Tags: land

For the past few years, I’ve been taking a trip to Spain at the end of September for the Cáceres Irish Fleadh. Last year I convinced my friends Liam and Monica to come along and they had a great time.

Like me, Liam just loves playing in sessions. Also like me, Liam likes to spend the gloomy short days of January thinking about travelling somewhere …and then playing in sessions there.

I told him I’d put together a list of potential trips for the discerning session hound. I figured I might as well share it here too…

First of all, there are Irish music festivals. Alas, most festivals don’t happen in the sunny climes of Spain. As you’d expect, most of them are in Ireland.

I’m heading to Carlingford at the end of this month for a weekend of Féile na Tána. I haven’t been before but it looks good. There’ll be the usual amalgam of workshops, concerts, and sessions.

Myself and Jessica will fly in to Belfast, then take the train down to Newry and get to Carlingford from there. You could fly into Dublin and get the train up to Dundalk, but the only Gatwick flights to Dublin are Ryan Air, and I’d rather entrust my instrument to EasyJet.

At the end of March we’re heading to Tullamore Trad Fest. That’s another one we haven’t been to before. Again, there’ll be workshops, concerts, and sessions.

Tullamore is just an hour away from Dublin by train and has plenty of accommodation options. We’ve booked into a nice-looking B&B.

There’s no avoiding Ryan Air for this trip and I want to take my good mandolin, so I’ve gone ahead and booked a separate seat for it. I don’t want to take any chances with an airline that actively seeks to elevate misery.

The festival I heartily recommend is Belfast Trad Fest at the end of July. It’s super convenient to get to with EasyJet flights from Gatwick—go to Belfast city airport, which is right downtown.

The festival offers a really good accommodation deal in modern student flats. The workshops are top-notch, and best of all, it has a really well-organised session trail. You can easily play in sessions all afternoon and evening.

This year, for the first time ever, Belfast trad fest is immediately followed by the all-Ireland fleadh, which promises to be pandemonium. I’ve never been to the fleadh before but I’m going to stick around Belfast for it.

You could head to the Willie Clancy Festival in Miltown Malbay at the start of July (the website seems to be having some issues right now). But good luck finding accommodation. The event is so big now that unless you’re camping, there’s not much chance of finding a place to stay. If you make it there though, non-stop sessions await. Non-stop chaos awaits too. That’s part of the deal. Great workshops though!

There are other festivals I haven’t been to but I’ve heard great things about. The Pádraig O’Keeffe Festival in Kerry in October sounds fantastic, especially if you like your polkas and slides. But it’s in Castleisland, which doesn’t have much in the way of accommodation. So unless you’ve got transport, it’s going to be tricky.

There’s a trad fest in Kilkenny in March. I’ve never been but they’ve got a session trail. You’d need to fly into either Dublin or Cork and then get on a bus. Either way, it’s Ryan Air from Gatwick.

I’ve also never been to the Ennis Trad Fest in county Clare in November but I’ve heard good things. Accommodation for the 2026 event is already in short supply though.

But you don’t need a festival to play in sessions. In fact, the kind of sessions you end up in at festivals have a different vibe to the usual sessions, simply because they’re formed of a hodge-podge of visiting players.

There a few spots in Ireland where you’re guaranteed a session pretty much any night of the week.

I love Galway. There are afternoon sessions in Taafe’s and Tigh Cóilí as well as evening sessions in the Crane and other places. You’d need to fly into Dublin and get the train from there. It takes about two hours.

Galway is busy in the summer time and accommodation can be pricy, but if you go off-season you can find some cheaper options.

Ennis has music most nights. There’s a regular bus service between Ennis and Shannon airport that’s nice and quick. You’d need to fly Ryan Air from Gatwick though.

And then there’s Belfast again. Even when the trad fest isn’t happening, Belfast has sessions seven nights a week. Check out the Belfast session guide Instagram account for up-to-date details.

