It has been a hard few weeks. Actually, it has been a hard few months. I’m sure you all know the feeling: you are running on the hamster wheel, trying desperately to get ahead of the next deadline. There seems no end to it, just a blur of rungs and the endless loop of turning the wheel. Now that I’ve got out the wheel for a couple of weeks, I feel dizzy and disoriented. You would think that an album of folk songs about the cycle of seasons would make things worse, but it has actually helped enormously.

A week or so ago Mr. Bsag and I were stopped in our tracks by a song on the radio. I think every hair on my body must have stood on end. It was ‘Wassail Song’ by The Watersons from their Frost and Fire album. It was recorded in 1965¹, but if you heard the songs in a pub or an apple orchard it could be any time in the last three or four hundred years. The album is a cycle of traditional folk songs celebrating different seasons, starting at Christmas, moving through spring, summer, autumn and back to winter again. It is stripped back to the absolute essentials and just features unaccompanied voices, except for a rather startling drum on ‘Hal-An-Tow’.

I listened to it right through yesterday (not on shuffle, obviously), and after a couple of songs I was having trouble holding back tears. I find it hard to explain why². Voices, and voices singing in harmony — particularly those as beautiful as the Watersons’ — always move me, but it wasn’t just that. The songs aren’t really sad (some are quite jolly, such as ‘Hal-An-Tow’), but there’s something deep and real about them. They are about timeless, unchanging things. Birth. Death. Resurrection. Fertility. Hunger. Sacrifice. Comfort. Fear. Grief. Joy. John Barleycorn must die because the Huntsman needs his strength. The Derby ram is full of life, but we kill him and make his skin into leather aprons that will last 40 years. Winter is cold, dark and hungry and we need the comfort and warmth of others. Good slays Evil and the Doctor brings Evil back to life, or Evil kills Good and the Doctor resurrects Good. There is always good and evil, death and life, and one can’t exist without the other.

The stories in the songs are like pictures drawn on layers of tissue paper. Every generation draws a new picture, but they see the outline of all the stories told before, fading to ghostlines. As the layers build up, the shapes in the stories bulge and flicker like flames in the fire, adapting to the lives of those who tell them. The names change, but the bones of the stories remain the same.

The seasons wheel and turn but life and the stories of life remain essentially the same. You can stay at a still point while it turns around you and not get dizzy. It’s like lying on the ground in summer, looking up at the starry sky and watching the slow waltz of the constellations around the stellar pole. There’s a lovely verse in the Wassail Song I mentioned earlier that beautifully encapsulates this feeling:

We know by the moon that we are not too soon
And we know by the sky that we are not too high
We know by the star that we are not too far
And we know by the ground that we are within sound.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, whether you are joyful or grieving, I hope that you get time to stand still and make out the unchanging shapes of the stories through the layers and take some comfort from that.

I’ve written here before about how much I enjoy using Pandoc, but I thought I’d write a bit more about my new Pandoc-based workflow. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Pandoc is a brilliant tool for converting from a wide range of markup formats to pretty much any other format. It has matured really quickly into an extremely full-featured and capable system, and can handle tables, images, and mathematical formulae as well as in-text citations and a properly formatted reference list. In short, you can do almost anything you might want to do in an academic paper with Pandoc.

I had just about reached the end of my tether with Microsoft Word, and wondered if it would be possible to use Pandoc from start to finish in the production of academic papers. I had been using it for some time to produce other kinds of documents on which I was the only author, and from which I only needed to produce a PDF, rather than an editable document. It worked wonderfully well for that, but I had two potential problems to overcome if I was going to use it for papers:

1. I usually write papers with co-authors who are mixed in their — how shall we put it? — geek-fu. In most cases, I need a system that’s so transparent as to be invisible to them. Ideally, they would continue to edit in Word or LaTeX (according to their usual preference), and I would covertly use Pandoc to make my edits and produce the final version for submission¹.
2. I need to produce a variety of final output formats. Some journals will accept LaTeX (yay!), but others will take nothing but .docx or .doc (boo). In the latter case, I’d still like a way to generate a nice PDF (via XeLaTeX) so that I can make a ‘pre-print’ version that I can (according to the copyright rules of most journals) post on my personal website for others to download. I could do this with a PDF made from a Word file too, but really I couldn’t stand to look at it.

