Why do we hate? (by alaric)

About a decade ago, I wrote a blog post about how people forget the humanity of others when they hate them. I find hate really interesting - it's not an emotion I'm particular prone to, but the world seems full of it, so it interests me. And it's usually very harmful, so I'm interested in ways to mitigate and eliminate it.

Since writing that post, I have pondered how we start to hate somebody in the first place, and I've noticed a pattern that seems to underlie a lot of hate. I've not seen it called out explicitly before, which is really interesting.

Read more »

Fire Balls, Space Junk and Ring Lightning (by sarah)

Wednesday on our way home from the kids drama and singing lessons we saw a weird orange light in the sky that seemed to flare but by the time we had processed it and mentioned it to each other it was just another dimming light that could have been a floating lantern or a satellite or plan wing tip - having just come back from a conference on the paranormal and tricks my mind churned with the possibilities. At first I thought it might be a satellite dancing across the sky or a launch I had lost track off - after all something was due to happen with Space Link wasn't it?

I struggle these days to keep up with launches and fly bys and some are more noticeable that others - also due to the visual distortions caused by a mix of graves disease, damage from head injury ie a blind spot my mind tries to correct for and sometimes wrong colour due to blood sugar levels mucking up my lenses - I am always suspicious of what I see. But I wasn't the only one and we talked about Day of the Triffids and I thought on how it didn't seem right for the fly bys or launches I have seen. Nor if I am honest did it look like any meteor shower I had seen including one with a confirmed landing.

Now as a family weird stuff does happen to us - the probabilities of our life are so extreme they have to be real life because you could not get away with this shiiiite in fiction and sky phenomena is one of the things we seem to be proune too. We have seen clouds with fluorescent edges, cold fire flickering in strange colours(st elmos fire), a green flash from the sunrise, sundogs guarding the sun, moon bows, transits of planets in tear drop shapes across the sun, eclipses, green skies, sand storms in spout form, strange lightning, shooting stars.

I on my own have seen, felt and heard a thunder bolt crash in a flash to the ground - the sound of it was deafening as we sat in our car by the traffic lights - a ring of lightning that arrived in Grey Towers at the end of Hornchurch town centre when I was very small - it was amazing and painful and very too close - I am not sure what the out come would have been if we hadn't been sitting in the car with its rubber insulated feet.

Alaric on the other hand has witnessed not 1 but 2 fatal air craft accidents, on of which they then spent their time administering first aid to the crowd (to be fair they have attended a lot of air shows and been a first aider/emergency response of some sort at many events).

We've seen strange fogs, and rare cloud formations, inverted rainbows, but not the aurora - I thought the translucent clouds we saw were this but they did not shift and move and are another meteorological phenomena called Iridescence or Irisidation. Some I thought could not be real like the dawn flash - but they are along with scientific explanations.

I wonder if it is just because we are outside a lot or because we look to the sky or because the improbable is still probable if there are billions of people living their lives on an increasingly chaotic system of a planet.

So I promised the kids I'd see if there was anything on meteor watch about the strange lights in the sky - and promptly forgot as not only did it remind me of Day of the Triffids but it reminded me of Smallsville - a Superman spin off taking us through the adventures of a town decimated by a meteorite strike - and I ended up knitting and watching that instead. It didn't even seem that strange if I am honest - oh another UFO - I wondered if a satellite had fallen, burning before it could crash into the surface of our world but no biggy really.

The next morning however I woke up regretting that I had failed to capture it on my phone - I had tried but it was over and we were weaving around small roads and I just took too long - now I wanted to know what it was... as a personal set completion - space junk was preferable - from a studying and travelling the cosmos point of view a meteorite would be preferable on many many levels including just not making our own sky a no go travel zone because we've created so much space pollution ie debris.

