Time And Space

So you think the clocks going back Is Difficult

Spare a thought for those that were living in 1582 when the Gregorian calendar reform took place.

We might think that we are hard done by in the United Kingdom, when the clocks are reset by an hour and in effect we have two get up an hour earlier.

Of course, this is balanced by the fact that at the autumn equinox, when the clocks go forward, we feel as if we have gained an extra hour of sleep.

Of course, few of us will ever think about the reason for this, and least of all, connect this shift in our management of time to the Gregorian calendar.

But the fact is that in truth our calendar is founded on the solar year, and we have the church of Rome to thank for the reform to that calendar in 1582, undertaken primarily so that the calculation for the date of Easter could be more accurately connected with the lunar calendar.

There is an interesting connection between the lunar calendar and the solar, but it is a connection that we are not fully conscious of.

But the truth of the matter is that the old Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, failed to take account of small inaccuracies in the differences between the two.

The consequence of this was that lunar and solar had become unsynchronised, and the adjustments made were intended to bring things back into order.

And so the length of the solar year was properly recognised to be 365.25 days in duration, with alternate leap years providing the additional necessary time between the two.

But in addition, there was a 10 day difference to be taken into account, and the solution to this was simply to forget 10 days of the calendar, which as you can imagine, for a mostly illiterate population, felt a little bit like losing 10 days of your life.

And if your birthday happened to fall in one of those 10 days, it must have felt as if you had been deprived of an entire year of your life.

And so, whilst we cope with this simple daylight saving means of adjusting our clocks, spare a moment for those mediaeval folk, who must have pondered hard as to the way in which they were being dealt with by the church, and all for the sake of calculations concerning which they would have found mystifying.

But there is something of poetic beauty in the way in which time has been distilled from an observation of the way in which the Earth moves in space, in the context of our solar system.

And although time is a particularly human means of making sense of things, it is ultimately something outside of ourselves, and immutable.

How well do you speak Klingon?

I don’t often use this blog to talk about my dreams. In the specific sense of what I have been dreaming about.

But last night, I had a dream. One that I find of sufficient interest to want to write about.

They say that sometimes in your dreams you can process ideas that you might otherwise have missed in your conscious waking life.

This perhaps constitutes one such example.

Quite simply, at some point in my dream, I think I woke up, or perhaps at least had a moment of conscious self awareness.

Enough to be able to remember my dream, and to smile at the thought of it.

Quite simply, in my dream, I was reading a lengthy article in some respectable newspaper which was all about the potential to develop communication with an alien race.

And the entire article was written in Klingon.

Now, I first want to make it clear that I do not speak Klingon.

Most of you will know that Klingon is an invented language, created for the purpose of pursuing an unhealthy interest in the Star Trek series.

I haven’t bothered to research Klingon using the Internet, although it would be a fair guess that it would be possible to discover an entire community of people that spend much time spreading understanding and knowledge of Klingon.

But, I am not one of them.

Although I did find it very funny, and interesting, that in the film Paul, the two young men travelling to America for a comic convention were able to speak fluent Klingon.

They were deluded in thinking that this language might be a useful means of communicating when they do not wish anyone else in earshot to understand what they are communicating about.

Since they have just met Paul, the little green alien in the title of the film, one of them uses his Klingon to be able to suggest that they overpower the alien.

Paul, however, asks if those words being spoken are in fact Klingon.

The idea that Paul is actually an alien, and that he is a danger to either of them, becomes quite farcical when it is realised that he recognises Klingon.

And all that this knowledge arouses in him is confirmation that the rescuers that have picked him up our complete nerds.

Now I am a fan of the new Star Trek films, that have given new life to this old idea.

Into the dark, released in 2013, is an exciting rebirth of the Star Trek film series.

But the idea that Klingon might hold some kind of key to alien languages, and that an interesting article in Klingon might be written for a serious newspaper, is in itself entering the realms of farce.

But as in most intense dreams, I read this article with interest, clearly making some sense of this strange language, and being interested in what was being communicated.

I do not recall anything exact of what was being communicated, and my only residual memory is that I was amused at the context of what I had been doing. Reading an article written in Klingon.

And hence this blog entry.

The conclusion of which is I think simply to be amazed at the possibilities in dreaming.

And part of me is simply relieved that I can have such lucid dreams, in spite of the fact that I have multiple sclerosis, and that although physically I am unable to explore the world, I can still travel to extraordinary places in my dreams.

Long may it still continue.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

It strikes me as a particularly relevant that this film by Hitchcock should have been shown recently.

Events in the news have been surprisingly reminiscent of some of the issues raised in this wartime propaganda film, which I found amusingly described on the BBC as a humorous thriller.

It is some measure of the quality of the film that it has been remade, and although I have only seen one of the remade versions, it is just as successful as the original.

Although there are aspects of the original that make it preferable, as ever, over subsequent remakes.

Hitchcock is not terribly well known for his humorous films, but this certainly has its moment of finding humour in the way that it pokes fun at two cricket obsessives.

But humour that is balanced perfectly with the deportment of those two otherwise laughable characters when confronted with danger.

This is as much part of the critical message of the film, in the same way that the ‘pacifist’ that is killed by a ruthless foe makes it clear that this is not the way of dealing with such an enemy.

That the vanished lady is an amiable elderly lady is another aspect in which characters are painted so as to be different from the stereotype.

The subtle message is perhaps that it is important not to underestimate the capacity of those that we might otherwise find humorous.

The McGuffin in this film is the notion that the contents of a secret treaty can be contained in a snatch of music, music that is smuggled out of the country in which the action takes place, and music which then unites Miss Froy with those who in turn have saved her from the clutches of foreign agents.

That it is a love story as well as at turns a spy thriller and a comic portrayal of the English abroad is part of the genius of the director.