Chiefly British

It was apparent over the weekend that maggots were in the wheelie bin outside. I tried various things on them courtesy of self-appointed experts on YouTube. Nothing worked. If anything they were multiplying and thriving. I was wondering which tactic to try next or whether I could make it to bin day on Wednesday. But yesterday (Monday) I noticed quite a lot were now on the lid. Then, not long after dark and after rain started, I went into the kitchen and saw numerous things wriggling up the glass parts of the back door. I went around via the front of the house and saw a biblical plague lite. There were hundreds (if not more) maggots all over the bin, along the path and up the kitchen door and adjacent walls. Strange thing is, the kitchen door isn't directly opposite the household waste bin. They were appearing to go directly, diagonally toward the door. Could they detect a faint whiff of the kitchen bin inside? I've long since ceased being amazed by the clever senses of apparently simple organisms. I was panicking a bit. I started throwing boiling water at them. I did this a lot before I realised that was just stunning them briefly and actually making them even keener to climb up the door.

Change of tactic. I now started throwing a bleach and water mix at them and it did seem to kill most of them that got hit or at least put them in a coma. I'm pretty sure they were in their thousands at this point and reckoned I needed to deal with the root of the problem or they'd just keep coming. The root of problem was the food source, the Mt. Doom of round-the-clock maggot factory, the bin. I managed to lift the maggoty, black, bin bag out of the bin and into another bin bag which promptly ripped because cheap supermarket bin bags are very thin. So I then inserted this bundle into a third bag which also ripped. I was getting very fed up. I moved this tied-off but side-ripped bundle up the back lawn away from the house and worried that the maggots in it would come out just as they had escaped the wheelie bin earlier. I opened the blinds at the rear of the house to cast light on the back garden in the hope it would discourage foxes et al. from going at the maggoty, smelly bag. The local tip wouldn't open for another six hours or so. I poured a bit of bleach on the grass around the bag in the random hope it'd stop maggots going walkabout and stop animals touching it. I checked it half an hour later and about ten maggots were on the exterior of the bag. Oh no.

Back at the battleground, most maggots at the side of the house (the back door is actually on the side) were dead but a few were still wriggling and some even still climbing. Yet more fed-upness. But perhaps this battle against evil was turning. About twenty thingies were still crawling on the bin sides and lid so I used more chemical wet bombs and missiles, then I put some water in the bottom of the now empty bin to drown the small bunch still in there. Turning back to the main carnage, I deepened the bleach puddles, especially where I saw any wriggling. I ran out of bleach and went to the twenty-four hour shop to get more. More bleach was splashed about. Some was put in a squirty bottle and sprayed in tactical hits. All this time I was worrying about how to get the stinky bag on the grass to the tip without maggotizing my car. I had an old duvet cover due to be thrown out so I decided I'd use that to transport the vile package to the tip…but I wouldn't bag it yet.

While I waited for the recycling centre to open I started washing and brushing the countless carcasses down the path away from the house and toward the road. This took forever because maggots stick to rough slabs when you brush them. Many tidal waves of water from the mop bucket were needed and incessant sweeping too. I also dragged the wheelie bin up the garden and poured the drowned larvae out. Then, at the last possible minute, I put the vile parcel that still had the maggot factory inside it in the old duvet cover, which I scrunched up and taped around. Thankfully, I only saw one maggot on the outside of the black bag, perhaps because the now cold air had sent them back inside it. Got it disposed of. Returned home. No maggots in the car. There was a slight smell in the car that had faded by the time I got home.

Oh, and yes, some did get in the house. I think I nabbed about twenty or thirty of them in ones and twos that wriggled in under the kitchen door. I was constantly re-checking for them all night. It was much anxiousness and it was terribly exhausting but I got all of them.