I recommend staying in The Flint, but make sure you ask for a room on the top floor far away from the nightclub if you’re there on a weekend.

So, to recap, here are some festivals to check out:

• Féile na Tána in Carlingford, county Louth in January (I’m going),
• Tullamore Trad Fest in county Offaly in March (I’m going),
• Kilkenny Trad Fest also in March,
• Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy in Miltown Malbay, county Clare in July,
• Belfast Trad Fest at the end of July (I’m going),
• Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann also in Belfast at the start of August (I’m going),
• Cáceres Irish Fleadh in Spain in September (I’m going),
• The Pádraig O’Keeffe festival in Castleisland, county Kerry in October, and
• Ennis Trad Fest in county Clare in November.

And then for year-round session action, you can visit:

• Galway,
• Ennis, and
• Belfast

As part of their on-stage banter, The Dubliners used to quip that “All the books that are banned in Ireland should be published in Irish, to encourage more people to learn their native tongue.”

There was no shortage of banned books back in the day. I’m reading one of them now. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

About halfway through the book, I read this passage:

The parcels for the Halloween party were coming every day. I couldn’t ask my father for one because a man is not able to do these things, so I wrote to him for money instead and a day girl brought me a barmbrack, apples, and monkey-nuts.

Emphasis mine, because that little list sounded so familiar to me.

Back in 2011, I wrote a candygram for Jason. It was called Monkey nuts, barmbrack and apples.

It’s not exactly Edna O’Brien, but looking back at it fifteen years on, I think it turned out okay.

I was supposed to be in Cork over the weekend.

Not only was it high time I paid my mother a visit, but the Cork Folk Festival was happening too. So I booked some relatively cheap plane tickets for myself and Jessica back in August and noted down the days in my calendar.

We didn’t end up getting our flight. This time it wasn’t because I messed up the flight times. We made it to Gatwick airport in plenty of time. That’s when we saw that our flight was delayed.

See, Storm Amy was moving in. We were hoping to get into Cork before the storm hit, but now with the flight delayed, that wasn’t likely. In fact, it was more likely that the flight would just get more and more delayed and possibly even get diverted.

To start with, we settled in at the airport, prepared to spend an hour or two more than we had planned. But, sure enough, the delays kept piling up. It was time to make decision; wait it out in the hopes that we’d eventually make a very bumpy landing in Cork, or cut our losses and run.

I quickly looked up flights for the next couple of weekends and spotted some cheap ones a fortnight away. I booked them and then called my mother to tell her we wouldn’t be showing up that night, but we’d see her in a couple of weeks.

Alright then, time to go home.

Wait a minute …how exactly are we supposed to leave the airport other than on an airplane?

It turns out there’s a process called “decontrolling”. You need to find someone from the airline (or in our case, a third-party contractor operating on the airline’s behalf) who has the security privileges to walk you back out. But you still need to go through passport control …even though you never left the building.

Luckily we didn’t have any checked luggage or it would’ve gotten complicated. As it was, it was just weird. It was all very City And The City.

That flight we abandoned did finally take off …six hours late. By that time we were back home on the sofa eating pizza and listening to the wind gusting outside. I think we made the right choice.

After spending a week immersed in the language and the landscape of Glencolmcille, Jessica and I were headed to Miltown Malbay for the annual Willie Clancy music week.

I could only get us accommodation from the Monday onwards so we had a weekend in between Donegal and Clare. We decided to spend it in Galway.

We hadn’t booked any travel from Glencolmcille to Galway and that worked out fine. We ended up getting a lift from a fellow student (and fellow blogger) heading home to Limerick.

Showing up in Galway on a busy Saturday afternoon was quite the change after the peace and quiet of Glencolmcille. But we dove right in and enjoyed a weekend of good food and music.

But I missed speaking Irish. So on the Sunday afternoon we made a trip out to Spiddal for lunch just so we could say a few words as Gaeilge.

