Photos are up!

Photos

Dude, like, I'm turning into one of those annoying world travel bloggers. Of the whole, unbearable "here I am sitting in a tiny café with a glass of pomegranate juice..." variety. Ech.

Updates: It snowed! Now the view from the hotel is like this:


Updates: I didn't go to Khiva, but back to Bukhara:




These minarets gleam like turquoise steel or the sides of fish in the sun; they are fantastically beautiful.


Stupid camera bends everything. Next time I'm going to buy something with a lens that works...

In case all this is oppressively picturesque, here's something less spiritual and more visceral: Butchers shop! See what they did, there?


Updates: I went to a fantastically outré avant-garde play on dancing boys

Updates: More later...I have run out of time. Pictures took a bloody age to load, and conference day 3 is starting....off I go to the conference centre (which is a nightclub at ... night. There's a dancing cage and a huge mural of an improbably poised silver science fiction woman wearing little but a metal bikini and some form of space gun. Hilarious place. Perfect for a conference)

laters, fretmarketeers! x

Russian breakfast

From my hotel balcony...

I’m sitting here with my glass of cherryade, my rye bread and cheese, and the lights have just dimmed by two stops. Ah, this place is great! Sometimes I wish I was old enough to have spent time in the USSR before everything changed. Although also, emphatically, not.

This place is a fine old Soviet hotel. It looks like, as M said, a wafer that someone has bent in half ready to snap and eat. To be honest, you couldn’t think of a structure more likely to put you in mind of earthquakes. Which is probably the point. Tashkent was almost entirely destroyed by a huge quake in 1966. It was rebuilt as a modern Soviet city, with an earthquake-proof metro, and bulky, pale concrete blocks of flats and offices along streets lined with plane trees and elms. The plane trees here keep their dead leaves all winter, peculiarly — I must ask about that — and in concert with masses of elm-keys, hanging down like pale brown dried fish on racks, and the ghostly grey and black hooded crows, the white concrete and the glaucous, breathy sky, it seems the strangest, most wintery place imaginable. Even the air is white, as if it held, suspended, fine woodash, salt, or powdered snow.

Very strange, because apart from the traffic rumble, the only other sound I can hear from the balcony is the tropic carrolling of mynah birds — recent immigrants; god, they must be hardy to live in this blanched winter world. I am very impressed. There are bounties for mynahs; you get free cartridges if you shoot them. I can’t see that making a whit of difference to their populations, but I guess it’s a good way to get ammunition if you’re a local farmer — cartridges are very expensive here.

And yes, fretmarketeers, as you can probably tell from my wandering attention, I’m jetlagged to the point of dissolution. It was a horrendous flight, six hours overnight in an ancient 757 with broken air-conditioning, so we sweltered in our close-packed seats and I couldn’t sleep at all; got to that peculiar point of exhaustion where you fall prey to insitent, weird, synaesthetic intutions. I remember sitting, totally wiped out, in the baggage hall at the airport yesterday morning feeling that my emotional state exactly resembled a page of gothic type printed in white, rubbery, raised ink onto thick tracing paper. See? Bonkers.

Better this morning — ah, the delights of pro-plus caffeine tablets, plus two big, strong cups of nescafé. So, this hotel has seventeen floors, and an apparently infinite number of rooms, most of which are uninhabitable. They’re renovating it room by room. It has expanses of shining parquet floor, gleaming wooden corridors, and bits of newly renovated marble and glass which sit inside this extraordinary, crazy shell. The front of the hotel is knotted in rather beautiful concrete filligree that almost, but not entirely hides the sight of crumbling concrete and rotting steel. Mmmm.

And the lobby seems, Soviet-hotel-style, full of assignations in the evening; I’ve not had any phonecalls or midnight raps at the door but then I’m not the target audience, as it were. E has been offered massages and women by helpful attendants twice already, and M misheard one such message rather creatively; he spent ages wondering why someone wanted to give him a late night message.