Lessons learned:
1) Don't put food waste in the outside bin unless it's bagged. I sort of knew this but risked it.2) Maggots are Orc-like.3) Boiling water doesn't work. If the the bin has been emptied of waste and all the maggots are there then water can drown them but it doesn't need to be boiled. They're brilliant at sprinting up vertically though, so you have to make sure they're splashed right down. Also, water in the bin when the maggots and waste are still present probably encourages evacuation, also known as Armageddon.4) Bleach/water mix kills them but killing every single one permanently is extremely difficult for some reason.5) Get maggots as quickly as possible. I once fettled a minor bin maggot problem with white vinegar, but in that case they were caught very early and the bin was emptied the next morning.6) The council only emptying the bins every two weeks makes me very annoyed. I think it was nearly two weeks ago that I scraped food into the bin.7) Spending about twelve hours all through the night fighting a war of attrition against waves of vermin is exhausting. I was on my (crappy) feet most of that time. My (crappy) back had to lift an extremely obese bin bag and the mop bucket full of water weighed a ton as I carried it many times around the house. By 8:30am I felt more broken than I can remember feeling. I suppose having previous injuries exacerbates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch

I recently lost a lot of data…computer files. About forty gigabytes worth to be precise, due to my stupidity. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

But I did manage to recover them with recovery software, or the vast majority of them…I think. I'd have to look through the thousands of files and folders carefully and even then, how would I know for certain that some hadn't been lost? The size in gigabytes of the recovered data is about what I know was lost, so the signs are good. PHEW! One is relieved, isn't one?

But what an absolute berk I am! I'm not the worst of berks. I don't go around blithely with only one instance of my main device's files (ie. the instance on said device). I know someone who does this {shudder}. Nor do I think that copies that are on another internal drive or partition, or on an external but plugged in drive can really count as proper backups. And I don't assume a single instance of data is OK as long as it's in a cupboard away from the computer. But here's how, despite being less of a berk than some people I know, and with the help of a small, momentary brain burp, I can end up with a backupfuckup.

I had these two flash drives. Each held the exact same data. I felt secure in having the data doubled-up. I know that proper sticklers would want more than two instances of any data but I thought it was OK to be going on with. But then…I came up with…

…a cunning plan!

Uh oh! What is it about cunning plans? They do so aft gang awry. The flash drives each were only about a third full, and the nature of the data made me think the amount wouldn't change much. So there was a lot of wasted empty space. That space was paid for and I wanted to use it. So my punning clan was to partition each drive down the middle and thus have extra partitions available for other uses. This efficiency technique clearly marked me out as a genius, no? So then I wondered if I ought to partition and format drive A, copy data from drive B onto it, partition and format drive B and finally copy the data back from drive A to drive B. It would mean having just one instance of the data for a few minutes. Not really a clever idea, but, well, my analysis of the situation was that of many idiots throughout history. I thought: it'll be alright.

I got myself into right tizzy with drive A. I kept changing my mind about what format to use. It went something like this: let's use FAT32 because it's 'normal', it's understood everywhere. Oh wait, it doesn't support files over 4Gb. Yes, I'll use NTFS instead. Err, on second thoughts, NTFS isn't universally supported and I don't currently have any files over 4Gbs, so I think I'll try ExFAT because it's what U.S.B. flash drives come with. I mean, you don't need a mac format to store a mac's files do you? Do they have special mac metadata in them? Possibly…so I'll go with HFS+. Err…wait a minute, the new all-singing all-dancing file format on macs is APFS. Apple reckons APFS is the dog's bollocks. It's probably really efficient and uses less space and is less likely to get corrupted and maybe even makes me a cup of tea in the morning. Yep, that's the one. Argh…no! I've just remembered, most systems, including many macs can't make sense of APFS. Terrible idea. So sod it, if ExFAT is what flash drives come out of the factory with, I'll just use that, end of story.

