I've come to the conclusion recently that grumpiness is a peculiarly male phenomenon, and that women don't really understand it. Mrs.GOS certainly doesn't - she thinks that when I'm grumpy I'm being negative, and that I must be unhappy. Try as I may, I can't convince her that being grumpy is actually quite enjoyable, and that for many men the cultivation of a finely-tuned bad temper is the best way to avoid an old age slumped on the sofa watching celebrity television and dribbling.
I'm not exaggerating: I really enjoy being grumpy. Finding new things to be grumpy about is a source of endless fascination, and every day I spend many happy hours trawling the internet (then when I've watched enough porn, I open the Daily Mail website).
There are distinctions to be made, of course. There are things that one feels, as it were, professionally annoyed about, like the alleged Global Warming or fortnightly rubbish collections. And then there are the things that really touch you where you live, and spoil the even tenor of your life.
Like Windows Vista, for instance. Bastards.
Still, even a joyful thing like grumpiness has its limits. There are good things in the world, there are people who act with intelligence and rational common-sense, there are organisations that perform effectively and provide satisfaction for their members, and it would be unreasonable for a website like this to dwell all the time on the negative side of life and never acknowledge the positive.
So just for once I'd like to share with you three things that have lately given me unalloyed pleasure.
The first is a book, "Consider the Birds: who they are and what they do"
by Colin Tudge. Now, I wouldn't call myself a birdie person. I've taken no more than a passing interest in them, though I do put food out for them, can tell a bluetit from a duck (ducks are bigger), and once picked a pheasant out of my radiator grille. It was dead.
So why I chose to read this book - a hefty volume with comparatively few pictures - I really can't say. But what a revelation! It's beautifully written - in fact if he would only use about 30% fewer punctuation marks I'd say it was perfect - and he has the knack of explaining the most obscure science with crystal clarity, and making it interesting at the same time. And it's no superficial dumbed-down science-for-the-thick-masses kind of book, either: some of the chapter headings include "Convergence, divergence, homology and cladistics", "The third lineage of Passerida" and "The ethologists: Tinbergen and Lorenz".
But it's never heavy-going, and Tudge has a lightness of touch that keeps you buzzing along without noticing what arcane stuff you're being introduced to. Other chapters include "Why not eat plants?" and "Sex for bonding, sex for fun". I'll drink to that.
I'm not sure that this marvellous book is going to change my attitude to birds. I think they'll still be things that twitter and fiddle about in the garden and crap on my car. But it's definitely changed my mind about books - mainly, why the hell can't everyone write like this?
My second joyful discovery is a computer programme called OpenOffice.
You will know, I'm sure, that Microsoft's "Office" suite of programmes has established a virtual stranglehold on the world's computer-users. It includes the word-processor most people use, "Word"; a very good spreadsheet called "Excel"; an extremely versatile text/picture manager called "Powerpoint" which is intended for public presentations but actually makes a good small-scale editor for posters and anything that mixes text with graphics; and a very powerful database, "Access".
Office applications are powerful and effective, but they can also be frustrating. Word has far-reaching and intrusive autoformat features which you cannot, whatever the pundits say, turn off and which has wasted approximately 15% of my life.
Access is, frankly, weird. It's certainly effective, but it was plainly invented by an exo-skeletal being from Aldebaran, operates in ways completely unknown to man, and requires such a rigid grasp of logic that you might as well be a computer yourself. And it has no "Save as" function. When did you ever see a computer programme that didn't offer "Save as"? Loopy, plain loopy.
Well recently my laptop, powered by that most futile piece of flatulence from Bill Gates's nether parts, Windows Vista, decided that it didn't like Microsoft Office any more and wasn't going to open any part of it, so there (except for Access - that still works. Why was I not surprised?). Rather than spend many night-time hours arguing with it, or many daytime hours arguing with some obtuse dimwit on a telephone helpline, I looked round for alternatives. And boy, did I find one!
