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Exactly one year ago, Kathryn Oates, my wife, was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all the gynaecological cancers, but treatments remain very limited and prognosis is poor except on the relatively rare occasions that the disease is caught very early in its development.

Kathryn was not so fortunate. Not only had the disease spread, but it proved difficult to classify, extremely aggressive and resistant to treatment. She fought a pitched battle, but the illness took its toll, and she passed away at 1am on 31 May. She was surrounded by family and friends in her last days, and went peacefully at the end.

We buried her today, in a humanist ceremony directed by family and friends at a woodland burial site near her childhood home in Sheffield. This is the tribute I wrote and read for her.

As some of you may remember, I didn’t say too much about my wife when we got married back in 2001. I had expected the words to come naturally, but when the moment came, summarising what Kathryn meant to me proved too formidable a challenge. I was speechless – a state into which Kathryn all too often plunged me. But with that loss of words came the loss of an opportunity to acknowledge what a unique and wonderful woman I had married. Today I want belatedly to remedy that, with utmost regret that I must struggle to express in my words what Kathryn should by rights be demonstrating by her deeds.

Kathryn wasn’t much on eulogies. She felt that unalloyed praise strips its subjects of their humanity, and wanted people to remember her as she was, not as some idealised image. I’ve borne that in mind when writing this, but I’ve also borne in mind that Kathryn erred mostly when she took her virtues to excess. So I’ll tell you today only about Kathryn’s virtues; and as to her flaws, I’ll note only that she never did anything by halves.

That Kathryn would want an unvarnished tribute itself testifies to her characteristic and perpetual honesty. She was notoriously bad at lying. That inability had less to do with her technical command of the Machiavellian arts – which she had studied in a spirit of intellectual curiosity – than with her devotion to truth and plain speaking, which made deceit in all its shades unthinkable.

For her, falsehood was the enemy of justice – and that made it difficult for her to comprehend or tolerate the devious, unscrupulous, unthinking and unkind. Kathryn could never look the other way or keep her head down: she would never allow laziness or malice to go unchallenged, no matter how much trouble, inconvenience or embarrassment that might cause. She fought tirelessly for fairness, both for herself and for others.

That spirit of fairness reflected her belief that all people are worthy of respect: she asked only that they respond in kind. It was not for nothing that she had a reputation as “the miss who tells the truth” among the children she worked with – children whose hearts and minds she won by neither talking down nor looking up to them. That open-faced, even-handed approach won her friends everywhere we went: among Hopi Indians, London youth and Japanese waitresses alike.

Kathryn believed that everyone was worthy of such respect because everyone was capable of extraordinary things – a belief that was firmly grounded in her own capacity to astonish. For Kathryn was indomitable in every sense of the word. She assumed, a priori, that she could do anything that she put her mind and hand to – from construction to computing to cookery.

Remarkably, she was almost always right. (Sometimes she was a bit off on the scale of the task in hand, but nonetheless). She built furniture, repaired cars, wrote essays and made crockery; played games, drank cocktails, sang pop songs and rode horses. She would translate languages she didn’t speak and give directions to places she didn’t know. In short, there was no better way to get something done than to tell Kathryn she couldn’t do it.

Her example taught me that there is no excuse for not trying, that fear of failure is more fearful than failure itself, and that one should not settle for adequate when excellence is in reach. Kathryn despised the mediocre and the mundane, living by William Morris’ sentiment that one should tolerate nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful. In fact, at our first meeting she went considerably further, by telling me that she wanted nothing in her life that was not both useful and beautiful.

And in that respect, her greatest subject was herself. Over the course of her life, she transformed herself from duckling to swan; from rambler to globetrotter; from dropout to scholar. Some of this transformation was the result of heritage, upbringing and time. But much of it was achieved by the exercise of Kathryn’s formidable will, a force of nature that knew no boundaries and was unfettered by convention or received wisdom. Kathryn was never afraid to assert what she was, what she had to offer or what she stood for.

And the reason that she could do this was because she was passionate about everything she did, about everything she believed: for her, there were few causes not worth fighting; few moments not worth seizing; few sensations not worth savouring. Kathryn was animated, eloquent and persuasive; her enthusiasm was infectious and her excitement evangelical; and she worked hard to imbue her acts, thoughts and possessions with constant, almost symbolic meaning.

