Life Less Literary

I’ve been meaning to run some Webtrends reports on my personal site for… most of my life really, and finally got around to doing so. I’m used to running these reports on commercial webservers, and getting very little back in the way of interesting information, so I was amazed at some of the stuff Webtrends had to say about my site. In particular the search-engine terms which had led people there in the first place: for the commercial sites we maintain, there are usually very few of these, most searchers getting there by the rather wasteful strategy of typing the site’s URL into a search box. For my site, the phrases were many and varied, often with little bearing to the information on my site.

The most popular term by far was Yorkshire Sculpture Park. For some time now, my life pages and others, which describe places I’ve been, have acted as surrogate websites for the places themselves - others being Grizedale forest, Kew Gardens, London Zoo and Portmeirion.

Next in popularity: CD and song titles. A while back, mainly as a thought experiement, I wrote a program to catalog my CDs via CDDB and put the results online (thanks to Maggy for planting the idea). Although I’ve never done anything with this since writing the program and plonking the results online, the wierd and wonderful collection or words contained therein has attracted visitors like flies to shit. This explains why terms such as “disciplin kitchme”, “towering inferno kaddish”, “children’s songs”, “comme des garcons”, “stock hausen walkman”, “virtual violin”, “hum bom”, “ligeti musica ricercata” and “everybody else is doing it so why can’t we?” crop up with alarming regularity.

Of course, there were also a sizeable number of hits caused by things I have actually written, albeit not necessarily in the form that I wrote them. A few of my favourites are listed below:

• sad pictures (I presume because of the page of photos of myself, which I entitled “Pictures of some sad old git”)
• sad git (ditto)
• nigella lawson photo (obviously a juxtaposition of words on one of my lifeless pages)
• leo burnett (not that wierd, as I work there and mention it frequently, but there was a time when my website came top of Altavista UK’s list when searching on this term, much to the embarrasment of both myself and Leo Burnett’s senior management)
• los angeles zoo (Never been there, although I almost visited the zoo in San Diego once. This actually links to a page that mentioned the band Los Bastados and Antwerp Zoo)
• okapi (yeah, I think I took a picture of one once)
• nonsense poetry (nice to think that I’m included on this one)
• henry moore (although there’s a lot of his sculpture at Yorkshire sculpture park, which I have photos of on my site and which is one of my most popular “search engine draws”, it seems that this search is leading to a CD page which lists both Henry Kaiser and John Moore)
• rhodedendron (one of my favourite words, even if I can’t spell it. Glad to see it crop up here)
• gurning
• demons myth (a page of Sun Ra CDs seems to contain both Angels and Demons at play and Sun Ra’s Solar Myth Arkestra)
• justified (makes me feel vindicated!)
• poem death funeral (from Thoughts about Death and Love)
• love and death poem (ditto)
• night monkey (from The Monkey)
• diesel dan
• picture of croissant
• stood on the burning deck
• drunken amateurs
• wierd drawings
• life video of london
• apple of my eye
• catholic guilt
• buckingham palace guards
• girly

(To find out where these queries lead to, you could do worse than heading to Google and doing a site-specific search covering just www.sumption.org).

Finally, where would we be without Ask Jeeves?? Well, we would probably be a lot wiser, but infinitely less entertained. The three top queries from Ask Jeeves to hit my site, with possible explanations, are as follows:

1. where can find pictures of ludvig van beethoven? (I have a CD of the Pastoral Symphony by the aforementioned composer in my collection. No mention of pictures though, nor any idea why Jeeves’s Altavista UK link-up should want to send people to me)
2. from 1920-1979 how did disciplin in schools change (Hey buddy, learn to spell discipline, otherwise you’re just going to end up with a track listing for a CD by Disciplin a Kitchme)
3. where can find cd by sheila chandra entitled this sentence is true (not on my site, I’m afraid. I do have a copy of The Zen Kiss, but I’m not selling)

Postscript: Of course, by repeating all of these phrases on this one page, I am doubling my chances of being hit upon by disenchanted web-searchers. For anybody reading this who arrived via a search engine, I’m sorry you didn’t find what you wanted, but please relax, make yourself at home, and feel free to explore everything else that I have on offer.

When I was younger, around 9 or 10, I spent all of my time either reading or to-ing and fro-ing to Twickenham library for a new selection of 3 books (enough to last me about a week). My choices were fairly eclectic, ranging from Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (which even at this early age I found strangely erotic because of the protagonist’s cavorting naked in the pastry mix) to Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Mort d’Arthur (the Arthurian legends, as told by this 15th century author, were I have to admit, a little over my head at the time). But there were two series that I would actively seek out and read above all others, Nils-Olaf Franzen’s Agaton Sax books, and the Uncle books of J P Martin.

I was ecstatic yesterday when I found two websites detailing the latter, and also discovered that the first two Uncle books have been republished (possibly the only book I have seen on Amazon to get uninterrupted 5-star reviews) - having read through Harry Potter with Rowan, and got well into Artemis Fowl, I’ll be glad for my sake as much as hers to have these excellent books to read next.

