It’s Vanished!

Wednesday was a momentous day for me. ‘Twas the day, against all odds, that I submitted my thesis. So, those of you who have always wondered ‘just what is the role of self-efficacy, locus of control and intellectual ability in guided self-help for depression, anxiety and stress’ need only make your way to this 96-page tome.

The final print took place on Tuesday. Inevitably, having printed the required three copies, I found a mistake on page 6 which, when rectified, threw the entire document out of kilter. But we got there in the end, at the sad expense of a few good-sized trees.

Wednesday took me, stumbling and deranged, into the bindery of the Edinburgh University library. The route to the bindery takes one through the basement, where every piece of electrical equipment that has ever been under the auspices of the university is discarded at the end of its tenure. There are mountains of monitors, computers, and all sorts of gubbins lying about. There are probably one or two moldering academics in there as well, somewhere. When you get a few layers down.

Those who have been following my hapless course into the world of magic would be most impressed, in that I managed to pull off an impressive trick without being aware of it. Let me tell you about it in the style of a instructional magic book:

The effect: the performer prints three copies of a 96 page thesis, and places each in an A4 envelope. These he places in his bag and takes home. The following day, he selects a spectator from the university bindery. The envelopes are then removed from the bag, and the three copies of the thesis placed on a flat surface in full view of the spectator. The front page of one of the copies is seen to be missing. The bag is shown to be empty. The performer should direct the spectator to make an extra photocopy of the missing page through the use of some finely judged-patter. The performer then leaves to submit two copies of the thesis, which are chosen at random by a further spectator in the clinical psychology administration office. The performer later discovers the missing front page at the back of the copy he has retained in his possession.
The method: I have absolutely no idea.

Anyway, despite a few hiccups, it’s in. I have decided not to look at it again until the deadline in a week’s time. I don’t want to notice some mistake I could have changed if I’d had the time.

Let the good times commence.

Going Blind

Hello, cherubs.

Not much to report today. I’m approaching crunch time re. the thesis, but then you know all about that. Let’s move past that, if we can.

I was having a very industrious day yesterday. Some of this industry was directed at four key texts in the art of magic, all of which are now within my sweaty grasp. Things are not progressing at the frenetic pace we were all expecting, but they are progressing nonetheless. The past week has been spent trying out a few bits and bobs, but also trying to plan a trajectory. I have even downloaded (I kid ye not) some study guides. Whenever did play appear so much like work?

Anyway, when I wasn’t fumbling around with that, I was putting up a blind in the one-time-study-now-room-designated-for-baby. I’m told that babies don’t confine their sleep/wake patterns into two conveniently compartmentalised segments like the rest of us, so steps had to be taken in order that they might be fooled into a nocturnal mood simply by the lowering of a blind, when the occasion called for it. 

Anyway, it was all installed after some assorted hacking and banging. Afterwards, I thought I’d unfurl the instructions to see how well I’d done. Quite well, as it turned out. But not so well that a bright child might utterly mistake day for night. There’s still a bit of light coming in the sides, you see. Not to worry, though.

To finish on a light note, I was tickled by the instructions for this blind. They were written with an ebullience you don’t often associate with rather mundane window coverings. It’s opening words were:

‘Congratulations! You have purchased a fine window covering.’

I was momentarily regretful that we do not have a household policy of keeping a bottle of champagne on ice at all times, in the event of an unforeseen cause of celebration such as this. But I did feel rather proud of my noteworthy purchasing achievement.

The follow-up remark was almost as good:

‘It should provide years of enjoyment’.

Now, enjoyment is something I never expected to get from a window-blind. Pure, unexceptional, light-occluding functionality, perhaps, but not enjoyment. How does one enjoy a blind? Am I using it in entirely the wrong way? Is is really the manufacturer’s expectation that I should wake up every morning for the foreseeable future and wonder what blind-related delights might be in store for me? There I was expecting to more-or-less forget about it once it was up. Wrongly, it turns out.

I’d better dash for now, but I’ll keep you updated. Particularly with regard to my enjoyable adventures with a blackout blind.

All Change

Now, if I could just rally my senses, I might be able to fire off a quick opinion about Transformers. Mrs H and I are about to embark on a (possibly apocalyptic) visit to the Mamas and Papas shop in Craigleith, so time is of the essence.

