Author: orbific

Some rules for hiking

Of course, there are no real rules for hiking, other than those that will help you to enjoy a walk. But these are some things I’ve learned recently hiking trails in the UK:

  • Menus in pubs can be judged by how well designed they are: never order a £13 burger from a badly-designed menu.
  • The only app that will tell you the weather accurately is a window.
  • Never rely on fell-runners to tell you if you’re on the path: their definition of a path is very different to a hiker’s definition.
  • Swearing at moody cows doesn’t help the situation.
  • Via Craig Mod: “Always eat your best thing. That way you’re always eating the best thing you’ve brought.”

I like that rule about eating the best thing in your pack. Deferred pleasure is fine – like putting money aside for the future – but it is not the best approach in all situations.

A Discordian/Mycelic Parish Magazine

When I caught up with Dan Sumption recently, we discussed the idea of a Discordian/Mycelic parish magazine. We want to produce a simple, lo-fi zine listing all the things that have happened or been made across the network over the last year. We’re going to publish this at some point over December, and it should give people something interesting to read over the Christmas/New Year gap.

We want to include books, events, podcasts, celebrations, records and meetings among our little tribe. We’re doing our best to gather everything in. Obvious entries are the Toxteth Beating of the Bounds, Church of Burn’s appearance at Secret Garden Party, the ongoing F23 Podcast, Rupert Callendar’s book What Remains?, the Lost Doctor, and the latest book from John Higgs. There are probably dozens of things we have overlooked. What should be included? What should we be listing? We are planning to produce short mentions for each thing, typically 100 words or so, but longer if needs be. We can type something up, or you can give us something ready to go.

As the year closes out, we will gather everything up, lay it out, and print copies of the magazine to share with everyone (there will be a small cost for printing and postage, but we will keep it as low as we can). A PDF copy will be made available in the new year. It will only be a small edition, but it will hopefully be both a souvenir of 2022, and a pointer to interesting things you might have missed. We want to see how this works with a view to doing something more ambitious and comprehensive for 2023 Annual.

Getting this sorted by the end of the year will require precision discordianism, so the sooner you can send things to us, the better.

Book Review: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

In my early 20s, I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The book describes a complete system for organising your life, and I soon felt more in control. I stopped being late and – mostly – remembered things. It did me a lot of good.

The problem with GTD is that it works by capturing everything. Every possible project was in the system somewhere. I had whole lifetimes-worth of things I might do, research or make. GTD captured all my fleeting thoughts, even the ones I should let go of.

Now, twenty years later, I’ve dropped most aspects of GTD, but the principles are there. Fleeting thoughts go into colourfully-covered moleskines, and are written up into a huge scrivener file. For a long time, I used a Google Keep note as a calendar. It worked. Moving to Yorkshire has helped, as for a time I had fewer things competing for attention than I did in Brighton. I adapted GTD into something that works for me, but I’ve never found a good answer to that question of choosing what to let go.

Four Thousand Weeks, the recent book from Oliver Burkeman, is the antidote to other productivity books. The title refers to the length of a British lifetime. Expressed as 4000 weeks, it sounds a lot shorter than eighty years. Life is too short to do everything we might want to, so productivity is better approached as a choice of what to pay attention to rather than trying to do as much as we can.

With this acceptance of incompleteness, Burkeman turns the usual productivity advice on its head by admitting that there will never be enough time, and we will never feel on top of all our workloads. “Productivity is a trap,” Burkeman writes. “Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”

Burkeman uses this idea of conscious choice to recontextualise some familiar ideas. He sees trying to do more than one thing at once is a way of avoiding dealing with the choice. Distraction needs to be managed. Hard choices about what we focus on need to be made consciously. “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

Burkemann also writes interestingly on the idea of distraction from social media. Most people writing on this topic focus on the idea of Silicon Valley stealing our attention, whereas Burkemann looks at this as a choice in what we pay attention to.

Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: it’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief. We’re told that there’s a ‘war for our attention’, with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that’s true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy.