I didn't just think all that in my head. I literally kept formatting the drive over and over again as I rethunk things. And that may be why I screwed up; I faffed so much that I forgot the original plan. Well it's either that or incipient Alzheimers. Once I'd finally made my mind up and finished formatting drive A, I removed it and formatted drive B. Then it suddenly dawned on me. 'I haven't have I? Please let it not be so. I'm scared to look. Let's look. Oh God, I have {sinking feeling}. How could I do that? What's wrong with my bloody brain?'

Anyway, long story short. Reading up told me that R-Studio was the best file recovery software. It's the one professionals use. It was rated best or equal best for most of the various types of recovery tasks. It was just slightly beaten by DMDE at recovering lost or formatted partitions. Whilst I was reading about file recovery, and before I actually tried to recover anything, I read that plain text files are very difficult to recover once lost. This is apparently because…well, they are plain. There's little to no metadata with them. They don't leave clues lying around like other filetypes do. So it's hard for recovery programmes to know where to find the relevant bits and glue them together. This discovery put me in the doldrums a bit. I knew my drives had held some plain text files I didn't want to lose. Some were quite important or useful. Some contained text I was just downright fond of. So I went forward with slow, concerned trepidation. I knew that recovering stuff from an external, non-live device was more likely than from a live running system. But I'd never done this before and had some doubt, especially about plain text files.

DMDE failed to locate, let alone resurrect the old volume despite allegedly being good at that sort of thing and despite no data on the device being over-written. Well, I did format it to buggery didn't I? With a standard, deep scan it did find most of the files judging by the size of data found, but thousand of files were only found by signature scanning, meaning they had the wrong names and sometimes no extension and the tree structure of folders was gone. If partition undeleting wasn't possible, I decided I may as well try the extolled R-Studio. Well stone the crows! It found the old (ExFAT) volume! In fact, when including extra—apparently duplicate—files, it found an amount of data greater than the flash drive capacity. I've no idea how that works; perhaps it's something to do with my silly formatting mania. The whole nested folder hierarchy appeared complete as well. Like I said up top, I'm not 100% sure a few things haven't gone to that mysterious place files go to when they die. But working from memory, I honestly can't see any omissions. And it presented my plain text files too! With the correct names! In the correct locations!

Phew!

So there you are. R-Studio, the sine qua non of file recovery software. Well, sine qua non means 'without which nothing' and other programmes will find something, so what's Latin for 'without which, less'? A quick look up tells me that R-Studio's motto should be:

Sine quae minus.

The old man next door has passed away (cancer). Apparently, for the last few days he was sleeping most of the time while holding his late wife’s photo in his hand. That’s that then. They were nice neighbours. We used to have nice conversations over the fence (me with him, not her). I remember him saying a few months ago that he was taking anti-depression tablets because of the loneliness. I can imagine the desolation of bereavement in old age. After the very last conversation I had with him, he said 'see you later', or something to that effect as per usual and raised his hand. As he moved from the bins toward the archway into the back garden—planning to mow the grass—I wondered about the wave of the hand. I started wondering if it was meant as a farewell. Did he think he might not speak to me again. Perhaps I was reading something into it that wasn’t there. He didn’t seem like he was three months from meeting his maker but I knew the cancer was advanced. Would that be the last time I ever spoke to him? I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t had that experience of wondering if I’m seeing someone for the last time before. It's an odd feeling, like an uncertain, questioning premonition. I briefly spied him three times after that. The last one was as he went from car to house on two crutches. No more talking though.

I keep having debates with myself about password managers. I've always had a mental block about 'single point of failure' even though the benefits are obviously massive. Yesterday I'd more or less talked myself into using one but then I read about their history of security breaches and flaws. Now I'm having some doubts. I suppose every piece of software ever made will have some issues. Nothing can ever be perfect. I'm more concerned with blatantly stupid security policies—Last Pass used to have the master password hard coded in the app and 1Password used to downgrade https to http by default in its internal browser—than with inadvertent bugs. So I'm wondering which one is the most sound. If it was more friendly, Keepass would probably be right for me (due to it keeping things local). I'm probably too much of a muggle for that system though. BitWarden seems promising but perhaps a bit clunky compared with the famous ones. I like that it has extensions for outlier web browsers (Brave, Vivaldi and Tor).

