Yarr! – The Weblog of Bob Heffernan

One day, some time ago, as I walked toward my home from the bus stop, my thoughts were interrupted by the honk of a horn and I turned to see my father’s car and all my family in it. The door was thrown open for me to join them the rest of the way home, and so I did. The door was closed and the car moved on and a second later a large cloth bag was handed to me from my sister who sat in the front passenger seat of the car. “We got you a present,” said my Dad. “Don’t open it until we get home.” The bag was a little warm. I started to poke at it in order to ascertain, without looking, what might be inside. “Don’t squeeze it!” my sister exclaimed, almost grabbing the bag out of my hands in panic. So, perplexed but under orders not to peek, I sat with this warm bag in my hands the few seconds it took to get home.

When we arrived home, I was allowed to look into the bag. Opening the top up I looked inside to find two tiny and very frightened eyes looking out at me. A kitten! A tiny kitten, shivering and terrified after her long journey. I had been asking if I could have a cat for some time now and now it had arrived unannounced and in a bag!

After about a fortnight of deliberation I finally named my cat. To me, as an ardent fan of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, the naming of the cat seemed an important matter and one deserving much thought. Several good names were suggested, among them Pox, Dr. Christmas Jones, Hollywood Hulk Hogan and Cat but I finally decided to call her φ after my favourite number. Various theories have been advanced by members of the family to explain φ’s name, including that her name is the second word of “fee fie foe fum” and that her name comes from the line in a soliloquy of Hamlet “Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden”. I often get funny looks when I explain the origin of the name. For this reason the cat is usually referred to as “Cat”.

Due to an almost insatiable appetite φ is considerably larger now than she was then but no less charming than she was as a little kitten. It has come to light that she is quite deaf, as is the case with many white cats. As such nothing fazes her. I turned the vacuum cleaner on once to do a little cleaning and rather than flee the noise, as most cats would have, she hopped onto the base of the machine and rode around on it as I tried to clear the room of her pervasive white hairs. She will plague you with mewing as you sit reading a book on a Sunday evening and not relent until she has sat on your lap and been rubbed and stroked until she falls asleep. If you leave the wrong door open you will find a hot little white ball asleep on your bed when you return in the evening. If you turn on a light in the room she will chase the shadows it throws for hours, and never grow tired of the Sisyphean pursuit. She is cuter than a red button on a little girl’s coat. She is, all in all, a very wonderful cat.

Here is a picture of a small stack of some of the older books that I own. The bottom two books are two of the three volumes of Mant’s Bible, which was published in 1816 “for the use of families” and included expository notes by George D’Oyly and Richard Mant. Unfortunately I do not own the first volume of this set. It is one of my greatest hopes that I will stumble upon it in some bookshop some day. The next book up is Poets of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Robert Wilmott and published in 1869. The little book on top is a copy of the Everyman’s Library edition of The Vision of Dante Alighieri as translated by H.F. Cary and is a 1928 reprint of an edition first printed in 1908. I chose these particular books to put in my little picture, not necessarily for their age but for their beauty. In the time that these books were published a book was still a relatively expensive and esoteric commodity, although the Everyman edition of Dante would have been comparatively cheap seeing as it was aimed at a broader market than the older books might have been. Books then were items prepared with some care, and were viewed as things more permanent than the book of today. As such, even the cheap edition of Dante here is more elegant and pleasing to the eye than the average book one might buy today.

I bring this up, not to bemoan the decline in the beauty of the book. This decline has paved the way for the widespread availability of the book which is a far more important and useful thing. I bring it up to state that I love books. A blog professing to give one an idea of things I come across daily would be sorely incomplete without some mention of books. I truly love books. I don’t mean this in the sense that I love to read, this is also true and I have loved to read my entire life, but what I mean to say is that I love books as objects. I might wax lyrical about older books, of which I own only a few, but I will readily admit to loving all sorts of books, be they old new, hardback or paperback. There is a certain aesthetic I go by obviously, I often prefer hardback books and I generally like simple and elegant cover designs on soft-back books, but I think it is fair to say that, in general, I love books. Even little chapbooks published in tiny poetry presses, I love those too.

It goes deeper than this. I also love the layout of the text on the page. This is one of the things that fascinates me most, and one of the things that draws me to poetry (for in poetry the possibilities when it comes to layout are almost endless). I love the different fonts used in different books, I love the way books are typeset, the list goes on. As physical objects, from the covers and the binding to the printing on the page (considerations of content aside) I love books.

