pumpkinstrokemarrow

A second cultural outing this week, this time to the Globe to see "Love's Labour's Lost". (Not altogether sure that the apostrophes are in the right place - one might have thought that both love and labour were plural in this context - but I have gone to the bother of checking in my copy of the text). A very energetic and rather young performance, in which much loving attention had been given to staging, music, mime, dance, deer and bounding. And, as with the Magic Flute, rather taken with how much like a pantomime it was - in this case with the words being particularly decent rather than the music. All most enjoyable. Not really bothered how authentic or not it was.

Slightly concerned to discover that we had seats without backs but this was more than compensated by being in the front row and having a substantial wooden rail to lean forward on. Ringside seats in fact - if one neglects the groundlings swirling around below one. Red cushions well worth their pound a pop. Being slightly above them, slightly (maybe three is enough for one paragraph. But it is sometimes slightly irritating to be groping around for an alternative word when one actually means the second time what one said the first time. Repetition rools) disconcerted by the way that the eager groundling faces followed the action around the interesting stage - there was even a certain amount - heaven forbid - of interaction between the groundlings and the artistes during the action.

But the words were a bit of a problem. I had had a quick look at them beforehand - and found them very dense. Well laden with all kinds of verbal trickery, a good proportion of which depended on knowledge of the vocabulary and events of the day. Now I am reasonably well read but, without more time or inclination to study, it was reasonably heavy work. The result was that, with the words being rather gabbled amidst a welter of other action, a good proportion of them were lost. And I would be very suprised if more than a small proportion of the audience were in better case than I. So while I can see that if one does know the words, one might be unhappy at their loss, for most of us perhaps this rather non-verbal production is the way forward? At least until we re-learn how to cope with complex speech. Have we been ruined by a diet of TV and newspapers which has been controlled to hearing and reading ages of 10 or something?

Spent far too large a chunk of today chasing down a bug in an Excel program. And the flambouyant explanations one comes up with in these circumstances remain impressive. Despite all one's experience, one's mind still turns to the possibility of the fame which might acrue from discovering and properly documenting a bug in the mighty Excel! But, alas, plodding detection work eventually grinds the answer out of the system - and in this case, as so often, the solution was very banal. Not what my Latin teacher used to call an intelligent mistake at all. What I think he meant was an error which was not simply carelessness or thoughtlessness, but a mistake which arose from asking the right question at the right time, but coming up with the wrong answer.

Moving into bubble land, I believe there is quite a strong analagy between software detection and the crime sort. The same chasing of hares. The same blundering around in the dark with the heavy breathing of one's managers (who understand nothing you understand) just behind one's ears. The making your mind up far too early in the game and being blind to anything which does not fit in with what you have already decided is the answer. The implicit assumption that any fault must lie in somebody else's bit of the system. For a jape (albeit of a rather prosy sort) one might translate a Morse mystery into an Excel mystery.

Talking of fame reminds me of a fragment of a dream I had the other day. I was sitting in the tube watching a rather non-descript somebody reading a full-page advertisement for some job or another. I remember being distinctly put out that such a non-descript could even contemplate applying for a job which justified a full-page advert when I had never got much beyond the classified.

This was a day or so after another of those dreams when I visit an imaginery but persistant place. In this case an imaginary pier in Portsmouth. It seemed very familiar in the dream and on waking I was sure I had dreamt about this pier before - but maybe it is all an illusion. The dream can fake the impression of familiarity along with everything else.