I wonder if there is anything that you can do to mitigate the 'single point of failure'. I always see two factor authentication as a liability because you're combining something you can forget with something you can lose. So it's single point of failure times two. I had a cunning idea: use several password managers and portion passwords out to them so if there's a catastrophe with one it only affects a portion of the things you log into. I like that idea in theory, but I suppose you'd have to be able to instantly remember which password manager to invoke for every log in. Tricky…and maybe the extensions would clash. You could use a different browser for each password manager…but it's getting complex now. Do I sound neurotic with all this? I don't think anxiety about putting your whole life in one basket is neurotic, but I need to work something out and get on with my digital life. I wonder if you can have duplicate second factors (2FA). If you can, then that would mean the single point of failure is mitigated and the loss—or breaking—of the second factor is probably alleviated. So if I was using my phone as a second factor and dropped it down a well…but had a Yubi Key with the same authentication on it…no worries, eh? Can you do that?

I was doing some food shopping for my mum and dad today because I’m now an unpaid fetcher. While I was driving, they played 'Mother of Mine' on the radio. I almost lost it. I had to pull over. I used willpower to force myself to not lose my composure fully because you can’t go into a shop with red eyes can you? So then I drove off again. There may have been a little rheum and a slight reddening but I’d not be at the shop for ten minutes so I’d look perfectly normal by then wouldn’t I? Mind you, I was still fighting the urge a little while the song continued. When it finished, the D.J. said 'we’re all a bit emotional in the studio here'. I defy anyone who has or has had a more or less kind and generous mother to not be moved by that song.

I used to hear the song from time to time when I was young and while I thought it was somewhat nice I don’t remember it moving me especially. I'm not sure what caused my reaction today because my mother and I were never that close and we’re not very similar either to be honest. As I listened to it I found myself thinking about how my mum had done so much for me for so so long. Mostly little things that are easy to take for granted probably, but it all adds up. So I think that was it. Perhaps also a recognition of her age and the beginnings of some fragility. If you’re young and your mother has many decades ahead of her, you probably have no reason to feel this kind of pathos, but eventually, some day, you might. Maybe there just comes a point in time when our mothers reach a certain age when something switches over inside of us and we start seeing them differently.

Whenever I come across something moving like the above song, I ask myself 'is it just sentimentality, or is there something truly meaningful in it?' For many many years I misunderstood the definition of the word sentimental. I’d never looked it up. I thought I knew what it meant. I thought it just applied to the stirring of certain emotions. I think it was about a dozen years ago when something someone said about sentimentality prompted me to look it up. In the dictionary I used I was surprised to see that the main definition said that the emotions in question were being aroused in an exaggerated or self-indulgent way. I used to sometimes say that I had a fairly high tolerance for sentimentality, but now I was seeing the word in a more negative light. Some dictionaries don’t use the negative sense as the main definition so take it as you wish. Was Neil Reid just being mawkish? Did he sit down and try to manipulate people's emotions so they'd rush to buy a record? The track was after all released at perhaps the tail end of the sentimental period of popular music. In the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, maudlin songs were very common. There were songs about dead dogs: Old Shep and Old Tige. There were songs about orphans left out in the cold. Songs about men riddled with remorse because they’d killed someone while drink driving. Songs about widows called Honey and their trees. False sentiments are heard sometimes. But I can’t second guess Neil Reid. He may have written his song in a fit of genuine tenderness. It’s lyrics are ordinary; they don’t suggest anything remarkable. But 'Mother of Mine' may be one of those gestalt creations where the product is greater than the sum of its individually analysed parts. You certainly get atmosphere. The fellow's tender voice alone is primed to stir us up. Atmosphere has an intelligence and a depth all of its own. It’s not to be sniffed at. Except when it makes you cry of course.

