editorialgirl

By gum, I think they’re really going to do it.

March 1st is the day that the application for a massive statue of an Ent goes before Birmingham City Council’s Planning Committee – and to my horror, the Planning Officer has recommended that it be approved.

If you don’t know what an Ent is – and I’ve found that most people I’ve spoken to don’t – you’re probably not a J R R Tolkien fan. The Ents are tree giants – here’s the Wikipedia definition.

It’s probably not very fashionable of me to say this, being from Moseley, but I’m really not a Tolkien fan either. I was a big reader when I was little, but I tried Lord of the Rings and found that it wasn’t my thing. I’ve never had the inclination to try since. And the film – oh yes, very pretty, but – I dunno – so gay!

So why an Ent? And what’s it got to do with Moseley?

Well, Tolkien’s family lived in and around Moseley when he was small, and it is said that parts of Moseley Bog and the surrounding Sarehole area inspired Middle Earth.

In fact, Tolkien and I grew up in the same place (give or take 100 yards), albeit 80 years apart. He and I played in the same parts of Moseley Bog as children (he knew it as “The Dell”, we called it “Blackhills”) and whether you’re into his fantasy world or not, it’s easy to see how he was inspired to create it.

It’s also easy to see why Moseley is proud of its connection to Tolkien. But I don’t think a statue of an Ent – let alone this design – is the best way of commemorating this.

Leaving aside the fact that we’re about to get a huge ugly metal statue of something only geeks have heard of, that looks like it’s been designed by a child, on the village green, what about the fact that it’s nowhere near any of the places that inspired the books? Why not put it in Moseley Bog, or by Edgbaston Reservoir? If you’re trying to attract Tolkien tourists, why not put more money into marketing the beautiful bog and mill? Put on tours to visit the two towers?

Don’t get me wrong – like many others I’m all for public art. But why weren’t any alternatives offered?

The meeting starts at 11 o’clock and the Ent statue is one of 16 applications under consideration.

UPDATE (Midday, 1st March)
No, I haven’t heard yet. But I just noticed that Eye on Moseley used the “That’s Ent-ertainment” headline 18 months ago. Bugger.

UPDATE (10pm, 1st March)
Yep – as suspected, it has been approved.

Today I finally plucked up the courage to post an application form that I’ve been carrying around for ages.

It’s a residential writing course for beginners that’ll be held in September by the Arvon foundation. The tutors for the course are proper published authors and everything.

Starting to Write: Telling Tales
“For people interested in writing prose of all kinds. We will explore the link between real life and imagination. If you’re willing to experiment, you should finish the course better equipped to tell the truth and to make things up, and understand how close the two things often are.”

(No idea if they will have any places; my courage did not stretch to phoning up and asking simple questions.)

UPDATE: they didn’t have any places :o(
I’m on the waiting list though – let’s hope there’s a cancellation!

ANOTHER UPDATE (July): I had a call to say there had been a couple of cancellations and would I like a place? Now I’m all nervous about it again – but can’t wait!

I haven’t rambled on about synaesthesia for a while and haven’t mentioned it on this blog at all yet. So here’s a taster … if you’ll excuse the pun.

Briefly, synaesthesia (or “synesthesia” – without the first A – for our American friends) is a “condition” which means that some of my senses are a little mixed up. (I’ve put “condition” into inverted commas there because I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that not everyone has it.) It means that – for me, at least – letters and numbers are different colours, music and sounds have shapes and the days of the year stretch off into the distance on a rollercoaster-shaped calendar in my mind’s eye.

As a child I used to get ear infections a lot and often complained to my mum that I was “getting grey rainbows”. Looking back, I can see that the grey rainbows were just the visual representation of the sounds that my ears were making. I’ve since found out that my parents mentioned my “grey rainbows” to the doctor, who proceeded to test for head trauma. Not many people had heard of synaesthesia then.

I didn’t realise that not everyone made these associations until I saw a BBC Horizon documentary, “Orange Sherbet Kisses”, at the end of 1994, when I was 19. It started by showing some numbers and the voiceover said “… Some people think that the number four is green”. I was very puzzled by this because – as any fule kno – the number four is brown. And I don’t have some weird “condition”. Everyone associates numbers with colours … right?

Since then I’ve found more and more resources and information about synaesthesia on the web. For example, Cassidy Curtis from San Francisco has the same sort of “coloured-letter” synaesthesia as I do and he explains it really well – with FAQs and everything – on his other things website. He’s also developed a great flash applet which is the nearest to a visual representation of it that I’ve ever seen. (The only problem is that the colours he sees for letters and numbers are completely different to mine – and only another synaesthete could know how annoying that is!)

I’ve also been down to Oxford to take part in some research, where Megan S Steven scanned my brain using an fMRI scanner and asked me lots of questions.

And I’ve taken part in a documentary for BBC Radio 4 called Hearing Colours, Eating Sounds where I spoke (nervously!) about the colours of my alphabet.

If you’re interested in finding out more about synaesthesia, I highly recommend looking up Prof. V S Ramachandran, one of the leading synaesthesia researchers, who explains it in a very compelling and easy-to-understand way. Here’s the transcript of a lecture he gave in 2003 (I was there, groupie that I am).

Ramachandran explains that – as I suspected – we’re all synaesthetes, in a way. So of course I’m going to think he’s great.

Although my synaesthesia has faded over the years (I guess my brain has worked out which associations are important now and which ones it can safely put to the back of my mind) it’s still noticeable and I’m still fascinated by the whole subject. If you want to know more – even if it’s just “what colour is my name?” which seems to be the most popular question – ask away. I’d be happy to bore you with my views on it any time.

Got an email from a manager at work today. “Please find attached a map…”, it said, so I was a bit confused to see that the only attachment was an Excel spreadsheet.

All became clear when I opened it:

Genius.

There are so many questions that this makes me ask. Why not use one of the many map websites that are freely available on the internet? Maybe he’s not very web savvy. So why not use, say, Paint? Why not scan a printed map? Why … just why??

I’ve been playing with the tilt shift idea this evening. Not with an expensive lens, obviously, but with Photoshop’s Gaussian blur.

I don’t have any aerial photographs to use, but I tried it with one of the pictures from last weekend’s walk on Bredon Hill:

Anyone got any tips? I know it works better with harsher lighting and a more aerial view …

The first fake miniature photos I saw are still my favourites. They belong to a Swiss photographer called Gérard Pétremand. I especially love his set Pompiers (firemen). Every time I see them – even now, after seeing them a million times – I just can’t make my mind believe that the fire engines are real.

I love this set of photos of bus and train seats on flickr.

I sent the link to a few friends at work last week, only for some bright spark to point out that the jumper I was wearing could have been mistaken for part of the set.

Ha very ha ha.