Today I’m off to Khiva, huzzah, which rather ruins my conference preparation plans, but how can I resist?

Off again

Back to Central Asia tomorrow! This time it'll be less of a surrounded by jackals in a non-waterproof tent in a thunderstorm type trip; more of four star hotel in Tashkent type trip. This is a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Wish me luck, though: it's Uzbekistan Airways again....

AT-AT walkers in Cambridge!

Thank you, fatrobot! You have made my day.

Jericho where is the History Clasps the Nature

That is the slogan of the Palestine Wildlife Society, who are holding their "First Spring Birds Migrations Festival" in March and are trying to get tourists to go. It costs $40, which includes an overnight stay in the Moon Hostel, and:

• Planting Tree in the garden on your name.
• Bird watching "early in the morning or after noon"...
• Bird Ringing "Banding" during the day time "morning and afternoon
• Visiting the Archeology sites in Jericho and its area
• Hiking from St. George Monastery "Wadi Quilt top Jericho

I met these guys at a bird fair a few years ago. They gave me a postcard with a blurred photograph of a tortoise on it. Whatever your views on the region, respect to these guys: it must be fantastically hard to run a wildlife society in Palestine.

Superbus

My brother just sent me this extract from Wikipedia. It's about Penn and Teller's legendary video game, Desert Bus.

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time.

If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out.

Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen over halfway through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.

Entire article here

A recent observation

Undergraduates think they're very good at telling lies. But they're not. They are absolutely rubbish at it.

Days of the Comet

One morning last month I woke just after seven, extended a chilly arm out from the bedclothes and turned on the radio. Clear skies, said the weather report; clear skies for the first time in weeks. A strange short-circuit sparked in my brain, and suddenly I was dressed, in the car, and driving. I was barely conscious, still. All I could think of was this:


Comet McNaught!

Low to the horizon, and close to disappearing, it was the brightest comet in three decades. The Great Comet of 2007. You needed to see it early in the morning, or late at night, just before the sun came up, or just after it had gone down.

I was in the car because I was on a quest to find a comet. And to find a comet, I needed to find a horizon.

I'm still not sure why this quest was so excessively important that morning. I've taught the history of cometary theory to IB undergraduates, and I remember the thrill of disappointment at the thumbsmudge that was Halley through a telescope in 1986. Part of it's quite comprehensible: comets are cool.

But remember also that I grew up in an estate belonging to the Theosophical Society, where people wandered around faded sunken gardens and groves of ginkos and bean trees while quoting Blavatsky? The estate where the original prints of the Cottingley Fairies, faded and fly-specked, hung on the walls of Conan Doyle's favourite summer house on the terraces? It also held a chap who swore he'd seen an alien spaceship land in the meadow one summer evening; he'd watched it all from the battlements of his crenellated house. It was also, most importantly, where I spent about three years scheming how I could catch all of the newts in this pond:


Yes, sufficient weirdness all round for baby pluvialis to have caught just a hint, a tiny burring of it, surely. Because my reaction to the arrival of comet Mcnaught was slightly bonkers. See the comet! You must see the comet! It is very important, personally, to see the comet. I MUST SEE THE COMET.

It's important to realise I was barely, barely awake when I started driving. Because of course I should have gone to Castle Hill, five minutes away, where I could have had a perfect view.

Believe it or not, this is the highest hill in Cambridge. I told you East Anglia was flat.

Or the fens. Somewhere as gloriously, lake-flat as Lode or the hinterlands of Upware, where the Ouse flows through black, cake-mix fen. That’s where horizons are. You can guarantee a horizon there. Aside from nubbly willows and the occasional grain-dryer, it's probably the best place to see a horizon in the whole of bloody England.

But no! I was still, really, asleep. And my sleepy logic said: the sun rises in the east. Drive east. Off I went, driving through the faux-American mall-strips of Newmarket Road, and off towards Newmarket.

