The story behind M104

"On my last night in the now barren Oval Office I thought of the glass case I had kept on the coffee table between the two couches just a few feet away from my desk. It contained a rock Neil Armstrong had taken off the moon in 1969. It had been carbon dated to be 3.6 billion years old. Whenever arguments in the Oval Office heated up beyond reason, I would interrupt and say, "You see that rock? It’s 3.6 billion years old. We’re all just passing through. Let’s calm down and go back to work."

"That moon rock gave me a whole different perspective on history and the proverbial "long run." Our job is to live as well and as long as we can, and to help others to do the same. What happens after that and how we are viewed by others is beyond our control. The river of time carries us all away. All we have is the moment."

- an excerpt from "My Life", Bill Clinton

I have forgotten most of the rest of the book, but this passage from chapter 60 still rings crystal clear. Nice party trick, Bill. I think the rock was there for more than just a party trick, though. I think the rock enjoyed pride of place to commemorate Bill Clinton's role model, John F Kennedy. Kennedy's ambition was to put man on the moon before the end of the 1960's. Kennedy never lived to realize that ambition. If I was Bill, the story behind the rock in the glass case would be more important to me than the rock itself.

I do not know what prompted H to loan me the audio book, Bill Clinton's autobiography called "My Life". It was read by Bill Clinton himself. H would not have known that I have never read a biography or an autobiography in my life. Nor am I political. Perhaps H offered me the 6 CD set because we had spoken once about how she filled her time in her travels between Manchester and home. Music fan that she was, H did not confine her interests to radio or recorded tunes. H listened to audio books too. She probably wanted me to try a new experience: an audio book.

H's intuition about the book was well guided. I transferred the 6 CD set to iTunes and Bill's story unravelled in 61 chapters over the space of a summer week when company was a black 8GB iPod Nano. "My Life" was, maybe I should say is, a remarkable story. Only Bill can make the traumas of White House life play out like a normal day in the life of a normal person in a normal office. I suppose a problem is never any larger than the bubble you put it in. You just have to stand outside the bubble and stand back far enough to appreciate the perspective - Bill's "proverbial long run".

* * * * * *

As bubbles go, the Sombrero Galaxy is about as big as it gets. Astronomers call it M104, or NGC 4594. M104 is an unbarred spiral galaxy. It sits in the constellation of Virgo, and it is visible with nothing more than binoculars, although you need a 12 inch telescope to see the galaxy's trademark dust ring. M104's scale makes anything mankind does insignificant. I have not researched its age, suffice it to say that the picture here, captured by NASA's Hubble Telescope, is what M104 looked like 28 million years ago - the time it takes for light from that galaxy to reach us. It takes light 50,000 years alone to traverse M104's own diameter which harbours a mass commensurate with about 800 billion of our Suns. If you are wondering about M104's energy efficiency rating, then forget it. Its bulbous luminosity is outrageously over specified: over 2,000 globular star clusters, 10 times more than our galaxy holds hostage. Next, a supposed supermassive black hole at M104's epicentre vents enough x-ray emissions to suggest an invisible mass of a billion Suns. There is more. A 157,000 light year-long halo of dark cold gases, primarily hydrogen, ringfences the galaxy's colossal perimeter. Nor is M104 waiting for you or me. Nobody knows where M104 is ultimately headed, but wherever it is going, the celestial juggernaut is heading there at 1,100 kilometres per second - 683.5 miles per second, according to its redshift. You can look at the Sombrero Galaxy with X-ray, red light, or blue light. You can look at the Sombrero Galaxy mathematically or statistically. You can just look at the Sombrero Galaxy in plain white light with binoculars. Any way you look at M104, it is a staggering creation. Words do not do it justice - to understand its scale, all you can do is try to assimilate it.

Imagine having a moon rock on your coffee table so that family and friends could pause to reflect. It might not be impossible. Celestial fragments fall to Earth daily. I may even have handled or trodden on a moon rock in my travels. Bill Clinton would still have one up on me: his rock was hand delivered from the Sea of Tranquility. One thing I do have is a poster of the Sombrero Galaxy. M104. NGC 4594. U gave it to me. U gave it to me as a remembrance of a lazy and ambient Saturday morning three springs past when U and I sat on a hotel patio by the River Avon outside Salisbury. That balmy morning U and I pored over a book called Cosmos while a pair of swans idled their time in the Avon's dancing eddies and currents underneath a stand of willow. A neighbouring German couple asked politely about the black hardbacked book, about the same size as a briefcase. The front cover, sporting Hubble's award winning image of M104, had caught their eye.

The poster sat in a cardboard tube until this month. Now the poster enjoys pride of place in a clip frame on the wall facing the top of the stairs outside my bedroom door. The picture has a story behind it like the rock in the glass case on Bill Cinton's Oval Office coffee table, and as I suspect is the case with Bill's moon rock, the story behind my picture is at least as important as the picture itself.

