T is for Traveling with G and why Delta Airlines is forever on my Christmas card list

T

(A true story for the letter T)

I have fleetingly mentioned spending a lot of time in the US travelling when I was a child.  In a reversal on the usual procedure, my role was often to look after my father.  He was spectacularly eccentric and my mother deemed me a proper person to make sure he got to places on time.  She had done it for many years and felt that her 12 year old daughter would make a decent substitute.  Or something.  I've never known quite what her reasoning was.

However it came about, G and I found ourselves going on a jaunt to Mexico via San Francisco before heading to New York to catch a flight home to England.  Ever practical, mum made sure that I was the person looking after passports, visas and flight tickets.  "Make sure you tell your father the flight is two hours earlier than it is." was her parting advice as she saw us off.

It was well-intended advice.  G habitually ran late everywhere and his notion of comfortable travel consisted of drinking half a bottle of wine, swallowing a nembutal and crashing out in a cacophonous snoring heap until the flight landed.  Minor details like knowing where we were supposed to be staying he could deal with, but airports did not bring out the best in him.

G and I liked travelling together.  I didn't mind the snoring and rather enjoyed whimsical side-treks to wherever took his fancy.  He let me stay up late and was unfussed by my desire to live entirely off Pepperidge Farm cookies.  It was a win-win as far as we were concerned.  Stage one went very smoothly.  Atlanta to San Francisco was a complete success.  I went with him to whatever lab it was he was supposed to visit and cheerfully broke some software.  We went to see Godspell.  We ate some nice meals and looked at San Francisco which I adored and have never visited since.  Onwards to the airport for the journey to Mexico.

Following mum's advice, I managed to get G awake enough to arrive at the airport comfortably early.  I was so proud of myself.  He wandered off to the bar while I book browsed and we met up to have some lunch.  Over which he announced that he had taken his pre-flight nembutal.  Two hours early.  This was not good news.  Oh how my sensible lie had come back to bite me in the bum. 

Working our way down the marathon walkways of San Francisco airport, we duly arrived at the departure gate and I took my eyes of an obviously rather woozy G to make sure we had the relevant tickets.  When I looked around again, he had vanished.  He stayed vanished.  The flight was called.  He was still vanished.  I could only think of one solution.  He must have gone to the Gents and the nembutal had kicked in.  By now, I was the only person at the departure gate and announcements were blaring all over the airport demanding that Professor Pask present himself immediately. 

Major panic ensued.  I was not going to investigate the Gents by myself.  Masterminding my father was one thing, but that was way out of my remit.  I got on the flight and demanded to see the captain.  Where I explained that my father had probably passed out in the Gents and could they possibly go and get him for me.  To the infinite credit of Delta Airlines, they did just that.  I've been grateful to them ever since.

This, of course, was before we got trapped at Mexico airport when we discovered that my visa had expired.  Same journey, but another story.

F is for Father (of second order cybernetics and me)

F

Stills from the second video link below.

I said that my father would get a longer entry, and here it is.   First, a couple of video clips giving a rough idea of some of his work and ideas as explained by the man himself.  They're both rather grainy and come courtesy of Youtube.

The Experimenters from 1974 - part of a BBC series.  I dimly remember this being filmed.  Note the sweet synchronicity of my childhood being in Richmond, Surrey and our home now being in Richmond, North Yorkshire.

Archive footage  from 1979 I think.  Not sure where it was made, but it gives a good flavour of G's style.

Both are edits by Paul Pangaro, who also runs an archive of G's work (link at the bottom of the post).

All of this is public record of course.  My own perspective is a bit different since I grew up with the man and understood only a very little of his work.

It took me a very long time indeed to realise that G was a major figure and regarded by some as a bona fide genius.  I was a naive child perhaps, but it was a genuine shock to discover that other people had fathers who did things differently.

• Like being awake during the day.  
• Like not walking up and down the road eight times before dinner.  
• Like not running on the spot for 40 minutes every night.  
• Like not leaving eight dabs of food on the edge of his plate for the fairies.  
• Like not having a basement full of combustible machinery and a steady stream of adoring and/or traumatised staff and students living with them. 

Looking back now, I realise too that my mother was made of truly sterling stuff as she took all this in her stride for the most part.  G had huge personal charm, but was also tunnel-visioned and selfish to an astonishing degree.  Our lives revolved around  his timetable and nothing and nobody got in the way of it.  He needed that order to function I think.  He simply assumed, childlike, that things would happen as he wished because that was the way he wanted the world to work.  

That makes him sound like a unloveable tyrant and he was not.  He was, in all the important ways, the kindest of men.  He moved mountains for his friends, students and family, often going to a lot of trouble to do so.  He took infinite pains with his students, pushing them far beyond anything they'd thought themselves capable of achieving.  He listened with equal interest to the latest developments in his own field to the minutiae of my day at school.  Really listened as well.

I've never known anyone so open to information.

For the record, I loved him dearly, miss him terribly and wish almost every day that I could share things with him.

A proper memoir is brewing I think.

For those interested in the technical side of G's work, I warmly recommend Paul Pangaro's extensive archive.  To be found here.   Paul did his PhD with G and is an old, old friend. 

C is for Cybernetics, Costuming and the deadly Catoblepas

C

My father was a cybernetician, so I couldn't really let C pass without mentioning it.

My father, doing his imitation of a rogue pixie. 
Photograph (c) Paul Pangaro 1985 (with apologies for not adding that before, but I had no idea who took it)

I admit that I also had a sneaky hope that few others would pick this as their letter C.  It was not to be.  The talented Suze over at Analog Breakfast got the jump on me.  Go over there, read her piece and starting pinging each other.

G (my dad) will get more mentions in due course.

