Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn

By Stephen Fry
August 28th, 2009

Professor Higgins opens the My Fair Lady Song, “I’ve Thrown A Custard in her Face” with a long string of Damns, which I am in a mood to repeat. I have a ten-ton deadline hanging over me suspended by a single human hair. If I don’t stay and stare at my screen all day every day until I have bled out a screenplay I will have my nipples torn from me like medals from the tunic of a disgraced officer and Shame will know me for her own.

Douglas Adams liked deadlines: “I love the loud whooshing noise they make as they go past,” he said. My deadline has whooshed past four times and this is now IT. I deliver or ELSE.

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Servers With A Smile

By Stephen Fry
August 26th, 2009

Nothing more than a housekeeping miniblog today, I’m afraid, but it might interest those of you who like contemplating the astonishing power of volume.

I have for some time now been very wary of tweeting or retweeting URLs, however worthy the cause. The high (and entirely gratifying) number of followers that I have accumulated on Twitter means that when I point them towards a site it can often get almost instantly stampeded and flattened, swamped and strangulated. Only news pages and similar big name sites can withstand such a rush. I feel like the most awful bully and vandal when, within seconds, a tenderly cared for, loved and valued site goes down. It has taken me a long time to learn the lesson. Distributed Denial Of Service style slashdotting assaults and instant clamouring of this nature is akin to thousands of people all trying to get into a medium-sized shop at the same time. The weary shop-keeper, brushing away the broken glass into the street, turns to me and shakes his head. “But you asked me to alert people to your place, you insisted that it would be fine…” I say. He shakes his head and turns his back on me. Isn’t there some sort of cartoon character or figure in children’s literature who tries to be friendly but can’t help being clumsy and breaking everything and gets run out of town? Seems to ring a bell. Anyway, that’s me.

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Office Slavery

By Stephen Fry
August 25th, 2009

I don’t think I need explain how much I love the world of tech. I love the software and hardware and firmware and wares of all gradations on the digital Moh Scale in between. I love smartphones and watches and ebooks and media players and social networking services and maxiblogs and miniblogs and microblogs. I love audioboo and audiobooks. I love earphones and earplugs and visors and touchscreens and MUDs and HUDs and apps and apple and applets.

And yet. Oh and yet…

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Confession

By Stephen Fry
August 22nd, 2009

When Auden and Isherwood left Britain for America in 1939 they attracted much opprobrium and many brickbats. Evelyn Waugh portrayed them as Parsnip and Pimpernel, lily-livered pansy traitors who left their country in its hour of greatest need (though how exactly Great Britain needed two literary types like Wystan and Christopher he didn’t quite explain) and many red-blooded patriots to this day still shake their heads at the mere mention of their names.

So now I have a monstrous confession to make. I am quite as much a cowardly wuss as any who has ever abandoned his homeland in times of trial and tension. As I write this I am 38,000 feet above sea level, hurtling towards New York City at 533 statute miles per calendar hour. Happily Alan, the captain of the plane, has personally popped down to tell me the current cricket score – my chosen career and its attendant baggage of fame have their advantages (carry-on baggage of fame, I suppose one should term it). The flight deck had tuned in to the BBC’s 198 longwave transmissions of TMS to receive the news that England were 100 for 3. No loss of wickets yet. But at this moment we’re too far over the Atlantic for broadcast radio reception and are now relying on Shannon’s ATC tower for updates, which are achingly slow in coming. For all I know we’re ten wickets down at lunch and Australia have launched a devastating counterattack.

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Glory Be

By Stephen Fry
August 22nd, 2009

There is a quality in human affairs, so rare, so fleeting and so intense that to invoke its name in any context risks derision. To invoke its name in the context of sport must seem especially perverse, pretentious, preposterous and pathetic. I have always flirted with those four mockable Ps and nothing can stop me now. Even a reasonable night’s sleep hasn’t diminished the euphoria that sees me now unleashing a peal of eulogistic superlatives and hyperbolic encomia that can only bring me taunts, yawns and snorts.

What is this quality, so rarified, so prized? It is Glory. Glory is a golden word to be used, like saffron, in sparing pinches. Religion has always loved it, and tried to deny it to the sublunary sphere. Gloria, gloria; Gloria in excelsis Deo. Glory be to the Father. Solomon in all his glory. Our glorious dead. It has often been observed of war that while it is rightly hated and feared for bringing out the worst in humankind, it cannot be denied that it can sometimes bring out the best too. It is one of the few human arenas that can produce true glory.

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