frankie, and other short stories

i have been silent for quite some time, i know, i know. andyxl will be saying pissy things about the regularity of my posts again.

i’ve been working very hard indeed, so please forgive me. every 6 months i descend into a flurry of long tedious meetings, mainly concerned with ALMA – 4 full days of those – sometimes in Japan, Chile or North America. after that i sit on another poxy committee at ESO – another 2 full days, this time in Garching. the screamer in my Garching hotel last week was the most exciting thing that has happened there in 3.72 billion years. add the travel – the bane of my life, not helped by Edinburgh’s shitty little airport – and i become properly depressed and start talking about giving up on this astronomy lark and making my fortune.

a few things i’d like to say, while i’m here:

please can we have frankie boyle as president of the world? how come Ricky Gervais becomes properly famous yet frankie is unknown? could it be something to do with their nationalities? surely not. i sincerely hope frankie gets laid, well and often. he deserves to.

my vocabulary has increased markedly this week. the clocks have gone back and i am now forced to cycle on edinburgh’s roads. the darkness, which descends at 4pm, means i can no longer pick my way safely down the back of blackford hill. virtually all of my new words are germanic-sounding combinations of the c word, the f word, another f word, related to the first, and occasionally the  w word, and they are directed at drivers that think cyclists picking their way amongst the potholes need but a foot or two of space.

whilst typing this, it has crossed my mind that someone may read it after i’ve been crushed. either that, or after i’ve been jailed for throwing my bike through some tosser’s windscreen. i hope it’s the latter, and that you’ll write to me in my cell?

SPIRE does the business

i’ve spent a decade or so attending Herschel/SPIRE consortium meetings. some poor buggers have spent almost twice that long and had to suffer the various early descopes, where the mirror plunged from around 7m to half that diameter. i suppose that’s what awaits me in the coming decades since i’m co-PI of FIRI – the Far-Infrared Interferometer – which a huge team of talented astronomers and engineers proposed at the last ESA Cosmic Visions deadline.

i spent today at RAL. they made me sign their version of the official secrets act, so i can say very little, but i only need a few letters: WOW!

SPIRE is phenomenal. i’m a good judge of what constitutes a decent telescope or instrument, and the performance of SPIRE is breathtaking.

the scientific steps taken with Herschel will be incremental rather than transformational  - only the Square Kilometer Array ever dares use the t word, because it has never faced a rigorous review or tasted any flavour of reality – but i can predict with confidence that Herschel will prove a worthy successor to Spitzer and SCUBA.

i will go a step further and predict that after the lessons of Spitzer, which spent too little of its short life doing spectroscopy with IRS, there will be a more rapid switch between “gee whiz, look how pretty that is!” and “let’s do some physics!” because the SPIRE Fourier Transform Spectrometer is doing very very nice work. i only wish i could be more quantitative, but i value my testiculars.

i’m back from my vacation, by the way, or from my period of enforced unpaid child minding, as i more accurately refer to it. i promise not to abandon you again. i have much to say, but much of it must await the publication of some rather sensitive reports…

cosmic balance

last night brought me an example of perfect counterpoints – terror and bliss.

i was awoken at midnight by my 3-yr-old  son crying for help, so i crawled out of bed and went to see what was wrong.

i felt him before i found him – so feverish that he resembled a BBQ more than a small child. he was clutching his face and sobbing that ten ogres had stolen his nose.

i was torn between mirth and horror – the meningitis-inspired fear familiar to all parents.

all’s well that end’s well. i slept, fitfully, beside my wee furness of a son, and when we were woken at 7 by my wifey, his temperature had subsided.

blocked bog

i am a bit of a whiz around the house – rather more practical than your average, head-in-the-clouds astronomer, but i recently found myself stumped by what should have been a routine household chore – a blocked loo, caused by my eldest horror flushing about 50 sheets of toilet paper, just for the hell of it.

as a good northern boy, my reaction was focused on the wasted money rather than the blocked loo, though this is clearly due to ours being a luxurious dual-loo household.

defeated, i read all the internet how-tos. i ordered a huge plunger, and a strange bendy wire thingumy, and i pushed about 2 yards of garden hosepipe down there as well. all unutterably useless.

days passed, then weeks, and it was dawning on my miserly northern soul that i might have to hand £100+ to the kind of person that delights in ripping people off. (everyone earning £100+ for an hour’s work is thus categorised by those of us born north of Watford).

last-chance saloon: B&Q, hermiston gate. i asked an elderly assistant what he could suggest to help me clear my loo…

“are you squeamish?”