I think the selfless, motherly giving of lots of kindness and aid and alms over a lot of years (even just in the passive way of just being present) added to a perception that she is reaching—hopefully very gradually—the end of her term is what brings out the feelings.

It's more than a decade ago that I was awakened one morning by a scratching sound making itself known from the vicinity of the wall vent above my pillow. Given that not too long before that, there had been rats in the space between downstairs and upstairs, I was a bit spooked. The rat sound was more of a 'padding about' sound…and thankfully, was quickly dealt with by the semi-detached next-door-neighbours (which is where the thick-tailed ones were getting in from). The scratching near the bedroom vent seemed more like a bird because there was a bit of tapping or pecking as well. After a pretty long period of waiting to see if the creature would find its way back out, it was clear that it wouldn't. The inner wall vent was an early post-war, integrated cement thing. My brother said I'd have to break it open to let the bird into my room. I gave him a dirty look. Ruin the formed vent? And let out into my bedroom what might be a bird but might just possibly be a giant man-eating, sewer rat? A mutant rat could gnaw my neck and give me Weils disease and I'd die a horrible death. Or it might do for my jugular and all my blood would spurt out up to the ceiling and I'd die in a few minutes.

Well I didn't have much choice did I? …and it definitely sounded like an over curious—and now rather worried bird. I easily picked a hole in the fairly soft cement grill and a bird popped her head out. Hello my little titmouse!

