I’m watching the fireworks from the balloon festival on my balcony: giant blooms that live for a second, fading as gravity claims them and the points of light fall towards the dark. The smoke drifts across south Bristol in a long snake, reminding me of old oil paintings of battles fought with guns and confusion, and it occurs to me that it’s travelling in time as well as space. At the snake’s mouth, the first red flower still lives; halfway along are the tiny sparkling golden canapes that accompanied the huge green and purple courses; hovering over the old warehouses I can still see the final barrage of the huge spirals that ended the display. The explosion lasts for a brief moment, leaping and falling in an eyeblink: the smoke lit by the city lights spreads this compressed time into something more manageable. Totterdown is the beginning of the first burst, Bedminster the point where the stars fell to earth. Mapping time with wind and light.

I’m thirty in a few days time. I’d love to see my lifesmoke: the last decade’s passed in the time it takes a firework to live and die, and I would appeciate the chance to see my actions spread out into something more comprehensible, something I could walk back and forth along, something I could use to digest what’s happened and understand it better. Perhaps, though, I ought not to dwell on the smoke. Perhaps I should concentrate more on the firework, and start thinking less about the echo it leaves.

I’m recording a short intellectual journey I undertook in the last five minutes that to me illustrates what I love about the internet, and also how knowledge can both provoke and disperse mystery and fascination.

I was watching an edition of the televison programme QI, made available to me through the power of the social networks around the Bittorrent technology, in which a chance remark on William Farrish’s 1792 contribution to our current mechanisms of formal assessment (using numerical grading to assess written answers in an examination: previously, according to that august and illustrious mouthpiece of his researchers, Stephen Fry, candidates’ fluency within a given area of human knowledge was judged through their spoken Latin responses to examiners’ questions) led me, through Google, to a summary of the proceedings of a 1997 round-table discussion on paradigm reform within the social sciences hosted by the American National Institute for Mental Health.

The remarks, as presented on the web, were articulate, important, relevant in many ways to my professional interests, and I found myself distracted, as so often happens on the internet, by their attempts to frame their debate within a Kuhnian analysis of scientific endeavour, when I was struck by a phrase of Dr Hoagwood’s: “Here at NIMH…”. Instantly, my mind was transported to my old school library, and a book I’d never read but whose title had always fascinated me: the Rats Of NIMH.

Never having read the book, I had only a shadowy conception of the entity called NIMH: to me it seemed redolent of robes and secrets, the capitalisation and lack of crucial final vowel suggesting a kind of Gaelic Gnosticism (I had only recently learnt of YWHW and the mystifying lack of vowels in Hebrew). The conjunction of this panel of learned social scientists, concerned with helping their disciplines to make an even more substantial contribution to human life, and this childhood fantasy brought to my mind a picture that tickled me, an image of sensible thinkers saying things like, “Our solutions are not necessarily going to be monolithic”, and, ” Yes, on the Wittgensteinian analysis the social domain comes about through essentially discursive practices”, with the hoods of their robes over their brows, and the power of the amulets worn by all made visible through the spectral motes dancing around their quills.

Of course, on reading the Wikipedia entry (spoiler warning) for the Rats of NIMH, I learnt that these two NIMHs were, had always been, one and the same, that the rats in question had strong links with the mental health organisation, and in an instant a twenty-year-old part of my mind reserved for the magical and unexplored crumbled and shrank. One less temple to explore: one less cult to study and disband. I should be more grateful for my newly-knowledgeable state, but, you know, I’m not.

and what better way to spend it than sitting at the foot of an escalator in Wheelock’s prestige shopping and lifestyle destination mall, waiting for Outlook to connect to work so I can email some slides to someone? None, that’s what. Perhaps going home and cooking some food in my new pans, or better still, going out and buying some food, then cooking it in my new pans. I would eat out but it feels unfair to the shiny couples having a nice night out to make them sit next to me, as I drop my chopsticks and read the paper in my scruffy shorts. Lowering the tone. Still can’t get used to shopping malls having tone.

Also, still can’t get used to seeing the net curtains move slowly in the breeze and realise that the breeze is inside, while outside is the comfortable temperature of an afternoon at a relatives’ house, when you’ve all had a cup of tea after lunch and feel a bit sleepy. Speaking of feeling sleepy, I am, and I can’t wait to have a second go on my new bed, fresh from IKEA (pronounced “ickier” over here). What would really improve the experience would be knowing what time I ought to set my aircon to go on, so I don’t have to wake up wondering why the sun is so close to the earth. Actually, I should find out how to use the timer before I decide on a time.

So I’m in my flat, anyway, and it all seems good: local area is a change from where I’m spending the rest of my time, with plenty of places to buy household goods, cheap TVs (although I’ll probably only get one), fresh veg and shiny moving tat. It’s a bit like living back in Aldgate, with less cutlery. Things done: got bank account, turned on power and water, written presentation, bought map, found shops, made lists. Things yet to happen: find wardrobe, got haircut, send presentation despite paying through the nose for wifi because the email server’s down. Jon, if you’re reading, where’s the email gone? It was there ten minutes ago. If you sent me an email telling me it was down, well, I didn’t pick it up in time, and now I can’t.
Internet access won’t happen until I can show Singtel my Employment form. So far, they’ve been the only people who need to see it, rather than just accepting my passport number. I’d been expecting it to crop up more frequently. Until then, I’m limited to wifi grazed on the street. Everyone in Singapore seems staggered that I can’t find free wifi, but so far no-one’s been able to say where I might find it. This looks like a good way to find some, though, if I’m online. Doh.

right – 2 minute warning, so I’m posting this. More later, I should think.