The conservator’s ideal museum would keep all objects in climate-controlled enclosures, sealed off from each other and the outside world, without any lights or visitors.

Such a museum wouldn’t be very useful, but it would keep the objects in good condition!

Perhaps a compromise would involve the museum providing free downloads of images they’ve taken themselves to help reduce the number of photos being taken.

Clearly this refers to the 40 years since England last won the World Cup, in that famous and horribly over-quoted final at Wembley, which is no more. It’s a good effort I think.

Unfortunately, looking at the path I was walking on at the time, with the bottles and cans and boxes and bits of magazine strewn all over it, I think something a little more drastic is going to be needed before people stop leaving crap everywhere. In the mean time, walking down some streets round here is nearly enough to make you cry — or at least nauseous.

Jealous? You bet! But I wish them every happiness, and intend to go over to Boston, MA and see them some time next year, for they will be making their new lives in the States.

Tomorrow the real stress starts: an 0638 train from Nottingham takes me to Bristol for the Automated Reasoning Workshop. At least I should get a good dinner in the middle of it — the restaurant where we’re having the meal looks gorgeous. I return to Nottingham on Tuesday, and have a few days of relative peace before turning out again to the Midlands Graduate School in Leicester, another four days causing me to have to miss the April meeting of the Society of Recorder Players, something I’m displeased about as due to the holidays I’m currently deprived of the opportunity to play with other people. I can’t wait for life to return to some semblance of normality.

Around all this I also need to finish off some other things, and somehow find some time to sleep and not go mad.

I cannot wait until May.

According to the article, the report on which it is reporting suggests that power needs to shift away from ministers to MPs, and from central to local government. Sounds good to me. We’re supposed to be a parliamentary system, so the continual emphasis on the Prime Minister and what the Prime Minister wants and the surprise evident in the reporting when he doesn’t get it mystifies me. The Prime Minister is not a dictator, not an emperor, most certainly not the King. I’m leaning quite heavily toward the notion that banning political parties might be a good move. Or at least banning party policies that force MPs to vote with the party line. Let each MP vote according to the best interests of his or her constituents, the people who in some way voted for him or her. Let each MP be more involved in his or her local constituency. Let it be felt that writing to my MP will actually get me some attention, that he or she will take notice of my opinion.

It also recommends a 70% elected House of Lords. That scares me in a way. If not done right, it could just be a puppet rubber-stamping chamber that approves everything the Commons vomit up to them. An elected House of Lords would have to be carefully separate from the Commons, their priorities different, their campaigning and affiliation nothing to do with the government. Perhaps we could supplement it with a randomly-selected sample of voters (well almost random, in some sense representative of the country as a whole, so drawn from the entire country and from a variety of backgrounds and communities), who are picked for say a year, and during that time are required to (and compensated for) weigh in on Acts which are about to be passed, giving extra opinion to be heard in the Lords’ debate on the subject. That would offer a direct line between the people and the upper chamber, but perhaps it wouldn’t work in practice.

Pipe dreams? Bit like true democracy itself, but if we’re going to be a representative democracy, can we at least feel like the people in charge represent us?

Another rambling random idea comes to me. Continue to have MPs for constituencies, but also have MPs for groups. They’d draw their support from votes nationwide, and sit in the Commons or maybe the Lords, or possibly both, representing issues or groups or causes which are particularly important to the voters at the time. Might be tricky to set it up right, but it could cause an interesting shift in the power structure.

Anything to stop the impression that Tony Blair can do whatever he wants and Parliament will automatically approve it. That idea is dangerous and needs to be stopped immediately.

Although that really does remain to be seen. They’re still talking about a forced total evacuation, so we’ll see. Some are kicking up a fuss about the police confiscating guns from the citizens so they can’t resist the evacuation — personally, I don’t think they should have them in the first place so I’m really not bothered about that. I am not particularly pleased with the way the whole affair has been handled, but there’s really nothing for me to do — other than rant about it occasionally from an uninformed perspective, and give frequent thanks that I don’t have to move to America. Britain has its flaws — plenty of them — but on the whole it works out pretty well at the moment.

I have of course been preparing to go back to Nottingham to start my PhD. Sort of scary really — I’ve done this all before, to the same University, but it’s been two years and I’m really completely unprepared for the necessary organisation to get this all sorted. Oh well, it’ll come together at some point — no doubt not to Mum’s satisfaction, but I’m not very good at that lately. We do need to get out of each other’s hair, and this should sort it quite nicely. Were I not going to Uni, I’d be looking to move out I think. That’s no secret — I’ve told Mum that myself.

