Lego!

I came home today and started heading up the stairs, when out of the corner of my eye I caught glimpse of a Lego logo (a Lego logo? Rogo bogo!). What was this doing in our paper recycling bin?

I walked over and, joy of joys - it was the Lego magazine! Well, I was happy, but then I felt sad for the poor boy who hadn't received his magazine. But I looked at the address, and it was addressed here, so I had no way of taking it to its rightful owner.

If anyone knows a Joseph Parkin, get in touch with me so I can give him his magazine. Until then...

Anyway, I used to be in the Lego club too, I used to spend all my time building really cool things with Lego, I used to just sit in my own little world, elaborating my space station, listening to Radio 1. I used to look with envy and curiosity at some of the models in the Lego Club magazine - the Master Builder pages. I wanted to be a Master Builder too, but I didn't have as much Lego as these other guys. I remember the tea-stirring machine: as I child of seven I sat there and studied this picture, and then finally somebody bought me a motor and I made my own tea-stirrer. But it was useless, it just splashed the tea all over the place! I didn't quite know it then, but I needed gears...

Of course, these days, I spend my days in the abstract world of computer code, perfecting marvellous trading systems, and I look with envy and curiosity upon the code of the master builders of the software world - the guys who have their own consultancies, and who write the books...

I have a new book, it excites the life out of me. Among other things, this book claims to contain "an abstraction for treating objects uniformly that doesn't have a physical counterpart". Wow! This leapt out at me as being the single most exciting thing I'd come across since the mind-blowing literature of Macedonio Fernández, a man who laboured to find a way to use language to take us to a place that bore no traces of reality whatsoever.

And that's my little journey of thought for today.