Floating down to Camelot

How big does a group need to be before it is acceptable to give Christmas cards to only some of its members?

Yes, I know there are many groups where everyone decides not to give cards at all, or to only send electronic cards, or whatever. But let's confine our musing to groups where the dishing out of physical cards is the norm.

A company with just 6 employees, or a book group with just 8 members. People would almost certainly give cards to everyone in the group, even those they barely knew or didn't like. Giving to only half would seem like an insult to those you'd missed out - and you'd almost certainly find that one of them gave a card to you, thus causing that whole "oh no, I got a card from them and it is not Too Late to give them one in return" angst.

But a large open-plan office or choral society with over 100 people in it? That sounds Too Big for people to be expected to give to everyone, and it's also much more likely that there are people in the group you've never met. Is it socially acceptable to give cards only to a hand-picked selection of people you know and like, while missing out the others, or is it necessary to devise some other justification based on sub-groups: "I'm only giving cards to the brass section," even if you absolutely hate Erica on second trombone, and had a great time with viola-playing Lily in the pub last week?

So, how big does the group have to be before it stops being the norm that you give cards to everyone?

I ask only out of idle curiosity, not because I'm facing any card-related dilemmas of my own.

The stated justification for the Round Table is that no knight takes precendence. However, most medieval depictions of said table show King Arthur sitting at it. This is a clear contradiction of the stated aim, since precedence will be defined by proximity to Arthur. Yes, you could randomise this, perhaps by holding a daily raffle (proceeds to go to distressed damsels), but you could do this just as easily with a plain old rectangular board. I think the most likely solution is that King Arthur sat in the middle, either in a hole cut in the exact centre, or sitting on an elevated platform that dangles from the rafters. No knight should suffer the ignominy of having the king's back turned to him, so the King would have to rotate. It would be easy to devise a mechanism for this, like a turnspit or a donkey-powered well, powered by dogs or small servant boys (but probably not hamsters.)

However, other problems present themselves. Some sources put the number of Knights of the Round Table as high as 150. That is a VERY large table, and likely to need a veritable forest of legs beneath it. However, medieval carpenters who can build cathedral roofs can cope with such a table. But what about the poor king, stuck in the centre of a circle large enough to hold 150 round its circumference? Think of the noise, and the constant shouting of "what? What?"

And then there's the problem of serving. Service a la Russe hadn't come along yet, so all dishes need to be put on the table at once. With a rectangular board, you can fill up from both sides. High Table, sitting on only one side, can be served from the opposite side, and regular people can ask the person opposite to pass them the buttered parsnips. With the guests sitting around the rim of a vast circle, only a tiny part of that table can be used for serving food, and the rest is wasted, and impossible to clean without clambering on it. The King, stuck in the middle, would need food parcels thrown at him - a skill, perhaps, practiced by pages in the tilting yard?

But there are other ways to denote precedence at the dining table. Take the whole "above the salt" thing. Clearly it would be out of the question to have a single, elaborate Salt on the table. Thus we see the origin of the small salt shaker that we see now on every cafe table - or maybe even tiny sachets, that survived into the present century only in Salt 'n' Shake crisps. And what about boars' heads and such like, and the honour of carving such things? If Knight A has a boar's head put in front of him, and Knight B only has some boiled cabbage, then Knight A is clearly more favoured! Instead of this divisive practice, we would need a vast array of small plates of mixed food stuffs, none of them an obvious centrepiece. Did the dining needs of Camelot lead to the invention of tapas?

Or did the Round Table itself rotate along with the King, thus bringing boar's head to each knight in turn? Was the Round Table the origin of the Lazy Susan?

I've always thought that "see you later!" was something that could only be said to someone you were expecting to see later that day. "See you tomorrow!" and "See you next week!" or a vague, "well, um, see you again, um... well, sometime," were available for other occasions, as were more generally applicable things such as "Bye!" and "See you!"

However, this has led to exchanges such as this. Colleague leaves in the afternoon to go to a meeting elsewhere. "See you later!" colleague says. "Oh, are you coming back?" I say. "No," says colleague. This has happened so often, and with so many people, that I am now wondering if I have been wrong all these years. At the end of our weekly dance practice, loads of people say "see you later!" to everyone as they leave, although they know these people won't be seen again for a week. Maybe I am the only person who interprets "see you later" in the way that I do.