We also got some practice in every morning getting coffee at the Plámás cafe. You get a ten-cent discount for ordering in Irish. What a lovely little piece of behaviour design—a nice gentle nudge!

From Galway we made our way down to Miltown Malbay where the Willie Clancy festival was in full swing. We were staying out in Spanish Point, so we could escape the madness of the town each evening. Mind you, there was plenty going at the Armada hotel too.

The hotel was something of an extravagance but it was worth it—we had a beautiful view on to the beach at Spanish Point and our room was tucked away far from the wild shenanigans in the hotel bar (not to mention the céilís on the other side of the hotel!).

I have to admit, I got quite overwhelmed the first day I ventured into Miltown proper. It’s easy to have a constant state of FOMO, constantly searching for the best session. But once I calmed down and accepted the situation, I had a lovely time at some really nice sessions.

Last time we were in Miltown Malbay was three years ago …and three years before that. Maybe we’ll be back in another three years.

I don’t know, though. It kind of felt like going to the South By Southwest after it got crazy big and the host town could no longer bear the weight of the event.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed our two-week excursion down a stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way from Donegal to Galway to Clare.

I had never been to Donegal before my trip to Glencolmcille to spend a week there learning Irish.

I had heard it’s beautiful there. But pictures don’t really do it justice. When our bus was winding its way down into the valley, it looked breathtaking, laid out before us like a green haven where we’d spend the week immersed in the language as well as the landscape.

The reason I say that pictures don’t do it justice is that the light is constantly changing, like in the Lake District or the Dingle peninsula. The beauty is formed of equal parts geography and meteorology.

We had a day to explore before the language courses begin. We strolled along the beach. We walked down winding paths to find ancient burial tombs and standing stones.

Then it was time to knuckle down and learn Irish.

Oideas Gael provides seven levels of learning, increasing in experience. Jessica went in at level one and I was amazed by how much she had picked up by the end of the week. I figured I’d go in at level three or maybe four, but after hearing a description of all the levels, I actually decided to try level five.

It turned out to be just right. There was lots to learn, and I definitely need to make sure I keep working on it, but the teacher was great and my classmates were lovely.

Tar éis an cursa, tá níos mó ealois agam, tá níos mó taithí agam, ach an rud is tábhachtaí, tá níos mó féin-mhuinín agam. After the course, I have more knowledge, I have more experience, but most importantly, I have more self-confidence.

And after a day of learning Irish, it was nice to unwind in the evening with a pint in the local pub, where there was also a session every single night. Not only were the musicians top-notch, they were also very welcoming to this blow-in mandolin player.

All in all, it was a wonderful and fulfilling week.

Beidh mé ar ais arís! I’ll be back again!

I’ve been taking some time off after UX London. That was a big project I was working towards all year and it went great, so I think I’ve earned a reward for myself.

My reward is to head off to Ireland to immerse myself in the language and music. A week at an Irish language school in Donegal followed by a week at an Irish music festival in Clare, with a little weekend in Galway in between.

First I had to get to Donegal. My plan was: fly from Gatwick to Dublin; get the train from Dublin to Sligo; spend the night in Sligo; take a couple of buses to get to my destination in Donegal.

I fell at the first hurdle.

I consider myself a fairly seasoned traveller at this point so I’m kicking myself that I somehow messed up the time of that flight to Dublin. I showed up after the bag check had closed. That’s when I realised I was off by an hour.

The next available flight to Dublin wasn’t until late in the evening. Jessica and I contemplated spending all day waiting for that, then spending the night in Dublin, and then doing all the overland travel the next day.

But we didn’t do that. We went to Belfast instead. As it turned out, we had a great evening there at a lovely piping session that only happens on the last Friday of the month—the very day we were there. It was meant to be.

The next day we got the train to Derry, then a bus to Letterkenny, and then eventually another bus to Donegal town (the first one just didn’t show up—probably because Donegal were playing a semi-final match at the time), and finally the bus from Donegal town to Glencolmcille.