So what do we know about this fire ball? It was seen most in Scotland and Northern Ireland but others including here in the SW of England saw it, some of which are our friends who commented on my Facebook post - also if you say you saw one mysterious sky object people will tell you all their UFO stories - I like this it is interesting - if you want to share go ahead and leave a comment <3

When I initially checked it was thought to most likely be debris from something and that was being checked out - but later in the day it seemed to have become the meteor scenario - so a rock from space that exploded in our atmosphere from uneven heating caused by the friction of falling through our atmosphere and the different materials, cracks and possible things like ice evaporating to super heated steam very quickly (this process can cause serious explosions as can many gas or liquid reservoirs within things like asteroids - also there are classification systems for all of this which I am semi ignoring to use words more widely know).

WE didn't even really see a fire ball - just a flare at most and there seems to be two times floating around for the even which might be an issue with daylight saving or maybe there are two events which wouldn't be particularly surprising as natural or human origin space debris tends to scatter on its way down especially if there are explosions! Or of course people are people and they make mistakes!

I really thought it was going to be one of the star link satellites if I am honest but according to the UK Meteor Network and other such groups and bodies of experts it looks like it was a meteor and that it is likely to have landed in the sea. There is more sea than land on Earth so that isn't really surprising and I recall several lectures on the finding and not finding of meteorites and the reasons behind this - the Earth is still "accreting" were are hoovering up space dust and being bombarded with rocks and narrowly missing the big chunks of other planets that are no longer planets or never quiet formed into planets in the first place.

Of course I am obsessed with space rocks so could bore you for hours with them - I am currently trying to set things up so that I can collect micro meteorites as such projects like Project Star Dust have managed - I even rope in groups of scouts - mainly we stare at bits of sand blown in from the deserts, or rocks thrown off the road but occasionally something unusual turns up.

(I found that this post had not gone live for some reason so it was back blogged to the date of writing)

An anecdote from my distant past: The Tale of the Half-Working Network (by alaric)

Ok, this is an interesting tale I've retold in person a few times. So I've decided to write it up for the world to see.

The scene: My student flat, 1998. Seven of us are living there, and we're all nerds so there's lots of computers. The world of networked multi-player games is exploding, and we want to play.

So, we buy some network cards, and go to Maplin for some coax cable, BNC connectors and terminators, and start to set up a 10BASE2 LAN.

But one of the computers can't talk to the others. What's going on? Read more »

Headless, Heedless, Reckless and Restless (by sarah)

I feel a burning restless desire to just do something but have no energy and the thought of choosing anything is hard at the moment. I feel like I am wondering aimlessly - like my head has been cut off. I am just me but who is me and what do I do now? The last few years have just been absorbed with caring and doing and before that just surviving - it has been a rough run through grief and miscarriages and hitting my own mortality more than once and then both parents gone as brackets around a global pandemic. And I am still here looking at my beautiful family knowing it is only a fragment and that they each of them is hurting and fighting their own battles and a chunk of that - what ever they say is my fault weather through my fault be it genetics or circumstance.

My heart isn't just broken, it is pulversized - it is raw meat - it is a bloody pulp that I am not sure can be revived - I want my babies and I want my parents - but I have Al and the kids except I feel I am loosing them - this is only right for the kids they are growing up and I can not cling to them because the ones in-between are missing. I feel that I sacrificed my last bastion of motherhood to look after my Mum and yes I resent that and I know people think I am selfish for even considering more babies. I am just a tattered remnant now - I look at all the things I am supposed to enjoy and I just think "but do I really?" I am doing better with this but still not sure it is not obligation.

Alaric says they just want me to be happy but - what is happiness - all I ever wanted was to feel safe and secure - to not be in pain. Apparently that is not happiness and I have struggled with pain my whole life and I'm no longer sure that I will feel alive without it. What would that be like? No pain? I am sure there must have been times of no pain but my memories are riddled with it. Sitting on the wall waiting for a bus at 17 my back burning, standing doing my shifts at the Union at 21 my pelvis and hip aching, 11 year old me in a Guide game crying because to sit like that made my knees feel like they were being crushed. And I didn't know others did not also feel this. And just to ease it often robs me of thinking capacity as the pain killers space you out but then so does lack of proper sleep.