The key to making this work is to stay in Markdown format until the last possible moment, and then convert to different formats as needed. My current workflow is that I write Markdown in a text editor, opening a Marked window beside my editor to quickly preview the text, see the word count and so on. I could generate a PDF using Pandoc, but that would take a bit longer, and for a quick-and-dirty preview, Marked is fine and updates automatically each time I save the source file. Every now and again, I generate a PDF using Pandoc, rendering all the elements properly, just to check that things are working as I expected. Once I’ve finished an editing round and am ready to distribute the document, I create Word (.docx) or LaTeX source versions as appropriate. Pandoc does a brilliant job of both, and if you set up various options properly (of which more later), you don’t need to tinker with the output file.

Once your co-authors have done their bit, they send back the edited file. If it’s LaTeX, you can covert back to Markdown using Pandoc, diff the file with the previous version and go through the cycle again without too many problems. If your co-authors use Word, you have a bit of manual work to do copying across any changes they have made using Track Changes into your Markdown source file. I would love it if Pandoc could convert from .docx to Markdown, but that seems to be a one-way street². However, that’s pretty much the only minor annoyance in the whole process, and a small price to pay for being able to work in Pandoc the rest of the time.

Once the whole grisly writing and editing process is finished, you then convert to whatever format is needed by the journal. If they accept LaTeX, they may well have a specific style file and reference format. You can either pass the required style file as an option to Pandoc, or you can export to .tex and then tweak the file as needed for submission. If you have used Pandoc’s built-in automatic citations (which use citeproc-hs), you’ll need to convert the in-text citations to the native BibTeX format. Since they are marked up fairly simply, it’s not difficult to write a quick regex to do that, and then do the final conversion natively in LaTeX/BibTeX. The key thing is that these are things you only need to do once (or twice, when you have to make revisions after the referees have torn your masterpiece apart), just before submission. It’s also quite scriptable, so it should be possible to automate it.

I’ve also set up one more thing to make the conversion process easier. Pandoc is immensely powerful and well documented, but the range of possible options means that I often forget which ones I need to get the format I want. If you set a lot of variables (like your preferred font, margins and so on) at the command line, it can also get a bit long-winded. So I decided to write a wrapper script which simplifies the process and sets some of the defaults I use most often, while retaining some flexibility to change things on the fly. The script below is tailored to my own use, but feel free to use it and mould it to your own preferences. It requires commander so you’ll need to gem install commander before you use it. It’s also very rough with absolutely no error checking, so you’ll certainly need to edit it to fit your setup, specifying where your BibTeX bibliography, default .css file and so on are located. I’m going to continue to work on it a bit more, but it’s usable for me now as it is. Happy Pandoc-ing!

iTunes Match

Warning: Hifi geekery ahead

I’ve been pondering for a while how best to handle my digital collection of music. I have a lot of CDs and a small but growing collection of vinyl, but I also have a lot of music in digital format. Some of this has come from buying music through the iTunes or Amazon stores, but most is from my CDs that I have ripped, or from Apple Lossless format downloads from my Society of Sound membership. This is all stored on a Mac mini in the living room that has done sterling work as a media centre¹ for several years. However, one of the perennial problems has been how to share this collection of music with other devices without having to download, sync or manage it in complicated ways.

I do have a couple of Squeezebox devices (a Boom in the bedroom, and a second-hand Classic that was in my office until recently), and these help a great deal. The Squeezebox server software reads the iTunes library and then allows you to play items in the library through the players located throughout the house. This works extremely well, but I’m worried that at some point this system is going to break because Logitech (who bought Squeezebox, neé SlimDevices) have recently announced that they are no longer supporting it. They only make one product now, and the impression is that they have no interest in supporting the products any more. The devices themselves will probably continue to function of course, but the problem is that the system depends on the Squeezebox server. It still works on Mountain Lion at the moment (albeit as a legacy 32-bit Preference pane), but I worry that the next software update will break the server. I think in the longer term I will have to think about something that is better supported, like a Sonos system, but I will be very sorry to leave behind my Squeezebox hardware. It works well and I’m fond of it.

