What I do (using only the 1000 most common words)

This has been doing the rounds - http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ - explain difficult things using only the ten hundred most common words. So this is what I do (not that complex really, but hey)

I look at the world, carefully.

I want to know which bits are hot and which are cold, where the rain falls and where it is dry, where the wind rushes and where it is still. These things can make the lives of people better or worse, so it is important to understand them. It is also interesting because I want to know about how the world works.

The world is always changing. It changes every day and each month is different. But if we look very carefully we find that it changes every year, every ten years, every hundred years. No matter how we look, no matter when we look, the world seems to be changing. If we want to know how the world now is different from how it once was - if it is different - we need to look with great care.

Some people think that we are changing the world. They think that sooner or later, changes in the air from all the things we have burned will make the world much hotter. When we burn things the air gets hot, but that is not why they think the world will get hotter. You will have to ask one of the people who believes this to find out why. It is a very interesting story and although the world is very, very big, the story has in it some of the very smallest things we know about.

The changes in the world could be big and these changes could make the lives of people better or worse. It is quite hard to say for sure, but some people believe that for very many people it will be worse. Others believe that the changes will be small, or they will not be bad for very many people. Because of this we would like to get a better idea of what will happen.

The big problem is that the world is all joined up. If you change one small part, other parts change too. It is not possible for one person to think about all the ways the world is joined up.

To understand the world people build small worlds inside computers because computers can think about many more things than people can and they can do it much faster. However, the worlds inside computers are very small and they are not exactly like the real world. It is possible that important things are missing from the small worlds.

One way to check if the small worlds have all the important things is to look at what has already happened. If we look at what happened in the small computer worlds and what happened in the real world and they are nearly the same then we start to think that the small worlds in the computers might be able to tell us what will happen in the next years and tens of years and hundreds of years.

But this is only a start. People are very good at saying why something has happened. Some people and some computers are very good at this and they are so good that even other people think that this person knows things that haven't happened yet. Sometimes they do and sometimes they do not. The only way to tell for sure is to ask the person to write down something that has not happened yet. Then you can look at the world and see if it does what they said it would.

That too is only a start. Understanding happens slowly and it happens by looking often and carefully at the world.

So that's what I do. I look at the world, carefully.

Books: why I like them, why I'd miss them

The smell of old books is one of the most evocative I know. I'd miss that. I'd miss second hand book shops with vertiginously steep staircases and mysterious damp patches, where the shelves stretch up into the darkness and the only way to reach them is to use the ricketty old step ladder with a sign saying 'not for customer use' which makes you ache to know what they're hiding up there. Shops where it is acceptable to browse for hours, purchase huge quantities and feel virtuous. And, at the till, over the owner's shoulder you can see rooms, inaccessible to the public, which contain as many books again or more.

Deepak Chopra

I am greatly enjoying Deepak Chopra's daily words of wisdom. He has quite a talent. He doesn't just talk bollocks: listening to him actually feels as if he is gently, but insistently, trying to push a bollock into your ear.

That is all.

Dark Room

There are moments in Steve Mosby's "Dark Room" where the tension becomes almost unbearable, but even in its quieter passages - in some cases quietly beautiful and beautifully touching - you feel uneasy. Something just beneath the surface, just out of sight, something locked away in the dark room is restless and turning in the blood warm darkness.

Someone like you

"I heard that your settled down that you found a girl and you're married now"

So begins the song that has seared itself into my mind. A dark drama without resolution. That opening line promises darkness and beauty. That voice! It speaks of planning and waiting, a-biding of time in tear stained isolation, that there would be more later to destroy, that the crime would be greater, the revenge sweeter, the prize dearer.

She has pictured this scene in her head a thousand times, slowly breaking down all the sane defenses a person would set up against themselves acting in this way. She is there on the door step, perhaps unsteady on her feet, drunk, beyond drunk in the eerie soberness the other side. She has rehearsed this moment in her head a thousand times. The words that come out are slurred and vicious, but not in her head. In her head the voice is perfect.

It is perfect, wrenched from the depths of her soul, edged with sorrow. A barely constrained howl. She wants to accuse him, convict him with his own happiness, sentence him to the same infinite sorrow. In the next line she nearly loses it, the reality bubbles to the surface, almost breaks through

"I heard that your dreams came true."

The sing-song "woo" of true, the eyes roll, she can't resist the epic bitchy suggestiveness of:

"I guess she gave you things I didn't give to you"

But she's over that, soaring in some airy space free from all baggage. She sees as clearly as the far-sighted hawk. And what we see clearly we are duty bound to report. Dragging up unfathomable energy she shows that she's past that, she has risen above it. They're just old friends now, she chides:

"Old friend why are you so shy. Ain't like you to hold back, or hide from the light."

This situation is utterly normal. The neighbours lights are coming on, curtains are twitching.

"I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited, but I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it"

Social nicety slides in one line back into the sickening lurching darkness underneath. The undertow that sucks the unwary summer swimmer far out to sea where the storms have broken the sky. Then...

"I'd hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded that for me, it isn't over."

As if anything else could be true. As if this could be over. You see, he made a promise and promises are old magic.

"Never mind how I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you two
Don't forget me I begged. I'll remember, you said
Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead x2"

That final couplet, resonates. It is almost Shakespearean in its ambition, but there is a threat there too. It hurts. It hurt me and now I am here, in the night, when the innocents sleep and dream untroubled dreams. Before one can digest that though, another mood change from cold airless heights to honey-soaked nostalgia.

"You know how the time flies only yesterday was the time of our lives.
We were born and raised in a summer haze bound by the surprise of our glory days."

How they glowed, burned, blazed in the sun of that long summer. Those brief hours and weeks. The pollen heavy air, heady with young love, when eternity can start in an afternoon and bear it out even to the edge of doom.

Doom, where we find ourselves now.

"I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited but I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it
I had hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded that for me, it isn't over."

"Never mind how I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you two
Dont forget me I begged, I'll remember you said.
Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead x2"

The second time it is like a mantra, the force is unstoppable. The voice at full bore like the ocean boiling annihilating light of a supernova. Then deftly brought back to earth and earthly concerns, taste.

"Nothing compares, no worries or cares
Regrets or mistakes they're memories made
Who would have known how bitter sweet this would taste"

How has she found sweetness in this? Why is the voice doubled up on that line? We are coming back to reality. In this moment she truly is magnificent.

She's nearly done, the masterpiece is nearly complete. The wild magic at an end. We are left with a reprise of the chorus, but there's one crucial change. One minute detail, that would surely chill the bones of any man who heard it.

"I wish nothing but the best for you-ooo"

Before it was "you two" but this time, this last crucial time there is no two. There's just him, alone in the dark on the doorstep. The silence in the house behind him is too complete.

The sirens in the distance sound.

Silence.

It is written

You had to pay for days like these. The clear air, the quiet and the pure summer sun didn't come cheap. Doug had a lot of money. So much in fact that he could afford the luxury of growing his own strawberries. Only the birdsong wasn't real, but there are some things that money can't buy.

The trap

Once upon a time there was a hunter who made his living hunting animals and selling their skins. He had a coat, which he was very proud of that was made from the furs of all the animals he had hunted. The great coat kept him warm in the winter when the snow covered the forest.

One year, the winter was particularly cruel and, at the start of spring, snow still overlaid the country like a shroud. The hunter’s traps were always empty and he found that he had to venture further and further out into the old forest where the trees tangled overhead and it was always as dark as night beneath them.