So who do you agree with? Me, or (almost) everyone else I know?

I do not understand expensive Christmas crackers. Now, I have never experienced truly expensive Christmas crackers. Dukes and millionaires and super-villains may well adorn their Christmas table with thousand pound crackers that contain real tiaras, jokes performed by world-famous comedians (who appear in holographic form at your seat to perform them), and crown jewels and rocket packs.

Okay. Resuming now. I took a few minutes off the imagine the staff Christmas party in an evil overlord's secret underground lair, and from there moved on to Christmas dinner in the Dark Lord's fastness. I think I'm ready to resume this post now. Right. *deep breath*

Forget super-expensive crackers, and consider only the price range of crackers that you buy in normal High Street shops. I've experienced (do you experience a cracker?) crackers that were £4 for 12. I've... experienced (I'm saying it more doubtfully now, as I mentally envisage a theme park called The Cracker Experience, and pause to imagine its rides) crackers that wanted to be sold at £12 for 6 (but were reduced to half price; I only EVER buy crackers at half price.) I've experienced (said defiantly this time) crackers that I'm sure cost twice that, if not more.

( Compare the cracker )

I have just been accused of overthinking things. I find this accusation very unfair. I mean, somebody just asked the question, "What would you do if the world was going to end in a week, and this was a certainty, with no room for doubt? What would you do?" "Well, obviously I'd stop going to work," someone else said.

"But wouldn't everyone do that?" I said. You wouldn't be able to buy anything, because there would be nobody to sell them or stock the shelves. There would be no power, water or electricity - presumably, unless these things carry on quite happily without human intervention. You couldn't jet off for that holiday of a lifetime you always meant to have, because who would fly you there or accommodate you or feed you? Some people would just go, "Wahay! No police! No judges! No consequences!" and indulge in looting and crimes and anarchy. So when the law-abiding people, driven by their inability to buy food, were driven to some polite and tentative looting of their local shop, it would be empty anyway.

The only hope would be that the "Wahay! No consequences!" gang were outweighed by those who were driven by the impending End of All Things to turn to religion, and therefore were determined to cram as many selfless good deeds into that last week as normal. But it would be too much to hope that all these good deeders were electrical engineers, or saw the orderly maintenance of grocery supplies in local corner shops as as good deed sufficient to tip the balance in their Last Judgement. And, besides, some of them would be too busy desperately turning the other cheek that they'd get squished by the "Wahay! No consequences!" lot. As would the "there might be some mistake; best not do anything rash in case this whole thing blows over" lot. If they hadn't starved due to their refusal to even try to loot bread, that is.

"Okay," said the others, "what if the world was going to end, but only you knew about it?" That would be just as bad, I said, because there would be Questions. Try to quit your job. Questions. Bureaucracy. The slow-moving wheels of HR. Pretty annoying to spend the last week of the world locked in disciplinary hearings and the like. And could you really enjoy that last week if you had to watch everyone around you proceeding in blissful ignorance, when you knew that everything would end in a week? And imagine all the arguments that would result from the whole "what's the matter, dear?" "Nothing," conversations.

So, like I said, apparently I overthink things and ruin perfectly good conversations. I have no idea what they're talking about. ;-)

The supermarket I usually use has a "baskets only" lane, but doesn't specify how many items you can have. I naively assumed that all express lanes were the same, but found out to my cost that they were not. On my first visit to the supermarket across the park from where I now work, I joined the express lane with 11 items, only to get sternly told by the assistant that it was strictly ten items or fewer. She made me put everything back in the basket and join another queue.

Today I had 10 items, so decided to risk it again. There were 4 people ahead of me in the queue. However, it turned out that one of them, although he had only 3 items, had forgotten about the whole concept of paying, and when asked for money, embarked on slow but laborious search of every possible bag or pocket, in search of his wallet. Another was doing something long and complicated involving exchanging stickers for knives. The sight of knives on the conveyor belt caused someone behind me to say, "She's got a knife!" and run away to the trolley aisle on the grounds that it would quicker. The other 2 people had 12 items, so had split them into two groups, and paid for them in two separate transactions, thus taking quite a lot longer than they'd have taken had the system allowed them to go through with 12. (I consider this Cheating, and grumped silently about it in the queue behind them.) ("Have you got a loyalty card?" they were both asked on transcation 1, and said no. "Have you got a loyalty card?" they were both asked again on transaction 2, on the off-chance that they'd just acquired one by magic. Clearly this is a shop that believes in Rules and Scripts, and neither can be departed from.)

