Christine Ohuruogu’s stunning 400m victory brought Team GB’s gold medal haul to 16 as Britain sealed their best Olympic performance for a century.
Okay, now I am feeling patriotic! Hell, I almost stood up for the national anthem twice today!
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All posts for the day August 19th, 2008
Rainbows.
As I sit at my desk, looking out of the window and trying to think of something to blog about, the sun comes out on this otherwise quite miserable and rainy day and quite suddenly I see it. A rainbow. And I am reminded once again of the uniqueness of every viewed rainbow — the fact that if you and I were side-by-side looking at it together you would be seeing a different rainbow to the one I would see. In fact, my left eye sees a different rainbow to the one that my right eye sees. The explanation is fairly simple, but I don’t really want to comment on that. Instead, I want to share a quotation with you that this phenomenon brought to mind — a quotation that admirably expresses how I feel about science and life in general.
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
– Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow.
I think Dawkins hits the nail on the head with this passage and I would seriously recommend this particular volume to anyone out there who hasn’t already read it.
The Yesterday Tree.
The chapter outlines for the next novel are still progressing steadily. I have about ten chapters outlined in, for me, great detail. It is opening out in a slightly different way than I would have expected, but at heart it’s still the kind of novel I want it to be — psychologically intense, dark, Kafkaesque, character driven but with a pacey, thriller-style plot. I will be glad to get the outline out of the way, however. It’s a pretty labourious process at times — write a bit, check a few facts, write a bit more, research police murder procedure, write a bit more… you get the picture — but it will make the whole process of writing the novel far less stressful. I’ll be able to concentrate much more on the language, on creating the feel I want.
It’s all in the preparation — isn’t that what they say?