Just life, really. Things will get more interesting once I get back to Nottingham — although I’ve been doing some things which could turn out rather interesting. I’m just not going to talk about them right now.

Doesn’t that add a nice aura of mystery to the whole affair?

Much has been written about the response to the attacks by Londoners. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised by how people dealt with it. They have, after all, faced years of attacks by the IRA and carried on going to work in the morning. This is still a significant event, of course — fifty people are dead — but we have seen and endured worse. We can endure this without losing our culture or our way of life.

I find myself completely baffled by the mindset of the people who could orchestrate and carry out such an attack though. The concept of deliberately causing such explosions, at a time and place to kill and injure as many people as possible, is something I cannot hold in my mind with any consideration that I might carry out such an action. Yes I know, I engage in simulated violence playing Grand Theft Auto on a regular basis, but that’s far removed from the real world. When real people suffer as a result of my actions, I simply cannot conceive of doing it.

So what kind of mind does a person have to have to do such a deed? That’s what worries me.

Jamster. The ringtone people.

‘But why?’ I hear you ask. ‘Why are they the most evil evil in the world today?’

Because they have Flash adverts. With sound.

Unfortunately it seems there were some problems with the craft during the flight, so they’re going to want to check things very carefully before they think about doing another flight. I would guess that we’re unlikely to see them win the X Prize before October or November, which is cutting it close as the competition expires at the end of the year. But then what do I know?

What I do know is that Alanis Morissette’s new album ‘So-Called Chaos’ is excellent. I just wish I found it easier to remember how to spell her surname — I usually end up adding too many ‘r’s, and have to check it every single time.

I also got hold of a copy of ‘Liege and Lief’ by the Fairport Convention, which I had high hopes for as it was voted the most influential folk album of all time by the Mike Harding show on Radio 2. Unfortunately it was very disappointing; some of it’s excellent (‘Matty Groves’ and ‘Tam Lin’ stand out particularly) but their version of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ can’t hold a candle to June Tabor’s recent rendition of it on ‘An Echo of Hooves’, and ‘Reynardine’ likewise is nothing next to Maddy Prior’s version on ‘Arthur The King’. So four or five good tracks out of 10 surely doesn’t qualify as the most influential of all time… does it?

Still, I bet it made an impact when it was first released. Maybe I’m just spoiled by June Tabor, Steeleye Span’s new works, the sublime Kate Rusby and the rather surprising Jim Moray.

“The dye, which the farm insists does not contain chemicals”

So if it’s not got chemicals in it, what does it have in it, exactly? Good intentions? Quick science lesson people: every substance is a chemical or combination thereof. The stuff you extract from plants is no less a chemical than the stuff that comes out of enormous chemical plants — and that probably came out of a plant somewhere along the line as well.

People automatically think chemicals are bad, but where would they be without their sodium chloride, eh?

Yeah yeah, I know the location’s not a shock.

So Alex had some things to say about the things Carl said in his response to Alex’s entry, and Alex also had some things to say about the things I said in my response to that same entry. Now I have a few things to say about the things Alex said in response to both the aforementioned responses to his original entry.

Gosh I love this, it’s amazing how convoluted the sentences can get when you’ve just got a few levels of TrackBack. Imagine what it’ll be like when we’ve been at this for a few more weeks.

And now to the point.

To quote Alex: “Matthew’s comments on the feelings we have during an encounter with “God or Gods”, slightly worry me.”

He said a bit more than that but I’m not going to reproduce the entire thing, I’ll respond to it instead.

Alex appears to be worried by my suggestion (based on real research, incidentally) that sensations he’s always seen as spiritual effects with apparent physical symptoms are in fact physical symptoms caused by spiritual stimulation of part of the brain. Personally, I don’t have a problem with this at all. If this is how it works, I can see two explanations for it. Either $deity comes along and thinks ‘ah, I’ll let this human know I’m here’ and pokes out a finger and tickles the right bit of our brains, or a God turns Their awareness on us and part of our brain responds to that attention through some kind of non-physical means, and that response, that recognition perhaps of the presence of Divinity, causes an interaction within the brain which causes such physical sensations.