It was that passionate quality that first attracted me to her. Kathryn and I knew from almost the moment we met that we were meant for each other: it was obvious that I had met someone whose vitality and energy would carry her through our life together without hesitation or doubt, someone whose appetite for the new, the rare and the splendid would never tire or fade. Kathryn knew everything and could do everything; and everything that she did not know, or could not do, she made it her business to learn post-haste.

She also wanted to see everything there was to see, and that took us to a great many astonishing occasions and places, from Iceland in the winter to the Sahara in summer, and many points in-between. We enjoyed a great many amazing experiences along the way. But for me, the true joy of our journeys lay not the destination, nor the getting there, but in being with my wife as she looked with eyes wide open at people and places new. For me, the purpose of travelling was not to visit places I had never seen: it was to watch my wife rejoice in the warmth of a life worth living.

For warmth was another constant in our marriage. Kathryn was ever loving, ever affectionate, ever tolerant. She understood and pandered to my foibles, with a generosity of spirit that even in her last days saw her trying to make me happy, to prevent the circle of our relationship from breaking open. She succeeded, and I can only hope that I reciprocated in full.

Her own wants and needs were simple: to love and be loved. And I did love her, and she loved me, the kind of open and undemanding love that requires few explanations and no apologies. When I was weak, she was strong; when I needed her, she was there for me. I said before that Kathryn did nothing by halves, and that included her marriage and her friendships: she gave and expected undiluted, uncomplicated and unconditional love and support.

Kathryn may be gone, but that love and support continues today. Her love continues to sustain me, both in the knowledge of its clarity and in the closeness it has brought among her family and friends. It would be dishonest, in the spirit I began with, to say that Kathryn would not want us to be sad today, or for the weeks and months to come. It will take time for us all to move on. But she would want us now and forever to cherish what she gave us and honour her memory.

And the best way to do that is to lead our lives with passion, courage and honesty, just as she sought to lead hers: from her first breath to her last and with each and every beat of her heart.

If you would like to honour Kathryn’s memory, please donate to the Eve Appeal.

And once again the New Year is aging rapidly while I fail to muster my resolutions into any coherent shape – and this in a year when I have more reasons than usual to try to break with bad habits. And my to-do list is still non-existent: so far, all I’ve managed is a meta-list:

TO DO:

(1) Write to-do list
(2) Filter list and prioritise.
(3) Execute in order of priority.

Still, in the spirit of the slightly-past-it geek-meme of Getting Things Done, I give you the last 43 Things I wanted to do – a ragbag compilation of goals, desires, whims and fancies. I did take out “adopt a walrus”, but the fact that I haven’t found time to weed this list any further does not bode well. Still, writing this entry has taken care of one item …

No Evidence of Disease.

Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

A few years back, I tried to interpret my life as though it were a dream (I think I got the idea from a Douglas Coupland novel) . It’s like keeping a dream diary, only you try to discern the hidden symbolism of events in your waking life, rather than your sleeping one. It proved to be incredibly difficult — perhaps I’m just too literal-minded — and I gave up after a few days.

For the past few weeks, though, my life seems to have consisted of little but a waking dream — a succession of portentous, oddly unreal events. And I can’t wake up.

The Age Project thinks I’m 35. Sigh.
Still, at least the good people of HR5256 know better.

Update: Well, 200-odd people have now voted, and they collectively think I’m 33. I feel better.

Of all the major disabilities, blindness is perhaps the easiest to simulate, but the most difficult to really comprehend. At first sight, it might seem to be sufficient to close one’s eyes. However, when you, a sighted person, close your eyes, do not imagine that what you see is comparable to what a blind person sees. After all, behind your closed eyelids you still have the brain of a sighted person, and your brain is full of the images, colours, shapes, movements and faces of the things and people around you, which you know are still there, and which you can recapture the moment you open your eyes.

So says John Hull, a professor of religious education at the University of Birmingham who went blind in his mid-forties. In the fifth episode of the Radio 4 series Blind Man’s Beauty (audio replay), he talked to the BBC’s Peter White, who’s been blind since birth:

Peter White: As a child, the first low rumble of thunder set up in me not fear, but excitement – at last, someone had switched on the universe.

John Hull: Thunderstorms, at first, when I couldn’t see the lightning, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it, I’ll never really appreciate storms again [laughs] , but that was totally wrong. A thunderstorm is just an overwhelming experience.

White: And for John, the thunder performed a role which I believe you would once have to have seen to appreciate.

Hull: When you’re a blind person, you’re like a dot in space, you’ve got the ground under you but you’ve got no horizon, that’s something sighted people find it hard to realize, you’ve got no horizon, when you’re blind. You’re just a speck of consciousness, a body, moving along over stuff, but not in stuff, really. But thunder, I love, because it sets a roof on the world.

