Football

Beautiful day today, much of it spent in beautiful company. West London is not at all my stamping ground, but several hours meandering this afternoon through a few of its particular post-industrial urban wastelands convinced me that another trip or two, this time camera-toting, are demanded by the City Jitters project (not that that's anything as organised as a 'project'). I especially appreciated the passing green parrot, incongruous in wintry England, but lovely.

At one point I found myself in the midst of a surging football crowd, attempting clumsily to explain the centrality of Hillsborough to the shape of British popular culture over the last two decades. Probably there is no uncrass way of connecting the horrific deaths of nearly 100 people with the Premier League's avaricious globalisation and Posh & Becks media whoredom, especially when talking to someone born in 1980 and raised on the other side of the world, thus unafflicted by knowledge of, say, the Inter City Firm's predilection for Stanley knives. The past may be another country, but the 70s and 80s seem disproportionately barbarous in this one.

In any case, the Craven Cottage outflux, though a little intimidating to we bourgeois ponces with our ingrained fear of the mob, was perfectly behaved and familial, replete with enthusiastic small children clutching their match programmes as cherished totems. Even as alienated from team sport group-identification as I am, and with an ongoing hatred of all things football, I found the whole scene rather sweet.

This unwonted positivity may be in some measure related to the various other developments of the week, not least the long-awaited 'sewing machine' protocol deployment to UCL's SICM rig, meaning that we can at last generate at least vaguely adequate scanning ion conductance images. Now we just have to do a lot of noise-reduction and cleaning up, and gear up for cell-attached single channel recording, and implement the whole surface confocal laser thingy, and then we might actually get to the point where I can, maybe, do some sodding science...

But I'm not counting on that just yet.
Posted by matt at March 1, 2008 11:51 PM