And I think of my mum and the pain she endured and I get so angry - incandescent and this rage... it scares Al - it scares them and they need me and I can't be there for them and I know this has broken them. There has been so much lose for both of us - during all this Al also lost friends and family members and had to make decisions they never expected to have to make. They said they are sick of me almost dying and they are sick of death - it is eating our lives this bereavement merry go round we have been living. 5 years now - 5 yrs of lose and medical dramas and it sticks in our throats and it is scouring our bones and we are tired. The year before the pandemic Al ran out of leave days to take for funerals - last year they had to have months of compassionate leave to help me look after my mother and it was harrowing - the thing we all found the worst was when she was calling for her mother and reaching her arms up to us like a toddler but it came and went and the week before they discharged her I was hopeful even when they took her back in after the disaster of a discharge - I still thought... it doesn't really matter... things either don't matter or the smallest of things seems so frantically important.

The sunsets have been amazing lately - because of storms and dust and climate change - things that were once rare - specific light and cloud formations are now a regular thing and they are beautiful and breath taking but they are born of turbulence. I vibrate now - it is weird and part of the Graves Disease from my understanding - my whole self just kind of hums and the dreams are bright and real and in those dream I am retrieving my parents from weird distorted gardens or trying to get out of zombie filled shopping centres whilst trying to retrieve children I have left behind and sometimes Mum is already dead and sometimes they sit up after embalming and they have trouble thinking and I see the photos of her from when she was young and I think of the person she never got to be - the person she actually was beneath the damage and that hurts most of all - because she poured those regrets on us in the last year - she told us about her loves and wants and wishes.

I wonder if the vibrations are the after shocks of turbulence - like there has been an Earthquake and the sea floor is still cascading as minute shifts in currents prod the now unstable surface and everything slips - crashing down into the abyssal plain smothering fledgling life that dared to try and exist on the edge. This is my life now - it is a new stage - a phase as yet unseen but I have no idea where I am going and I am not sure I am even steering. Our electric car broke down on Friday and I had to steer as it was pushed round the corner but really I was just making things easier for those pushing I was following directions and I don't even think it really mattered if I'd done it completely wrong. I am on that hummocky bit of the river after the full force of the rapids - but I don't know where the river leads so there could well be more to come or a water fall or slow meandering rivers or back waters that snag and down you.

All I know is the more you love the more pain there is to feel - there is no way around that - no way at all. So all there is is loss really. It grinds you away. Sometimes I think I am just echos of all those I have loved that I still love and that fill my heart and mind - they are there but where am I? What am I? How can I ever be? I have always felt I only really come into being around others - that doesn't mean I don't want to go off and have time alone but there are still those people there for when I return - I am still tethered - but now... I feel like a none person. I had to spend the weekend on my own and I realised I am 41 and no one can remember me being on my own in a building at night - not once - room yes building no... there has nearly always been room mates for a start from siblings to cousins to my nans to my mother to other students to Alaric to the kids to sleep overs with friends - so I went to invite people round for a sleep over and realised it sounded completely in appropriate and so I didn't send the invites and then I had to face being alone. My friend visited for the afternoon after I cracked and asked what are you supposed to do on your own? No really I don't get it and I didn't like it if I hadn't had the animals I am not sure what I would have actually done.

All of this I know is part of the grief but I am also really not sure who the hell I am and I long LONG to run and climb and jump and I know that is realistically unlikely at best - I watch my friends caving videos and I can't even manage weeding my own garden at the mo - for the first year since university I am not growing veg or herbs - I have planted nothing just scattered some flower seeds and bought already growing plants to pot up to try and make things look ok - but they don't because actual work needs to be done and sometimes I can't even get myself into a vehicle without help.

I am so tired but thrumming with energy at the same time - oh I want to go to the skate park and fail at doing stunts - I want to join the armoured combat group - I want to canoe in the canal.