It’s a bit weird going to the cinema in the middle of the night. For one thing, you tend to rub shoulders with those who look like they don’t usually see the light of day. And as would be expected for a movie such as the above, there was a delightful masculine skew in the audience demographic. There was, of course, the odd girlfriend / wife in evidence, but few looked as if they really wanted to be there. They were out of their depth, the poor things.

An amusing preface to the film, for me, was that my viewing companion was ejected at the very beginning. Apparently, when cinemas display posters of long-anticipated upcoming attractions, this is not to be interpreted as an invitation to help yourself to said posters. This my friend learned, to his cost. ‘Look but don’t touch’ would be my tip for any potentially light-fingered cinema-goers. 

So. The film. Truth be told, it fell just ever-so-slightly shy of what I was expecting, which is to say I found it a little disappointing. Of course, there were plenty of visual treats, but a lot of them felt a little bit familiar. Maybe I’m getting too old, but I find myself quite unable to make sense of overblown, hyperkinetic action scenes. Picture the scenario: you’ve got a gaggle of robots, each very large, ripping chunks out of each other within a small urban space. It sounds good on paper. But filmakers have this habit of filming such sequences in such a way that they’ll zoom right into the thick of the action, so that you feel like you’re right there. This is all very well, but it becomes hard to appreciate what’s actually happening. All you have is a vague impression of lots of metal flying in all directions, making lots of noise. Have you ever had to watch a video of a relative’s holiday? You know the sort of thing: camera all over the place, zoomed in up to the hilt and flitting from person to person in a manner more likely to induce nausea than a sense of coherent narrative? Well, Transformers was a bit like that in parts, and sometimes about as much fun.

I won’t spoil the plot for you, mostly because I am slightly hazy about it myself. I might have slept through a little bit in the middle. For example, I’d be grateful to know what became of John Turturro’s character. Did he just disappear, or did he meet some variety of grisly end while I was getting some shut-eye? The perils of late-night cinema, people. Suffice it to say that it involved robots (some good, some bad), a handful of humans, um, a box that did something or other, a pair of glasses. I think eBay was involved somehow. Probably best you see it for yourself really.

For me, it was no more than a notch above average. But perhaps repeated viewing would reveal more than (initially) meets the eye.

Hallows Be Its Name

Greetings, brethren.

For a nigh-unimaginable number of people, it’s a very special day today. This day, the 20th of July 2007 AD has been dubbed ‘the last golden day of ignorance’. Everyone get ready. We are about to turn a page.

The page in question, of course, is the front cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh instalment in J. K. Rowling’s record-breaking series. I assume it’s a record-breaking series, although I am at a loss to cite the latest Guiness tome chapter and verse. Let’s take it as a given.

You’ll have noticed that a degree of fuss has been made over these books. None of it by me, I might add. I’ve not read any of them myself. Which, some might argue, makes me a trifle underqualified to hold forth about them. I did see films one and two, though, which is something. The first one I loathed. But I thought I’d give the second one a go. The second one I loathed.

I found it difficult to get excited about the world’s favourite boy wizard. I am all but alone, it seems. In Britain, one in every forty households has pre-ordered a copy of Hallows. In Morningside, home of J. K. Rowling and veritable hotbed of Pottermania, it is one in every nineteen. Remember, of course, that these figures represent only those would-be readers who have chosen to receive their book in the post. It tells us nothing of the scores who will this evening be crowding into Waterstones to get their greedy little hands on a copy, nor of those more sensible folk who intend to pick up a copy over the next couple of weeks, just whenever they get the chance.

Everyone’s waxing lyrical about Harry Potter at the moment. Our new PM thinks that J. K. Rowling has ‘done more for literacy around the world than any single human being’. Even those responsible for medical audit at the John Radcliffe have entered into the spirit of things. They’ve published the finding that, on average, accidents involving children are far fewer on Harry Potter release dates than on other weekend dates. So they’re all for it, obviously.

I’ve been having a little sniff around all the conspiratorial Potter waffle on the internet. I’ve been particularly enjoying all the leak-anxiety that seems to be floating about. You see, when you’ve got all these books lying about waiting to be delivered, it’s all too tempting for people to take a quick peak. There are all sorts of stories about plot secrets from previous books being leaked prior to the release dates. But the message from the true fans is clear: ‘seriously, we’re almost there guys’. At least Potter fans have got each other to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Anyway, enough of this tosh. Suffice it to say I won’t be attending any Potter launch parties tonight. Largely because I’ll be enjoying the Transformers premiere down at the Ocean Terminal (which, coincidently, starts at the exact moment Hallows is officially released). Stick that in your cauldron and boil it.

