Tom Womack

I have an adequate pick-axe; I believe some people enjoy hitting things with an axe.

When I moved into this house, the garden contained three large and awkwardly-placed tree stumps. I have removed rather less than one tree-stump a year, and there is now one left. I have dug a medium-sized hole around it and got to the point where it is necessary to beat upon its many roots repeatedly with sharpened iron, but have failed for eight weeks to proceed beyond this point.

Would anyone care to join me in my garden at 3pm on Saturday 20 February, to remove with pick and shovel as much of the tree-stump as can be removed before the light fails, and then move to my living room to sit in front of the hot fire on which the previous tree-stump will be burned? Bring own mattock if you have one. Tea and biscuits will be provided while the axes are in use, liquor and pistachios afterwards. Axe-based parts of event will be cancelled in case of heavy rain.

(Please RSVP so that I know exactly how many axe-wielding maniacs to anticipate)

The nurse who does travel vaccinations at the Bridge Street Health Centre is very nice, but takes a great deal of pleasure in informing novice southbound travellers of the many ways it is possible to become problematically unwell in even the reasonably civilised parts of the bottom of Africa. So:

5 Feb morning: Hepatitis A+B booster ✔

5 Feb evening: Rabies 1 ✔

sometime next week: sort out Zambia visa (turns out it costs $50 at the border)

12 Feb morning: Typhoid, Rabies 2, collect prescription for malaria prophylaxis ✔

5 Mar morning: Rabies 3, Hepatitis A+B booster 2

6 Mar: buy bulk quantities of dioralyte and 50% DEET, also light-weight long-sleeved shirts quant. suff.

Packing notes:

• SLEEPING BAG AND LINER


• POWDER FOR WASHING CLOTHES BY HAND

The practice nurse suggests I have a hair-cut before leaving.

13 Mar evening: fly LHR-DXB-JNB
14-27 March: http://www.intrepidtravel.com/trips/UOQ (16-24 March are in malarial areas, if I read the itinerary and http://www.fitfortravel.nhs.uk/destinations/africa/botswana/botswana-malaria-map.aspx correctly)

New York and London are both famously polyglot cities: if you want to find a native Russian speaker, it won’t take very long and there are obvious places to start.

Penguin Books is a major publisher with offices in London and New York.

It is therefore a sign of a slightly embarrassing failure of copy-editing that, in one of Clive Cussler’s novels, as the hero is spotted creeping on to a Russian ship, a guard shouts ‘Ostanovka’: which even my desultory Russian tells me is “stop” in the sense of the place you go to to catch a bus.

Have any of my readers noticed their lower legs and upper arms becoming more than usually itchy in the last three or so weeks? I have; I complained to my co-worker and found that he and his wife both had, and so why not ask everyone I know ...

(I suspect it may be a matter of very cold outside weather translating to very low humidity inside central-heated houses)

I read 13 books in December; the winter nights are long, the weather wasn’t very good, and I had a cold at the start of the month. Again, all from the library or from Project Gutenberg.

( A dozen one-paragraph reviews )

I am not entirely ready to trust mobile-phone salespeople on the subject of what tariff I should use for my phone; I have a dim suspicion that they are more interested in their commissions and in the course of action most profitable for their employer than in my best interest.

I have an iphone 3G, I bought it from the Apple Store for £159 with an eighteen-month contract provided through O2 seventeen months ago. I have been paying £35 a month since, which I think of as a £20 contract fee plus £15 paying off the implicit loan for the difference between what the iphone costs and what I paid for it.

I now have a paid-for iphone 3G. I've no desire at all to spend £400 on an iphone 3GS, whether as a lump sum or as an implicit loan. I would like the phone I currently have to continue working.

In the last nine months I've used 315MB of received cell data and 32MB of sent cell data, and in the phone's lifetime 12 hours of voice calls; I would expect to be able to get that level of cellular network access for a fiver a month at most, and be making my provider most of a fiver a month in pure profit by so doing. How do I go about doing so?

Meme! Meme! It's a meme!

Well, in Cambridge most of the time

Seeing my brother and bits of Iberia, just before Easter
Madrid, in a random lastminute.com hotel next to Atocha: two nights
Iberia, on the Madrid-Lisbon sleeper: one night
Lisbon, in a hostel just off Av. da Liberdade: three nights

Eastercon
Bradford, Campanile Hotel: three nights

Janet and Owen's wedding, party
Oxford, the youth hostel: two separate nights

My cousin Vicki's wedding
Very pleasant restored-farmhouse hotel near Yeovil whose name I can't remember: two nights

The ACA and Worldcon, July to August
Toronto, Sheraton Hotel: six nights
Toronto, Best Western Primrose Hotel: one night
Toronto, Global Village Backpackers: two nights
Kingston, aboard a retired Canadian Coastguard icebreaker: two nights
Montreal, papersky's house: about twelve nights

Spain again, in October with family
San Sebastian, NH Aranzazu: three nights

The glamorous life of an itinerant software trainer
Paris, small hotel on the Rue Brancion near Parc Georges Brassens: three nights and one wallet stolen
Paris, Mercure hotel, banks of the Seine a little way outside the Peripherique: one night
Sandwich, The Bell Inn: two nights

45/365 is really quite a lot

Soleil synchrotron 162 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=48.709258,2.145381&spn=0.005678,0.006781&t=h&z=17
GCHQ building 194 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.899105,-2.124041&spn=0.005309,0.006781&t=h&z=17
Pudong synchrotron 208 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=31.190603,121.582759&spn=0.00368,0.00339&t=h&z=18
Diamond light source 238 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.574176,-1.310871&spn=0.005348,0.006781&t=h&z=17
ESRF synchrotron 319 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=45.208174,5.690371&spn=0.006062,0.006781&t=h&z=17
Advanced Photon Source about 400 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.702781,-87.988386&spn=0.006424,0.006781&t=h&z=17
SPRING-8 synchrotron about 500 metres http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=34.945192,134.431458&spn=0.056425,0.054245&t=h&z=14

Google Earth for "APS synchrotron" transports you to central Antarctica, rather than Argonne; I suspect someone has messed up latitude and longitude.