Instead I plod along with crutch or sometimes crutches and slowly amass the kilometres to add to challenged I've paid to get medals from - I am walking 100 Km for a medal I've personalised for mum but it isn't even a proper charity walk or anything - its just a shiny medal I thought would fit. People like telling me what to do - I am struggling to even want to listen to them - I would say I am running of regardless except I am not but maybe this is the way to go - maybe the river knows - I was after all born of the Muddy Waters, I have the Estuary in my bones - I have found a part of the Severn to sit and be by whilst Mary is in dance and a robin has befriended me and tries to steel my chips - hovering in front of my face and I love the birds there - I see herons and swallows and house martins (well by the houses I do), and I get to see the mud banks and think about how I used to go down on the Thames foreshore with my dad and find bits of broken doll and weird green crabs that didn't belong and needed the warm water from one of the factories to live. I remember the big chunks of chalcopyrite they put in when the docks had gone and I'd planted trees there with politicians helping with the digging and how important I felt planting those trees were even though I had a huge chest infection and shouldn't have been doing anything - I remember my mums students doing an art project on the rivers and waters ways and how it was tied into those trees and then whilst sorting things for the funeral me and and my brother went to parts of it and my friend who works on it told me about the new larger project that takes into account the fens and marshlands and I just remembered my dad taking me to see the wolves in there large enclosure and how the one I liked to watch with their piercing eyes would trot over and look at me though the fencing and follow me as best it could and the walks learning about all the uses for nettles and that I don't think I've taught my kids to identify the trees well enough and that I loved the marsh with its hidden Iron Age footings and the little owl with apparent ears. And I miss all of this.

After Dad died I felt he was some how Old Father Thames - that was how I saw him in my dreams - but I live far from my rivers except it turns out there is a tunnel connecting the Thames and Severn so I felt/feel that that makes them one thing - but kind of not as well - I liked that connection and I longed for the sea and estuary during lock down and I love walking by the rivers and seeing and photographing their multitudes of life - I feel I am part of them - I am the will o whisp that is the marsh light and I am the girl who played in the river and went to the river ever day and who went to get their dad to rescue the kids who did not know or understand the river or when you should not go in. I first found rocks on our river bend and I dream of my river realm regularly - I showed Mary water plants so that they could know where not to tread and at my place along the Severn we were told the tide was coming in - that the bore was coming and so we waited and Alaric got bored and wondered off but me and Mary watched and Mary got excited as the mud banks were swallowed and I realised watching the calm shallows become chopping muddy hills of water - that this brackish world trapped and interlinking two worlds - the sea and the river - this is my world - with salt marsh to boggy patches of unknown depth and the wide wetlands with hill struck island and I feel the boats calling me and the reeds waving and recall why I love Wind in the Willows so so much though I probably am Mole.

The rivers gave me pebbles and pets that were wild from foxes to badgers to ducks to my new robin friend - and I am those cross currents and calm water turned to power churn - I can go against the flow or with - I can choose - but there is life and danger in this.

Recently as I walked down to the river to earn this gold heart with my mums name on it that is probably spelt wrong because I made it but thats ok because I always spelt it wrong I thought about Sabrina or Hefren as my dad called her and of how she is the river Severn and I can help but here the eulogy Alaric created from my mothers own words about the boats and the adventures here and dad had had and hoped to have again - the rivers connected but separate are them and I miss donning a wetsuit and swimming in brackish waters that tend to salt and going in little boats up the river. My brother is into canoeing at the moment and has my granddads boats - I wonder if he too feels this connection with the rivers and I know that sounds stupid but I have always been called to water as to rock and fire.

Maybe spinning around trusting the currents is the way to go and maybe backwaters and rapids all have their place though I would like very much to have my family whole and be picnicking on a sand bank as we used to do.

Trickle charging spare batteries in the van (by alaric)

So, my van is a former "welfare van"; originally the sort of thing that would pull up next to some roadworks, offering a space for the crew to shelter from the rain and have their lunch. The back has four seats (with belts, so people can travel in them, making it a seven-seater overall), a table and a bunch of storage compartments. But it also has a 200Ah deep-cycle battery pack and a bunch of auxiliary electrical accessories. Read more »