Burkeman is also particularly good when he talks about the need for community, and how we should not be optimising these things out of existence. He points out how easy this is to do in an efficient world, with deliveries and no-contact airbnbs. Some friction is good where it brings us into contact with other people.

For me, the most powerful thing is this acceptance that clearing the decks will never succeed, and will only make things worse. Trying to ‘make time’ for the things we care about by clearing away other tasks means we never get around to what matters.

The big test of whether a book like this works is what changes it produces in the reader. I am letting go of a lot of things – better to succeed at a small number. To stop trying to do too much. “The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.”

Anti-memetics and the new horror

I recently read There is no Antimemetics Division, by the pseudonymous qntm, and it was one of the freshest and most exciting horror novels I’ve read in years. It emerged from the SCP Foundation wiki, a collaborative storytelling project about the ‘Special Containment Procedures Foundation’, which manages dangerous entities and items to stop them causing harm.

qntm’s stories focus on a division of the Foundation that deals with anti-memes. These are ideas that obscure their own existence and are easily forgotten. Some of these ideas are predatory and dangerous. One such example is described as “a cognitohazard so dangerous that we can’t even write the reason why we can’t write it down down”. Another character describes them as “living fnords”.

This is a book that gives great concept, exploring all the different possibilities of anti-memes, as the characters fight an enemy they cannot allow themselves to consciously consider. It’s a huge challenge, which one character describes as “like building and launching Apollo 11 without a single engineer deducing that the Moon existed”. The book is well worth reading, and you can pick up a good flavour of it in the introductory story. It’s briskly written (an artefact of its origins) but very entertaining.

Around the time I was finishing the book, Dan Sumption linked me to a twitter thread where @bitterkarella theorised about “a new genre of horror that’s really blossomed online over the last 5-10 years… about a weird “otherness” infecting the world”. SCP was given as one example of this, alongside Scarfolk, Night Vale, Don’t Hug Me I’m scared. People suggested unedited Footage of a Bear, or the stunning movie Pontypool as examples. “It’s a style that clearly grew out of creepypasta but is sort of its own thing now… It blends elements of bizarro, Kafkaesque absurdism, body horror, and cosmic horror, often presented in a found document format.“

There are obvious links with the New Weird and Hauntology. I’d put House of Leaves down as another example, along with some Borges stories. It’s a type of fiction I’ve always loved, and it seems to be on the rise.

Some people have made the distinction that this is not cosmic horror, as that deals with entities invading the world – but I see that more as Lovecraft’s specific take on the concept. For me, cosmic horror is about discovering the universe we live in makes no sense, whether that’s due to extra-terrestrial gods, or being trapped in the opening titles of TV shows. This thing that @bitterkarella talks about is a type of cosmic horror, but there is some new aspect coming through.

Borges wrote a wonderful essay called Kafka’s Precursors, about how Kafka’s writer retrospectively grouped a series of writers in a new genre of ‘Kafkaesque’ writing. Whatever this new form of horror is titled as, it’s going to produce some interesting new works, and recontextualise some old ones. qtnm’s There is No Antimemetics Division is a great example of this ‘new horror’.

Holy Sites of Heptonstall

Bank Holiday Monday, and I was supposed to be in County Durham, visiting my friend and fellow-pilgrim Dan. My handbrake was playing up, so Dan set out to visit me in Hebden Bridge instead, arriving a little after lunch with Molly the sheepdog. We ate burritos in the park then followed the wooded valley of Hebden Breck towards Heptonstall. This village sits on a hilltop above Hebden Bridge and was the larger settlement until the Industrial revolution, when the bottom of the valley offered water to power mills.

Walking through the woodland along the river, it is easy to overlook how the water has been domesticated. Massive stone walls channel the route, but they are so old and moss-covered that it’s easy to think of them as natural. Dan stopped to point out a chopped tree that had been transformed with the addition of two figures. One was a white china rabbit holding a drum that nestled among the moss where a trunk had been severed. Above it, slightly smaller, was a statue of a gnome, with a faded yellow smock and a pale blue hat. We didn’t disturb them in case they were important to someone. An offering to the woods, maybe.