This July 20th is the 40th anniversary of the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at Tranquility Base. Word is Neil and Buzz were a little short of gas when they landed. Maybe one day someone will be in the area with an oily rag and a dipstick to find out how much juice is left in the tank, and settle a detail for the history books. Within a few hours of that landing the rock that found its way to Bill's Oval Office was in either Neil's or Buzz's hands. Let's not forget Michael Collins, either. I have always thought the most difficult job of the Apollo 11 mission really fell to the astronaut who rode shotgun anonymously in the command capsule while Neil took his steps for man and mankind.

What a perfect opportunity it is today not only to remember those three men, but to say thank you to H for loaning me the book to fire my imagination and which I only returned yesterday and to U for the remembrance of the moment in Salisbury, which together have helped me emulate Bill's party trick in my new house. As Bill says, there is only ever the moment to live in, and now is the time to tie all these threads together - John F Kennedy's ambition - Bill's rock - H's book - U's poster.

Thank you for your technically oriented thoughtfulness, ladies. To bring things down to Earth, I think I will plumb in my new washing machine today. It weighs clothes and has a maximum spin cycle of 1,200 rpm: one statistic at least which exceeds M104's performance. Sigh.

A Revelationary SMS

SMS from Andrea, Sunday 12.07.2009, 9:51pm:

"F**k you. F**k you a** hole. I'm off to Australia. I'm working all day at the girls school. Not going to court any more. F**k you. Ps I hate you".

We'll see.

Monday, 13.07.2009, Rhyl District Court, 9:45am. Rhyl's courthouse, pictured here, is a bland and unremarkable venue. District Judges must curse when their duty rosters flag a spell at Rhyl. Still, Court is Court. I headed up the stairs to the waiting room. I knew the routine. "Good morning", I announced, looking around for signs of Jon, my lawyer. "I am here for the 10:15. Directions hearing. Galloway. Who's sitting this morning?", I calmly fired at the security guard. "

"Ah, yes sir, you are the first here today. Are you acting for the applicant, 1st respondent, or second respondent?", came the reply.

What it is about me? When I partied with Andrew and his banking friends from National Westminster Bank and latterly Deutsche Bank in London, I was regularly mistaken for the maitre d' at London's finer watering holes. I have subsequently been mistaken for a head office manager of grocery store Tesco, a 5 star hotel manager, and a consular diplomat. The lowest common denominator appears to have been either a dinner suit or a lounge suit, and simply standing still. Today, I just needed to be recognized as a single father. One day maybe I will be regarded as an eligible bachelor.

"No", I smiled, "today Mark", I said glancing at his badge, "I am just a Dad."

***

Tuesday 14.07.2009, 11:30am, Lion Quays Health Resort, Oswestry. I never expected that one day I would be wandering around a health resort as a PE instructor. Rather, a martial artist. I am not sure if it is a step up or a step down, and I do not care. The tenure is immensely entertaining, and now that I am on the other side of the fence I imagine I might find out if PE instructors are as lucky with the girls as they are supposed to be. Not that I am bothered. By and large, the opposite sex is taxing me this month.

Monday did not go badly. Tuesday just had a better feel about it. Monday was business. Andrea avoided her obligations to the Court, and the Court explained to me that they were powerless to intervene. Really. I mean, really. A Court? Powerless to intervene? One judge, three lawyers, a social services officer, and Andrea was working her magic and running circles around them all. Suddenly, I did not feel so stupid. One thing about an alcoholic is that they can give anyone a run for their money.

I lost patience on Monday. I promised my girls I would do everything I could to help get Mum back on track. The Court was letting Andrea off the hook. Letting Andrea lampoon Her Majesty's Court Service was not going to happen if I could help it.

A couple of months ago Mountain Rescue passed me over for the solitary reason that I was a single parent, and if I fell off a mountain on night duty, the girls would not have a parent to wake up to the next morning. At the time I felt a pang of injustice. Meanwhile my ex, flouting court orders, obligations to her daughters, and now evidently planning a sojourn in Australia, had iced her cake by getting a job as a supposed role model to students for business, and was spearheading a government backed project in North Wales by visiting schools and advising children about lifestyle, self employment, and self motivation. Apart from the predictably appalling aptitude of those strange government vehicles called quangos the likes of which sponsored Andrea, just how could that be?

I did not know the full extent of Andrea's activity with children until I talked to the school nurse to get my facts straight after Court. I was highly motivated by her answers. Yes, Andrea was working at my daughters' school on the same day that she was supposed to be at Court. She was lecturing children about the virtues of alcoholic abstinence and self employment. Worse, she was due in school the next day, too.