The existing websites probably describe this subject better than I could - Maximum R&B’s “who is Uncle?” has wonderful descriptions of all the main characters and locations - reading of Uncle, the Old Monkey, the One-Armed Badger, Beaver and Nailrod Hateman, Hitmouse, Jellytussle and the rest… the names themselves brought back ooodles of memories. But then Kevin McGrath’s “The Uncle books” page contained an actual excerpt. Must get that book NOW!

Basically, Uncle is an elephant. He lives in a place called Homeward, which is like the tower-equivalent of the Tardis, always more towers than you could possibly imagine. More towers than even Uncle knows about - the kind of never-ending always-more-to-explore place that fascinated me as a kid. And the towers aren’t just plain old towers, they are wierd, wonderful and multi-varied, towers full of treacle, that kind of thing. I’m sure that this had a big effect on my imagination and the fact that even as an adult I’m not satisfied by a plain old common-or-garden anything, I want a house that has a swimming pool in the cellar, a glass loft extension/greenhouse, an underground grotto in the garden, that kind of thing. The Uncle books were totally imagination-stimulation, totally unputdownable, totally unique, and I am incredibly excited about returning to them…

By the way, I got a new haircut (not so new, one week old today in fact):

The other day, I received an Important Official Notification at the flat. The notification was for DAVID. At least, I presume it was for DAVID. Something tells me it may have been for DAVID. DAVID? DAVIDDAVIDDAVID VIDDA VIDDA ADVID AVDIDDIDVA?

Has to be one of the best examples of direct mail and the “because we can” principle that I have ever ever seen. Ever. Ever?

Wow! Went flying last week. Leo Burnett were holding their annual sports day at Foxhill’s. I was quite tempted to go - I missed it last year because we had too much work on (although we held our own sports day - a circuit sprint around the perimiter of the 3rd floor offices, followed by a hike to Monza for a spot of marathon food eating) and despite being put off by the exclusivity (no denim or mobile phones allowed) I’m always tempted by a bit of a bash.

But then Goff stepped in and asked whether anyone wanted to join him in an alternative activity - a day of flying in his plane, headed either to Le Touquet in France or the Isle of White (according to weather) for a lobster lunch, then back to Foxhill’s for the evening activities. I had been at a wedding at Sywell Airfield a couple of weeks earlier, and watching the vintage aircraft take off and land had given me air-envy. I leapt at the chance and fired an email straight back to Goff.

The week of our flight was sunny, hot and clear beyond anything we are used to in this country. At first I thought that this boded well for a day’s flying in perfect weather, but as the week wore on the humidity built to unbearable levels, and it dawned on me that all this water would have to find a way out of the air at some point. On Thursday the radio news spoke of violent thunderstorms in the West of England, tearing roofs off caravans and generally causing havoc. I had mixed feelings - worried (god forbid that we should get caught flying in a thunderstorm), disappointed (what if the weather’s too bad to fly?) and relieved (if the weather’s too bad to fly, nothing dangerous can happen).

On the day itself, the sky was filled with clouds but not of the violent thundery type. We (Catherine, Olivia and myself) arrived at the airfield to meet Goff in the cafe, where I wolfed down a fried egg sandwich smothered with tomato ketchup. Mist was floating low over the airfield, and there seemed to be no prospect of taking off in the near future, so we sat and chatted, aviation talk plus office gossip, and the time passed pleasantly and quickly. On a quick foot-tour of the airfield we inspected numerous light aircraft and gliders, new and vintage, and climbed inside Goff’s craft (which was in the hangar for repair - we were hiring one of the airfield’s planes for the day) for a fiddle with the controls and a play at being pilots. By lunchtime things had improved little, and we were beginning to wonder whether we would ever get airborne. We adjourned to a nearby pub for a sizeable ploughman’s lunch, and looked on with excitement as blue patches appeared in the sky. On returning to the airfield we were cleared to fly. Having arrived in the morning pumped with adrenalin, and throughout the day adjusting to the idea that we were less and less likely to get to take off, suddenly finding ourselves with a plane to prepare put our heartrates up a notch or two.

Finally we were in the cockpit talking to the control tower, all checks completed, no turning back, and the plane taxied to the runway. We accelerated forwards and… started lifting into the air, surprisingly smoothly. I felt slightly nervous, like climbing up in a rollercoaster, watching the ground move further away and wondering when the next scary bit would hit. At 1000 feet we started to bank, the plane wobbled, and my grip tightened on the strap hanging next to me. My stomach churned a little - again it was a rollercoaster feeling - knowing that you’re fairly safe but in a scary sort of way. We levelled out and cruised above the countryside, crossing towns, hillsides, country estates, lakes, follies, and ending up above the Silverstone Circuit. We circled the track that Mika Hakkinen would be speeding to victory at one week later, and headed back to the airfield. Landing was far less painful than I had anticipated - we descended to a few inches above the ground, levelled out the plane and then smoothly touched down on the runway. It was great. So we did it again - just a quick take off, circuit and land this time. In contrast to the first ascent, I felt no nerves whatsoever - it all seemed more natural to be in the air than on the ground.

Having had that small taste, I’m eager to do it again. Hopefully we will make the France lobster trip before too long. And in the meantime, I’ve been in touch with Sheffield Aero Club to enquire about flying lessons. Now I just need another mortgage to pay for them.