Our grand inquisitor

Like some kind of Portuguese explorer looking for the spice islands of Indonesia, there are those who seem to feel the need to explore the further reaches of available toilets in the building. Have we not all witnessed a mysterious character who appears from nowhere and slips into your floor’s toilets every now and again? The toilet tourist. Perhaps they’re installing themselves as an envoy who will then start trading in exotic air freshener. So you walk in, catch eyes and pretend that this is all perfectly normal. All the while thinking that "we've got a live one here" and wondering how one ought to ask someone to put a can of air freshner to one side. Luckily, there don't seem to be too many of the professional freshners that are so trendy in even the least salubrious of areas in London.

Anyway, the heat continues despite entering autumn and we’ve been here for about 40 days. Now admittedly we’ve not exactly been fasting, but there are certainly temptations. Switzerland is our Diabolos and Lucerne the temptation to display divine powers. Perhaps it is the ghost of one particular procurator that still floats around on top of Pilatus who is preaching to us. Or else it’s the lack of golden leaves and silvery lakes, but there is a lure there. One that will no doubt draw us back.

Perhaps we are just being presented with options and too much freedom. Perhaps we are no longer needed in Switzerland and should go before the grand inquisitor straight away. No doubt drawing parallels like that should be enough in itself. After all, nobody’s killed Fyodor here, but it’s probably still worth holding some kind of trial. Of course, anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him so we probably ought to be careful. We’ll embrace the bloodless, aged lips and make sure that choice still remains.

Or is this all just literary theft!

Weaving a web of precedent

With such a baffling array of new 'tools' for the web, it's a wonder what they are all supposed to do. After all, what use is a tool without a job? In fact it seems that most of them create jobs rather than solve them. Take this blog for example. Before I started it, I spent my time on other things and yet the advent of a new technology has led to my writing banal and conceited thoughts into a space that no one reads. Or at least I don't know if anyone reads since there is no counter for visitors. Perhaps the counter will only start with visitors or there is no 'tool' for that very real job. We create with no other purpose but to create a perfect technology.

So the Internet is some strange Pygmalion adventure that will end with us all praying that Venus takes pity on us all and brings it all to life. Worryingly, Second Life has in fact almost achieved this already. We could even go so far as avoiding the Web’s series naming convention like it is a sequence of ever more boring films and plump for calling it Paphos. The worst part is that we are all so insouciant about what would truly be the momentwe cross the Rubicon and disturbingly immerse ourselves in our technological marvel. And who was born in Paphos?

All this leads to the news that it’s humans' innate sense of fairness that has separated us from chimpanzees. An extraordinary discovery that perhaps has huge ramifications for how we look at our modern societies with their increasing unfairness. Of course, it’s worth considering whether this is really a discovery or more of a wishful interpretation of animal behaviour to be a simpler version of ourselves. A Web 1.0 if you like.

This is wear are tail begins

I was accused of mistaking the secret of facism for its secretiveness, engineered no doubt by my remarkable impatience in pushing through the spell checker without due attention, turning, presumably "secretive" into "secret of", thus rendering the whole into a mystical, sacred and well, strangely inspiring allusion: "secret of fascism". It ought to be a film by Victor Erice.

It was, in fact, quite deliberately engineered. Otherwise the final dénouement of fascism being revealed as an entity in itself rather than living vicariously through thugs wouldn’t work. Considering the destruction of medieval Berne and its imminent replacement with brutalist concrete monstrosities, as a result of people raging against our urban dystopias, perhaps Fritz Lang would be a more pertinent film maker too.

Strangely enough I read about the riots in The Guardian which is almost worse than wistful reminiscing about Luzern. Perhaps Switzerland is my Shere Khan, hunting me until I fully move on into the Orient. I’m not sure I’ll be following in the steps of Kipling, but these are still early days.

The rugby has been fantastic; the only downside is that England vs. Les Bleus translates to 3 on Sunday morning over here. However, the vast numbers of Kiwis and Aussies to bait more than makes up for it. Our Irish contingent is no less pleased and has become as French as she will become soon!