I had never been to Donegal before. Everyone always goes on about how beautiful it is. They are not wrong. The closer we got to Glencolmcille, the more our breath was literally taken away by the stunning landscape.

So here we are. We’re both doing Irish language classes. It’s all very challenging and very rewarding at the same time.

Best of all, we’re doing it in this unbelievably beautiful place.

This is the just the start of my little odyssey on the west coast of Ireland and it’s already absolutely wonderful …apart from that unexpectedly bumpy start.

Also sprach Wittgenstein:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

Or in English, thus spoke Wittgenstein:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Language and thinking are intertwined. I’m not saying there’s anything to the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I think George Lakoff is onto something when he talks about political language.

There’s literal political language like saying “tax relief”—framing taxation as something burdensome that needs to be relieved. But our everyday language has plenty of framing devices that might subconsciously influence our thinking.

When it comes to technology, our framing of new technologies often comes from previous technologies. As a listener to a show, you might find yourself being encouraged to “tune in again next week” when you may never have turned a radio dial in your entire life.

In the early days of the web we used a lot of language from print. John Allsopp wrote about this in his classic article A Dao Of Web Design:

The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang.

One outdated piece of language on the web is a framing device in two senses: “above the fold”. It’s a conceptual framing device that comes straight from print where newspapers were literally folded in half. It’s a literal framing device that puts the important content at the top of the page.

But there is no fold. We pretended that everyone’s screens were 640 by 480 pixels. Then we pretended that everyone’s screens were 800 by 600 pixels. But we never really knew. It was all a consensual hallucination. Even before mobile devices showed up there was never a single fold.

Even if you know that there’s no literal page fold on the web, using the phrase “above the fold” is still insidiously unhelpful.

So what’s the alternative? Well, James has what I think is an excellent framing:

The landing zone.

It’s the bit of the page where people first show up. It doesn’t have a defined boundary. The landing zone isn’t something separate to the rest of the page; the content landing zone merges into the rest of the content.

You don’t know where the landing zone ends, and that’s okay. It’s better than okay. It encourages you design in a way that still prioritises the most important content but without fooling yourself into thinking there’s some invisible boundary line.

Next time you’re discussing the design of a web page—whether it’s with a colleague or a client—try talking about the landing zone.

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad | The Orwell Foundation

After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen.

George Orwell on the coming of spring during the darkest of times:

It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

I love libraries. I think they’re one of humanity’s greatest inventions.

My local library here in Brighton is terrific. It’s well-stocked, it’s got a welcoming atmosphere, and it’s in a great location.

But it has an information architecture problem.

Like most libraries, it’s using the Dewey Decimal system. It’s not a great system, but every classification system is going to have flaws—wherever you draw boundaries, there will be disagreement.

The Dewey Decimal class of 900 is for history and geography. Within that class, those 100 numbers (900 to 999) are further subdivded in groups of 10. For example, everything from 940 to 949 is for the history of Europe.

Dewey Decimal number 941 is for the history of the British Isles. The term “British Isles” is a geographical designation. It’s not a good geographical designation, but technically it’s not a political term. So it’s actually pretty smart to use a geographical rather than a political term for categorisation: geology moves a lot slower than politics.

But the Brighton Library is using the wrong label for their shelves. Everything under 941 is labelled “British History.”

The island of Ireland is part of the British Isles.

The Republic of Ireland is most definitely not part of Britain.

Seeing books about the history of Ireland, including post-colonial history, on a shelf labelled “British History” is …not good. Frankly, it’s offensive.

(I mentioned this situation to an English friend of mine, who said “Well, Ireland was once part of the British Empire”, to which I responded that all the books in the library about India should also be filed under “British History” by that logic.)