Don’t worry. There’ll be a spoiler-laden review to follow shortly.

The Key

Did I mention that I wanted to become a magician? Apologies if I over-egged it a little bit. I think it would be closer to the truth to say that I wish to learn a few tricks with which I might amuse people when I run out of conversation. And to that end, it’s going quite well, thank you. None of my ‘key texts’ have arrived yet. Although, it gives me a thrill to buy things from Amazon for which they charge you a sourcing fee. They probably need to travel to far-away places to obtain them from ancient men in little shops down dark alleys. Or maybe they’re just tucked away at the very back of the store-room.

Either way, even without the literature, I’m cracking on apace. Wee Gorbals was kind enough to equip me with my first trick, which is a good start. I’ve also been trying a bit of coin magic, which I’ve been testing on Mrs H. She is a very obliging audience, and is never too shy to cry out ‘I can see it in your other hand’.

I’ve been thinking about where all this enthusiasm came from, and have concluded that it probably goes back much earlier than the last couple of years. Several incidents have come to mind, only one of which I’ll talk about today, if you don’t mind. I’ve got a thesis to submit in a couple of weeks, and should probably be getting on with it.

But let me tell you about the first magic trick I was ever witness to. My family were entertaining (?) another family with whom they were quite friendly, and their son said he wanted to show me something. I was probably about six, he was probably about 16, but to my eye might as well have been as ancient as Yoda. He produced a front door key, which he placed in his palm and pressed against my chest. Then he took his hand away, and it was gone.

Put yourself in my shoes, if you’d be so gracious. The possibility (now obvious) that he had surreptitiously transferred the key into his other hand did not occur to me. I was left with the perception (not to mention a slowly-dawning horror) that the key was inside my chest. I asked if this was indeed so, and he confirmed it (perhaps underestimating the extent of my aforementioned horror). And then, to cap it all, he said ‘here, feel it’.

And I touched the place where it had seemingly gone in. There are ribs there, I know, but I was certain that I could feel the key as well. There was no question (in my mind) that it was well and truly there.

Perhaps sensing my alarm, he executed an additional bit of flim-flam and appeared to produce the key from my back. It had gone right through.

I was still horrified, but my mind was reeling for another reason. As I’d grown up, I’d been working hard to put together some coherent opinions about how the world works. One of the maxims I had hitherto settled on was that a physical object (e.g. a key) could not pass through another physical object (e.g. me). At least, not without leaving some trace of its passage. And yet, it had happened. Although my thoughts were not articulated as such (c’mon, I was only six), I had the distinct feeling that I was going to have to rethink things.

And then there were the possibilities. Was this something I could learn to do as well? Imagine what you could do with a power like that. You could, well, pass things through other things till you were blue in the face. This was going to turn the world upside down.

Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed when I found out how it was done. I think my mother coerced him into revealing the secret, perhaps so that I would go back to sleeping at night. But I’ll probably never forget that feeling that this was something incredibly out of the ordinary, and that I was somehow witness to something that would make me re-evaluate everything that’d gone before.

And now and again, I’ve wondered what it might be like to be able to treat others to a similar experience. I might even try to perfect ‘key through the body’ for old time’s sake.

Royal Rumble

You’ll have heard the news about the BBC’s latest gaffe? No? Let me outline it in brief. The Beeb are in trouble, because they took some footage of the Queen, edited it in such a way as to suggest that she’d stormed out of a photo-shoot with Annie Leibowitz, then put it on telly.

What amused me about the story is that gaffe like this is unlikely to happen by accident. Therefore, somebody somewhere consciously decided that it would be a good idea to mis-splice the sequence of events in order to convey an undoutedly more interesting, but nonetheless totally different story to that which actually took place. The most bizarre aspect of it all, of course, is that the relevant person or persons did not feel that this was at all dubious (or, presumably, they wouldn’t have done it).

What worries me is that they probably only got found out because the Queen happened to see the trailer. This sort of thing is potentially happening all the time. I wonder how much of what we see on TV has undergone a similar sexing up, and passes through our critical filter and is assimilated into our worldview without setting off any warning alarms?

If incidents like this tell us anything, it’s probably that we should be cautious in believing anything we’re told on TV. That’s because those in the television business are less concerned about the accuracy of your knowledge than with trying to get you to watch their programmes. They would rather entertain you than keep you accurately in the know. If you’re entertained, you’ll come back for more, providing a welcome boost for ratings and salaries. If you’re merely in the know, you’ll likely as not change the channel. Or even stop watching television and go outside. This is why Open University is only ever on at a time when no one watches television. It would never survive alongside more entertaining programmes on the other channels. Sad but true, chum.