Newmarket: the home of English racing. Newmarket: a town with a ridge of hills named after it. I should have thought a little harder about what that might mean. Because I got more and more exasperated, in my sleepy state, as each time I crested a hill, a view with a rise in front of it reeled out in front. An endless rescinding of comet-viewing possibilities. Brushy combs, furzey wood-haze. Every hill, another hill behind it.

I need a horizon! There must be a horizon! I have never hated trees so much before. Or chalk. I started getting flickery, migrainous intimations in my sinuses as I passed the July Course at Newmarket, and turned up towards Tattersalls and the station. On and on I go. Dullingham, and on. At no point was there a good view. I got a bit crazed in the small villages east of Newmarket. I can’t even remember what they were called. There were hedges, game-strips, deep lanes and watertowers. My command to go east finally beached me in Stibbington, when I spun the steering wheel to tear up a small lane that narrowed and transformed to a farm track of indescribable narrowness — what were they using, a vineyard tractor? — and I got stuck, and had to get the car out of the mud, which was hard, and annoying, and involved shoving stones under the wheels and swearing a lot, only quietly because there was a possibility that someone might come out of the farmhouse and ask what the bloody hell I was doing there at 7.40am in a rusty 1987 volkswagen Polo .

Eventually, something broke inside me. Acceptance, I guess: the sun must be up by now. No chance of seeing the comet. So I drove back, sadly, cheered slightly by passing rooks, and a buzzard coasting over the car. I was so wallowing in my sad acceptance of failure that it took a very, very long time for me to realise something important. Something wasn't quite making sense. I spent some time glancing at the sky through my rear view mirror, and eventually parked in a layby on the B1011 near Quy, looking back over my shoulder at the lambent sky, irritated at the glowing contrails all at the wrong angles for comet tails, and: oh.

Oh.

I saw a fractured bolt of incandescence glowing through what I'd thought was a clear sky. And another one below it. And I realised — the whole heel of the hand to the forehead “idiot!” realisation— that the reason I’d not seen the comet had bugger all to do with topography, but because it was cloudy. My whole trip had been conducted under a serious atmospheric misapprehension.

I remember feeling that there was an important lesson to all this. Beats me what it was.

Snow

Lime trees, lamp-post, snow. It's all a bit C.S. Lewis, isn't it. My hair hides no horns, however, and there are perfectly ordinary human toes at the end of those boots.

It's nice to see Cambridge in snow. On my way to the office, I bumped into a gang of College gardeners. "I'm going to make a snowman!" I told them. "You're a bit late for that" they said, gesturing vaguely to the orchard. "The students have made loads already". "Ah" I said. "But mine will be better. It will be a fellows' snowman".

I didn't make a snowman. After seeing the twelve foot high giant snowmen built by teams of engineering undergraduates across Chapel Court and on the playing fields, I rather lost interest. I know when I'm beaten. Christina wrote later to say she'd watched an impromtu cricket match in her car-park: students using a pile of snow for stumps and a snowball as a ball.

These budding Collingwoods were rounded on by a member of College staff who shouted from the window, "No ball games!"
"It's not a ball" they countered. "It's snow!"

Snowballs are such strange weapons. One January day many years ago I was sitting upstairs at a table in the English Faculty library watching a bunch of happy undergraduates having a snowball fight across the wide-open wasteland of the Sidgwick site. As I watched, there was a pause in proceedings. The unmistakable form of Stephen Hawking in his buggy thing came into view, making his laborious way up icy Sidgwick Avenue, accompanied by his wife. And I swear, there was this moment where all these lads looked at Stephen Hawking, and then down at the snowballs in their hands. Oh, they were so tempted. I was horrified!

I nearly killed Stephen Hawking once. I turned the corner of Pembroke Street in my little red Renault and there he was, in the middle of the bloody road. I tell you, he's a terrible driver.

That might have ended my academic career, don't you think? Can you imagine the headlines?
The worst thing is, after I parked the car and stumbled into the department, rather shaken, I confessed my near-miss to a colleague.

"Oh" he said. "I wouldn't have worried. He did all his best work twenty years ago".