Enough. This was a magnitude of revelation beyond my comprehension. I acted without the judge, without the lawyers, without social services. Just me and my telephone. Andrea will not be returning to my daughters' school again, and she will not be visiting any more schools, at least until she answers a few questions before the bench in October. A Court Order must be seen to have standing, whether a judge is prepared to enforce it or not.

Will Andrea show up in October? Doubtful. It would mean an admission of lies and perjury, to say the least. If Andrea shows up - well - the girls want Andrea to engage after all. What's another 6 months of psychiatric assessments? Career? What is a job but just a job? Some people would probably consider a position at Lion Quays a considerable achievement, ensconced among marble pillars and pristine trappings. Wealth. Wealth does not come from a wallet, though. It comes from the heart.

SMS to Andrea, Monday, 13 July, 2009, 4:45pm:

"Sorry you missed Court today. The school was mortified about the confusion. Your boss was mortified too. He says there will be no conflict with the directions hearing in October, and the Judge is writing to you to confirm the date. See you there."

A midsummer night's dream

"...To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end."
(A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene I)

Taoists would like this quote. Taoists are fascinated with the concept of returning to the origin. Understand the origin, and it is possible to return to the origin. Return to the origin by stripping away our ego and those acquired states that contaminate our congenital nature as we age and, well, the path to immortality is there. It is a proposition, if you will, in reversing time. That said, Taoists do not see immortality as perhaps the western world sees it. Taoists see immortality in the sense that it is possible to merge our spirit with the source code of the universe - the Tao. Not a lot of people, even Taoists, ever get so far.

Am I a Taoist? No, no more than William Shakespeare is Taoist and no more than I am either Taoist or Church of England. "C of E" as we say around here. "Anglican" as others might see it. Although, maybe by my very insouciance, I am. Would it matter? That is for another blog. I just thought that this midsummer night, one that coincides with Fathers Day, a quote from an aptly named play written by Shakespeare might embellish the aspirations of his prescient ancient Oriental Taoist counterparts. For my part I am happy with my new watering can. On this midsummer night, I am dreaming that maybe the beefsteak tomatoes growing behind me will bear a tomato that I might actually enjoy come August or whenever they ripen. Did I say dreaming? Maybe dreaming is a bit of a stretch. Wondering, perhaps. There are better things to dream about.

Made in Greece? You "feta" believe it!

The headline was Lou Duro's idea. His ideas were all over the rest of the article, too. My article. I wrote it. Lou, editor of the Crete Gazette, edited it. Charming. I could live with the headline. It resembled one of those classless strap lines the National Enquirer preys on, or indeed any British "red top". It was the story that bothered me now. The flow was all wrong. Crete's English speaking population would be critiquing the story online. For all I knew, Umar might even see it. He told me he liked the story earlier. That was in Chania. Three and a half hours later, and a couple of hours in a car between airports, and the online edition in Britain had someone else's DNA all over it. Why must editors meddle?

It was November 2005. I had just returned from Crete. Kate and I had rented a house overlooking Georgioupolis (pr: Yuri-aw-polie) a few months earlier. I liked the coastal town, and I liked the region's capital, Chania (pr: Hania), even more. Although Crete's interior has an unmistakable frontier feeling about it, Chania is really rather chic. Nestled against a 10,000 ft backdrop called the White Mountains, Chania and western Crete do not lack for much at all.

Kate liked the sun, and she wanted a permanent move away from the UK. A business opportunity seemed ripe to me, too. The plan was to spend a year building a business model in the eastern Mediterranean while cementing my UK business, so that in 12 to 24 months there would be self sustaining operations in the UK and Crete. It was a plan. The plan had to be this way, too. For one thing, there were my daughters. Even if Andrea would ever have agreed to letting the girls out of the UK, Crete did not make sense for them for anything other than school breaks. Also, Crete, or should I say Greece, was in the Euro zone: the drachma was dead, and with it cheap holidays. Greece traded with a new currency: the euro. This was good for Greece in the longer term, but it was double edged medicine. Average pay in Greece was much lower than in Europe's industrialised north. Greek land and property cost a fraction of the going rate in Britain. On the other hand, as goods and services began flowing southwards from the north to improve living standards, Greeks were feeling the pinch as the higher cost of those goods ate into static local salaries. If I was to enjoy Crete, I needed the spending power of a northerner. If I moved to Crete and burned my bridge in northern Europe, I might never have the purchasing power to buy my way back into a G7 economy.