Just to be clear, I’m not saying there’s a problem with the library using the Dewey Decimal system. I’m saying they’re technically not using the system. They’ve deviated from the system’s labels by treating “History of the British Isles” and “British History” as synonymous.

I spoke to the library manager. They told me to write an email. I’ve written an email. We’ll see what happens.

You might think I’m being overly pedantic. That’s fair. But the fact this is happening in a library in England adds to the problem. It’s not just technically incorrect, it’s culturally clueless.

Mind you, I have noticed that quite a few English people have a somewhat fuzzy idea about the Republic of Ireland. Like, they understand it’s a different country, but they think it’s a different country in the way that Scotland is a different country, or Wales is a different country. They don’t seem to grasp that Ireland is a different country like France is a different country or Germany is a different country.

It would be charming if not for, y’know, those centuries of subjugation, exploitation, and forced starvation.

British history.

Update: They fixed it!

When I play music, it’s almost always instrumental. If you look at my YouTube channel almost all the videos are of me playing tunes—jigs, reels, and so on.

Most of those videos were recorded during The Situation when I posted a new tune every day for 200 consecutive days. Every so often though, I’d record a song.

I go through periods of getting obsessed with a particular song. During The Situation I remember two songs that were calling to me. New York was playing in my head as I watched my friends there suffering in March 2020. And Time (The Revelator) resonated in lockdown:

And every day is getting straighter, time’s a revelator.

The song I’m obsessed with right now is called Foreign Lander. I first came across it in a beautiful version by Sarah Jarosz (I watch lots of mandolin videos on YouTube so the algorithm hardly broke a sweat showing this to me).

There’s a great version by Tatiana Hargreaves too. And Tim O’Brien.

I wanted to know more about the song. I thought it might be relatively recent. The imagery of the lyrics makes it sound like something straight from a songwriter like Nick Cave:

If ever I prove false love
The elements would moan
The fire would turn to ice love
The seas would rage and burn

But the song is old. Jean Ritchie collected it, though she didn’t have to go far. She said:

Foreign Lander was my Dad’s proposal song to Mom

I found that out when I came across this thread from 2002 on mudcat.org where Jean Ritchie herself was a regular contributor!

That gave me a bit of vertiginous feeling of The Great Span, thinking about the technology that she used when she was out in the field.

I’ve been practicing Foreign Lander and probably driving Jessica crazy as I repeat over and over and over. It’s got some tricky parts to sing and play together which is why it’s taking me a while. Once I get it down, maybe I’ll record a video.

I spent most of Saturday either singing the song or thinking about it. When I went to bed that night, tucking into a book, Foreign Lander was going ‘round in my head.

Coco—the cat who is not our cat—came in and made herself comfortable for a while.

I felt very content.

A childish little rhyme popped into my head:

With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep

I almost got up to post it as a note here on my website. Instead I told myself to do it the morning, hoping I wouldn’t forget.

That night I dreamt about Irish music sessions. Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe my dream to you—I know how boring that is for everyone but the person who had the dream.

But I was glad I hadn’t posted my little rhyme before sleeping. The dream gave me a nice little conclusion:

With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep
And dream of rooms
Filled with tunes.

The Web Component Success Story | jakelazaroff.com

The power of interoperability:

Web components won’t take web development by storm, or show us the One True Way to build websites. They don’t need to dethrone JavaScript frameworks. We probably won’t even all learn how to write them!

What web components will do — at least, I hope — is let us collectively build a rich ecosystem of dynamic components that work with any web stack. No more silos. That’s the web component success story.

Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer - YouTube

This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.

If you’re travelling around Ireland, you may come across some odd pieces of 19th century architecture—walls, bridges, buildings and roads that serve no purpose. They date back to The Great Hunger of the 1840s. These “famine follies” were the result of a public works scheme.

The thinking went something like this: people are starving so we should feed them but we can’t just give people food for nothing so let’s make people do pointless work in exchange for feeding them (kind of like an early iteration of proof of work for cryptobollocks on blockchains …except with a blockchain, you don’t even get a wall or a road, just ridiculous amounts of wasted energy).