Anyway, Squeezeboxes don’t solve the other part of the puzzle, which is playing my collection on other devices and computers. When Apple introduced Home Sharing a while ago, I thought that might do the trick. However, it required you to download music from your main collection on to other computers which isn’t what I wanted to do: I wanted to be able to stream my music to the iMac in my office, and to be able to fill my iPhone with a selection of tracks without having to download them to my computer first, or to sync my iPhone with the Mac mini in the living room. So I spent a few years using a work around in which I mounted the iTunes folder of my Mac mini over the network on my iMac, and then set up my local copy of iTunes to use that folder. That still meant that I had to manually manage syncing tracks on to my iPhone, which was a bit of a chore.

When iTunes Match came out I was tentatively excited because it seemed that it might solve the my problem. It took me a while to get around to setting it up, but I have now done so and am pretty impressed by it. For those of you who don’t know how it works, the idea is that you pay a fairly modest yearly fee in exchange for having access to your entire music collection anywhere (provided you have internet access). Once you have set it up, your iTunes library is scanned and matched with music already available in the iTunes Store. If it’s already in the catalogue, it does not need to be uploaded, but you get access to a copy already in the cloud, encoded at 256Kbs even if your copy was lower quality. Music that is not available on the iTunes store (like my Society of Sound albums) is uploaded and converted to 256Kbs AAC files, while the originals remain untouched². Once this process is complete (mine took a few days), you can then connect your computers and iPhones to iTunes Match to have access to the entire collection. You can either stream the music without downloading it, or you can choose to download what you want if you know that you may be without internet access.

This has worked really well for me so far. I love the fact that I can listen to anything from my collection — on a whim — on my iPhone, and I have found the streaming to be pretty robust. It also means that my copy of iTunes on my iMac gets automatically updated with any music that I add to the main iTunes library on the Mac mini without me having to intervene. Even better, the meta-data in the iTunes library (play counts, date last played, rating and so on) is now actually useful to me, because it gets updated however I chose to play the music, and if I set a rating on my iPhone, that gets properly synced back to the master library.

Audioengine D1 DAC

As a result of iTunes actually being useful to me now, I decided to swap around my audio equipment a bit. I had used my Squeezebox Classic connected to a pair of Audioengine A2 speakers (pictured above) to listen to music in my office. That worked well, but I really wanted to move the Squeezebox down into the living room so that I could connect it to the high quality speakers and amp in my main hifi system. I have been really impressed by my little Audioengine speakers, so I decided to get their D1 DAC so that I could play music directly from iTunes on my iMac, while greatly improving the sound. The D1 is really tiny but well made, and connects to the computer via USB, which conveniently provides power as well as sound input. It then connects via standard phono cables to the speakers (the A2 are active speakers, and so need no amplifier). There’s a volume knob on the front, which saves me blindly fumbling behind the speaker for the volume control there (the only flaw with the A2s in my opinion), and you can turn the unit off and on using the tiny, lit button on the front. This handily also switches the iMac’s input between the built in speakers and the DAC. Finally, there’s a headphone socket for those times when Mr. Bsag is in the next room getting irritated by my choice of music. Plugging in headphones cuts the output to the speakers automatically.

I’ve been really impressed with the sound quality from the D1/A2 combination. It certainly compares very favourably with the Squeezebox/A2 pairing, even though the D1 is probably not quite fully ‘run in’ yet³. The soundstage is really clear and detailed, and the music is rich but well-defined with a wide variety of styles of music. I suppose that I should be suprised that it makes such a difference using an outboard DAC rather than the rather sub-par soundcard built in to most computers, but it does amaze me that such a tiny box can produce such wonderful sound.

