Monthly Archives: August 2010

Turkish delight (well, what else could I call this post?)

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The Vampire Plagues has arrived in Turkey, or at least London, the first volume has. As you can see it continues the totally not being Twilight in any way shape or formvibe. I don’t know whether “Vampir Alacakaranligi” means either “Vampire Plagues” or “Vampire Dusk” but I do know it’s not something to say lightly.

In fact a lot of Turkish seems to be made up of words that people forgot to stop spelling. Give or take an accent or two, “Jack Harkett lurked beside a pile of weathered tea crates from a Calcutta merchant ship” comes out as “Jack Harkett, Kalka’dan gelen bir ticaret gemisinden indirilen günes ve rüzgârdan yipranmis çay kasalarinin olusturdugu bir yiginin yaninda salaniyordu“. And boutros boutros to you, too. “Goodbye, Father” is (rather sweetly) “Güle güle, baba“. I’m very pleased with myself for tracking down a line in the mass of Turkish text without reference to the English at all: “Limon yemek istiyormus da limon onu yemis gibi görünüyor” (“She looks like she wanted to suck a lemon, only it sucked her instead“.)

One day – one day, I promise – I will use my Swedish copy of Vampyrguden as a Rosetta Stone for learning my wife’s mother tongue. Learning Turkish, for the time being, goes on the back burner.

Cathedral no. 3 and Mosque no. 1

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Once upon a time I had an interview at Warwick University – which turned out quite well – which meant having to spend the previous night in Coventry. So I had an evening in a new town to myself, and did some wandering around, and came across the two cathedrals – the gleaming new post-war barn and the stone skeleton of the old one next to it, burned out by Luftwaffe incendiary bombs. And as I learned the story of the new cathedral, and how German volunteers helped with the work and how it has developed a worldwide ministry of reconciliation, I fell in love with it and decided I simply had to write a story about it.

It took a few years – had to become a writer, first – but I did write it, and it was awful, thrumming with love and Christianity and general goodness, and for sheer ickiness it broke all known records. Fortunately I could tell it icked and sat on it.

Many years after that, by a miracle, good friend Gus Smith (who writes as Gus Grenfell) suggested a way it could be de-icked, at least a little, and I’m eternally grateful to him for the suggestion, which a character takes up in the last few paragraphs. In fact I would go so far as to say atheist Gus (albeit with a Methodist minister father) came up with a much more Christian solution than I was managing: I love these little ironies. Residual ick may lurk in some sentences but overall it is much, much stronger than it used to be. The story finally got written, and published in Interzone, where it came 46th= in the annual readers’ poll, but what do they know? I called it “Cathedral No. 3”, unaware (after three years living in Coventry) that in actual historical fact any new cathedral would be cathedral no. 4.

All this brought to mind by the move afoot in New York to build a mosque near to the Ground Zero site. “Near” is a relative term: one of the comments over at Making Light’s take on the story reminds us that in a city anywhere is “near” somewhere else.

Not dismissing for one second the pain felt by those who lost loved ones on 9/11, it’s this kind of spirit that always lets society move on and improve upon the past. Whenever dictatorships are replaced with stable democracies, or people of different races accept integration as the norm, or no one cares any longer if you’re Protestant or Catholic, it’s because people let go of the hurt. Or, failing that, just shut up and don’t talk about it and go to their graves bitter and wizened but they keep it to themselves and the poison doesn’t leak out into a new generation.

I think a mosque near Ground Zero would be a jolly good idea.

New computer

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Is black and shiny. Lots of RAM. Is Windows 7. Is not a Mac. All these good.

It’s been nearly 10 years since the last completely new computer, and that was bargain basement stuff that ran on Windows ME and got updated to Windows 2000 as soon as decently possible. For the last four years I’ve been using a secondhand Windows XP PC, which was the bee’s knees when it arrived but since then the bee has grown steadily more arthritic. Upgrading is always at least mildly fraught and in this case it was hanging over me throughout our trip in Sweden, due to the computer arriving the day before we left.

In fact, it’s been possibly the most minimally fraught upgrade yet. Everything important has been installed, a few little-used programs remaining to be added when and as. Documents, photos and music backups all just fell into place (even if I did have to reinstate the playlists manually in iTunes, as it couldn’t read the library file “because it was created by an earlier version of iTunes”. Well of course it was, you fool; you’re the one asking me to upgrade by a decimal point every couple of weeks …). Unlike the old machine, the new (22″) screen can display a double page spread in InDesign CS4 of the Delightfully Dotty Car Club magazine that I design and edit, with fully legible text rather than grey blurs. I looked at the spread and felt that warm glow within that says there may be trouble ahead but it’s dealable with; the worst is over. That was the primary objective: everything else is gravy.

I like the design of the interface. Of course, “pretty” <> necessarily “more functional” – the TARDIS console can’t really travel in time, you know – and the computer would work equally well if the tops of the windows were solid and opaque so you can’t see the desktop behind them, and if the close and minimise buttons didn’t glow slightly as if lit from within – but it ties in well with what the machine actually does. For the first time ever I am forced to use the words “nice piece of design” in the context of Windows.

This is Windows, though, so obviously it can’t do everything perfectly. It finds new ways to insist on being helpful: like when you call up Task Manager to kill a frozen programme (it still happens), it tries to diagnose the fault after you have told it you just want it to drop the programme where it is and walk away. It also keeps asking permission to install stuff, or rather, to make changes to the hard disk. Oh, come on! When did you ever ask that before? And when did I ever say no?

I’ve had to say goodbye to some old friends which are no longer compatible on a 64-bit system. My Windows Cardfile address book, which has been with me ever since Windows 3.1, couldn’t hack the new oxygen-rich atmosphere and so perished. All the data was backed up and has been copied into Google Mail contacts, but even so. The principle. And some long cherished games have gone the way of all things, but I hadn’t actually played any for a long time. They were just junk on the mantlepiece, tedious stuff that you have to move and dust around and never use but you don’t throw them out because they’re there.

I have previously ranted about Office 2007, and just because Office 2010 is three years older, don’t think that changes anything. However, after careful consideration it didn’t really seem uninstalling it just so I could install my comfortable familiar copy of Word 2000 (which came with the ME machine, if I remember correctly). Into every life a little clunky software must fall.

Further fraughtnesses arose in finding that I hadn’t put the installation disc for the old Actiontec wireless router with all the other disks, and anyway the router was’t compatible due to its desire to connect to the main computer by USB. The new router from Virgin (also shiny, also black) has two aerials and WPA2 encryption and four ethernet ports: in fact everything is done by ethernet rather than trying to be clever with USB ports. All of these are good things too. During the installation process, run off an .exe file rather than an .html file as advised in the documentation, I only had to guess (not being told) that I had to turn the modem off and on again twice.

Round about now someone always starts trying to extol the virtues of Macs or Linux because “they just work” or “they’re modern technology” or some other equally vapid reason. What these people never get – are incapable of getting – is I don’t care how it works. I don’t care if a little goblin climbs up behind the screen every time I press a key and inks in my chosen letter (in reverse writing, obviously) on the glass while another follows behind it colouring in the pictures. And I don’t care if this process is inevitably fatal, like a bee stinging, so that having performed this task the goblin then falls to its death and is blown away by the internal fan. It does what I want, when I want it.

So, looking forward to what 2020 might bring …