White: I’m sure he’s right, but I’m not sure that’s something I could even begin to understand. Indeed, I’m not quite sure I know what a horizon is.

It was appropriately thundery when I heard this, and I closed my eyes and tried to imagine. But Hull was right. I couldn’t escape the feeling of centredness, of being fixed to the spot — because I “knew” that I could immediately locate myself in external space by opening my eyes, almost as effortlessly as my proprioceception helps me to monitor my personal space.

It’s curious that I can’t share Hull’s experience because I’ve never been blind; and White can’t because he’s always been blind. The development of the sensorium is evidently path-dependent.

There’s more about the experience of being and becoming blind on Hull’s website. He’s also written several books about the experience of blindness, including On Sight and Insight, which includes a fuller account of a thunderstorm and is available through Amazon UK.

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So I had this great idea for a spoof detective series, right? Because all the detective shows on TV revolve around mismatched “odd couples” who don’t get on. You know the sort of thing – Starsky & Hutch, Cagney & Lacey, Dalziel & Pascoe, Rosemary & Thyme, Whistle & Flute …

So I thought, why not turn that on its head and have a buddy show in which the lead characters are detectives who are exactly the same? Imagine the spoof potential! No-one’s ever done that before!

Oh.

A friend of mine once pitched the idea of a book about the concept of “business class” – exploring the idea that there are whole categories of experience that are only accessible via the frequent-flyer lounge. Lost in Translation, which I saw a few days ago, has stuck in my memory as the film of that unwritten book. From start to finish, it’s an exposition of the travails of travel.

My days of trans-Atlantic commuting made it easier for me to bond with Bill Murray’s character attempt to articulate his feelings to his long-distance wife: “it’s not fun, just very, very different”. And K empathized with Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte, for whom the novelty of exploring a new city solo has long since faded into ennui. I wonder how much resonance the film has for those who don’t get to travel on the corporate tab. Do they regard the characters as ungrateful whingers, much as some of my friends regard me?

And there was another fillip, too: because so much of the action took place in the immediate environs of the Park Hyatt and the Metropolitan Government Offices, the backdrop was immediately familar from our trip to Japan; but because I was there on vacation, my memories were much more exuberant. Like looking at holiday snaps through a business-class lens.

Update: Yesterday I saw Girl With A Pearl Earring, also starring Scarlett Johansson. Which had a completely different milieu, but a strikingly similar basic theme: an (almost-)unrequited romance that crosses social barriers. And I liked it about the same. So perhaps the business-class backdrop didn’t matter after all.

Another update: “Business Class” turns out to be the title of one of Shell’s current scenarios:

Business Class is symbolised by a briefcase. It is a world that operates like a business, with a focus on efficiency and individual freedom of choice. Global elites and the dominant influence of the United States lead continuing economic integration. But it is also a world where established authorities face continual challenge, with power diffusing from states to other institutions.

Mike, you should’ve written that book.

And another: Okay, this is what I’d have said if I knew anything about film:

What links movies as disparate as “What Time Is It There?” “Before Sunset,” “Lost in Translation,” “Nadja,” “Chungking Express” and others to “Sans Soleil” is its sense of impermanence as a permanent state, of travel as being a never-ending process, of human connection as both fleeting and profound, of any sense of home having to be achieved in spite of (or because of) an overwhelming sense of rootlessness. In one section, the narrator talks of returning to Japan and having to rush to all his favorite parts of the city to make sure they are still there.
It’s that peculiar and specific mixture of uncertainty and reassurance, of staking any sense of security on ground that is always shifting, that is at the bottom of these movies. In the beginning of William Gibson’s novel “Pattern Recognition” he writes, “She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that the mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.” The experience of standing at the baggage carousel, fearful that some vital part of us has missed the flight, is the beauty and sadness of these films.

Tonight’s Horizon was an interesting investigation of the Atkins diet, which I’ve always regarded as the ultimate in wish-fulfillment for reluctant calorie-counters, remarkably reminiscent of Bloom County’s “eat less, exercise more” riff:

But apparently I was wrong. Short version: Atkins does work, but apparently because the large quantities of protein eaten by adherents works as an appetite suppressant – in other words, it works by caloric restriction like any other diet. (Although possibly with rather worse implications for the long-term health of your internal organs). So quite how Stanley Green, Oxford Street’s “Less Protein” protestor, kept his trim figure, I don’t know.

