My Space

I was talking to a lawyer the other day (Get me. A mathematician yesterday, a lawyer today. Me and the Candle Stick Maker are out on the lash this evening.) about that nuts Old Etonian in Kenya who has finally not got away with shooting locals who stray onto his vast estate. And the lawyer was saying that this old school fool had no real perception of anything other than the space six yards around him. Which reminded me about someone in Kenya talking about the Masai Mara and how all the animals there basically live in - and breathe and see and perceive and worry about - a six foot square existence around them.

Which is a nice way of carving up the world, and indeed trying to make some sort of sense of huge spaces like the Masai Mara, and how all the animals and people and bugs and dust work together, around each other, and with each other.

It's the same in London. The same arena. We can text someone in Nairobi, and download something from Washington, and email someone sitting in a hotel lobby in Sydney, and check a website that is promoting an ice cream stall on the beach in San Diego, and drop a zombie or whatever on someone living on the moon via Facebook. But it ends up being about that six square foot parameter.

All that really affects us is that Big Issue seller who is there in our face trying to sell their magazine, and the looney on the bus, and person in the queue in front of us, and the crush by the deli counter in Waitrose, and that walk from our seats to the bar, and the two losers who would not stop talking right in front of me at the Steve Earle gig last night, and...just small stuff (which can get big I know, if the looney kicks off or the person in the queue pulls out a gun). But it's all carved out for us to respond to. Seems both reassuring and also rather dull.

In related news, we are having amazing Maybethereisagod sunrises and sunsets here in London at the moment. Good reminder about looking beyond our six foot square. [On which note, hhn posted his blog, and went and sat on a mountain with his thumb up his ass.]