It's called OpenOffice, you download it from the internet, and it contains a word processor "Writer", a spreadsheet "Calc", a database "Base" which I haven't used yet, a drawing programme, a Powerpoint clone called "Impress" and something Microsoft don't offer, an advanced maths calculator.
So far I've used the word processor and the spreadsheet quite extensively. The spreadsheet is every bit as good as Excel for everyday things - Excel may have more advanced functions, but as I never use these I really couldn't care less. The word processor is actually better than Word - for a start you can actually turn the autoformat off! In other respects it's very like Word, and one slips seamlessly into it without turning a hair.
But the two greatest things about OpenOffice are (a) it's totally compatible with Office. You can open Word documents with it, you can save them in whatever format you like, and you can send documents to your friends and they will be able to open them with Word. Similarly with the other applications.
And (b) it's completely FREE! Just Google it and you'll find a number of places you can download from (the only snag I had was that it took me some time to find a way of placing icons to each application on my desktop). It just warms my heart that someone - not just an individual, actually, but a group of people - had the intelligence to create something that really works, and the generosity to give it away. The fools, they could have made their fortunes.
My third bit of serendipity is a magazine. It's called "The Great Eastern Journal" and it comes out about four times a year, rather irregularly. It is beautifully produced on shiny, high-quality paper, it is expensively illustrated with fascinating, usually pin-sharp historical photographs and diagrams, it's well-written and thoroughly edited, and it offers an astounding depth of scholarship on the minutest of subjects. Sadly you can't buy it off the shelves of W.H.Smith. You have to join the Great Eastern Railway Society (or to be honest, filch it from someone who has), and this is not a step to be taken lightly because these people are seriously nutty. The Great Eastern Railway disappeared into the much larger LNER in 1923, and was not a bad railway as such things go. It was responsible for the main lines from London to Cambridge and Norwich, for the remarkably intensive suburban services out of Liverpool Street, and for many charming and bucolic country branch lines. It carried so little mineral wealth and so much agricultural produce that it was nicknamed "the Swedie", it painted its engines a rather pleasing dark blue, and spent its short life in comparative penury and obscurity.
But this doesn't stop the members of the Society from delving ever deeper into every tiny facet of railway life. This is not just engine-numbers; we're talking heavyweight obsession here. There are authoritative articles recounting the life histories of minor servants of the railway, biographies of station porters and their entire families all painstakingly researched and carefully illustrated. I can't think how I managed before I knew that Station-master Ernest Wicks was born in Lime Tree Place, Stowmarket on Thursday 16th March 1876, and once met the King of Belgium.
There was once a very interesting article on Great Eastern Railway footwarmers: but its author did not, as most of us would have done, content himself with explaining what a footwarmer was, how it was used and why it was necessary. Oh no, this man was a scholar: he managed an entire three-page article about Great Eastern Railway footwarmers at Lowestoft, 1894-5. And the most recent supplement to this magazine carries an intriguing piece about that most vital of issues, Great Eastern Railway loco-shed sand bins, which as any fule kno can be divided into several sub-varieties: Type 1 wooden with a sliding cover, Type 2a in metal with square corners and a lift-off cover, Type 2b similar but with a heavy hinged cover, Type 2b.1 which has the hinged cover mounted longitudinally (only seen at Cambridge and used to hold a white substance that may not have been sand, but included for reasons of completeness), Type 2c in metal with rounded corners, and Type 3 made of brick.
I mean, one really needed to know all that, didn't one? It's completely and utterly dotty, it's so wonderfully and obsessively eccentric that it could only be carried out by men, and probably British men at that, and it's a testament to the entirely laudable premise that if you're going to be potty, you might as well do the thing really carefully, thoroughly and with an all-pervading sense of quality and style.
I love it. I take my hat off to them. Now, you might be interested to know about this hat ...
The GOS says: That's quite enough positivism. Normal service will now be resumed ...
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
Copyright © 2009 The GOS
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