A woman appears at Marylebone Station yesterday evening; gaunt, hungry, addicted, and in a hurry. "Earls Court, mate. I've been in police custody for past three days. Don't worry; look, I've got money." She holds up a police-issue, polythene bag, full of banknotes and other valuables. "No, make that Shepherds Bush Green." Hallelujah, Shepherds Bush is all motorway from here; the remnants of some 1960s attempt to turn London into an elevated, concrete ring road. "What did they hold you for?" "Something I didn't do." "Did you hear that the Queen died?" "No??" "Yeah. You must be one of the last people not to have heard about it." The traffic at Shepherds Bush Green is, understandably, too slow for her. She jumps out, bungs me a Twenty, and lurches off. "Good luck to you", I tell her, but we both know it's in vain.
As with most jobs, I suppose, one grows into it, eventually becomes it, and finds ways of mitigating most but not all of the hazards of it. The fumes and carbon monoxide in the air add gravel to my voice, and authenticity to the cab drivery comments I find myself making. And despite every economic metric being to the contrary, business is booming.
The Cask & Glass on Palace Street is a miraculous little bar. Adjacent to The Prisoner's house, from the subversive 1960s TV show, it cannot have changed much since then. I had never set foot in it before. London has its secrets. The military band is rehearsing a funeral march, and they do sound a little sloppy. The gaudy colours of the late summer flowers piled up in condolence in Green Park are poignant. Messages among them from primary school children, told what to think and with love to give; and those from real people expressing real sorrow. 1984 hypnosis, or the backbone of our country?
Sitting outside Waitrose in Marylebone High St, a favourite spot. You never have to wait long, although the punters, with their groceries, are often not going far. Up walks the retired Deputy Head of the school I taught in for five years. Everybody's friend and nobody's friend. My departure was acrimonious. "I don't know you", I say, when she asks if I'm available, but she doesn't hear. I'm eating a sandwich, so she probably thinks I'm in the middle of lunch or something. Not a flicker of recognition on her face. I get a job shortly afterwards, and she's halfway up the street still looking for a cab, the stupid, two-faced ****.
I must have driven around London for twelve hours today. I am an automaton, and my subconscious mind has taken over. I try to feed it some mathematics every day, so it can work on that too, and as usual it is unclear whether that is leading anywhere. I am not mad. On your way home, but like a true addict you leave the light on, not wanting to be stopped, just in case you miss the job in your direction. Some Hasidic Jew women want to go to Stamford Hill, however, which has the largest Hasidic community in Europe. I used to live there. How much? About thirty. They jump at the chance. Might as well call in at St. Pancras on the way back. Bound to be one going into the centre. Gowan Avenue in Fulham, please. Where Jill Dando was murdered. I used to live near there. One of those affluent, two-way residential streets full of parked cars, which makes it difficult for traffic in opposite directions to pass. My passenger and the driver of a car coming towards us get into a shouting match over it, but my passenger lives on Gowan Avenue and his mother knew Jill Dando. I keep quiet, because automatons are unable to care.
I now know why you don’t carry a a gun; you would shoot many of your passengers and it would cause you much pain and trouble trying to get rid of the bodies. Could you just toss them into the Thames?
My friend the soothsayer has resurfaced. The one that sells the word to cab drivers in installments, but at Victoria not King's Cross now. I had been wondering what became of him. Two sheets of A4 at a pound a time, if that won't break the bank. Attention, Focus and Everyday Life. Secular common sense. People talking without speaking, hearing without listening, etcetera, etcetera (as he would put it). Not so much of the using bold, block capitals to make a point, either. Less is more. He congratulates me on the homemade sandwich I'm eating. I'm trying to do the right thing, brother. If I were to hand out cheap advice to strangers, I'd tell him to take a course in creative writing, or a degree in English at the Open University or something. But I'm no good at living my own life, let alone anyone else's.
Last edited by lastcardcharlie; 11-03-2022 at 09:32 PM.
There’s always a shop on Oxford Street that’s been taken over by East End spivs, with a window full of incongruous, £10 dresses, and a microphone patter throwing back to the heyday of the Roman Road and Petticoat Lane markets. “Come on, girls, have a look inside and grab yourselves a bargain. Stocking fillers for a fiver? We’ve got them in the basement…” This year it dawned on me how to draw a 6-dimensional cube: draw a large cube, and at each of its vertices draw a small cube. Enough for a negative counterexample. And the idea of a torus as a donut is misleading: a donut is not a torus, it’s a stereographic projection of one, from four dimensions onto three. No, not much progress this year.
It seems that two circles will give unique coordinates to every point on the donut, which also projects onto both circles. Must be to do with other maps factorizing uniquely through these projections. Not that that matters much. Christmas. Peace on Earth, goodwill to all men, and people paying in cash. I am a learning algorithm, and I am getting good at driving around London. The Knowledge is all about shortest distance, but there comes a next level phase afterwards where more often than not one has to disabuse oneself of that, and go with the traffic flow. One year back on it after lockdown.
Sure, I have New Year’s resolutions. An early morning walk in the park, egg on toast for breakfast, hummus and salad sandwich for lunch, fish and rice and salad, and fruit salad, for dinner. Let’s go. The conclusion is that space is a product of circles not lines, and I can’t begin to make the conclusion work. Have another pint and enjoy the ride, right?
But I had a good day yesterday, Phat. At the moment of despair, I found something I can work with, at least for a couple of weeks. Plenty of isometries to go around. My previous post might have been the bottom. Stay tuned.
Lines definitely define space. And they all converge at the nexus of the universe which just happens to be on my front lawn, right next to a bunch of sword ferns.
Some fools think the nexus is located in a run down pub in the East End owned by a bitter old man expelled from Oxford for cheating. It is a charming story but untrue.
Isometries are a myth. But like Gods they never die.
An American art critic gets in at Tate Britain, wanting, not unusually from there, to go to Tate Modern, and strikes up a conversation. We are in agreement that the former is a civilized place to spend a couple of hours, whereas the latter, although it has a better collection, is poorly designed, confusing and claustrophobic, and full of schoolchildren and tourists running around eating ice creams. “What’s your speciality?”, I ask. “Contemporary; I’m going to see the Cezanne exhibition.” “Cezanne? That’s not contemporary.”, I scoff. “Cezanne is dead.” I launch into a lecture about street art and how contemporary means right here and now, and go down Brick Lane if you want contemporary. Pretty sure he’s going to get a piece in the New Yorker out of it. Of course the torus, considered properly in 4 dimensions, has enough isometries, it being a subset of the 4-sphere. The orthogonal group, the group of isometries of Euclidean space, i.e. rotations and reflections about the origin, is the symmetry group of the sphere.
The 4th dimension is time, right? So if we give Homer Simpson a donut, how long does he have to keep it unmolested for it to be considered 4-dimensional?
Dimension isn't necessarily to do with physical space or time. How many dimensions something has might be the number of independent pieces of information needed to describe it. For example, if you flip 10 coins or roll 10 dice, the space of outcomes is 10-dimensional.
I used to think of n-space in terms of filing systems. That's not very mathematical although it did seem to help me visualize things. Also came in very handy much later when I was writing triple-draw lowball sims.
Even now I still get into trouble explaining my decision matrices to people used to thinking in terms of branching. Sitting in linear algebra class 50 years ago, little did I realize how often the subject would come back to haunt me. And to help me.