Except she wasn't a titmouse. She was a brown female Blackbird. She jumped in and flapped about without purpose. A mini chase ensued around my bedroom. The most bedroom action I'd seen in a long time. When she—scared—made for a dark corner, my brother threw a T-shirt over her to calm her and took her downstairs and let her out. A council man came and had a look at the bargeboard. He shrugged and said he couldn't see any place a bird could possibly get in and therefore he couldn't fix anything. For a while, I was a teensy bit nervous that I'd have birds coming in above my head while I was in bed…at least until the vent was fixed. But they never did come in again and I forgot about it.

~~~

Well bugger me, it just occurred again this Sunday morning. Another bird in the wall. Like the last time, I gave this little flapper an hour or two to see if it could find its way back out. It couldn't. There is obviously something about that space behind the eaves that affords ingress but not egress. Like a fish trap, but for birds. How strange, how Lovecraftian. This time, the inner vent is a flat metal plate with slidable slats (which were shut). Anyhow, when I went back to check a final time, the two bottom nails on the vent had been popped out and the bottom part of the vent was slightly out from the wall. The little rascal had managed to force its way into my room and make an escape through the window. There were also forensic particles of wall plaster on the end of my bed adding to the Great Escape evidence . So I didn't get to physically see the bird this time. Was it another Blackbird? A Starling? A Bullfinch? Guesswork. The vent slats were open, suggesting birdy had somehow slid them back for a look-see before going for the brute force approach. Actually, those stubby nails into the mortar were always crap; that vent was never very secure. An Aphid could have sprung it. I'm just glad this rude intrusion happens less than once per decade.

Over the last few years I've watched lots and lots of old, black and white British films. I was going to say 'so you don't have to' but I imagine very few people would be remotely interested in them anyway. There is a channel over here in Blighty called Talking Pictures TV which tends to broadcast mainly British films from the forties, fifties and sixties and a few from the seventies and thirties and even the odd early eighties one. It shows a minority of old American films too, and there have been two or three Australian ones. Why am I doing this? Well, because modern mainstream films are unsatisfying, that’s why. Lets catalogue the ways in which they undernourish (at least for me):

1) They’re all American. More or less. There’s nothing wrong with American films. Some of my favourites are American. I’m just bored of the foreign monoculture. TPTV is a bit of an antidote to that.2) They’re bland. The industry has been financialised. They constantly iterate the same film series and are frit of anything unusual. They know Epic Film pt.6 will probably make profits. Perhaps the industry was always financialised but it's certainly getting better at it. They also pander to their typical repeat customers, who, judging by all the animations, superheroes and things being blown up are quite young. The old films can be bland too but they don't have that plastic cosmetic look.3) They have that plastic cosmetic look. You know, the women look like they've been extruded out of a machine and the men are unrealistically sleek and cool. I like craggy characters. I also like the crumbling, Victorian, industrial townscapes of films like 'A Kind of Loving'. I like some grit.4) They are becoming more and more political. I thought artists should make films, not commissars. The moral code in earlier films could be preachy too, but with much more self-doubt and with lots of holes in it. The films I cite aren't exactly paragons of traditionalist thinking. They're often socially concious and directed by liberal thinkers. I think the post-war period represents an interesting point of equalibium between the old attitudes and the new attitudes. You see both represented fairly equally in some films of the era…before social radicalism then became dominant.

So are the old black and white British films I’m watching really good? No, they’re crap! Honestly, they’re nearly all rubbish, or just rather boring at any rate. Lets be honest, Britian was never one of the great domains of cinematic production. A lot of them are unremarkable portrayals of coppers chasing gangsters or they are tedious conveyor belt comedies. The British rarely approached films with the artistic seriousness of the French or the proper populism of the Americans. The class system got in the way. We had stuffy old gents ensuring that British films represented their concerns (not subversive working class people) and mirrored their experiences (obeying fags in public schools or fighting thuggees in India). It sounds like I'm contradicting myself on the politics and morals in the films of the time. No, it's just that the old and new thinking—and old and new filmmakers—overlapped for a long time. Even when the class system was very faded, British filmmakers seemed a bit lost. They couldn't bring themselves to adopt either the French way or the American way. Some Merchant Ivory films were reasonable and there was Mike Leigh, but most of it was rather boilerplate. So you have to get through a lot of chaff when you watch these things. I don't recommend others take this up as a habit, for you'd soon lose the will to live. Such a tiny proportion of them are good.

Am I going to keep it up? Is it worth it? For me…and only for me, it is still worth it. Put it this way, if I hadn’t got into this 'hobby' I may never have seen 'The Naked Civil Servent', a brilliant film about one of the stately homos of England. This film enlightens me on the previous life of gay people in Britain and it has a delightful patina of dishevelled empire, old British grubbiness you won't see anywhere else. And would I have got around to seeing 'A Taste of Honey' which reminded me of long forgotten idioms I once knew but which had got buried at the bottom of my brain. ‘Oh the big ship sails on the alley alley oh, the alley alley oh, the alley alley oh’. Or the grittily cynical 'Look Back in Anger'? No neat, telegraphed happy ending there. These are all nine-out-of-ten films.

As an addendum of sorts, I should mention that the channel I'm watching shows a lot of old public information shorts and wartime propaganda shorts. Seeing these—along with reading some history and watching some documentaries—has made me realise just how socialistic Britain's civil service, local government and technocratic bureaucracy could be even that early. A type of scene I've seen several times in these short films is one where a local bureaucrat puffs on a smoky pipe, assesses the town about him and then proclaims 'We can't continue like this. When we win this war, we can't go back to this squalor. We can't ask people to toil and struggle, to have their wills bent to this immense cause for freedom as they have these last years, and then ask them to settle back into a life of dirt, poverty and disease. We must tear all this down [sweep of the arm at the old brick buildings and cobbled streets] and build a new and better world fit for new men and new women.' I am paraphrasing from memory. This could be expanded upon with stuff about Uncle Joe and stuff about poor journalism and stuff about concrete buidlings but I ought to stop.

Oh, addendum 2: I almost forgot, TPTV even show old television series. Most forgettable, but a couple were good. 'Callan' is a very cynical seventies spy series with Edward Woodward as the assasin for the British secret services who hates what he's doing but whose boss refuses to let go of him. 'For the Love of Ada' is a seventies sitcom about two bereaved pensioners starting a relationship and getting married. It's very close to being my favourite British sitcom ever…and I'd never even heard of it before.