This kind of thinking seems reprehensible from today’s perspective. But I still see its echo in the work ethic espoused by otherwise smart people.

Here’s the thing: there’s good work and there’s working hard. What matters is doing good work. Often, to do good work you need to work hard. And so people naturally conflate the two, thinking that what matters is working hard. But whether you work hard or not isn’t actually what’s important. What’s important is that you do good work.

If you can do good work without working hard, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s great—you’ve managed to do good work and do it efficiently! But often this very efficiency is treated as laziness.

Sensible managers are rightly appalled by so-called productivity tracking because it measures exactly the wrong thing. Those instruments of workplace surveillance measure inputs, not outputs (and even measuring outputs is misguided when what really matters are outcomes).

They can attempt to measure how hard someone is working, but they don’t even attempt to measure whether someone is producing good work. If anything, they actively discourage good work; there’s plenty of evidence to show that more hours equates to less quality.

I used to think that must be some validity to the belief that hard work has intrinsic value. It was a position that was espoused so often by those around me that it seemed a truism.

But after a few decades of experience, I see no evidence for hard work as an intrinsically valuable activity, much less a useful measurement. If anything, I’ve seen the real harm that can be caused by tying your self-worth to how much you’re working. That way lies burnout.

We no longer make people build famine walls or famine roads. But I wonder how many of us are constructing little monuments in our inboxes and calendars, filling those spaces with work to be done in an attempt to chase the rewards we’ve been told will result from hard graft.

I’d rather spend my time pursuing the opposite: the least work for the most people.

I no longer have Covid. I am released from isolation.

Alas, my negative diagnosis came too late for me to make it to UX London. But that’s okay—by the third and final day of the event, everything was running smooth like buttah! Had I shown up, I would’ve just got in the way. The Clearleft crew ran the event like a well-oiled machine.

I am in the coronaclear just in time to go away for a week. My original thinking was this would be my post-UX-London break to rest up for a while, but it turns out I’ve been getting plenty of rest during UX London.

I’m heading to the west coast of Ireland for The Willie Clancy Summer School, a trad music pilgrimage.

Jessica and I last went to Willie Week in 2019. We had a great time and I distinctly remember thinking “I’m definitely coming back next year!”

Well, a global pandemic put paid to that. The event ran online for the past two years. But now that it’s back for real, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

My mandolin and I are bound for Miltown Malbay!

OutHorse Your Email

I must remember to try this out-of-office email strategy.

Aliendscapes - Alien Planet Generator

Generative landscapes made with 2K of vanilla JavaScript.

Click (or refresh) for a new one.

In Quest of Search

On the surface this is about the pros and cons of minting a new HTML search element to replace div role="search" but there’s a deeper point which is that, while ARIA exists to the plug the gaps in HTML, the long-term goal is to have no gaps.

ARIA is not meant to replace HTML. If anything, the need to use ARIA as ‘polyfill’ for HTML semantics could be considered as a sign and a constant reminder of the fact that HTML falls short on some semantics that benefit users of assistive technologies.

I went and spoke at an actual real live conference. As expected, it felt good …and weird. All at the same time.

It felt strange to be inside a building with other humans sharing an experience. At times it felt uncomfortable. The speaker’s dinner the night before the conference was lovely …and anxiety-inducing. Not just because it was my first time socialising in ages, but also just because it was indoors. I’ve been avoid indoor dining.

But the travel to Zürich all went smoothly. The airport wasn’t too busy. And on the airplane, everyone was dutifully masked up.

There’s definitely more paperwork and logistics involved in travelling overseas now. Jessica and I had to fill in our passenger locator forms for Switzerland and the UK. We also needed to pre-book a Covid test for two days after we got back. And we had to get a Covid test while we were in Switzerland so that we could show a negative result on returning to England. It doesn’t matter if you’re double-vaccinated; these tests are mandatory, which is totally fair.