Anyway, it seems to me that the important thing in an express lane is the amount of time you take going through, not the number of items you have. I therefore propose that express lanes start labelling themselves as "no more than 90 seconds per person," or something like that. Of course, shop assistants vary very much in their speed, so each assistant would have to have a speed rating, and extra seconds would be added (or taken away) from the 90 seconds accordingly. It's only fair. Also, delays that are Not Your Fault (barcodes that don't read etc.) will result in the automatic pausing of the stopwatch.

The problem comes with deciding how to penalise those who exceed their time. After all, the time limit is most likely to be reached after they've bagged their items up, but before they've paid, so it's not the shop's interest to have the assistant say, "sorry, your 90 seconds are up. Please take your bags and leave." Cancelling all the purchases, and making them take everything out of their bags and go back and queue again is clearly not an option, since it would only cause even more waiting for the people behind in the queue. I think the best solution is to fine everyone who overruns. If they've not yet reached the point of being asked for money, £1 can be added to their bill, but if they're half way through paying, they'll have to put £1 in a collecting box. It would also be nice to reward super-quick shoppers with something, too: perhaps points on a card, which they can collect to redeem for nice things.

It used to be a rite of passage for new members in the Oxford Tolkien Society. At some point, innocently, they would say "SORE-on" or "MINE-as Tirith," and get loudly corrected by everyone present. Okay, so it didn't happen to everyone, but it happened enough to be - in my memory at least - something of an in-joke. I certainly pronounced both words wrong until I was told.

The Hobbit was a book I had read to me, aged 8 (although I illicitly reached the book down from its "out of reach" place on top of the wardrobe and read ahead) so I can blame my original mispronunciation of Smaug on my Mum. (She also said "Fylie and Kylie," which I stubbornly persist with, despite the Kylie Minogue connotations (that didn't exist back then, of course) because I think the alternatives sound even sillier. Or sylie. Or seelie.) The Lord of the Rings names I read to myself at 9, so have only myself to blame.

Not that I feel that guilty, really. ( Questions about the pronunciation of made-up words. )

People often seem to have difficulty accepting a person's taste in fiction doesn't necessarily reflect their real-life opinions. Several examples in the last few weeks have set me a-musing.

( Musings )

I don't find it that hard to accept that the world has changed since I was a child, because I have changed. Even so, it still sometimes startles me to look back at pictures and images of the 1970s and see just quite how old they now seem. Things like Life on Mars startle me by showing (and doubtless exaggerating) how much things have changed. There was a very recent series on Channel 4 which consisted of modern people watching 1970s clips and gasping, "wow! What primitive racist/sexist/perverted/bigoted idiots everyone was back in the 1970s and how enlightened we are now!" (Everyone at work was talking about it, gasping in horror at the clips (and, yes, many of them were quite startling.) I said I hoped to live to see the 2060s version of the show, in which celebrities from 2060 look back at clips of TV in 2014 and gasp in horror at the quaint and shocking social attitudes that were considered normal back in those unenlightened days. This was not the correct reaction, apparently.)

Anyway... I find it a lot harder to accept that the world has continued to change after I became an adult. This fact jumps out at me every now and then, and startles me far more than the 1970s so. I was just reading a book that I was thinking of as "modern," since it's the first book in a current series set in the modern world. At one point, the main characters heard a reference to a local historical figure, and needed to find out who he was. How on earth can we do it? they wondered. The library's on half-day closing today. Who else can we ask? No mention of the internet whatsoever. (And, yes, I know full well that even nowadays, not everyone has access to/can use the internet - I deal with this issue every day at work - but that's not the point.) I turned to the publication details, and the book was published in 1998. and therefore probably written in 1997 or earlier. In one way, it's "modern." In another way - no internet; mobile phones being very much a minority possession; people smoking in indoor public places - it feels like another world.

