Out of the way

Some thoughts on dead bodies. Maybe not everyone's idea of a fun read.

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I had a birthday recently...

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I have new glasses. This is lovely, because it means I can actually see well again.

My left eye is not bad. My right eye is not very good. A couple of months ago I lost my glasses, and had to revert to my "emergency" pair. Which had become my emergency pair becaus the right lens dropped out and was lost forever.

A month of working with those (and needing them, because my right eye was so often useless that I was really pushing the left) had me wondering if I would have learned to favour one eye.

At Gregory's place, the courier delivered my glasses. They are new, funky, don't have real frames, just arms and things stuck onto the lenses. They sit high, and they are amazingly light. (I have worn glasses for about ten years. When I was younger my eyesight was just as bad, but I had more energy to strain my eyes. I started with glass lenses, and have moved to ever-lighter glasses bit by bit).

Funnily enough, the courier also delivered my privacy screen to Gregory. It's a bit of plastic, made by the same people who invented those little yello sticky notes that are everywhere now. It is almost transparent, so long as you look at it straight on. From about 45˚ it is hard to see much at all, so I can sitin a meeting and read confidential mail in large type without worrying about who else is having it waved in front of them.

I wonder if the couriers thought about this, as they asked a blind guy to sign for a package. When I was younger I delivered televisions and the like around the suburbs of Melbourne for a while. Occasionally I would be asked to explain how to operate a new television or video recorder - and I remember that while blind people would ask for detailed explanations, they would also actually be good at remembering them. It struck me that having a couple of video recorders and a couple of TV's, all connected together, it would make sense to be good at remembering how each one worked. I don't think I had thought about it much before, but it seemed reasonable for people who had a lot of spare time to want to copy video cassettes, and record a lot of stuff.

Someone recently asked what blind people do with a photo website. I recall going to buy my first digital camera, with a blind friend who was replacing his (I should have just bought his old one, I guess), and asking him where he put his photos. He collected them, asked a bunch of friends to tell him which were good and which weren't (and what was in them), and then he stored them or sent them to people. Same as anyone does. After all, there are only a few things you can do with photos.

While I am travelling, I generally need to be working. I also try to keep up with my friends, at least a bit (I have to admit I am not always good at it)...

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These were the lyrics to an obscure Beatles song. Since I had it on a cassette tape that had a mostly black cover, it took me ages to realise that it was the "White Album", which was actually titled "The Beatles".

But here, they are because I finished books number 8 and 9.

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It seems like the most classic of dumb excuses, but for most people it actually happens a couple of times.

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Err, that's meant to be Bangalore, the first place I have ever been in India.

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Demain je prends un vol pour le Maroc. Pour moi, ce sera ma deuxième visite - c'est le seul pays en Afrique que j'ai visité. J'y vais pour une réunion W3C que j'ai organisé là-bas, mais après 12 ans de s'appeler "World-wide blabla" c'est la première reéunion qui aura lieu en Afrique. Eh, beh. C'est mieux d'arriver tard que ne jamais arriver. Je suis bien content que ce se passera enfin, et aussi qu'il y en aura une autre cette année.

Je passerai 5 jours à Rabat, et apart la reéunion je participerai dans un mini-conference à l'Université Mohammed V des Ingénieurs (avec mon ami Robin Berjon, et peut-être des autres).

Et si on trouve des utilisateurs d'Opera ou de My.Opera là-bas, ils sont aussi invités à une soirée de discussion, peut-etre prendre un verre ou quelque chose à manger, et discuter Opera. (La technologie - au niveau musical je suis malheureusement presque nul).

Pour moi, c'est une éspéce d'aventure, car je ne sais pas beaucoup de comment les gens utilise le Web au Maroc. Je sais qu'il y a des telecabines et des cybers, mais est-ce que tout le monde ont des portables avec Opera déjà installé, ou veulent quelque chose comme opera mini, ou s'interesse pas trop au Web, ou construisent leurs propres browsers?? Y-a-t-il miliers de bloggeurs là-bas, ou millions, ou des dizaines?