Consequently I’ve been having a great time this weekend listening to all sorts of music and controlling it using a combination of Alfred’s built-in iTunes controller (which I prefer for finding and playing selections) and CoverSutra (which I prefer for the ‘now playing’ bezel and artwork display).

To stream or not to stream?

Before I took the iTunes Match plunge, I had been thinking about subscribing to a streaming service. Both Spotify and Rdio offer pretty good streaming services, and both have mobile clients so that you can access music on your iPhone or iPad too. I have had a free Spotify account for a while, but don’t use it much because of the annoyance of the adverts. I had a trial of Rdio, and was generally impressed by the breadth of their catalogue and by the clean interface of the player which I found much nicer than the Spotify player. However, I had rather mixed feelings about relying on a streaming service like this. It’s great to be able to find and play pretty much any piece of music at a moment’s notice⁴, but I worry about how little money actually reaches the artists when you ‘pay’ for music this way. Also, I tend to research my music purchases fairly carefully, and they then become firm favourites that I listen to repeatedly over many years. I therefore like to own the music, sometimes in multiple formats: if I really like an album, I’ll get a download for convenience and a copy on vinyl for listening to it properly.

I wouldn’t rule out possibly using one of these services in the future, but for now I think that the combination of buying individual albums (either as downloads or as CDs that I then rip) and using iTunes Match to make them available everywhere probably works better for my mode of music listening.

As some of you may know, our two cats are Somalis. Somalis aren’t as vocal as, say, Siamese, but they do have a distinctive range of chirrups and trills that are rather unusual. Even among Somalis, Bianca’s vocalisations are — shall we say — unique. I thought I’d talk a bit about some of the bizarre noises that come out of her from time to time.

The Meoyawn

As the name suggests, this happens when she starts a meow but then gets ambushed by a yawn mid-meow. I wish I could convey how odd it sounds. The start is a conventional meow, but then she sounds like a teenaged boy whose voice is breaking, as it veers wildly from squeaky to something slightly deeper than her normal pitch. If you’re not looking at her when it happens, it always makes you turn to look. If you’re lucky, you catch the look of utter ‘WTF?’ on her face as she closes her mouth. I think it takes her by surprise as much as the rest of us.

The Whifflesigh

If I’m working at home, Bianca will often come and join me on my desk at around 4pm. By then, deep feline ennui has evidently set in. There are no wood pigeons in the pine tree outside my window to mock-stalk and it is several centuries¹ until dinner. Even her favourite pastime of flicking the pad of mini-Post-It notes² off my desk with a dismissive flick of her paw seems to have lost its entertainment value.

She gazes out of the window and emits what I have come to call her ‘Whifflesigh’. She inhales deeply and starts to exhale in a sigh. However, rather than one long exhalation, she chops the start of it into a series of short, staccato, in/out breaths. If you imagine squeezing a dog’s squeaky toy that has lost its squeaker, that’s the kind of effect you get. It’s very quiet, but because she’s sitting right in front of me on the desk (blocking my view of the screen, usually), I catch every nuance of the Whifflesigh.

It sounds like the kind of sound that might be made by a character in a Jane Austen novel, sitting with her embroidery by a window, but fervently hoping to see a handsome and well-built gentleman striding across the gravel, possibly — one can hope! — having first taken an impromptu dip in the lake fully-clothed, and thus cutting a dashingly moist figure. But alas, the gravel is devoid of moist gentlemen, hence the Wifflesigh.

The yarARGHleBaHrGGGLE!!

This one is impossible to render phonetically, is very variable in its pronunciation, but always features multiple syllables and a variety of pitches. Furthermore, like the Spanish Inquisition, no-one expects the yarARGHleBaHrGGGLE!! Picture the scene: it’s late afternoon one weekend and you are sitting quietly on the sofa reading a book. You see no sign of cats, and everything is peaceful. Then, when you are least expecting it, an unearthly, drawn-out banshee cry of yarARGHleBaHrGGGLE!! rises from behind the sofa or the curtain. When your heart rate and blood pressure have returned to medically acceptable levels, Bianca (for it is she) strolls nonchalantly into view and gives you an innocent “What?” look. It’s an exercise in unsubstantiated anthropomorphism to try to assign meaning to these sounds, but I’m pretty sure that the yarARGHleBaHrGGGLE!! is just Bianca’s way of saying “What Ho, chaps, here I am!”.