Our scepticism about TV should probably extend to other media as well. Newspapers, for example, would sooner tell you something sensational than true. Faked photographs of war crimes in Abu Ghraib? Stick ‘em on the front page! Oops, I’ve been sacked.

Sigh. We can’t rely on TV, newspapers, or anything else to keep us properly informed. There seem to be three options available to us: 1) live a life of total ignorance, 2) believe most of what you’re told, with the caveat that it might all be false, or 3) rely solely on The Hutchison Monologues to keep you up to date. At least with the latter option, you’ll not come across anything misleading about the Queen.

A Kind of Magic

 

Let me tell about some things that have happened to me in the last couple of years.

1. When we were staying in Swiss hotel, and despite counter-urgings from every fibre of my being, I attended a magic show.
2. I started watching Derren Brown programs, and read his book
3. I saw The Prestige
4. And to cap it all off, I accidently stumbled into Hoyles on the Oxford High Street, with a view to looking at their exquisite chess sets and their rather diverting line in toys to test the mental capabilities.

It turns out that this little visit was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As ill-conceived as it sounds, I have decided to become a magician.

Don’t panic, readers. I’m not thinking of a career change at this stage of the game. Why don’t we start out by thinking of it as a pleasurable pastime; a sideline, if you will? We’ll see how we get on. It might be, of course, that I prove to be an interminable cackhand and will end up abandoning it. But I hope not.

So. The first step is to learn how to do it. All the websites seem to say that ‘earnest study’ is required, which immediately sounds the alarm bells. However, I’ve gone ahead and ordered a few books on various aspects of magic. Whether, via their contents, I can learn anything half-decent remains to be seen. Oh, and as a dedicated student of magic, I should probably refer to these sources as ‘key texts’ rather than simply ‘books’. Important to set the tone from the outset, I think.

Naturally, I will chart my progress via the medium of regularly-updated Monologues. Which is to say that this may be the last you hear of it. But I really do hope not. Of course, if it does take off, it’ll mean that my tombstone will have to be slightly larger to accommodate my new accolade:

Here lies Hutchison
Philanthropist
Psychologist
Illusionist

Now that really would be magic.

Such Memories of Oxford

I really liked being in Oxford last week. It was nice to see the family again, and to savour the sights, sounds and smells of my home city. I love it.

And I’m not the only one, apparently. According to the Oxford Mail (a paper I never read, but which I assume to be the final word on all things Oxford) some 700,000 tourists from Mainland Europe visit Oxford each year. What the Mail neglected to mention was that they all wear identical yellow rucksacks and walk down the street linking arms six abreast, the continental scamps.

There is something about hearing a familiar accent which is also quite comforting. Incidently, this doesn’t happen very often in the city centre, because the Continentals (see above) are the only ones there, or at least tend to gabble loudly enough to drown out the natives. But when you do happen to overhear a conversation in your childhood dialect, it’s sublime. It’s quite difficult to convey the working class Oxford accent in text. I think it sounds a bit like how Ricky Gervais might talk if he chose only to speak in the present tense.

Wandering around Oxford was good for the spirits. We had a nice lunch at The Head of the River, and managed to get a look at some of the college buildings (admittedly, this usually happened only in passing, when on the way to more consumer-oriented pleasures). I had a wander through the Covered Market, and a quick five-minute amble (well, sprint) around the University Museum. I’d forgotten they had a Tyrannosaurus replica skeleton in there. It’s quite impressive. I’ll plan a bit longer next time.

For a large part, though, Oxford is much like any other city. Most of the larger shops are the same as you will find anywhere. A quick browse around HMV and Virgin even revealed exactly the same special offers as are to be found in Edinburgh. Dining choices in the city centre are also a tad familiar. It was brought home to me when we met one of Mrs H’s friends for a coffee. She suggested that we might go to the Starbucks on Cornmarket Street rather than the one on the High Street ‘for a change’.

Bleuh.

Tintintastic

 I always prick up my ears when Tintin is mentioned in the press. When I was a nipper, I was rather keen on him. Or rather, on the stories in which he featured. In fact, I seem to remember that Tintin books were much adored amongst my school chums. It was largely thanks to Tintin books that I barely read continuous prose until I was about 13.

