Hitching A Ride

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OK - to go some way to explain last night's apparently psychotic improvisation - I offer the following. I was riffing on the theme of a couple of significant anniversaries this year: the 100th. of Quantum Mechanics, and the 25th. of the death of Douglas Adams. There are two Douglas's that feature in the improvisation [it was made up as I wrote it] and a third which deserves a mention on a personal level. The thread of the thing was composed on the fly in the manner of a Round Britain Quiz puzzle, using the kind of cryptic allusion common to crossword setters the world over. Pictured above, some of the references laid out in Scrabble tiles. The full list is larger than this, but I'll leave it to you to work out the rest: it's all internally consistent, and follows some manner of logic which I can see clearly; which is to say I wouldn't have bothered with it otherwise.

Douglas Adams famously wrote 'The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy' "Trilogy", which was the BBC Radio Four soundtrack to my infamous three-day final-thesis writing binge, alone in our first flat in Stanmore Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, in early 1978. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book around the same time, which I purchased [at some expense] in my first term at UCNW, Bangor, in 1980, entitled "Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal, Golden Braid"; an enigmatic but difficult book which riffed on the very kinds of things that I am now so rather falteringly doing. Thirdly, of course, and tangentially, but naturally, is the third Douglas: The Douglas Arms; the now sadly defunct hostelry that was the welcoming space for tired and somewhat wary incomers to Bethesda in times past, and indeed when I first ventured here, the place I have lived most of my life.

Moving on, the Bond connection was multi-various in its intention. Staying with the, by now, I would hope obvious, Quantum theme, we have Q: a symbol used in audio engineering for the 'Quality Function', but rather more widely understood as a function of resonance, particularly with regard to filters, which applies to sound [but not exclusively] waves. We have c - the symbol for the speed of light; we have references to Denmark, Nils Bohr, and James Bond - "Quantum of Solace" - and of course Q their selves [I'm trying to be gender-non-specific here]; and also using bond as a side reference to the strong and weak nuclear forces, which obviously feature in this scientific and philosophical soup. The probabilistic sofa and stairs thing was also an inspired figment of the inestimable Douglas Adams' imagination, from his Dirk Gently novels, which as a theme featured in an old Macintosh screensaver for After Dark [Adams was a famously early adopter of the Apple Macintosh computer in the 1980s]. The leopard? Read The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy again, if you've forgotten the reference. All in all, last night's post was jazz riffing, no more, no less. Out of The Blue, shall we say...

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