But one slightly jarring feature of the programme was that it started out by suggesting that Atkins was a mystery because it appeared to violate the first law of thermodynamics. Yes, they were trying to explain why the supposedly “limitless” calories consumed by Atkins enthusiasts makes no sense, but the impression given was that it’s not just a biomedical mystery, but breaks the laws of physics, too … No wonder Michael Bloomberg doesn’t believe a word of it.

Update: I knew this all sounded familiar. It’s the same principle as Philip Greenspun’s “McDonald’s Diet”:

A McDonald’s sandwich is vastly smaller and lower in calories than anything you’d get in an upscale restaurant. Best of all, the menu at McDonald’s won’t tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren’t all that delicious. If you’re really hungry they can taste pretty good but have you ever been sad that you couldn’t order both the Big Mac and the Quarter Pound with Cheese?

(Un)fortunately – delete as applicable – the McDonald’s diet apparently isn’t any good for you either.

Since my internal editor is still out cold with the flu, I thought I’d tell you about this dream I had. No! Wait! Come back!

Well, for anyone who’s still here, the story is that we went to Bruges over the weekend. Bruges is as lovely as everybody says it is, but it was also extremely rainy – on Saturday, anyway – with the result that by the end of the day I was heading into severe head-cold territory. And by the time we got back to our hotel, I was running a bit of a temperature.

So when I went to sleep, I dreamt about two medieval monasteries (no doubt inspired by my surrounds), each set on consigning the sum of human knowledge to the memories of their hundreds of monks. They’d put their faith in organic, rather than vegetal, memory, to cite a recent meme. And I had the job of bug-testing their efforts. Which was problematic, because they gave quite distinct – but complementary, rather than contradictory – explanations for everything I asked. So there was no way of telling which was better.

(This being a fever dream, there was an additional dimension of complexity in that the answer determined which side I should be sleeping on, whether the covers should be on or off, and so on – but never mind that now).

Quite why my addled subconscious thought I should arbitrate over some kind of ecclesiastical taxonomic schism is beyond me. Classificatory systems don’t figure very prominently in my life these days. (Hell, I don’t even have categories on this site. Yet). But evidently some bit of me – perhaps my geek-male hindbrain – thinks they’re sufficiently important to be worth destroying a night’s sleep for. And I’m apparently not alone.

During my last trip to Brighton, I picked up a reproduction Victorian postcard of the Brighton Volks Railway from the giftshop at the Pavilion. You might recall Volks Railway as the quaint, but slightly pointless, toy-train that sometimes trundles along the beach from the far end of the car park to the foot of the Pier. But the postcard (unscanned, for copyright reasons) shows something quite different: a bizarre contraption on stilts, riding through the waves like a kind of miniature oil rig, with bowlered gents and bonneted ladies enjoying the ride.

It turns out that the oilrig contraption was part of Britain’s first electric railway, which originally ran all the way out to Rottingdean, three miles down the coast. A short part of the journey was carried out on a slow, sea-going platform known as the Daddy Long-Legs. As far as I can make out, the seabound stretch served little practical purpose, but enjoyed great success as a quick jolly for tourists until it had to be abandoned to allow new sea defences to be built. (Photos and more details here and here).

Brighton’s tradition of pleasurable follies (including the Pavilion and the Pier) continues today: apparently an architect has drawn up plans for a perpetually sunny artificial island two-thirds of a mile off the coast, complete with skyscraper hotel (via Exploding Fist). Making the highly-questionable assumption that this ever gets off the drawing-board, access will apparently be by plane or dedicated rail. Will the Volks Railway (or at least its spiritual successor) ride the waves once more?

So I had to remove an old toilet (among other things) from the garden today. It was horrible. But at least I could listen to my stereo on my wireless headphones, which made it almost bearable. Of course, I could just have used a Walkman, but that wouldn’t have been futuristic, would it?

Cables are, of course, a pain in the posterior if you share your home with a house rabbit. But even if you don’t have a wire-trimmer on legs around the place, they’re so last-century. That’s why I love my WiFi network. Next I want a wireless music system. Oh, and a wireless telly would be good, while we’re dreaming.

All I need now is wireless power (or decent fuel cells). Pity Tesla never worked that one out.

Geeky as it sounds, much of my early life was measured by the travels of the twin Voyager probes to the outer solar system. (Other kids idolized rock bands; I was a fan of interplanetary spacecraft. Go figure.) I was spellbound when Voyager 1 sent back its first pictures of Jupiter in 1979; then again a year later when it reached Saturn. The Voyager probes were quite literally exploring strange new worlds, and my pre-teen self was exploring with them.