There are numerous paths to Heptonstall. The road up from the town is a long tarmac slog, but various footpaths tangle on the hillsides, some offering easier walks. The blackberry bushes were heavy with fruit, some of them pale-tasting, others vivid and sour. We picked our route by taking whichever path looked most interesting, finally emerging near the cafe, whose keeper was proud of the Biscotti Cheesecake that Dan ordered. We ate on a bench, while a nervous cat watched Molly.

Heptonstall has two churches standing side-by-side. The original, dedicated to the English martyr Thomas a Becket, was damaged in a gale in 1847 and now stands as a ruin, the bones of a building. The new church was built in the old church’s grounds, and dedicated to a different Thomas, the apostle who doubted the resurrection. It seemed strange to have the same name for the church while changing who it referred to, and I wondered why Thomas a Becket was out of favour. We wandered through the ruin with Molly, who was visiting her first church. In a small recess someone had placed a painted rock, a memorial to the slaughter in Dunblane, 25 years ago, when a gunman took seventeen lives. Between the ruin and the new church is a flagstone graveyard, the floor tiled with flat black markers, each detailing one of the dead, all made slightly uneven by time. It was here we encountered our first Heptonstall shrine.

David Hartley, also known as King David, was the leader of a notorious group of counterfeiters, the Cragg Vale Coiners. They would take coins and shave metal from them to be used in casting new coins. The gang were violent men, eventually hunted down for murder, but they are remembered as icons of resistance. They are the subject of a Chumbawumba song (“deliver us kicking from our pokes and sacks to the hills of Hebden, hell and Halifax”) as well as Ben Myer’s book The Gallows Pole which has been filmed for release in the Autumn. Hartley was hanged in York in 1770.

King David’s grave stands out. It lies in the shadow of a tree, and offerings have been placed on the stone’s smooth black surface. A couple of red roses, and a scattering of coins – it’s become a custom to place money on King David’s grave. It’s an example of what folklorists refer to a ‘ritual litter’. Other examples would be the roadside shrines dedicated to accident victims, or the pieces of cloth tied to rag trees. In a nearby valley from King David’s grave is a coin tree, where passers-by have pushed coins into a fallen rotting trunk. Dr Ceri Houlbrook has asked people why they participate in these rituals, and their explanations refer to luck, to wishes, and to imagined traditions. Whether it’s trainers thrown into a particular tree, coins cast into a fountain, or graves turned into shrines, we are eager to make the world holy.

Today, someone has arranged some of the coins into a plea: HELP. It’s August Bank Holiday, but Britain is looking at a grim winter. Along with the threat of covid mutations, strain on the NHS and an economy hobbled by Brexit, domestic fuel prices look like they will increase by 80%. For businesses, the situation is even worse, with care homes and schools facing the threat of bankruptcy. The country feels strained and exhausted. Rather than look for a solution, the government has been distracted by an endless leadership contest. Right now, pleading for help from counterfeiters, dead two-and-a-half centuries, seems more likely to bring help than the government.

We move on, past Thomas the Apostle church, crossing a track to reach another graveyard. This one is not as full as the other, with a strip of empty, unmown grass before the graves, which include the resting place of the poet, Sylvia Plath. It is the second of Heptonstall’s shrines. The grave is easy to find among the others, a cluster of people standing by it. We wait for our turn.

The stone is simple, and small rocks border the soil surface of the grave-bed. Green plants with veiny leaves cover most of the surface – possibly alkanet – and a small child’s windmill stands above them. Among the plants you can see pens that have been placed into the soil. Are they left as offerings? Or do people come back to retrieve them, having charged their pen in the famous writer’s grave?