If I read a cheap paperback book, undistinguished in design or layout, and I don’t enjoy it I will usually give it away to somebody else rather than store it on my shelves. However, there are several books, volumes of poetry in particular, which remain on my shelves even though I don’t particularly enjoy their contents. They remain there on their merits as physical objects. I only have a few such volumes now, but I’m sure the number will grow as my collection of books does.

I often toy with the idea of starting a small secondhand bookshop when I reach retirement age and dying amongst dusty volumes of books that nobody else wants. I have also pondered the idea of setting up my own small press some time, an idea which is much more reasonable, I suppose. Even if neither of these happens, I hope that at the end of my days my shelves will be full not only of novels and poetry that I love, but also many books, beautiful in and of themselves.

Well. Let us begin this little escapade, this foray into the waters of the mundane, waters that, to the chagrin of some, could hardly be described as uncharted. There may be too many charts, and too few interesting ones, but some of them have their charm. This exercise is to be primarily a cathartic one for me and so the interest of others is welcome but not strictly necessary. As such, I unabashedly present to the attention of my audience a small, grainy picture of a bus stop.

Yes, a bus stop! Hardly the most interesting item I could have chosen for my first attempt at my new format, hardly the thing to draw the interest of a prospective reader, but here you have it – a bus stop. My reasons for choosing this particular item are simple, it turns out to be quite difficult to take decent pictures with this little toy camera of mine, owing chiefly to the fact that the viewfinder is more inclined to show you what you are not taking a picture of rather than the opposite. As such, after a day of snapping off the occasional shot, the only presentable picture I had at my disposal was that of a bus stop. I have run the image through a few filters to make it a little clearer, which is why the colours have a certain air of artificiality to them (I like to think of it as “charm”). I particularly like the strangely vibrant green of the grass in the background.

My relationship with buses has been a long and troubled one. The morning this photograph was taken (yesterday morning, in fact) I was in a particularly grumpy mood, having slept overly late on a day where I could not afford the loss of time. To add insult to injury, I arrived at the bus stop to find that I had missed the bus by a few seconds (hence the lack of people in the picture). So, I was forced to wait 25 minutes until the next one, during which time I decided to begin my career as chronicler of my own life and take a few pictures of the deserted stop. Now, the bus for me has often been a cause for something close to despair. The bus from Cork city to Ballincollig is (relatively) infrequent, seldom punctual, extremely expensive and usually odorous. For the past four years I have found myself sat in it twice a day, silently (or sometimes audibly) bemoaning the its variously offensive aspects. I have stood long hours in the rain mentally picturing the brutal torture of tardy bus-drivers. I have crushed myself into too many buses full with too many people and muttered violence under my breath. I think it is fair to say that I am not fond of the bus, nor its many stops.

It must be said, the bus has not always been a source of gloom in my life. It has even brought some comfort. There have been times that the only chance I have had to do a little reading is on the bus, during my morning and evening commutes. I have sat on the bus clutching some beloved book and hoped the journey will take longer than usual, because when I arrive I must work, or eat, or do some other trivial thing. I have more than once forgotten to get off at my destination on account of being absorbed in a story or a poem. There is also the social aspect of public transport. The Ballincollig route is not exactly known for its talkative patrons, but there have been times when a stranger has had the courage to start a conversation with me and shone some light on a dull morning. There are some of these people I now know by name, there are some that I have even had occasion to meet outside of the confines of the bus.

Still, positive considerations aside, it is a source of private joy that my long and unenthusiastic affair with the bus is about to draw to an end. Mr. Bus and I will be seeing increasingly less of each other from now on, due to the arrival on the scene of a shiny new bicycle (which deserves to be, and will be, the subject of its very own post). As a friend of mine recently put it, in conversation on the bus as it happens, I am “raging against the machine by using a smaller and less complicated machine”.

Well, it turns out that the camera takes pictures of even lower quality than I remembered. The image on the left is a sample, a picture I took of some things on the dinnertable today:
In order for this silly little camera to take a picture that is even recognisable the lighting conditions have to be ideal and the camera has to be held very still. Results aren’t great if one takes a picture of a moving object either.