Then it was an endless six years before Voyager 2 made it to Uranus. During the intervening period, I became seriously interested in astronomy, partially as displacement activity from the messy practicalities of more traditional teenage pursuits. Uranus turned out, at first glance, to be kind of dull – but I didn’t mind. It was still somewhere that no-one had ever seen before.

Three years later, when Voyager 2 reached Neptune, I was getting ready to go to university (to study physics and, later, astronomy). I didn’t pay as much attention as I would have a few years earlier. But I was still pleased that somewhere out there, as I had grown from child to (nearly) man, Voyager had continued its long, lonely journey into unknown territory: ticking off the miles of its journey as I ticked off the years of my life.

After that, Voyager went quiet for a long time, and I gradually lost interest in astronomy. In part, it was because I realized that I didn’t have the patience needed to follow a single project for decades; in part, because the thrill wasn’t there any more. To be sure, there was lots of intellectually stimulating planetary science going on – and some interesting missions – but the vicarious thrill of discovery was gone. No new worlds.

So I don’t know quite what to think about the news that Voyager 1 may (it’s not yet clear) have exited the solar wind, at a distance of some eight billion miles from Earth. On the one hand, I’m gratified that Voyager’s still pushing the frontier. On the other, I’m somewhat sad that its era of discovery – and, by analogy, mine – is almost over. From now on, it’s a long coast out into the black.

Oh well. There’s always Pluto.

Radio 2 recently ran a two-part documentary on the Pet Shop Boys, whom I greatly admired during the 1980s for their habit of combining perfect pop songs with an uncompromisingly non-pop performance style. So much so, in fact, that I started to lose interest in them shortly after their first live shows, in which they famously abandoned their Kraftwerkian demeanour in favour of a more showgirls ‘n’ saxophonists approach. (When their records started heading in that direction, I knew it was time for me to move on).

Still, I had always consoled myself with the idea that the Boys, like Kraftwerk et al before them, had been ahead of their time in anticipating the rise of the anonymous DJ – as exemplified by the Orb’s infamous game of chess on Top of the Pops. So it came as a bit of a disappointment to discover that their stoic early performances had originated not from the desire to create some kind of Situationist commentary, but from simple stagefright.

And all the more so since I recently went to see Hybrid, whose first album of nu skool breaks I greatly enjoyed, only to discover that they turn into an only moderately teched-up rock band when playing live. To the extent of wheeling out Peter Hook to do his bass thing for a couple of tracks. (Kosheen, headlining, went a step further with a set that sounded like a two-step version of the Corrs.)

They’re just the most recent offenders. Time after time, acts that I once liked turn out to be unwilling to play live without watering down the music and turning up the showbiz. Why do perfectly good anonymous electronica acts keep pandering to this need to put on a show? Whatever happened to faceless techno bollocks? Doesn’t anybody want to be a scary android from the future any more? Or am I just being old-fashioned?

So a couple of weeks ago I went to see Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers at the National Theatre. Like most of Stoppard’s work, it works on several levels at once, the two most important (and remarkably commingled) being a marital farce and an enquiry into the value of moral philosophy. The play’s dated somewhat since its 1972 premiere, but it’s still a dazzlingly erudite and entertaining piece of work.

What I found particularly striking were the struggles of the protagonist, George Moore, to refute relativism through logic alone – since appeals to innate “goodness” always wind up appealing to a God whose existence can’t be logically proven. The snatch of dialogue that really caught my attention – and which I’ve just found in my newly-acquired copy of the script – comes as George’s protracted attempt to turn his thoughts into a coherent argument is interrupted by his nemesis, Archie:

ARCHIE: You were going to say Hitler or Stalin or Nero … the argument always gets back to some lunatic tyrant, the reductio ab absurdum of the new ethics, and the dog-eared trump card of the intuitionists.

GEORGE: Well, why not? When I push my convictions to absurdity, I arrive at God — which is at least as embarrassing nowadays.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that the greatest intellectual divide of our time is that between agnostic absolutists and atheist relativists. And I don’t know whether to find it alarming or exhilarating that the vast, decentralized talking shop that is Usenet has elevated the same logic to a simple rule of thumb. I’ve only run up against Godwin’s Law once, and have been embarrassed about it ever since. It feels a bit better to know that Tom Stoppard – or at least George Moore – ran into the same wall thirty years ago.