone


My gratitude to my brother for giving me this phone is so great that it is beyond words. I was living in a tent at the time, and the phone let me keep in touch. It could store a maximum of 10 texts! Unfortunately it's one of the things I have to throw out now.


Childhood Books Some books from my childhood


Clearing out the garage, I had to confront this stack of books from my childhood. There are so many memories attached to these books. It's moving to look through them, evoking sadness and nostalgia.


Books 1 More books


Those top 3 are a boxed set of Michael Crichton books that my brother gave me for Christmas (or birthday, can't remember which). I liked them, thanks for the present! I can see a book by William Poundstone there. Interesting person. I read about him much later when he was promoting his latest book on electoral reform in the US. A proponent of range voting if I remember correctly.


Books 2 Lots of memories here


That top one is supernature by Lyall Watson. I've written about him before. A classic book. Then The Meaning Of Liff, by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. I remember having it in my pocket as a teenager, and taking it out and reading it when we were visiting Ikea in London by bus. My mum thought it said, Meaning Of Life and thought it was a religious / self-help book. She said, 'that won't help you'. I didn't say anything. The book takes place names, and uses them for things that we don't have a name for. One that I remember is Polbathic, meaning to have the ability to turn bath taps on and off with your feet. Does God Play Dice? was very influential for me. I think I went to visit Dundee University and bought this book for my brother. Of course he wasn't at all interested and I was really just buying it for myself, but I fooled myself into thinking I was buying it for him. You know what I mean. This book first got me into fractals and chaos, which was one of the things that made me switch from Architecture to Physics at Uni. It was one of the few things I felt I understood, and created fractals from modelling diffusion limited aggregation for a project. During the Uni holiday I ran the simulation overnight on a laptop that my dad borrowed from work. The next book is H.G.Wells' The History Of Mr Polly. I read it at Uni, and it has a wonderfully peaceful ending. I was in much need of peace of mind when I read it. Polly Devlin's All Of Us There was actually given to me by Polly Devlin herself! Her husband was involved in a company called Open World that I worked for. I was asked to go over to their house and fix her computer. I did my best with it, and I hope I left it in a better state than I found it. In return she gave me a copy of her book. Lastly, the dictionary. On the front it boasts, 'Updated for the 90s'.


Cravat Cravat


This was the cravat I wore when I played the older Bernard in Dennis Potter's Cream In My Coffee. We took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it was seen by lots more than one person!

OS Maps

You youngsters don't know how lucky you are. We used to have to have these Ordance Survey maps in the days before smartphones and OpenStreetmap. Actually, some people loved the paper maps, my dad for one. He had a collection of them on a couple of bookshelves. They were a feature of my childhood. It annoyed me that there were duplicates for some. Why not throw away the older one? One sure way to torture my dad was to fold a map incorrectly.