It must be hard to be writing a long ongoing series in an era of rapid change. What are your choices? You can make your internal chronology match your publication chronology, but you might not want your characters to age that rapidly. You can doggedly stick to your desired internal chronology, and gradually slip into writing historical novels: book 1 is set this year, but book 25 is set 20 years ago. You can just hand-wave it away, and hope no-one notices: book one has 1998-style technology, and book 15 has 2014 technology, but strangely the characters have only aged two years.

Or you can just be plain confusing and contradictory. I'm now on to book 2, which was published in 1999. However, the publisher seems to have decided to "update" it for a new edition, since an event that happened 25 years ago has now been date checked as being 1984. However, since people are still assumed to be incommunicado when away from home, and nobody uses the internet to search for information, and everyone's still smoking inside, it seems like a very pointless update, as if the publishers are trying to con us into thinking it's set "now" when it clearly isn't.

In the book I'm reading at the moment, a character has recently appeared, whose "face was deeply scored with the tell-tale lines of debauchery and self-indulgence." What are the tell-tale lines of debauchery and self-indulgence? I've just spent a rather strange few minutes desperately trying to look self-indulgent in front of a mirror, to see if lines are likely to be etched in my face if I do it repeatedly, and have yet to notice any particularly unique and unambiguous lines. A few pages on, it was remarked upon that somebody else's face bore lines that spoke of the year of angst and hardship they had experienced a few hundred pages earlier. However, lines etched by self-indulgence are clearly completely different from Lines of Angst.

What about lines of short-sightedness? I've got vertical grooves between my eyes that come from having one short-sighted eye and one slightly long-sighted one. Between the two of them, my eyes focus okay, but only if I ever so slightly frown with my short-sighted eye. But I don't think fiction tends to notice such things. In books, facial lines come from past experience or from general disposition, and can even tell you at a glance if their wearer is a goodie or a baddie.

But at least they're not as expressive as eyes. Eyes in fiction are so much more expressive than our boring, workaday real-life eyes. In fiction, eyes can convey an amazingly in-depth account of their owner's emotional state, doing to every last nuance, and the person who sees the said eyes always perfectly understands what they can see. I keep wishing for an exchange along these lines:

"Her eyes were brimming with her love for him, but there was a shadow in them, too, caused by her concern about her father's disapproval, but - ah, sweet hope! - a glint of defiance that showed that she was planning to defy him and risk all for her love."

He went down on one knee and took her hand. "Oh, my love! I can see in your lovely azure eyes that..."

"Oh! What?" She shook her head sharply. "I'm sorry. What did you say? I was trying to decide whether to have meatballs for dinner, or if pork chops would be better."

(Ow. Typing is hard. I've managed to slice my thumb on some rose-scented shower gel, thus confirming my belief that Lush is a shop that come with a health warning. I'd previously wanted one on the grounds of its extremely potent smell, but now I realise that for all their happy, fluffy, "I am natural!" labelling, their products have TEETH.)

Anyway... I'm reading a book at the moment (the brand new Dresden Files novel, but that's probably not important, unless it turns out that we're talking about a UK/US difference here) and at some point, some people are trying to grab someone who's currently at work. For various reasons, going into his office is not advisable. Not to worry, they say. He's bound to leave the office to have lunch.

I don't think I've ever left my work place in order to have lunch - i.e. to eat lunch in a cafe, restaurant, bar or similar. If I'm out and about over lunch time, I will buy a sandwich and look for a pretty park bench or car park to eat it in. None of my colleagues ever go out for lunch, either. Perhaps once every fortnight or so, one or other of them will have forgotten to bring any lunch, and will pop out to the Co-op to buy a sandwich, which they will then bring back to eat, but that's it.

To me, eating out at lunch is an extravagent thing that only happens on holidays or rare special occasions. It's definitely not something that gets done on a normal work day - or indeed a normal weekend day, when at home. So what's more unusual here: my feeling that eating out at lunch is extravagent and unusual, or the book's assumption that going out for lunch is normal, expected behaviour?

I can't swim. The reason is quite obvious to me. Neither of my parents can swim, so I was never brought up to be happy in water. They didn't want me to be like them, so they did send me to swimming lessons when I was 8 or so, but then I'd already had 8 years listening to my Mum's terror of water. "You can never trust water!" is one of her most common sayings. She won't say, "Oh, look at that lovely babbling brook!" just, "Oh no! Step away! There might be a flash flood!"