The headstone bears her name, her dates (1932 to 1963) and a quotation: “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted“. Plath is named as ‘Sylvia Plath Hughes’, and the name she got from her Poet Laureate husband has been scratched, as if visitors have attempted to erase any claim Hughes has – Plath’s letters detail shocking physical abuse by him. On top of the gravestone, there rest a line of small stones, some of them holding down folded paper. Among them rests a small piece of violet heather.

Of course, I’m curious about what people have written on these pieces of paper – pleas, or tributes or even poems, perhaps. But I would not touch them – offerings in a holy place seem like something that should be allowed to be private. We head on, taking a path down by Hell Hole Rocks back to my house, away from the shrines of Heptonstall.

Sending out my writing

A while back, I wrote about how my writing has developed through reading Chuck Palahniuk’s discussions of technique. An even bigger change over the last year has been to focus on publication, in whatever form that takes.

Anxiety over sharing my work has long been a problem. It wasn’t the simple ‘fear of success’ that some people talk about, rather a ridiculous fear of negative effects from publication. At the same time, I’ve been driven to write stories since I could first write a sentence, and these two drives have been in conflict. Sometimes I’ve thought I should quit writing stories and focus more on other parts of my life – but quitting didn’t work for me either, so I needed to find another way through.

Since moving to Yorkshire, I’ve put more effort into sending work out. A lot of my old work was written with little thought of an audience. It was fun, and some of that work was great, but you lose rigour if you don’t define yourself against any external standards. I wrote some good stories that I have no idea what to do with. An example of this is a story I wrote called Richey Edwards vs Godzilla, a mash-up of indie music and kaijus. It’s a great piece of writing, but almost wilfully obscure.

Change is a strange thing – it can take years but feel sudden. I’ve been toying with ways to put my work in public for a while. Part of this was attending a 2018 Arvon course with Tania Hershman and Nuala O’Connor, which provoked me into one flurry of submissions. The South Downs Way zine project has been an interesting way to explore publication, and putting recent volumes onto etsy has worked well. In 2022, I have become more consistent with submissions (41 so far this year) and it feels like a significant change.

It’s not as if I am now writing things only so they can be published. I have a huge number of ideas and it is more about working on the ones I feel I can find a home for.

Recently I thought about writing a folk horror piece about offices. It was interesting, in that it took the elements of folk horror and transposed them to a corporate setting. But, at the same time, it was mostly a cover version of The Wicker Man. If I’d worked on this, it would have been competent, but I couldn’t imagine being enthusiastic about submitting it. Long stories take a lot of time, and need to be worth spending so much energy on. In the end, I stripped out the elements of the piece I liked, and it will emerge as a smaller, stranger piece than it would otherwise. I’ve spent too long writing solely for myself, and I need to make up for lost time.

Monthnotes: September 2022

September felt like a transitional month. I was still settling in the house, and slowly moving things into the right places. There’s a lot to do, and I was grateful to my sister and her husband for coming by to strip down the ivy and creepers. The old flat in Halifax had to be cleaned and handed back. I also wound up my job with Mindera, which I finished on the last day of the month.

Along with all this, I went out hiking for a week on Coast-to-Coast with my brother-in-law. Katharine came to visit and, inspired by a guardian article, we took a hike in Bradford, which turned out to be a little underwhelming. I did get to see an original Lowry painting, though. I think we had a copy in the house when I was small, and the original turned out to be much larger than I expected. I did local sections of the Pennine Way with James Spratt, including my first wild swim in Gaddings Dam reservoir. Vicky brought her greyhound Libby to visit and I discovered that greyhounds are weird creatures, nothing like other dogs. I was surprised to learn that they chatter their teeth to express joy.

With the long hike included, I walked 536,907 steps in September, with a maximum of 46,870 on the second day’s walking on the Coast to Coast. This means a daily average of 17,896, which is the highest for some time. My weight continues to float gently downwards, although only by a pound and a half, despite a sometimes poor diet.