“i’ve had my hand down past the u-bend several times, trying to fix it, so i guess not”

“right – wrap an old towel around your hand – make it big enough to fill the hole, with no room to spare – then ram your hand down the loo a few times”.

sounded vaguely plausible, and by jove it works! in seconds!

so my heartfelt thanks go to the gentleman at B&Q, and also to B&Q for having the sense to employ a few wise old heads. not often you get service like that.

choose life. choose a job. choose a career. choose a family. choose a fucking big television. then get your arm down your lavatory, right up to your pits. go on.

stimulation

like many astronomers, i’m turned on visually.

steering rapidly away from an obvious and far more interesting topic, we turn now to art. i was recently invited, by the Royal Astronomical Society, to a special preview of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2009. i was extremely excited by this prospect – a large collection of paintings and sculptures by a huge range of artists, for sale to the public, shown at the Royal Academy and viewed by a few hundred of the great and the good, and me, whilst a few dozen Polish folk (well, they were – we got chatting…) serve champagne and nibbles.

i enjoy watching crowds more than watching what the crowds are watching [breathe] – indeed, i can be often be found with my back to the stage at Glastonbury, searching for interesting faces, hats and things on sticks. being freakishly tall helps, once you become accustomed to the brickbats from shortarses behind you. so, armed with a glass of champagne, could there be anything more fun than swanning through a few dozen large rooms, absorbing the art and appreciating the pretty people? well, scanning the crowd at the Royal Academy, i was disappointed to find that the great and the good and their partners are, by and large, ugly. and most of the art was shite.

there i go, spoiling my post with honesty. sorry.

as is traditional here, i shall end with a question. why, with the likelihood that many present earn very reasonable salaries, was there such a lack of talent? am i really to believe that i am the only shallow scientist in the world?

arse

you know how sometimes nothing goes to plan, nothing works out? that’s my summer, in a nutshell.

shitty anonymous referee reports from so-called collaborators? tick. pipped to the post on an epic 12-year chase to nail the redshift of one of the first SCUBA galaxies? tick. zero detections after completing EVLA water maser survey of SCUBA galaxies? tick. diddle squat emission visible in EVLA CO(J=1-0) map of brightest known SCUBA galaxy, even though we known it has a stonking line? tick. loo blocked at home? tick. coffee machine knackered at home? tick.

and now, to top it all, Lew Ashby – the decadent record producer in Californication, a show i believe was written especially for me - seems to have overdosed. i find this very traumatic as i have been living vicariously through Lew for several months now, what with no longer having my own life and all…

can anyone offer something cheery to lift me?

saint viv

don’t know about you, but i always imagined vivienne westwood was pretentious and superficial – and that she was probably from hampstead

in one evening she has proved me wrong and become one of my all-time heroines. indeed, i feel i have found a soulmate – one of the few that i have no desire to jump into bed with, what with her being about 105. this week she rang jonathon ross, one of the BBC’s overpaid and slightly flabby light entertainment stars, and asked to appear on his show. her objective: to point out that our gorgeous planet is about to be lightly toasted, meaning that my son and daughter are unlikely to reach my age. think about that for a moment.

this has me in tears on a regular basis and i have been in search of a saviour for some time. the parallels with christianity are stronger than i expected. this search raises all kinds of questions… what if that saviour is a jetsetting fashion designer? unlikely, i grant you, but is it any less unlikely than our saviour being a dull, carbon-neutral green MP? if our saviour hasn’t been carbon neutral since birth, i can guarantee that the airline and car industries will have him/her nailed to a cross.

it worries me, because we don’t get a second chance. we being the entire human race. granted, not many of us deserve to live (i believe this to be true), but i defy anyone to tell me that my kids don’t deserve a chance. so far, 9 years into this millenium, we’ve saddled them with a lifetime of financial debt; next, we fry them. why? so that we can drive to Ikea and fill out houses with tat, and fly to marbella to eat fish and chips (or florence, middle-class folks). think about that for a moment.

anyway, viv is eloquent, gracious, thoughtful and, crucially, she is not from hampstead, but from cheshire. her voice was a delight.

coincidentally, viv shares my admiration of prince charles. could have spent his life shagging, jetsetting and filling his palaces with tat. instead, chose to take on several interesting projects, despite the absolute certainty that he would be “subject” to ridicule. that, i can empathise with.

isn’t it lovely when a preconception is overturned, for the better?

posh English women – p*ss off back to Hampstead!

cycling is my new passion – the most thrilling part of my day is either the ride to work, or the ride back. this is largely down to the fact that i live in the best city in the UK, by a country mile, but it also because my route to work takes in one of Edinburgh’s little-known gems: the Hermitage.

this is a delightful, broad path through dense, mature trees, alongside a large stream, at the back of Blackford Hill (upon which sits the Royal Observatory). i glide through this oasis of calm each morning, before lugging my bike up a steep path and arriving at work, dripping in sweat but very, very happy.

the return journey is hair-raising at first – a drop down that same steep path, slipping and sliding, then a slow plod through the Hermitage into sleepy Morningside, and home.