For several years, I’ve used a 20” iMac at work — one of the older model, plastic shell models, which was the first of the iMacs to have an Intel chip. It has served me well, but it’s starting to get rather long in the tooth. It’s slow, a bit unreliable, and cannot be persuaded to run Mountain Lion. Since I already had a MacBook Air 11” that I used for my portable computing needs, I thought that I might was well switch over to that as my full-time computer: it’s easily fast and powerful enough.

However, one thing I missed was having a large screen, particularly when working on documents (which is most of my work). The 20” screen of the iMac was certainly better than the Air’s 11” display, but a slightly larger screen would allow me to open two document windows side-by-side, and still be able to see the text clearly. I hadn’t tried connecting my MacBook Air to an external screen for work¹, so I borrowed an ancient, unused (and tiny) LCD screen from a colleague to try it out. I wanted to make sure that connecting and disconnecting the screen wouldn’t get irritating after a while. The resolution and colour fidelity of this borrowed screen was absolutely dire, but it was enough to convince me that the setup would work well with a better external monitor.

I did a fair bit of research trying to find a good, but reasonably priced, 24” monitor. I love Apple’s Thunderbolt Displays, but while they may be superb quality and have convenient, all-in-one connectors for MacBooks, they are ruinously expensive. I also didn’t really need a 27” display: 24” would be plenty.

After a lot of searching, the Dell Ultrasharp U2412M seemed to have very good reviews, and a good balance of features to price. It’s an IPS panel with an LED backlight, and extremely sharp (as the name suggests). It’s a 16:10 ratio, which actually works rather better than the standard 16:9 widescreen for working with documents as you get more lines of text on the screen. In some ways, it’s fairly basic: it doesn’t have built-in speakers or an HDMI connection, so if you wanted to use it in a home multi-media setup, it wouldn’t be ideal. However, it does have a built-in USB hub and — more importantly for me — it has a DisplayPort connector. This meant that I could buy a cheap DisplayPort to mini DisplayPort cable and connect my Air directly. So when I connect or disconnect it, I only have to worry about 3 cables: the power adapter for the Air, the mini DisplayPort cable and the USB from the built-in hub, and I can leave all my peripherals plugged in to the display itself. That’s only one more cable than if I was using a Thunderbolt display.

The quality of the screen itself is superb. It’s very bright, evenly lit, absolutely no dead or stuck pixels, and it has an excellent range of viewing angles. The video output from the Air displays perfectly, and I can use it with the Air closed (in ‘clamshell’ mode) which is convenient. The matte surface gives a slightly different feel compared to the built-in display of the Air or the glass screen of the iMac, but it’s accurate and very comfortable to use in the lighting conditions of my office. It also adjusts vertically easily, as well as having adjustable tilt, so it’s simple to get it set up ergonomically. Using it connected to my Air with an external keyboard (my HHKB, obviously) and mouse feels magical. The 11” MacBook Air is such a tiny, razor blade of a laptop that it seems extraordinary that such a gloriously large visual display can come out of a sliver of aluminium. I mean, I know how it works, but it still seems magical.

If you’re in the market for a reasonably priced external monitor, I think that you can’t go far wrong with the Dell Ultrasharp. The plastic body is in no way up to the build quality of Apple’s products, but it’s solid enough and visually very low key. The display itself is superb, and it has enough features for me. At some point, I might get a cheap pair of external speakers, because I find that audio is a bit muffled since I keep my Air in clamshell mode and the display has no speakers of its own. I’ll also have to use the iSight camera and microphone of the Air itself when I want to Skype, but that doesn’t happen often enough to be a big problem, and I only need to flip up the lid of the laptop to use it anyway. Given that I could buy four of these displays for the price of one Thunderbolt display and have some change left over, I think I can live with that trade-off.