I had a series of lessons, but in the end, the teacher threw me out of class. "I wash my hands of her," he said. "She can swim, but thinks she can't." Looking back at it, this seems quite shocking to me. I hope it wouldn't happen nowadays, and that children like me are given the help they need to build up their confidence, and aren't cast out in shame. He was on to something, though. In Primary School swimming lessons, my teacher noted that I could swim (well, sort of; it was a frenzied doggy paddle, since I didn't want to risk getting my face wet) when wearing flat armbands that I thought had air in them, but couldn't swim without them. She found this quite amusing, but didn't follow it up.

We had swimming lessons at secondary school (aargh, those memories of easing my painful way into that hideously cold outdoor pool!) and the teacher was similarly unsympathetic. (Not surprising, this. This was the same teacher who snapped to my Mum, "she's an intelligent girl; of course she can play hockey.") She once decreed that nobody could go to lunch until I'd swum a width, and made the whole impatient class watch as I flailed in my desperate doggy paddle, half my upper body out of the water. I did my width, but it certainly didn't fill me with any desire to ever get in a swimming pool ever again.

I remember being on the Arthurian North Wales pilgrimage in 1993. It was gorgeous weather, and we all went down to the beach at Harlech. Everyone else ran out on the long sands, into the shallowly sloping water, and out into the distance, to swim under the blue sky. My fellow non-swimmer and I stood watching them, and both said that this was the first time in years that we wished we could swim. I almost felt the same yesterday, when having lunch down on Ryde Sands, a similarly shallowly sloping beach.

Maybe I should try to learn to swim. Pellinor keeps offering to teach me, but the trouble is, when you can't swim, you're not used to wearing a swimming costume - I don't possess one - or appearing in public wearing one. Society decrees that as a woman, I'd have to shave myself in annoying places. I'd have to learn in a public place, where everyone else would see my desperate flailing. I shudder at the memory of the horrible cold of it, and the smell. There's just so many reasons (excuses?) not to. But maybe I should...

LOADS of bitey things around at the moment! I presume it's because the country has spent the last three months gradually turning itself into a swamp. ( Bitey things, midge mythology, bad things and naughty books )

I was amused by a little bit of radio phone-in that I heard yesterday, prompted by a few cases of schools/job centres/supermarkets banning people from arriving in their pyjamas. "Why shouldn't people wear pyjamas outside," one of the guests said, "since it doesn't harm anyone?" "No!" thundered the other. "Wearing pyjamas outside is Wrong!" "Why is it wrong?" asked the first person, "since it doesn't hurt anyone." "It's wrong because it's wrong," the second person effectively said. This little cycle went on for quite some time. It seemed to me that they were both demonstrating the same thing, which is that rules on correct clothing are indeed completely irrational and silly, but are still adhered to by most people. There is nothing rational in the rule that it's fine for a woman to wear a very skimpy bikini on the seafront promenade, but not to wear much more substantial bra and knickers to the local supermarket a hundred miles from the beach. There's nothing rational in the rule that pyjamas aren't work to the shops, but elasticated jogging trousers, which might look well nigh identical, are fine. I'm always amused by people who pronounce so earnestly that such and such a clothing combination Is Wrong, when these rules are so dependent on class, country and year. The other day, my boss spent a while going on about how tasteless and awful "we all were" in the 70s. I argued that "taste" is a purely subjective thing, and what we are now taught is tasteless could well end up being the pinnacle of good taste in ten years' time, but he wouldn't have it. All these people who cite their rules of acceptable clothing are doubtless wearing things that would have horrified people 50 years ago or 100 years ago. There is indeed no rational reason why wearing pyjamas outside is Wrong. Except, of course, because we do currently live in a society in which the vast majority of people consider it wrong, and might be offended by it, and will at the very least judge you harshly for doing so. Conventions may be irrational... but people still need to be prepared for the consequences if they flout them. Hmm... Maybe I should have phoned in. :-)

There's nothing like fiction to make you realise that you're no longer young. Every now and then, when reading a book written and set within my lifetime, I find myself stopping in my tracks, struck by evidence of how much the world has changed. Technological changes don't surprise me as much, since I'm well aware of how much things such as the internet and mobile phones have changed the modus operandi of intrepid child detectives, but attitudes and behaviour can still shock me right out of the story.