this morning, however, my appreciation has been spoiled. as i approached a group of 3 dog walkers, i slowed down and rang my bell, at a respectful distance, and smiled and thanked them as they let me through. so far so good, then one of them – a blue-rinse granny with a posh English accent, the type of woman most folk wish they could waterboard, the sort that you meet all too often in my adopted city – informed me that cycling in the Hermitage was against the law. not the tiniest glimmer of doubt in her demeanor, entirely unaware of the hypocrisy of berating a reasonably considerate cyclist whilst letting her yappy little dog poo on the path.

turns out she was talking out of her ass. if i’d been better informed – as i am now, after joining Spokes - i could have said “Your century is long gone, hen! Land Reform Act Brackets Scotland 2003. Now piss off back to Hampstead!”

who’d have thought it? politicians, in 2003, passed a law that changed things for the better. they must be kicking themselves. i guess the law of averages has to kick in once in a while…

annoyingly, my head being my head, i can’t let this go. instead of a feeling of bliss sweeping through my system as i enter the Hermitage, i now watch for signs of inhumanity amongst dog walkers. i’ve discovered that dog walkers are bimodal – either the friendliest folk on the planet, or the most miserable, antagonistic bunch of tossers you could ever meet.

this makes sense when you think about it – some folk have a dog because they dislike humans, others grow to dislike the daily chore of walking. before this week, i’d have thought of these people as the minority, but intense research has led me to the conclusion the bad-guy ratio is about 50:50. pity the dogs don’t become more like their owners, and eat them.

miserable dog walkers: you have joined my long-time enemies, white van man, bus driver and taxi driver. beware.

glastonbury vs royal highland show

my spiritual home is a field in the south west of england. normally home to a large herd of cows, it gets transformed for one glorious week into the best festival of music and arts in the entire world – glastonbury.

for the second year running, i’m not there, and the sun is shining – a tragic situation for which someone must pay! as i’ve said before, if you will forget the condoms…

anyway, today i found myself in a field just outside edinburgh, with some similarities to glastonbury. an extortionate entry fee for example. sadly, though, instead of 170,000 like-minded thrill-seekers, i was surrounded by thousands of ruddy-cheeked farmers, their livestock, and a good few hundred tractors: the royal highland show. jesus, what happened to my life? even my son was bored. he’s three; he gets excited watching grass grow.

the saving grace – and i only wish i could say this more often – is the BBC, an organisation riddled with mediocrity, whose prime-time output on BBC1, BBC2, BBC R1 and BBC R2 is entirely lamentable. somehow, though, they fill my void for three nights in June, with sublime coverage of glastonbury on BBC3 and BBC4.

springsteen headlines this year, a man i have adored since my high-school maths teacher, mr dobson, pointed me in his direction. then I got Mary pregnant, and man that was all she wrote, and for my nineteenth birthday i got a union card and a wedding coat.

bottom of the pops so far has been neil young – one of the wanky tosspots that punk swept away – and possibly the only musician i’d have mourned less than michael jackson, had he only had the decency to pop his clogs at 50.

on her royal majesty

there’s a title asking to be misconstrued.

back in 2002 i bought some china teacups from a market stall in god’s fairest county, Lancashire. they were to celebrate the 50-year reign of Elizabeth II (of England, Elizabeth I of Scotland). my purchase was purposefully ironic. friends were to drop by, be offered tea, and the receptacle would light the (royal) blue touch paper of rants about the monarchy.

as an aside, almost every decision one makes between the age of 26 and 35 is filled with meaning, and i don’t just mean haircuts and clothes. it’s all about mating, presumably, but then one wonders why the gay community tends to add an extra decade of self-absorption both before and after the straight community’s decade of superficiality? (tongue only slightly in cheek here). anyway, at our absolute peak we opt to piss away money, time and effort trying to be cool. i recall my mother, rather late in the day, remarking on how often and how savagely i made judgement calls relating to `cool’. it may be that her question led to my current state of decrepitude. if so, i’m grateful. decrepitude is my natural state; it winds up my wifey and winding up the wife is surely what replaces tedious self-absorption from 35 onwards?

i digress… i now find myself working at the royal observatory edinburgh and a member of the royal astronomical society. within 2 years i’m told i will be on the invitation list for a garden party. so how do i feel now about dear liz?

i’d rather she was running the country than gordon, but that’s also true of my mother, who hasn’t read a newspaper since i was born; come to think it, it’s true of almost anyone i’ve ever met, with the notable exception of astronomers. i wish Queenie would stick her oar in more often, to keep the electorate awake, and to keep our rulers on their toes. i love watching her son winding up architects: if ever a profession could be said with absolute certainty to be up itself, it’s architecture. am i proud to be her subject? i’m indifferent. i will say this: she’s a handsome woman, and she puts her mugshot on some damned fine chinaware.