Hidden

And today, as in Adam all died, so also in Adam do all eat good Indian food. So did my thoughts fragment as I spent an idle time with an old friend watching the world and the hero of the Mahabharata walk by with his characteristic gait.

So we go, you and I and everyone else, gods and goddesses, angels of all kinds, forms and metaphors. We walk by with characteristic gait, but some are more obvious than others. And thereto is a story aimed.

Walking

Dry brightness. Grey water. Sharp air. New growth. And all the stretchy stride that was pent up in the sitting-down and the long thin waiting. Freedom, one's own feet.

Small Places

I remember a long time ago when I was about six and I read the immortal textbook line, "Atoms are mostly empty space." The idea of space being empty had never crossed my mind, somehow. In real life, what we call 'empty space' in our living environment tends to contain stuff like dust, air, light, and the presence of life. Even if it were physically empty, it would be full of psychological depth, or fear, or night, or darkness, or something.

It's only much later in life that you find out about the small places.

The small places are those things that live in empty space, thus making it apparently not empty. But they don't exist except as psychological or mystical constructs, and it's hard to prove they ever were. Some small places are actually huge realms, but extremely compressible without loss (since the information content is tenuous at best, there can't be any loss). Such are the myriad Golden Ages of humanity, the secret alleys of the old cities, the mythical stations of the world's underground transit systems, the bookshops that you see only once and never again.

I encountered all four of these one windy winter morning in north London. It was during the time that I met my godchildren, who were still small and young and tender and very creative people. (Now, they're bigger and older and tougher but even more creative.) I decided to go for a walk down the road to Highbury, the heart of that wonderful 1886 football club, Arsenal.

On the way there, I found a large old bookshop, full of ancient F&SF books of all kinds. It was opposite the Highbury underground station, and I walked in and was very happy to purchase a couple of books. I promised myself I'd come back for a longer visit on the way back.

I walked back later. I never passed the bookshop again, even though it was along the main road and large and visible. Heh.

Insighting

I walked a long way today, my first long walk in a long while. The physical exertion of walking great distances generates better thinking than the mental exertion of attempting to generate better thinking. It's like this: you think about globalisation, and there is no reward for it. You walk around the globe, and you find that you know a lot about globalisation.

I am reading Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen stories, about an Oxford don who has a remarkable breadth of learning and a truly irritating way of using it. He solves mysteries, normally backwards and upside-down. Apparently, Crispin (not his real name) wrote nine detective novels from 1946 onwards. He listed his recreations as excessive smoking, Shakespeare, idleness and cats (among others). He also listed his antipathies, and made sure that his characters displayed interesting traits.

Reading Crispin is like taking a long walk in somebody else's head. Taking long walks in Singapore is like taking a long walk in Lee Kuan Yew's head. It is all very terrifying and reminds me of Escher prints, especially the one in which the monks walk around in endless circles; I think it's called Castrovalva.