The Guardian’s Bradford hike

My writing has been a little slower this month, with only six submissions, and one new story finished but not sent out (James Joyce’s Ulysses as a Cursed Object). For the first time, I had all of my current stories submitted at the same time (11 in total). I withdrew a couple of stories from submission (Wreckage and The Leech Catchers) as I didn’t feel they were as instantly appealing as my other pieces, but they might emerge somewhere eventually. The month ended with a flurry of rejections, bringing my stats for the year so far to 41 submitted, 7 accepted, 29 rejected. I’m more excited about writing than ever, and looking forward to playing with some ideas before I start the new job. Three stories were published:

I’ve been reading some great books this month, although in a disordered way, switching between them. Of the books I finished, three were non-fiction books about music – it’s as if reading about music has replaced getting into new bands. Curious about how the Beatles went on to make Abbey Road after the finality of Let It be, I read Ken McNab’s And in the End. There is a lot in the book about business dealings, shareholdings and corporate takeovers, but I guess that is a reflection of where the Beatles had found themselves. Nicholas Soulsby’s Dark Slivers focussed on Nirvana’s Incesticide, and produced a surprising number of fresh insights and revelations about Kurt Cobain. The book-length Nick Cave interview Faith, Hope and Carnage discussed Cave’s creative process and spirituality, as well as being a provocative engagement with grief.

Grief was also a substantial theme of Ru Callender’s memoir What Remains?. I’d expected this to be good, but I was surprised by how good. I discussed this a little on Twitter, but plan to write more soon. Storyland by Amy Jeffs managed to be more engaging than most books of myths, and contained many I’d not read before. I was inspired to read No Country for Old Men by the movie, and loved the grit of the language. Olivia Laing’s Everybody was another triumph – less cohesive than The Lonely City maybe, but it brought together people including William Reich, de Sade, Malcolm X and Nina Simone. There was also an amazing section on Ana Mendieta, an artist I couldn’t believe I’d missed out on. I also read a novel about music, David Keenan’s This is Memorial Device, which I think I need to revisit, as I don’t think I gave it as much attention as it deserved. It seems a book that would be better suited to physical form than on a Kindle. Finally, Sally Jenkinson’s new pamphlet Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg was released (for sale here), and it was a powerful and moving work. September’s reading might have been disordered, but I read some amazing books.

I didn’t manage much TV, although I finished watching Better Call Saul with Kate Shields. It was a great show, but I’m not sure what story it wanted to tell. And maybe telling its story alongside the events of Breaking Bad harmed it in the end. I saw several movies. Everything Everywhere All At Once was delightful, and as good as everyone promised. Kes was an interesting period piece. I watched The Return (2005) with James Spratt and it was somewhat disappointing. Withnail and I was quotable but the alcoholism just felt sad. I also made two trips to the cinema. The Forgiven was great, and I enjoyed watching a drama with no CGI, spaceships or superheroes. Nope was more my usual fare and was excellently constructed, although it didn’t grab me as tightly as I would have liked.

It’s been weird having such a long time between accepting the new job and finishing the old one. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into some new challenges. In the meantime, I’ve updated my programming blog with some missing content that was only on linked in. I also reviewed Dave Farley’s Modern Software Engineering book, which was excellent. I’ve got a couple of weeks off between the two jobs and I’m hoping to play with a few tech things in that time.

It’s been another battering month for the UK politically. Liz Truss came into power then a few days later the queen died. This meant that politics was out on hold despite the ongoing crisis. I was away for the mourning period, although this meant I caught a few TV screens where the BBC news seemed to be doing nothing more than interviewing people in the queue. When politics returned, Truss failed to solve the energy crisis for many people then unleashed the worst budget of my lifetime. Along with the nuclear posturing over Ukraine, this continues to be an anxious time.

Something musical I’ve enjoyed recently – Alison Rose’s acoustic version of the Nevermind album. Acoustic covers can be a cheap trick, but this album draws out how good the originals were.

