gnimmel (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gnimmel) wrote,@ 2006-10-15 20:12:00 |
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A trick done with mirrors and doors
It is an odd situation that I find myself in. To say that a lot has happened since the last livejournal entry of any substance is an understatement: I have, in point of fact, got married, moved house, changed both job and academic field and spent time on three continents, not to mention crossing the equator twice and the prime meridian nine times. Moving week itself was changeable: that was what the weather forecast said; we were on the chaotic cusp of autumn, and hundreds of birds wheeled and gathered over the road, black against the sunset, as we took our little Yaris back and forth along the A428. Forget that the fenlands have no appreciable scenery for hundreds of miles, forget that the sulphurous odour of cabbage fields hangs over them like a wet fart off the North Sea -- what they have in abundance is sky, and as we carried out our own small migration that sky was a Turnerian fantasy world of cumulus rising, clashing, huge thunderheads building up and breaking catastrophically, shafts of crepuscular sunlight striking out like an announcement of the second coming. We were very little beneath it all; somewhat less than the birds. But in our little way we're no longer Bedfordians. Everything over, we have ended up here: in Gwydir Street, in Cambridge, with all sorts of wonderful things a few minutes' walk away. I am quite off balance. It's all rather lovely.
How to describe where we are? We have bought a teapot which is rather too large for two people to use. I have baptised the front door with gin. We still don't have enough bookcases. Our local shops sell pigs' blood, black salt and pea aubergines. And then there are the doors....
See, there is a measure of poverty which states that a non-poor household should have more rooms than people; a condition we only just edged into in the Mew, assuming bathrooms to be countable. More remarkable was our position in the depths of abject door poverty. There were only three in the building, including the front one. If one included all cupboard doors, that number stretched to a generous eight. It wasn't something I felt strongly about, at the time. The Mew was a house with no hidden corners. We used its space efficiently. And now suddenly we're in this strangely large old Victorian house; a house with crannies, with a mysterious locked attic, with a door in the middle of the bathroom wall which swings open as you are brushing your teeth to reveal a mirror which reflects your arse, with big wooden cupboards smelling of old sap; and which almost certainly has a hidden entrance to a basement, probably beneath the stairs. When you walk to the front door, a very small mirror reflects the movement of your feet, as if there is someone else in the room; and another mirror turns the line of curtains in the front bedroom into a cloistered corridor to mirror-land. I went to a conference last week at the Royal Aeronautical Society; afterwards, walking along the edge of Hyde Park in pursuit of a particular bookshop, I had a sudden moment of confusion in which it seemed that the chirality of the world had been switched. I have never been very sure of my left and right and east and west, to be fair. But would it be easy, in a mirror-world, on a stage with a suitable number of mirrors and doors, to turn a Bedfordian modeller of stars into a Cantabrigian modeller of air transport? And how long would have one have to stay in a mirror-world before one stopped noticing?
For all my breathless words, I can't keep down the pedant inside; who would like you to know that, though humans stop noticing pretty quickly, our chemistry might not function quite correctly in a mirror world. But I have informed the pedant that if you play about enough with mirrors and doors, you might be confused enough not to care.
Enough of this. Good people, come and have tea with us! We have a large teapot, and it ain't going to drink itself.
It is an odd situation that I find myself in. To say that a lot has happened since the last livejournal entry of any substance is an understatement: I have, in point of fact, got married, moved house, changed both job and academic field and spent time on three continents, not to mention crossing the equator twice and the prime meridian nine times. Moving week itself was changeable: that was what the weather forecast said; we were on the chaotic cusp of autumn, and hundreds of birds wheeled and gathered over the road, black against the sunset, as we took our little Yaris back and forth along the A428. Forget that the fenlands have no appreciable scenery for hundreds of miles, forget that the sulphurous odour of cabbage fields hangs over them like a wet fart off the North Sea -- what they have in abundance is sky, and as we carried out our own small migration that sky was a Turnerian fantasy world of cumulus rising, clashing, huge thunderheads building up and breaking catastrophically, shafts of crepuscular sunlight striking out like an announcement of the second coming. We were very little beneath it all; somewhat less than the birds. But in our little way we're no longer Bedfordians. Everything over, we have ended up here: in Gwydir Street, in Cambridge, with all sorts of wonderful things a few minutes' walk away. I am quite off balance. It's all rather lovely.
How to describe where we are? We have bought a teapot which is rather too large for two people to use. I have baptised the front door with gin. We still don't have enough bookcases. Our local shops sell pigs' blood, black salt and pea aubergines. And then there are the doors....
See, there is a measure of poverty which states that a non-poor household should have more rooms than people; a condition we only just edged into in the Mew, assuming bathrooms to be countable. More remarkable was our position in the depths of abject door poverty. There were only three in the building, including the front one. If one included all cupboard doors, that number stretched to a generous eight. It wasn't something I felt strongly about, at the time. The Mew was a house with no hidden corners. We used its space efficiently. And now suddenly we're in this strangely large old Victorian house; a house with crannies, with a mysterious locked attic, with a door in the middle of the bathroom wall which swings open as you are brushing your teeth to reveal a mirror which reflects your arse, with big wooden cupboards smelling of old sap; and which almost certainly has a hidden entrance to a basement, probably beneath the stairs. When you walk to the front door, a very small mirror reflects the movement of your feet, as if there is someone else in the room; and another mirror turns the line of curtains in the front bedroom into a cloistered corridor to mirror-land. I went to a conference last week at the Royal Aeronautical Society; afterwards, walking along the edge of Hyde Park in pursuit of a particular bookshop, I had a sudden moment of confusion in which it seemed that the chirality of the world had been switched. I have never been very sure of my left and right and east and west, to be fair. But would it be easy, in a mirror-world, on a stage with a suitable number of mirrors and doors, to turn a Bedfordian modeller of stars into a Cantabrigian modeller of air transport? And how long would have one have to stay in a mirror-world before one stopped noticing?
For all my breathless words, I can't keep down the pedant inside; who would like you to know that, though humans stop noticing pretty quickly, our chemistry might not function quite correctly in a mirror world. But I have informed the pedant that if you play about enough with mirrors and doors, you might be confused enough not to care.
Enough of this. Good people, come and have tea with us! We have a large teapot, and it ain't going to drink itself.