Fortunately the conference organisers took care of booking those tests, which was great. On the first day of the conference I ducked out during the first break to go to the clinic next door and have a swab shoved up my nose. Ten minutes later I was handed a test result—negative!—complete with an official-looking stamp on it.

Two days later, after the conference was over, we had time to explore Zürich before heading to the airport to catch our evening flight. We had a very relaxing day which included a lovely boat trip out on the lake.

It was when we got to the airport that the relaxation ended.

We showed up at the airport in loads of time. I subscribe to the Craig Mod school of travel anyway, but given The Situation, I wanted to make sure we accounted for any extra time needed.

We went through security just fine and waited around for our gate to come up on the screen of gates and flights. Once we had a gate, we made our way there. We had to go through passport control but that didn’t take too long.

At the gate, there was a queue so—being residents of England—we immediately got in line. The airline was checking everyone’s paperwork.

When we got to the front of the line, we showed all our documents. Passport? Check. Boarding pass? Check. Passenger locator form? Check. Negative Covid result? Che …wait a minute, said the member of staff, this is in German. According to gov.uk, the test result needs to be in English, French, or Spanish.

I looked at the result. Apart from the heading at the top, all of the actual information was international: names, dates, and the test result itself said “neg.”

Not good enough.

My heart sank. “Call or email the clinic where you got the result. Get them to send you an English or French version” said the airline representative. Okay. We went off to the side and started doing that.

At this point there was still a good 40 or 50 minutes ’till the flight took off. We could sort this out.

I phoned the clinic. It was late Saturday afternoon and the clinic was closed. Shit!

Jessica and I went back to the gate agent we were dealing with and began pleading our case (in German …maybe that would help). She was very sympathetic but her hands were tied. Then she proposed a long shot. There was a Covid-testing centre in the airport. She would call them and tell them we were coming. But at this point it was 35 minutes until the flight left. We’d really have to leg it.

She scribbled down vague directions for where we had to go, and we immediately pelted off.

At this point I feel I should confess. I did not exhibit grace under pressure. I was, to put it mildy, freaking out.

Perhaps because I was the one selfishly indulging in panic, Jessica kept her head. She reminded me that we weren’t travelling to a conference—there wasn’t anywhere we had to be. Worst case scenario, we’d have to spend an extra night in Zürich and get a different flight tomorrow. She was right. I needed to hear that.

I was still freaking out though. We were running around like headless chickens trying to find where we needed to go. The instructions had left out the crucial bit of information that we actually needed to exit through passport control (temporarily re-entering Swiss territory) in order to get to the testing centre. Until we figured that out, we were just running hither and tither in a panic while the clock continued to count down.

It was a nightmare. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ve had this exact nightmare. I’m in a building with a layout I don’t know and I need to get somewhere urgently but I don’t know how to get there.

Even the reason for this panicked situation felt like it had a dream logic to it. You know when you wake up from a bad dream and you examine the dream in retrospect and you realise it doesn’t actually make any sense? Well, that’s how this felt. You’ve got a negative test result but it needs it to be in one of these three languages …I mean, that sounds like the kind of nonsensical reasoning that should dissolve upon awakening.

Time was slipping away. Our flight leaves in twenty minutes.

Finally we realise that we need to go back through passport control. On the other side we run around some more until we spot the location that matches the vague description we’ve been given. There’s a sign! Covid testing centre!

We burst in through the doors. The gate agent had called ahead so we were expected. The young doctor on duty was cool as a cucumber. He must have to deal with this situation all day long. He calmly got us both to start filling in the appropriate online forms to pay for the tests, but instead of waiting for us to finish doing that, he started the testing straight away. Smart!

This felt like another nightmare I’ve had. I don’t mean having a swab shoved up my nose until it tickles my brain—that was probably the least uncomfortable part of this whole ordeal. I mean I need to fill out this web form accurately. On a touch screen device. And do it as quickly as possible!