The week before last, Mr. Bsag and I went to a great beer tasting session at the Birmingham Beer Festival. It was a guided session¹, run by a lovely and very knowledgeable woman. I’ve drunk real ale for quite a while, but I’ve never done an actual tasting before, so it was very interesting. We started by smelling different varieties of hops and also eating malted barley. The barley was really a revelation: I couldn’t believe how much it tastes like beer. Since it is one of the main flavourings of beer, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but eating malted barley grains is like eating dehydrated beer. In fact, I’m surprised that no-one has yet tried to market it as dry, non-alcoholic beer — also high in protein and vitamins, and fat-free too! The other interesting thing was how much difference the malting process makes. Some were, well, malty and biscuity, others tasted like caramel or treacle (and were incredibly sweet), while the chocolate malt tasted (as the name suggests) exactly like dark chocolate with hints of espresso coffee.

This was all fascinating, but various hardened real ale enthusiasts around the table were keen to get to the part where we drank the actual beer, so we pressed on. We tasted 3 beers brewed by women, and two brewed locally. All beer was brewed by women at home at one time, but once commercial breweries took over, female brewers became very rare. I’m glad to say that there has been a bit of a renaissance recently, and a collective called Project Venus has been set up in which female brewers get together to collaboratively create a new beer.

One of the beers we tasted was a Project Venus beer. It was a dark porter called Venus Serem, brewed at the Waen brewery in Powys. Mr. Bsag is a big fan of porters (and of dark beers generally). I like some of them, but dark beers often come with a very high alcohol content, which I find a bit off-putting². This one was absolutely gorgeous though. It had an amazing earthy, spicy scent, and then when you tasted it even more flavours came through. There were hints of chocolate and then something spicy. We had a guess at which spice it was, but didn’t get it right (it’s cardamon). I thought I could taste licorice, but apparently I was hallucinating that. It actually has beetroot and green chilli in it, which is much nicer than it sounds. The beetroot give it sweetness and a deep earthy flavour, and while it isn’t hot, the chilli leaves you with a subtle warmth in your mouth. It would be a really amazing Christmas beer — best drunk by an open fire, while wearing a thick woolly jumper.

The other beers were nice too, but the Venus Serem was definitely the highlight. The tasting has made me think a bit more about the flavours in real ale, and I now take the time to swirl the glass and smell the beer in the approved way before actually drinking it, so that I can appreciate the scent. I also try to hold a bit of the beer on my tongue for a few seconds before swallowing it so that the flavours get a chance to wake up my tastebuds. Sometimes I forget and just drink the stuff like a normal person. Thank goodness we weren’t obliged to spit out the beer after tasting like you do at wine tastings. I can imagine the horrified expressions on the assembled real ale enthusiasts: spit out perfectly good beer? Are you mad?

What follows is deeply geeky and probably only of interest to me and about three other people. It’s also a bit of a rant at my own tendency to fiddle. You have been warned!

Sometimes you just need to leave things alone.

Yesterday I decided that I’d have a go at replacing rvm with rbenv. Both are collections of shell scripts that allow you to manage multiple versions of ruby, which you may need to do if you deal with applications, scripts or APIs that require a specific version. Both allow you to set global versions of ruby, or set a version for a specific project. Up until now, I used rvm to use Ruby 1.9.2 for my Octopress blog, which required it. Now, there was nothing enormously wrong with rvm, but I had encountered one or two problems with building gems and other bits of oddness. I therefore decided that rbenv would be a cleaner solution as it doesn’t intrude on the shell as much as rvm, and doesn’t try to manage gems. I had a bit of time on Saturday morning, so I thought I would just remove rvm and install rbenv: easy, right?