I was reading The Ogre Downstairs yesterday, because I felt slightly guilty about forgetting it when doing a Sporcle quiz that asked me to name every Diana Wynne Jones novel. Written in 1974, it includes a short reference to a past incident in which a girl of probably around 8 or 9, travelling alone, got off at the wrong bus stop and got lost. A man - a total stranger - came to her rescue, took her to a cafe for ice cream, then drove her home. Sometimes the plot of a children's book requires a degree of suspension of disbelief, in order to allow the children to be free to pursue the plot without parents getting in the way, but in this case, it was little more than a throwaway reference, written as if it was nothing remarkable.

Because I have to consider safeguarding issues at work, I am particularly prone to shouting, "But that wouldn't happen! at the TV, usually when someone strolls into a school without anyone trying to stop them, in order to have some long and inappropriate conversation with a teacher in front of a class of 5 year olds. Presumably builders/policemen/nurses/lumberjacks/lion tamers are forever shouting at the TV about similar breaches of safety procedure and protocol in their areas of expertise. A certain suspension of disbelief is required in fiction, after all. But I find it inconceivable that in 2011, an author would include an incident like the one described above.

I've not done a long walk since Walk the Wight in May (except for the long mountainous walk in Wales in July) and have been eager for the chance to get out and about again. I did so today, and now feel far more exhausted than I should do after 16 miles - about as tired as I was after 27 miles in May. It's depressing how quickly you get unused to exercise.

Random observations and thoughts:

- I crossed a country road next to a bus stop called "Back of Beyond." There were no houses anywhere in sight, and I didn't find Beyond itself.

- I see more and more ravens every time I go out. I think they're planning a coup.

- My route took me on a public footpath that goes right through a hilltop golf course - not perhaps the most ideal juxtaposition for either walkers or golfers. The whole hilltop is a mass of strange earthworks and terracing, and is almost enough to make me wish for some hideous future catastrophe that wipes out all written records, so future archaeologists can be baffled.

- On the way home, I saw a lollipop lady on duty outside a school that closed in July. While it's not as silly as it sounds - there's a nearby primary school and this was probably a popular route for those children to walk to school - she did initially seem to me to be a very sad and tragic figure, worthy of a sad little song.

- I did quite a bit of talking to the animals I met, which made me wonder quite how common such behaviour is. Normally, some of my talking to animals is clearly really just another way of talking to a nearby human. "Aren't you a handsome doggy!" can mean, "Hello, doggy's owner." "Hello, corvid! Are you a crow or a rook or a raven?" can mean, "Pellinor, look at that bird. What do you think it is?" But today I was entirely alone, yet still told a cow that it was very pretty, but should probably use less eyeshadow; told a smug bull that yes, his harem was indeed large and impressive; asked several gulls to confirm their identity; and told several caterpillars that they were very brown and fat anf furry, but did they really want to be wandering across the path the way they were?

I'd do a poll if I could think of what questions to include in it, but would be interested to hear when, if ever, people talk to animals, or flowers, or indeed inanimate objects.

Walking dogs last week made me ponder greetings between strangers. When I'm out on a country walk, the convention is to greet fellow walkers with a hello. However, greetings don't happen in every situation. When I walk the coastal path, I tend to get greetings from everyone I meet on the distant and remote stretches. As I begin to near the car parks, dog walkers abound, but only about half of them say hello to me. (However, I ascertained last week that these dog walkers would almost certainly say hello if I had a dog with me.) When I get to within a few hundred yards of the car park, no-one says hello, apart from people who are booted and rucksacked and obviously just passing through.

Are people more likely to greet people who clearly have something in common with them? Walkers greet walkers. Countryside dog walkers greet countryside dog walkers, but don't always greet dogless countryside walkers. On one occasion I was only doing about ten miles, so didn't bother with a rucksack or boots, and just walked in trainers and colourful cotton trousers and a t-shirt. No-one knew what slot to place me in, and nobody said hello, just looked at me oddly, or looked away.