I find the second more likely. It seems to me that such ‘encounters’, or maybe those moments when we move temporarily closer to the Divine, are accompanied or perhaps characterised by an opening of the mind, a point where some of our unused potential is tapped. This would be one possible explanation for how the invocation of the Goddess and God may empower the magical workings of a Witch, for in the presence of the Goddess and God they temporarily gain the additional capability to focus and channel a greater amount of energy. That would characterise the Goddess and God as passive enhancers, increasing and developing everything around Them.

That’s assuming a Deity can have a physical location, which in the normal sense of things (Jesus would be an exception) wouldn’t really be true. I do suspect that the Goddess and God, while capable of being in more than one place and responding to more than one person at once (or intervening/meddling with more than one person at once, if that’s what they’re doing at that particular point in time), don’t devote the same amount of attention to everywhere at once. When a Christian prays, it seems likely that God might turn a greater amount of attention to them, and cause such effects as described above in the process of doing so.

Alternatively, it could be a sense of deliberate physical reassurance, a trigger set off by God to let you know that yes, He’s really here.

A similar effect would be observed within the magic circle used by Pagans. When the circle is cast and the Witch or Witches within it stand between the worlds, they’re like a finger poked into the bottom of a fairly taut bedsheet – it pokes upwards into the part of the world above. Combined with the invocations of the ritual, this more or less ensures that the Goddess and God will pay attention to the circle and its occupants, causing once again the same effects.

Yet another possibility is that the sensation is caused by the mental/magical activity required by the human mind to contact God/Goddess in the first place, but I find that particular possibility somewhat unlikely. I don’t know why, it’s another one of these intuitive things.

This hasn’t been very coherent. To make some kind of conclusion to this point…

What I was trying to say might have been what Alex interpreted it as, but it’s not really the intent of what I was trying to say. The way Alex mentions a ‘purely physical thing’ implies that I don’t believe this is a ‘real’ spiritual event, but I believe it is — I’m merely attempting to explain, justify and find common elements in both our described experiences, for I believe as a Pagan that all religious experience can be characterised by similar or identical things.

And perhaps it’s a throwback to living with Christians at Uni that I feel a continual need to justify my own beliefs developing so differently (or perhaps not so differently), and perhaps I shouldn’t feel that need because it isn’t really necessary — certainly many other Pagans I’ve met don’t seem to share it (but then some of them seem to feel a need to attempt to disprove Christianity at every point, which strikes me as pointless and unnecessary).

I shouldn’t do that really.

And the other thing Alex said that I wanted to respond to:

“I don’t know the pagan position on evil spirits and stuff, but if they have the ability to stimulate our lobes as well, then we could be walking on dangerous ground.”

Yes, I suppose we could be, but I’ll suggest that most Pagans at least are not, because within the magic circle we are explicitly protected from all entities, spirits and other things which might do us harm. All the circle casting rituals I have read and done include a purging of the space and the establishment of a barrier through which only things which will not cause harm to those within (or some variation on the same theme) may pass, and in fact that prohibition often lies both ways, preventing harmful things being cast out of the circle, which effectively prevents that circle being used for harmful magic, in line with general Pagan morality.

So the general position on evil spirits is that yes, there are things out there which are bad and which you don’t want to tangle with on a psychic level. Guidelines for dreamwalking, astral projection and other such out-of-body activity all include the necessary things to do for protection from roving unpleasantness, some of which may be seen to come from other humans, although some authors are noticeably more worried about this than others. Dion Fortune wrote an entire book on the subject of psychic defence after suffering an attack herself when she was relatively young; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but intend to as it’s probably very interesting. Other authors such as Rae Beth speak very explicitly about protective barriers before attempting anything which might leave you vulnerable, such as moving to the astral plane. I’ve often thought of it as going out and leaving your front door open – you might be okay, you might come back to find a cat’s wandered in and peed on your sofa, or you might come back and your computers have been stolen. Not really worth the risk.

Oh, and I think Christians are probably walking fairly safely too, at least in a church… it seems to me that the effect of consecrating a church and then using it as a church on a regular basis would be similar to that of casting a magic circle. The church differs mostly in that it’s a permanent installation, whereas the circle may be cast anywhere, and the nature of this is down to the characters and relative sizes of the religions in question. There is no point building a place of worship just for Pagans in a village of four hundred people where virtually all of them are Christians, but there is a lot of point in building a church for them to go to.

I think that’s about it for now, I’m tired and you’re probably bored stiff by now anyway.