Wrong. Actually, installing rbenv itself wasn’t too bad, but it seemed to set off a cascading series of other problems¹. I knew that I had to set up ruby 1.9.2 for my Octopress blog, so I did that, but found that building my blog was completely broken. Rake just produced a series of obscure error messages. I tried upgrading to the newest version of Octopress (something I really should do properly at some point), but that just made things more broken. No problem, I’m using git, so I restored to the last working version. Still broken. I won’t bore you with the whole sorry saga (even if I could remember exactly what I did), but for every bit of progress I made, I broke something else: once I got the blog to build, Pow (which I use to view the site locally) wouldn’t start. Once I’d downloaded a new version of Pow and set it up so that I had the right environment for rbenv, the site loaded but the styling was utterly broken. At this point (about 8pm on Saturday night), I stormed away from the computer in a huff, had dinner and watched a film with Mr. Bsag.

This morning, I started again with a fresh head and have finally got the blog working again. There are still minor problems with my shell that I’ve got to resolve but I think I can see the way forwards now. I should say that I’ve had to do all this self-imposed fixing on my old Apple Bluetooth keyboard rather than my lovely Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro II because I managed to leave the latter at work on Friday. So not only has it been an annoying slog, it has felt like doing carpentry with a blunt chisel because I’ve got so accustomed to my lovely new keyboard. The moral of this story is obviously, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

It’s no secret that I’m a cat lover (or a crazy cat lady, depending upon your point of view). Like any person in thrall to all things feline, I love to watch them in motion. However, there are times when I find myself completely entranced just watching them sitting. They have such an elegant shape. I particularly like it when they sit upright, in a pose I like to think of as the “Goddess Bastet”.

I was watching Bella the other day as she sat on the windowsill in this position, looking out the window. Her forepaws were placed very precisely, pressed together tightly and just touching her back paws. Her body was a series of intersecting curves. The great arches of her ears, pointing neatly forwards, joined the tight curve of her head. Her back was a thing of geometric perfection. It always reminds me somehow of a golden spiral — a tight curve that opens out and then relaxes into an elegant sweep towards the ground.

And then there was her tail. Bella’s tail comes a very close second to her golden green, early autumn beech leaf eyes as her best feature. Like all Somali cats, she has a thick, luxuriantly furred tail. Some people describe it as being like a squirrel or a fox tail, but that doesn’t really do the extravagance of it justice. It looks like something a creature from the forests of Siberia would sport in the depths of winter. Like the rest of her coat, it has layers of woodland colours: russet, rich chestnut, and a deep brown like old, well polished leather. Over this, there’s a stripe of glossy black running along the length of her tail, and pooling at the dapper black tip. Most of the time, it’s in a constant state of movement, even if her body is still. It’s an eloquent tail, idly flicking, slyly arching, slowly curving or whipping fast like a striking cobra. It even twines around your leg companionably when you reach down to stroke her. It almost seems to have a mind of its own. However, when she sits like Bastet she holds her tail in a particular way. As she settles, she curves her tail to the left along the ground, wrapping it closely around her perimeter until the tip reaches her forepaws. Just as her tail comes to rest, the very tip of her tail gently curls back on itself.

Whenever I picture Bella, I see this gesture of hers. It’s a supremely elegant serif, a beautiful scroll carved into an oak bannister, or a wrought iron flourish forged by a master blacksmith. It’s impossibly beautiful. I find it hard to believe that she’s real.

A goddess in the form of a cat? Entirely appropriate, if you ask me.

Ten years ago today, I published the first post on this blog. Clichéd though it may be, it really does seem like yesterday.

I’m not sure that I ever thought that I would continue writing for so long. I wasn’t sure what I was doing when I started out (I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing), but somewhere along the way, I began to really enjoy writing. I found my own true voice, settled in to my pseudonym, and this blog became a kind of basecamp for my online life.

You never know what’s coming around the corner, but right now, I can’t imagine ever stopping. The frequency of my posts certainly goes up and down depending on how busy I am with other things, but it never feels like a burden to write here. Quite the opposite — when I have time to write, I sit down at the keyboard with enormous pleasure.