Elsewhere in the in the land of C, we find costuming.  Regulars will know that I have an ongoing fascination and frustration with sewing machines.  An enforced purchase of one back in January and a deep-end plunge into doublet-making has borne fruit.  I no longer assume turkey when an instruction tells me to baste.   I can put in darts and I know the difference between on grain and bias cutting.  It is a whole new arcane world to explore and I am (much to my own surprise) enjoying it.

Long term I will end up with a wardrobe full of costumes ready to dump on unsuspecting cast members.  At the moment, I have a room full of fabric and several doublets and floppy hats in various stages of construction.

C is a rich mine as it turns out.  My final entry is a shout-out for the Catoblepas.  This noble beastie appeared in early bestiarys looking like this -

Early form catoblepas

It seems the original incarnation was a mistaken view of the gnu or wildebeest.  As with many mythical beasts, the creature subsequently found its way into RPGs in a rather more malevolent form.  My first introduction was through D&D when a huge stinking harbinger of doom arrived during one game and killed us all.  You never forget your first catoblepas.

Monstrous catoblepas

Pictures are on the tiny side, but you get the idea.

A is for me and asparagus

A

First letter. First post in 2012 A-Z challenge.  Best wishes and good luck to all who participate in it.

It also begins my name.  I'm not the biggest fan of Amanda.  It's an OK name, to be sure, but it always sounds a bit flabby to me and I deeply hate "Mandy" as an abbreviation.  Hate to the point that I simply blank it out as something I don't hear at all.

On the other hand, it could have been a great deal worse.  My father wanted to call me Cybora, in honour of cybernetics.  Mum did not approve, nor did she much like his alternative, Amaryllis.  She felt that naming a baby something that meant "little tinkling stream" was a bad idea.  Since she was around for the birth and he was not (busy having dinner somewhere - a story which is a microcosm of their relationship), she got her way and went with Amanda.

Mind you, I'd probably take Cybora like a shot now, but I'm glad I didn't have to get through school with it.

A is also for asparagus.  Fortuitously, we spent part of this morning planting the crowns.  Hopefully they will produce delectable vegetable spikes of goodness sometime in the next three years.  It's a slow business growing asparagus.  Patience and a deep compost filled pit are required.  We dutifully dug what looked like a narrow grave, filled it with manure.  Planted the crowns, watered them, hoisted the soil back over the top.  Now awaiting results.  Asparagus crowns look like diseased sea urchins at high tide.  Time, we hope, will turn them from this -

to this -

Craving

This is silly.

I'm up to my neck in stuff that must be done.

And yet ... and yet ...

The craving will not leave me.  My head is bursting with games I want to play in and games I want to run.  These are some of my current yearnings.  They're in no particular order.  Most likely the prospect of running or playing in any of them is very slight, but you never know.  Don't ask, don't get.

The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
This one is a charming tale of academic possession.  Players are staff and students of a university.  All are prepared to use any means possible to get ahead.  If that means ingesting a demonic bug, so be it.  I love this whole notion.  I grew up in a highly academic family and spent a lot of my childhood at various cybernetics conferences.  Believe me, the Roach is mild compared to the real thing.  Also more fun.

Castle Falkenstein
And here we have a wondrous swashbuckling mix of steampunk and romantic heroism set in an alternate Europe.  As a passionate advocate of Anthony Hope and all his works, how can I not want to play this?

Chronica Feudalis
Ah, Chronica Feudalis - you bonkers re-imagining of life in a 12th century monastery where monks gather in the cellar to play covert games.  The book is a thing of joy.  Beautifully presented, elegantly written and with an interesting rules system.

Dogs in the Vineyard
From the fertile mind of Vincent Baker comes a West that Never Was.  In stark contrast to some of the others on this list, players roam the country bringing the Word to the unknowing and rooting out injustice.  Injustice leads to unrighteousness and pride and that way lies doom.  Think of it as "The Crucible" with added patchwork coats.

Everway
A Christmas present from my old friend Chris (find him over at Bladesharp).  This is a box of unalloyed crazy and is begging to either be played or incorporated into something else.  Possibly both.  I mentioned I have a Sigil passage coming up for one of my groups.  Maybe, just maybe.

Houses of the Blooded
John Wick's world is one I've wanted to play in ever since I first read about the Ven.  In common with a lot of these, the book itself is a beautiful thing.  Immersive, wonderfully illustrated and with a glorious level of dottiness with the annotations attached to the illustrations and the quotes from old Ven literature.  Also appealing is the notion that players must operate within this world and by the rules of this particular society in order to survive.

Mythic Russia
I found this at UK Games Con about three years ago.  Love at first sight.  I have a lot of Russian blood and a long-standing love of all things Slavic and this takes me right back to my childhood and my mum telling me Russian fairy stories she learned from her father.  "Once upon a time, east of the sun and west of the moon, there was a different place, but not too different ..."

Any takers?

On directing (courtesy of Jonathan Miller)

Since I must use my brutalised right hand as little as possible, I've been reading.  And in doing so came across this:

"Directing is like medicine.  What I liked about medicine and what I like about directing, is this very delicate relationship you have between a group of people working towards some end on the basis of analysing and reproducting human behaviour.  Since you spend a lot of time while training as a doctor watching what human beings do, and trying to diagnose them as a result, that sort of skill pays enormous dividends when you try to reproduce what people naturally do."

I like this quote.  Jonathan Miller can be an inspired director and crosses many boundaries of expectation.  On the whole we don't really expect people to be genuine polymaths.  What I get from this particular quotation is a glorious holistic approach, where everything he does feeds into everything else he does - with the result that it all gets enhanced.

It is a very cybernetic approach - of which my father approved greatly (he being a Professor of Cybernetics).