Welcome to vastbranch.com

Paint finished and doors back on my latest job. This one was seriously hard work. The clients chose the colours and pattern. It wasn’t my favourite layout (I gave them several other options that I liked better) but I love the colours they chose, and it looks awesome regardless. Soon it will be filled with thousands of children’s toys!

And here is Clem kicked back reading a takeaway menu. The photo is from September, but I like it and don’t think I ever posted it anywhere…

One thing that consistently troubles me about living in York, and something I’m looking forward to leaving behind when we move, is collisions. The population density in Europe, even in small cities like York, is so great that the chance of random encounters between individual people is incredibly high.

Just tonight, for example, I was pushing Clem in his buggy to get him to go to sleep, and as I returned home with my sleeping baby, having carefully allowed the braying youths on their way into town to pass well ahead of me down my street, there appeared a man on a bicycle. He was on the road and I was on the sidewalk, but he was riding towards me, strangely, and he kept slowing as he got nearer. Slowing and slowing, nearer and nearer. For absolutely no reason, apparently. Just riding more and more slowly towards me as I walked normally along the sidewalk towards home. Nearer and nearer, purposefully slowing.

As I passed him, watching him out the corner of my eye, he was rolling so slowly he was almost at a standstill. After I passed him I heard him dismount and hump his bike up the curb. I turned to see him entering one of the houses behind me. Of the forty houses on my side of the street, how likely is it that someone was riding a bike up to one in particular at the precise moment that I was passing it? That our timings had inclined us to collide, my timing on leaving home to walk around the block with Clem, his setting out from wherever he had been that evening? How likely that he should ride up to the front door of his house at the very moment I was walking by?

Very likely, apparently, things like that happen all the time. Every time you need or want to be in a specific place, there is someone else there already, or heading there.

When you increase the pressure of a gas in a container, the molecules get closer together and more collisions take place, thereby exciting the substance and increasing its temperature. I suppose the same principle applies to human beings in a city. Great numbers of people sharing a confined space increases the likelihood of any particular pair of people colliding with one another, and greatly increases the number of collisions that are likely to occur. And it also frays nerves.

Time to depressurize.

Check out our pics from Croatia in August! Edit refused to be photographed and Alec wasn’t around most of the time, so prepare to be disappointed if you hope to see pictures of them… or Charles, for that matter. Anyway there are some beautiful ones of the scenery and local colour and plenty of Clem and Becky, and even a few of me. Enjoy most!

The news that several MPs are being charged with criminal offenses relating to their handling of expenses has almost immediately raised the question of whether they are protected by parliamentary privilege, which protects them from being held legally accountable for any speech made in Parliament, and also covers, apparently, all parliamentary business.

Since expenses are clearly a part parliamentary business, it may just be that the police and Crown Prosecution Service have no right to get involved in this issue, that any wrongs committed by the MPs in question must be punished solely within Parliament itself.

If it turns out to be the case that MPs are protected from prosecution, their privileged status will only aggravate the public’s anger and its uneasy feeling that MPs are a special class immune to the rules and trials of normal men’s lives.

But take a moment to think why it might be that these protections exist.

If an MP can be tried criminally for anything related to doing his job, then a compromised police and CPS can be used to enact the political aims of a controlling party or group. MPs need special and protected status so that the powers of the state cannot be exerted against them for political reasons.

This may end up being a situation where some bad people get away with it due to their protected status as MPs, but that just means Parliament needs to put some teeth into its ability to regulate from within.

Beware the Night of the Long Knives.

Our local pizza parlour’s latest offering? No. The title for a visionary poem? No. The contents of a momentary blogjecture? Yes.

When you have a dog in a city, you spend a lot of time watching it taking shits. And even more time watching it preparing to take a shit. Gordon, and many other dogs I have observed in the various parks and fields where we go walking, have very specific requirements that must be fulfilled before they can relieve themselves of their fragrant burden.

The most important of these requirements is the presence of the what I call the trigger smell. The dog must locate the trigger smell before he can void his cumbersome bowels. I have watched Gordon run back and forth over the same piece of ground time and time again, his nose firmly to the ground, until he finally discovers the precise location of the trigger smell, and squats.

It could be the act of running that is of greatest importance in his behaviour, but I think it’s all about the smell. Now, from long observation, I have noted that the trigger smell is always to be found in the ground beneath trees. It can be found elsewhere but it is mostly found there.

Which leads me to the conjecture. I believe there is a fungus which lives symbiotically on the roots of trees which secretes the chemicals that constitute the trigger smell. The dog’s nose is, of course, easily sensitive enough to detect the underground scents, and trees do live in symbiosis with root fungi. And perhaps the dog’s turds provide further nutrition for the fungi, and therefore, the trees.

Any biology geeks out there care to investigate this conjecture further?

I was very glad to see Obama doing “Prime Minister’s Questions” yesterday and engaging in face to face discussion with congressional Republicans. As I see it, the problem with the Democrats’ healthcare reform was that they lost control of the message from the very beginning. When they announced their plan to tackle the healthcare problem — and it is a very real and palpable problem for tens of millions of people — they gave no solid indication of their aims and what sorts of policies they would use in order to achieve them.

Thus they left an opening for the Republicans and the PR/spin-doctors of the insurance industry to take control of the message and pervert it in any way they liked. So instead of the issue being government seeking to right an egregious wrong in our society by providing access to basic healthcare for all members of our society, the story suddenly becomes “your insurance premiums will triple”, “small business owners will go under”, “the entire healthcare industry will fail”, “the deficit will sodomize your children”, “the world is going to end in 2012″, and worst of all, “the commies are coming, just as soon as Obama gives ‘em the nod”.

So the Republicans, PR firms, spin doctors and insurance industry were able to sabotage healthcare reform before it even got started. They utilised the usual tools of control, stimulating people’s fear and drive to self-preservation, even though the scary information they peddled was false to the core.

Healthcare reform needs to happen. In order for it to happen effectively, both parties must cooperate and collaborate. But that’s going to be very difficult now that the general idiocy of the public has been worked up into a lather by scare stories about premiums tripling.

Obama showed great leadership in facing his critics yesterday and answering their assertions directly. In face to face debate, the divisive and deceptive nature of Republican politics became incredibly obvious. While Obama’s calm, cooperative nature shone out. I hope his positive and constructive attitude trickles down to the Republican ranks, and to the combative and entrenched Democrats. The best case scenario is that cooperation blossoms from the embarrassment of being upbraided by their leader. But if this event merely means the Democrats take control of the debate and we get useful healthcare reform, so be it.