I wanted to use this opportunity to thank you, gentle readers, for taking the time to read all this stuff I produce. I suppose that I would probably still write here even if I knew that no-one was reading, but it has added immeasurably to my enjoyment of this whole endeavour to be able to share it all with you. I know that some of you are recent visitors and some have inexplicably carried on reading for most of this blog’s ten years, but I have loved having all of you sitting around the campfire in my virtual basecamp.

I did have grand plans to celebrate this anniversary in a more tangible way. I’ve started compiling an ebook of my favourite articles here: a kind of ‘Best of But She’s a Girl’. I wanted to release it — with a triumphant ‘Ta Da!’ — today. Unfortunately, life (or more specifically, work life) got in the way, and I haven’t yet had time to finish it. When the most pressing of my ghastly deadlines are over in a few weeks, I’ll get back to it. Perhaps I’ll manage to release the book before Christmas, though I’m horribly aware how much that reminds me of those people on Grand Designs who state confidently that they will be in their newly constructed house by Christmas. They never are.

Anyway, book or no book, I raise my virtual glass of Bowmore 18 year old single malt¹, and say, cheers — here’s to another 10 years.

A few weeks ago, we went to an excellent exhibition at Compton Verney called ‘Flight and the Artistic Imagination’. It featured various works in all kinds of media from paintings and photographs to sculpture, video installations and even images from the Hubble telescope, all inspired by flight. It was a big exhibition and I loved a lot of the pieces, particularly ‘Battle of Britain’ by Paul Nash, some large format images of nebulae from Hubble, and a stitched-together panorama from the moon landings.

However, the pieces that really stuck in my mind were a selection of photographs by Alfred G. Buckham. Buckham was born in 1879, and during the First World War he was an aerial photographer in the photographic section of the Royal Naval Air Service. The photographs in the exhibition were taken after the war in the 1920s, when he started taking and selling aerial photographs to make a living. On entering the exhibition, the very first image you saw was an enlargement of one of his photographs of cloudscapes, applied directly to the gallery wall. This image was utterly stunning: you see a vast landscape of towering cumulonimbus clouds. Then you notice a tiny open cockpit biplane — like an insect crawling over the flanks of a huge beast — showing you the scale of the cloudscape. The photograph is black and white of course, and intensely dramatic with the sun glinting off the clouds, but deep greys and blacks hinting at a storm to come.

After you’ve been blown away by the grandeur of the photograph, you start to wonder how it was actually made. The photographer must have also been in a plane, at a time when they usually sported open cockpits. How on earth did he manage to get such a clear, sharp image while at great altitude, in freezing and while buffeted about by the wind? To make matters worse, cameras were not exactly compact and easy to operate at that time. Buckham used a large format glass plate camera which was heavy and cumbersome to focus. His photographs are awe-inspiring when you first see them, but your respect for his immense technical and artistic skill increases when you consider what he had to do to capture them.

When you read a bit more about him, it gets even more impressive. He crash landed 9 times, and after the last crash damaged his larynx so severely that it had to be removed and he had a tracheotomy. This meant that he had to breathe through a tube in his throat, so at altitude the freezing air would have entered his lungs without being warmed by his mouth and nose in the usual way. This must have been excruciatingly painful. He also refused to wear gloves while flying, because they impaired his ability to adjust the camera properly. He found storms dramatic and inspiring, so he often ventured out in very difficult flying conditions. To make matters even more hair-raising, he stood up in the open cockpit to take the pictures. As he apparently once put it, cheerfully:

If one’s right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security.

Well, some people’s idea of ‘perfect security’ doesn’t quite square with my own.

He made expeditions to Central and South America and got some stupendous shots of Rio from the air. However, I think I prefer the simple images of cloudscapes inhabited by tiny, vulnerable biplanes, with no view of the ground. They are so evocative of the freedom, wonder, but also loneliness of flying out of sight of the ground, with only scarf tied around your leg to hold you in the plane.

If you’re curious about his photographs, there’s a book (Vison of Flight), or you can see some of the photographs reproduced on the official web site.