Alors, si vous êtes de Maroc et peut me dire quelque chose d'utile, ecrivez-moi SVP (en me tutoyant, je ne suis pas un type formel d'habitude). Si vous serez à Rabat Mercredi ou Jeudi soir et veux parler et prendre un verre avec quelqu'un qui travaille pour Opera, pareil... (Vous trouverez mon addresse email facilement en cherchant).

On the weekend I saw some villages and some trees and mountains around the parque nacional de Picos de Europa (in northern Spain).

I started wondering about a lot of things. Is a village where people are building new houses, but fewer and fewer people spend as much as half the year there growing or shrinking? What is important to a village - a school? A football team? A festival?

It's hard to say, but my first instinct is to suspect a lot of it has to do with children. I grew up mostly in a big city, surrounded by other children. There were always people to play with.

But I was not a very sociable kid, compared to how I am now. I would go off on my own and read literally for days on end. I did play with other kids. We had a farm where we spent time, and I was the oldest of my family, almost as old as the youngest of the neghbours (who were a few kilometers away) and they would be the only people we would play with for a week. More commonly friends would come - my parents were (and are) fairly social people.

As I think about my experience, and about kids I have known who grew up in isolated parts of Ausrtalia or, like me, in the centre of major cities, I don't think the difference is in the children themselves, or the effect that life has on them.

Until recently, it has been pretty hard to have a "good job" in a village - either you inherit it, or you move to town for it. Is the web changing that? Is the fact that people can work from anywhere going to reverse some of the urban drift that has been a major feature of the last few centuries?

Will the people who have grown up in towns be drawn to the restaurants and bright lights so much that they stick to the towns for their everyday life, and take country holidays? Or will they see the vegetable gardens and the same people gathered in the bar as a world to live in while the city is a place to holiday?

I don't know. I am not a village people, I am a traveller. I enjoy being in a village, the easy familiarity, the sense that people belong, the ease of not having to choose every day which bar to go to and who to meet. But then, I am just passing through. What else is behind a village, what does it mean for the people who are always there, or for those who belong to the village, though they come and go?

In latin, senex meant "old man". My creeping senility shouldn't automatically be associated with losing marbles. I turned 36 recently - not yet an old man, but no longer a young one. (I can be legally excluded from various dating services in Australia, who cut off at 35, and can't go on a Kon-tiki meet-market singles cruise for the same reason. So there are some blessings )

My Granny, who is in her 90s, is not well, having been quite sprightly until recently. I thought that she would no longer be with us last weekend, and was glad to be in Australia and able to see her. She is still in hospital, and at any time her condition can only be described as unstable. I can't predict the future any more than the next person - she may get better, and live to be 105, or 125. She may not. It depends on many things, including whether she really wants to.

Perhaps all of these things are twice my current lifetime away from me. Perhaps not. We lose people from time to time. An ex-colleague passed away very recently, somewhat unexpectedly and apparently peacefully, at an age between Granny's and mine, leaving a number of people dealing with their first experience of losing a colleague at work. Others have dealt with it many times over.

Life is a gift. The lives of those who pass through our own, and our own life, are a short time we have. But if I could, as Woody Allen said, achieve immortality not through my work, but by not dying, would I? I don't know. Every new day is a gift, and people are precious in part because you never know how long they will be there. (In larger part, the people who are really precious to me are so because of the particular person they are...)

So how should I be passing my days? How should I note the accumulating years? I guess I will finish my life, some time, having left undone things I wanted to do and things I really should have done. There are times when I should have stopped, looked around, sat down in the grass and done nothing, instead of obsessively reading mail (or writing my blog ) or running off on some very-important-at-the-time errand or crusade. There are other times when I should have got off my backside and done something.

I didn't make it to see Granny in hospital today. I hope she's OK. I'll go see her tomorrow. She doesn't want to be there. I don't like being in hospital either.

Happy birthday to me. I guess Timboctou was out of the question this year. Still. I get to go to the Gathering, and do some cooking. That will be fun (and a little cold in medieval clothes). If I see you somewhere, ask and I might bake you a cake In the meantime it is one of those moments when I should do something. Make dinner, in particular.