Lou Duro, my editor, was a case in hand. Lou was a tall, dark haired, gregarious 60 year old American. He carried a few pounds more than he needed, but he had one of those builds that coped with excess weight. He tended to slick his unkempt hair back, and wore the kind of dishevelled and fashionless clothes that always leave me wondering what kind of shop they come from. He looked like a newspaper editor. Lou was blunt, but friendly with it, and he liked a story. Lou had moved to Crete some years ago from New Jersey, where he had built and run an advertising/marketing company. He was good in a kitchen, too. He had made a name for himself with a restaurant south east of Iraklion. Life was good for Lou, for a while. His good fortune ended abruptly with a motorcycle accident. It left him with a permanent and awkward limp, the legacy of a messy leg fracture and a year in an Athens hospital. Without medical insurance, Lou lost his fortune. He had to start again. He knew how advertising worked, so he launched a newspaper. It easily became Crete's largest English language paper, published once monthly in print and online. He and his business partner Yannis had plans for the newspaper. The plans were good news for both Kate and me. Lou would be around for a while, too. He would never be able to buy his way back into America. His bridge had burned. He was locked into a small corner of the Euro trade zone, and I really did not want to follow suit.

Here I was then, in North Wales with a cucumber, some tomatoes, some feta cheese, some olive oil, and assorted herbs. A greek salad. It did not taste anything like it does in Crete. The North Atlantic was venting the tail end of an American east coast hurricane across the British Isles. Kate was expatriated, and my vandalised newsflash about feta cheese was working its way around the world like a virus. Who would read it? Hopefully not Umar. Umar. What about her anyway? I asked her to marry me once. She said no. Boy, had I read that one all wrong. She was disarmingly polite about my faux pas: social skills came easily to Umar. It hardly ruined the rest of that trip about twenty years earlier on a square rigged tall ship in the Caribbean leeward isles. Maybe that in itself meant something. I wondered if she ever thought about me, or if maybe I really had got it all wrong. At three and a half hour's flying time from Manchester, that meant Crete was about 1,500 miles further away from Umar than I already was.

A free school lunch

"I am writing to advise that you continue to be eligible for free school meals and that they have been awarded for the 2008/09 school year in respect of the following....."

The letter rambled on with catch-all ambiguity, forged with mundane jobsworth mediocrity. Ken Jones, Denbighshire County Council's "Head of Revenues and Benefits", had written to me to let me know that my 16 and 11 year old daughters were welcome to free lunches for a year provided they went to school. Ken seemed to be very pleased about this because he had written to me a week earlier to tell me the very same thing. Perhaps Ken would even write to me next week after my girls had had the chance to sample their school's canteen food just to ask how it was for them. Perhaps. Ken is not a penny pincher. The letter had been laser printed in at least 600 dpi resolution. Ken's printer was fully duplexed, too, because side two of the A4 sheet of paper bilingually regurgitated a dump of contacts and appeal options. Life as a laser printer in Town Hall must be about as dull as it gets.

No matter. The girls have each been awarded £4.00 a day (about $8.00) to spend at their canteen this year, and the point of sale technology even protects their privileged status.

I say "privileged". There would have been a time when the girls would take their lunch trays to a segregated queue which would have made their newly awarded assisted status plain to caterers, students and teachers. Britain in the 21st century is more socialist than ever, though. It looks after its own. Just as well.

Ironically, the girls will be better off than most of their counterparts. Many of my friends are encumbered with bitter credit problems, and the looming ordeal of finding their kids' weekly lunch money is going to be a stark proposition as they go to bed on Sunday nights. I spoke to Sally a day or two ago. She and her husband never imagined that their household, worth £100k a year in income, could be sifting piggy banks for two "tenners" worth of assorted coins to keep 2 children fed at school for a week. Yet that is the quality of their life in 2008, and yet... yet, even if means did permit how many parents fork out £4.00 daily for their own lunch, let alone their childrens'? Having spent a few dark years trawling my pockets and drawers in hope more than expectation, I understand too well the heartbreaking exigencies of downsizing that so many of my friends are reeling from. In this economic downturn, no household is safe. Or should I say, few households are safe. Poverty has no respect for social order in 2008.

In case there is doubt about the entrenchment of social policy in Britain, here is a parting shot. My 16 year old daughter is to be rewarded for spending her next two years at school. She will be paid a State benefit of £35.00 (about $70) weekly for agreeing to continue at school. This benefit is called "EMA", or Education Maintenance Allowance. It is payable in addition to other grants like school lunches. Presumably EMA is a ploy devised by grey suited ones to discourage students leaving school at 16 to pick and choose from the wide range of attractive unemployment and social benefits available to school leavers. I am tempted to go back to school for two years myself.

The temptation is only whimsical, though. Instead, I will focus on my experiment in Palaeolithic nutrition. There will be celery and cream cheese for breakfast, shrimp salad for lunch, and grilled pork loin chops with a spicy home made guacamole for dinner. Palaeolithic? Why not? There is no carbohydrate. It is not costing me anything, and I doubt many hunter/gatherers needed plastic for their killings either: I can afford my day's nutrition from the money I would otherwise be spending on school lunches. The three day sugar withdrawal is gone, and one week into my project, I am three pounds down. The search for Umar continues.