Cambridge library reopened at the end of September, and I made a small vow to stop buying books, and instead get them out of the library. This enforces a to-read pile size of no more than twelve, strongly encourages reading a book within a month of acquisition, and means I can acquire perhaps-mediocre books on a whim the moment I hear about them without worrying that I'm wasting money, and any books without worrying where I'm going to store them forever. I've taken to reading the book-review section of the Economist mouse in hand, ready to stick holds in the library on anything that sounds appealing (though I am 106th in line for their copy of "Wolf Hall").

Jo Walton gave me Francis Spufford's "I May Be Some Time" when I stayed with her in Montreal in the summer. It's an odd book; it's not a history of polar exploration, it pretty much assumes you know the history of polar exploration, but it's a history of the popular perception in England of polar exploration - of how every Victorian child got to know of the white bear and the igloo, of how chronicles of voyages were the permitted escapism of some of Austen's characters, of how Franklin's wife stage-managed the search for him and ruined the career of the man who proved him a cannibal.

I think, though I can't prove it via Google, that Jo also recommended to me and to the world Frederick Pohl's "Jem". This one, go out and read, though be sure you're reasonably cheerful before starting the last hundred pages; it builds worlds on Earth and in the sky, the Food / Fuel / People blocs a way to think of the world that still works and is worth contemplating. Great aliens, good first contact, and the really worrying thought that there were millions of people in our world not long ago who thought for decades of the inhabitants of Russia and China in terms that could turn into Pohl's Russians and Chinese.

Next one was Mat Coward's "So Far, So Near"; the author came up in an aside on Ken Macleod's blog, this was what the library has of his, and it's something like Ken mixed with Roald Dahl, with just a touch of Douglas Adams around the edges. A collection of short stories somewhere between the comically weird and the really quite creepy.

Next one another Jo recommendation: "When the Kissing Had To Stop". A proper political thriller of a kind I'm not sure I've seen recently; again, Russians sculpted out of pure evil, and a bizarre conception of Britain's role in the world. Not too far off from a cold-war Farthing; though only two weeks later my memories of the book are mostly wood-panelled rooms and cold London fog.

Then, a collection of translated Quebecois writing - chunks of novels, novelettes in the settings of novels - from the Bragellone publishing house, prepared for and given away at Worldcon. There's a Dumas-with-dragons, a disconcerting ogre-slave-PoV of a death camp, a rather arch tale of an author defended from his agent by his characters. It's all a few dozen degrees twisted from the English fantasy-writing traditions, a bit more willingness to have characters exposed to and damaged by the unpleasant parts of the world. Interesting, but I'm not drawn to buy any more of the works.

The topic of Tony Faber's "Faberge's Eggs" is clear, though I'm really very shaky on the history of that part of the world; I had no clue that the Tsars were that direly and unrecognisingly autocratic, clinging to the Divine Right of Kings only twenty years before 'the Germans sent Lenin to them like some deadly bacillus in a sealed train'.

And to keep on the theme of bacilli, at about the time that Faberge was really getting into the swing of his eggs, H G Wells three thousand miles away was writing his first short-story collection, "The Stolen Bacillus". This is one I read (in the bath) with flashes of recognition in every other page: it's what Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart" is shaped after, the narrators of "Aepyornis Island" or "The Diamond-Maker" could have showed up in the White Hart with not an eyelid batted.

Perhaps the best book I've read this month was an unexpected one - the Economist had recommended Dan Cruickshank's new history of the Georgian brothel, and said his previous book was called "Adventures in Architecture". This the library had; this, too, I read in the bath, and this time the flashes of recognition were of myself. The man's travelled to sixty or so of the great architectural sites of the world, Istanbul to St Petersburg to Varanasi to Neuschwanstein, and in the places where our paths have crossed he's taken pretty much the same pictures I did. A lovely wry style for the writing around the pictures; a definite recommendation.

Last book of the month, another patch of history where I knew some of the names but not one of the events: Robert Harris's "Imperium", in core a reconstruction of Tiro's lost Life of Cicero. I knew nothing of the Roman republic, my brain would jump from Lars Porsena to Caesar and have Crassus and the Gracchi as contemporaries. It's an utterly bizarre world: the government of six hundred lawyers where 'by tradition' the prosecutor acquires the rank of his most powerful victim, the shapes of popular democracy with an electoral college of tribes superposed and the whole drenched in half a yard of bribery, the power of life and death granted to provincial governors.

This is the 85W-from-socket 425W-incandescent-equivalent-power lightbulb that I bought to see whether it would make me happy.

For size comparisons, that is an Apple smallish keyboard, a real apple and a real kiwifruit. The fruit are normal-sized examples of their ilk, and the bayonet on the lamp is of the standard size.