Well, we did it. Filled in the forms, got the swabs. But now it was less than fifteen minutes until our flight time and we knew we still had to get back through passport control where there were lines of people.

“You’ll have the test results by email in ten minutes,” said the doctor. “Go!”

We sprinted out of there and went straight for the passport lines. Swallowing my pride, I went to the people at the end of a line. “Our flight leaves in ten minutes! Can we please cut in front!?”

“No.”

Right, next line. “Our flight leaves in…”

“Yes, yes! Go!”

“Thank you! Thank you so much!”

We repeated this craven begging until we got to the front of the line and gave our passports to the same guy who had orginally stamped them first time we came through. He was unfazed.

Then we ran back to the gate. Almost everyone had boarded by this point, but the gate was still open. Maybe we could actually make it!

But we still needed our test results. We both stood at the gate with our phones in hand, the email app open, frantically pulling to refresh.

The minutes were ticking by. At this point the flight departure time had arrived, but the gate agent said there was a slight delay. They could wait one or two minutes more.

Pull, refresh. Pull, refresh.

“I’ve got mine!” shouted Jessica. Half a minute later, mine showed up.

We showed the gate agent the results. She stamped whatever needed to be stamped and we were through.

I couldn’t believe it! Just 15 minutes ago I had been thinking we might as well give up—there was absolutely no way we were going to make it.

But here we were boarding the plane.

We got to our seats and strapped in. We were both quite sweaty and probably looked infectious …but we also had fresh proof that neither of had the ’rona.

We just sat there smiling, looking at each other, and shaking our heads. I just couldn’t believe we had actually made it.

The captain made an announcement. They were having a little technical difficulty with the plane’s system—no doubt the cause of the slight delay, luckily for us. They were going to reboot the system in the time-honoured fashion of turning it off and again.

The lights briefly went out and then came back on as the captain executed this manouvre.

Meanwhile Jessica and I were coming down from our adrenaline rush. Our breathing was beginning to finally slow down.

The captain’s voice came on again. That attempt at fixing the glitch hadn’t worked. So to play it safe, we were going to switch planes. The new plane would take off in an hour and a half from a different gate.

As the other passengers tutted and muttered noises of disapproval, Jessica and I just laughed. A delay? No problem!

But oh, the Alanis Morissette levels of irony! After all that stress at the mercy of the ticking clock, it turned out that time was in plentiful supply after all.

Everything after that proceeded without incident. We got on the replacement plane. We flew back to England. We breezed across the border and made our way home.

It felt good to be home.

A Black Cloud of Computation

SETI—the Search for Extra Terrestrial Information processing:

What we get is a computational device surrounding the Asymptotic Giant Branch star that is roughly the size of our Solar System.

Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was — Are.na

In 1990, the science fiction writer Douglas Adams produced a “fantasy documentary” for the BBC called Hyperland. It’s a magnificent paleo-futuristic artifact, rich in sideways predictions about the technologies of tomorrow.

I remember coming across a repeating loop of this documentary playing in a dusty corner of a Smithsonian museum in Washington DC. Douglas Adams wasn’t credited but I recognised his voice.

Hyperland aired on the BBC a full year before the World Wide Web. It is a prophecy waylaid in time: the technology it predicts is not the Web. It’s what William Gibson might call a “stub,” evidence of a dead node in the timeline, a three-point turn where history took a pause and backed out before heading elsewhere.

Here, Claire L. Evans uses Adams’s documentary as an opening to dive into the history of hypertext starting with Bush’s Memex, Nelson’s Xanadu and Engelbart’s oNLine System. But then she describes some lesser-known hypertext systems…

In 1985, the students at Brown who encountered Intermedia had never seen anything like it before in their lives. The system laid a world of information at their fingertips, saved them hours at the library, and helped them work through tangles of thought.