Coast to Coast Day 10: Oak Tree Hill to Richmond

I only took a single photograph on the final day of our 2022 Coast-to-Coast hike. This was of a gap in a hedge that seemed ridiculously small. The landscape on this section was less epic than what we’d become used to. Wainwright himself was not a fan of this stretch, apparently describing the town of Danby Whisk as a low point in more than just elevation.

Getting on and off hiking trails can be a problem, as the best ones are in the middle of nowhere. Dave had had a van dropped off for us in Richmond, which meant having to return to the town at the end of the day. We decided to get a taxi to Oak Tree Hill and walk back from there. It also meant we got to bump into most of the people we’d encountered on the previous few days travelling, who were continuing in the traditional direction.

Finding a taxi to take us into the middle of nowhere that early in the morning proved tricky, and I was glad we weren’t trying to persuade someone to collect us from the wilds. The day’s walk, about 10-12 miles, was a slightly underwhelming ending to this leg of the walk. Pleasant but not spectacular. It’s a comfortable stroll through farmland, with a few small villages breaking it up, but very little to take the attention. In a way, it’s good to be tossing it away as a half-section.

The route brought us back to Richmond, ready to finish our hiking for that year. It was a shame to come off the trail, but walking six days rather than our usual four had been a great experience. Next year, only a few nights remain to finish the Coast to Coast.

Coast to Coast Day 9: Reeth to Richmond

The walk from Reeth to Richmond was another short day at just over ten miles. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out where to stop on hiking trails. Most people stop in both Reeth and Richmond, since the journey from Keld to Richmond would otherwise be an imposing 21.5 miles – not impossible, but a lot if the weather is against you. Going direct from Kirkby-Stephen to Reeth seems like a bad idea, as Keld provides a good chance to regroup from crossing the peat bogs near the Nine Standards. This means it’s hard to avoid a run of short days.

This was a day of relatively few photographs, although the landscape was charming. Given that the trail was leaving the Pennines, things had started to flatten out a little. We took a long lunch on a bench in Marske then finished the walk into Richmond, arriving early in the afternoon.

Richmond is a pretty town, and we took the chance to explore, although an expired English Heritage card meant we skipped see the castle. We stayed at the Black Lion pub, which had the best vegan food I’d enjoyed on this section of the trail. We also found a coin tree.

Coast to Coast Day 8: Keld to Reeth

Sometimes, when you’re walking a trail, you have a day that starts out as incredible then deteriorates to slogging along a tedious track. The walk from Keld to Reeth was an example of this. The first few hours were some of the best hiking I’ve done, with great views and curious ruins. Then we spent a few hours following a relatively boring track into town.

This was another day with a choice of routes. We took the high route, though the old lead-mining ruins. We heard from other hikers that the lower route along the Swaledale Valley was also pretty spectacular.

The route took us past into a series of valleys filled with the traces of lead-mining. It was obviously a grim and remote job, being some way from the nearest towns.

We stopped for lunch in the Blakethwaite ruins, by the side of the river. It was a fine place to linger for a break, since the day’s distance was only 11 miles.

The tone of the walk changed after we climbed out of this valley. We found ourself in an area where quarrying had stripped off the top soil. It was desolate, and one group of hikers we met had filmed videos of themselves pretending to be astronauts on the moon.

From there, it was a long slog along the track. Grouse hunters were out in force, despite the period of national mourning. There’s a long tension between walking and grouse-hunting, which reached a high-point at the Kinder trespass. Grouse-hunting seems an odd ‘sport’, with people paid to drive the animals towards the shooters, and others paid to reload the guns. Seeing the landscape taken over for such a vile activity is disappointing, and added to my frustration with the rather boring track.

We eventually made it to Reeth, which is one of the most beautiful villages I’ve seen. The central green is on a gentle slope with some amazing views, and the local ice-cream shop had an impressive vegan vanilla flavour. The town seems to have been hit by hard times, however, with a number of businesses for sale or even closed, despite there still being a few weeks to run of the season.