Such was my love (i.e. enthusiasm) for Tintin, that I once went along to a school fancy dress party in the guise of my favourite Belgian boy reporter. Some feat, I hear you cry, since Tintin is actually rather normal in appearance. For a cartoon, anyway. His jaunty tuft of hair is the only thing that distinguishes him from just any Belgian boy reporter. That and the way he wears his trousers at half-mast with his socks pulled right up. Suffice to say, I attended the party looking just a leetle bit gay. If I might be allowed to use a stereotype.

You see, stereotypes are what seem to have landed Tintin in trouble recently. Apparently, the Commission for Racial Equality received a tip-off from a Borders Bookshop customer in London, who had been innocently leafing through a copy of Tintin in the Congo. Now, I’ve not read it (it was quite hard to get hold of when I was younger) but apparently it portrays the Congolese as ‘savage natives’ who ‘look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles’. According to the CRE, Borders could not justify the peddling of such racist material, which should be pulled from the shelves and made available to the public only ‘in a museum, with a big sign saying “old-fashioned, racist claptrap”’. I think they were quite upset about it.

I quite understand that material like this will (or, at least, should) leave a nasty taste in the mouth now, but isn’t it an accurate depiction of attitudes and prejudices at the time (1920) in which it was written? OK, it’s probably not a good idea not to give it to children, but surely adults could make up their own mind? A blanket ban on everything that might cause offence to someone doesn’t seem like the way to go. And isn’t it more valuable to expose children to this type of propoganda, and explain to them why these views aren’t acceptable now?

In the meantime, we probably shouldn’t tell the CRE about Tintin’s sidekick, Chang Chong-Chen…

Scanners and Scammers

I always like writing about things that are slightly outwith my normal realm of experience. Such things happen to me only rarely. By definition, I suppose.

Now that I’ve outed Chuckles, I thought I might describe the process through which his or her embryonic existence was verified.

Back in the day, I accompanied a still-svelte Mrs H to the relevant NHS premises for the purpose of the three month scan. Mrs H announced the reason for her attendance to the receptionist, who welcomed us both with a warm glare.

‘Name?’

Mrs H gave it.

‘Date of birth?’

Again, Mrs H obliged.

The receptionist then realised that Mrs H was holding a card with this information clearly printed on it. Thinking to make the identity-confirmation task a mite harder, she gestured to Mrs H to hand it over, before making her final play:

‘Postcode?’

On Mrs H’s flawless recitation of the above, without the aid of the printed record, the receptionist seemed satisfied that we were who we claimed to be, and jabbed a finger in the direction of the waiting room.

You might assume that the process of actually getting the scan would be the substance for the most interesting part of this anecdote. Sadly, it wasn’t. It was all very matter of fact, really. But what really got me was that, once it was all over, the nurse / technician said that we could take away a couple of printouts ‘for a wee contribution’, before waving a plastic bowl full of money under my nose.

This struck me as strange, but (of course) social protocol dictated the desired response. I made put an appropriately modest contribution, making sure that I did it in such a way as to make the greatest possible amount of jingling. As we left, we wondered: was our contribution intended only to cover the cost of the print out? It would seem that some of the previous contributions were slightly disproportionate if this were the case (there were, it has to be said, a fair few notes floating around in there, but assuredly not from my pocket). Or was it for charity? That would (almost) be fair enough, but why wouldn’t they tell you which charity it was going to? Or was it (as I suspected) nothing but a bloody racket?

I tend to think that, whenever emotions run high, there’s always someone who thinks they should make a swift buck out of it. This works for negative emotions, certainly. That’s why funerals are so expensive, and why people buy internet domain names reflecting recent tragedies in order to subsequently flog them to grief-stricken punters: when people feel sad, they don’t mind paying up. The same is true on happy occasions: why is it so much more expensive to hire a venue or photographer for a wedding then for another equivalently-sized social gathering? Because it is such an unusually happy occasion, people feel OK about paying over-the-odds.

And when you get your first baby scan, that’s a happy day too. At least this was the emotion I was instructed to feel: ‘just look at their happy faces’ was the nurse’s description of my furrowed countenance in response to her monetary pleas. But if I’m honest, I felt no particular urge to open my wallet and empty it into hers.

But then again, perhaps this is the solution for a cash-strapped NHS. You can just imagine it: the oncology surgeon comes to visit you after your operation, and tells you that your operation was completely successful, and that you are completely free of cancer. Perhaps he should follow up with a subtle ‘ahem’ and an upturned palm?

I don’t know.