When I walk to work, I walk along a paved footpath between houses, then along a residential street that passes a school just before the preschool starts its day, then through a leafy and wildlife-filled cemetery. I generally get hellos from the (few) people I meet in the cemetery, but not from anyone else. The body language of the parents is particularly ignorey. If I was a stranger with a small child, would this be very different? The only time I get hellos on the footpath is when I'm walking to work early on a Saturday morning, when few people are out and about, except occasional elderly dog walkers.

Why do the few people I meet in the leafy cemetary say hello, when no-one else does? Most of them are there to stroll in the greenery or to walk dogs, so is a leafy cemetary honorary countryside, where town rules don't apply? Or is it merely because it's sparsely populated? Tennyson Down is a very popular place for a Sunday afternoon walk, and the whole "say hello to fellow walkers" convention seems to go out of the window, perhaps because they are just too many of them.

Is age a factor? My Dad used to claim that when two people approached each other on a narrow pavement, the custom was to exchange eye contact in which you communicated subtly which direction you were planning to dodge in order to avoid a collision. Women, he said, were usually really bad at doing this. Then he got older and white-haired, and found that women were just as good as men From this he concluded that women were reluctant to make eye contact with strange and possibly-threatening men, but that a strange old man wasn't threatening, so didn't count.

Of course, it takes two people to make a hello. The hellos I get are influenced by the hellos I give. I, too, am making judgements about the sort of people I think I ought to say hello to, and the sort of people who I think I ought to ignore. I'm musing as much about who I expect to be receptive to a hello, as about who is likely to say it.

"See you soon," my Mum said cheerily on Saturday, "As They All Say Nowadays." "Do They?" I asked, and she said that, yes, every local shopkeeper and hairdresser and tradesman and, well, pretty much everybody, really, said "see you soon!" instead of "goodbye," "which is silly," she said, "since most of them aren't going to see me soon." I said quite honestly that I couldn't remember ever hearing anyone say "see you soon" in this context, but I had noticed a lot of people saying "see you later." To me, "see you later" means "see you later today," so I might say it to Pellinor when popping out to the shops, but I've noticed loads of people saying it at the end of a once-a-week dance practice, or when serving me in a shop.

So now I'm wondering if there are regional differences afoot, or just selective hearing on the part of both of us.

Pellinor has long claimed that the best way to recognise a primitive civilisation is to listen to what they say when they ask you to follow them to meet their leader. If they merely intone "Come!" they are a primitive people who are ruled by robe-wearing elders, and there is a risk that they will take superstitious exception to your electronic transpondulator, and try to burn you as a witch. If they say "Come with me," they probably have transpondulators of their own, although they may well pose different dangers.

However, the flaw in his theory is that you have to make contact before you can carry out this test. By the time you've heard their "Come!" you are already committed to following your primitive chap to his elders. Fortunately, there is another way to test how primitive your culture is, which can be done merely by listening to the conversation of the natives. It starts raining. "It rains!" cries the primitive culture; "it's raining," says the advanced one. The arrival of a friend is reported. "He comes!" says the primitive peasant. "He's coming," says the advanced one.

What remains to investigate is precisely when this linguistic change happens in the course of a civilisation's technological development. Does it come just before steam engines? Is it a vital development without which a civilisation cannot create computers? And, if so, please can we start researching what new linguistic change is necessary before we can successfully invent transporters?

This last week, I've been doing some idle browsing on and off on the Domesday Reloaded site, looking at the accounts written in 1986 of life in various places that I know. While I have found the content generally rather disappointing, it's launched me into my musing about those aspects of daily life which have changed beyond recognition in those 25 years - and about those which haven't changed much at all. I could write a long rambling post about this, but everyone reading this has lived through those same years, so can come to their own conclusions. I have now moved on to trying to identify the 25 year period of British history in which daily life has changed the most. It is, of course, a totally impossible question to answer. How do you rank a revolution in religious observance in a religious age against a revolution in communication technology? Do you dismiss the ravages of war or civil war as a short-term misery that doesn't lead to long-term change in how people go about their lives? Does every generation tend to over-emphasise the changes they've seen in their own lifetime? History is full of people saying how the world today has changed utterly from the world of their childhood, after all.

So, yes, an impossible question to answer, and probably a foolish one even to ask, but that's what's keeping me entertained at the moment.

That, and sewing Beer Banners, to accompany last year's pies.