No more biscuits or free fruit.

Bless me Father because I have sinned, it has been 3 months since my last blog, and quite a lot has happened to keep me away! I seem to have been round the world at least twice but despite my best efforts, I now work for a company in administration! Despite trips to the US (twice) Taiwan, and Korea our financial benefactors have pulled out the last promised tranche of their loan and I found myself this morning saying goodbye to a number of colleagues and hello to administrators.
Particularly frustrating considering how close we are to delivering product. Well we’ll see how the next two weeks go.

A second major casualty seems to have been the free fruit and biscuits; we will all be suffering from scurvy before the week is out mark my words.

I’m pleased to say that now (unless a thousand others are lurking passively in the background), I seem to have three readers of this blog, and the latest one is most welcome and knows who he is. Welcome JRM, it’s been a while, this is for you!


"They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
With a Pink Hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot......."

The Uncertainty Principle of Physics states that if you know the mass of an object you cannot determine its velocity, and vice versa. In the first half of the 20th century, Werner Heisenberg postulated that simple-sounding principle, which implied that the mere action of measuring something changes it, such that you can never measure anything absolutely.

Another way of looking at it implies that, being there changes where you are.

This principle can be applied I'm sure, to much of what surrounds us in this new millennium. The mere presence of mankind in this world changes it. It's particularly noticeable with regard to beauty spots, as holidaymakers strive for more and more distant and unspoilt places to drop Coke cans as developers put up concrete. I note the Western European Monocuture that seems to be developing everywhere I go.

Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi" observed this trend at the end of the 60's in a few carefully crafted lines. Predictably, the "Love Generation", post - war baby- boomers with too much disposable income, who went to Goa to escape their apparent tribulations, found that the "end of the hippie trail", their "paradise" inevitably sprouted the "Pink Hotels" that had been so eloquently used to epitomise 1960s California.

The question to be asked is "is this type of change inevitable?"

How many times have you re-visited a favourite place to find it changed? It can change in obvious ways. Try following a "Favourite Walks" section from Spanish or Greek tourist guide book more than a few years old, and you'll see what I mean.

"Follow the river for a mile until you get to the small well, here the path diverges from the river......"

has become.

"If you look carefully you can see the culvert where the stream used to be, follow the pavement past the souvenir shop......."

You get the picture.

Places also seem to change in far more subtle ways. The physical changes may be small, but they are very different. A place is also people and memories.
The people you met the first time are not there this time. You realise then that the holiday was more than just the place. You change and the people you go with change. These things always combine to make the place different.

But does the Uncertainty Principle apply to life? The simple fact of living life changes life? Life changes people for sure. They change shape, get wrinkles and bunions, but this is just an example of Entropy, another physical principle that states that all things go from a state of order to disorder.
Return to the honeymoon isle and it's not the same. Even though the rocks are in the same place, the cafe is still there, the tide still goes in and out, and the tired Greek still drops fag-ash in the keftedes. It's different, you are different, and you changed it by the mere fact that you went there the first time. The first time you saw it with a different pair of eyes, but who's to say that the place hasn't changed? The teenager who raced snails in the rain has responsibilities now.
You have changed life with the smallest of decisions.

Heisenberg strikes!

You live life therefore you change it. Having that child, getting that job, not taking that flight, made life different from what it could have been.
Each small decision in life causes a fork in your reality, and opens up an alternative one, but unlike the cheap science fiction, there's no going back to the junction and living the alternative reality that would have been just as real if you'd turned right not left.