Still, I think it will serve me fine for the purposes I outlined before. I will probably want to resize the images slightly to make them a little less intrusive. Expect posts soon.

Update: I resized the image a little bit. This is probably the size I’ll go with from now on.

While wandering around lost in the city of Cork last night I had an idea. A flash of inspiration, as it were. I’ve been wondering how to find a format to make my recent determinations to keep a regularly updated personal diary-esque blog a reality. I think I may have found it. Somewhere around my house I have a tiny little toy digital camera gathering dust. I think I bought it in a bargain basket someplace. It has about a square inch footprint and takes horrible little grainy pictures. It’s something like the sort of camera you find on mobile phones these days, I suppose, but it is even worse on account of having a fixed distance focus and even lower quality images.

Anyway, this little gadget could be the key to regular updates. It’s tiny so I can carry it everywhere with me and take pictures very easily. The trick here is the fact that I could carry it everywhere every day. So here is what I propose: I will take pictures of things that I come across during my normal life. These could be the most mundane things, something in my bedroom or my office, say, or I could take a picture of something that catches my eye on a particular day. I’ll then put this picture on the blog and talk about what it depicts means to me. The diary aspect becomes clear when the picture is of something very ordinary. Over a period of time the cumulative effect should be a good deal of information about my daily life interspersed with my thoughts as I live it.

I understand that this is very likely not an original idea. I know there are people who regularly put photographs up on their blogs (linux.ie has a wonderful example in Donncha) but this is different because the emphasis is not on the picture, as such. The picture serves as an impetus for the blogging. Still, due to the fact that crappy mobile-phone cameras are so prevalent (one might even say endemic) I’m sure there are others who are doing exactly what I’m proposing. Still, I’ve never come across anything quite like this (I haven’t looked very hard) and even if it’s old hat for other people, it’s new to me.

Now I just have to find that camera…

Well, let’s give this a shot, eh? I’ve been procrastinating long enough.

In terms of blogging, my recent efforts have concentrated on my poetry blog, which is really little more than an indulgence. I’m enjoying it, although I’m not finding that my ability to critique my work has improved at all, which was partially the point of the whole affair. I am also growing in my feeling that my enthusiasm for the art far outstrips my ability in the area. Still, that’s a topic for a different post.

In things more concrete, I have started an MSc. in Mathematics in the last few weeks. Particularly, I am working on “numerical aspects of finite group theory”. Wonderful stuff. I would like to write a post soon about why I love group theory. The MSc. is through research and the life of a researcher is a completely different thing to the life I’ve lived over the past four years as an undergraduate. It is wonderful to not have to worry about exams and, for the time being at least, deadlines. It is very difficult to discipline myself to actually do any work when there are so few immediate expectations of me. It is also difficult to feel that I’m making progress when I have very little idea of how I should be measuring my progress. On a Monday I might prove something and be happy, on a Tuesday I might spend the entire day working to prove something and fail to do so, on a Wednesday I might spend the entire day reading. Each of these days was worthwhile but it can be hard to recognise each of them as worthwhile.

Then, of course, there are days like today where I do absolutely nothing of any merit whatsoever. This has been one of those days, although the decision to do nothing today was conscious. I needed to try and get some rest. Over the last few weeks I have been waking feeling very, very tired. This is despite the fact that I have been getting more sleep than I have for a long time. I am at a loss to explain this. The prognosis of most people is, of course, “stress”. Yes, stress, the modern zeitgeist. I certainly don’t feel stressed and I refuse to believe that I am, in fact, stressed without my knowing it. The MSc. is only in its infancy and so there is very little pressure on me. I have a comfortable part-time job which, apart from the odd occasion for panic (such as deleting all of my work in the progress of creating a backup, which I had to then reconstruct from memory), is not giving any cause for stress. My friends are all being wonderful at the moment, in particular my girlfriend who seems to spend her nights lying awake thinking of new and unexpected ways to be nice to me. None of this implies that I would be stressed. Yet still I’m tired.

So, stress or no stress, I have taken today to sleep in a little, avoid cycling to university in the rain by staying home, take time to write in my blog and surf the web a bit, and do only the tiniest bit of work. Perhaps it will help.

Well, this has been my first diary-like non pre-prepared blog post, as promised. I will not even read over what I have written, I will just publish. I’m almost proud of myself.