Moving house - Part V

Before I moved into my new house, I had this worry that the place was built on top of a sewer manhole. My anxiety was caused by some innacuracies on an ancient map of the grounds and by the presence of a trapdoor in the hallway, leading to a spooky crawlspace under the house. Well, the mystery was resolved on Sunday …

It began earlier in the weekend, with me noticing the toilet filling up dangerously close to the rim every time I flushed it. So, I checked the two manholes out back. The one farthest from the house was clean as a whistle. But as for the one that peeks out from under the kitchen extension, oh my!

A phrase from the Vincent Price voiceover on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came to mind: “The funk of forty thousand years.” Or more correctly, half a metre squared of old human excrement (mine was still up the submerged pipe, somewhere inside the house). Suddenly the bad smells in the bathroom all made sense.

My uncle came to the rescue with these big rubber poles that you can screw onto one another. We put about twenty feet up the pipe and shoved and shoved, with the power hose going, all the while running the taps to try and soften everything up into chocolate milkshake. My aunt had to walk to the other side of the garden at one point, the stench was so bad.

After about half and hour, the stuff started to come through, and lo and behold, a thick plastic bag arrived out of the pipe. What kind of moron would ever shove such a thing down the loo? I’d say there was at least half a year’s worth of crap built up before I took over.

The worst part was when the level went down far enough for you to see the pipe, then all my lighter coloured fresher poo came flying out, along with wads of toilet paper that threatened to block everything again. I had to reach in and scoop a load of this out before it went underground again. Oh, what a day!

Anyhow, it’s all over now, and I was never so glad to get a shower. At least now I know for sure where the sewage goes, and I didn’t even need to get into the crawlspace.

You didn’t want to know any of that, did you? But you have to admit, it is pretty funny.

What I learned from being an agnostic

Once upon a time, I stopped believing in a personal God, and this lasted for a couple of years. I was an agnostic (which lots of people are), meaning that I did not know for sure whether God existed or not. It’s worth noting that agnosticism is the same as atheism at a practical level; since you can’t be sure that God exists, you shape your life around the idea that he does not. I want to talk about the impact that agnosticism (or atheism) had on my life.

One of the big things an agnostic has to let go of is the belief in an afterlife. Some might argue against that point, but when you take a personal God out of the equation, all you are left with is an impersonal universe. You may have some kind of faint hope of an afterlife, in the same way that you might have the faint hope of God being real, but it’s not the same thing as believing in it. For all intents and purposes, you’re not expecting anything but oblivion when you die. But maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s true, and maybe it’s something that can be faced.

The problem was that my own future death was going to make a mockery out of all my accomplishments in life; nothing would have any ultimate significance. Thousands of precious memories would die along with my soul or spirit or essense or whatever it is that gives us life.

But one day something clicked: life was only meaningless when it was lived for the self. A life lived for the benefit of others was vastly different. Anything you do for someone else, without expectation of reward, is meaningful; you may die tomorrow, but the impact you had on someone else’s life goes on.

I thought I had grasped something vastly important about the meaning of life. Memories are not important; personal ambitons are not important; your self is not important; the only thing that goes on without you is how you’ve treated your fellow man. Suddenly Christianity seemed so egotistical, with its emphasis on the soul surviving death. Even the selflessness talked about in the Bible is not presented without some kind of future reward. I, however, had discovered a way of life that was truly selfless.

Something still didn’t sit right, though. If you make your own ego unimportant, how can others be truly important, when they are just like you? You may impact another’s life for good, but that other person will die one day, just like everyone else after him. If there is no ultimate significance behind the self, then is my philosophy perhaps just a smokescreen? Things look even grimmer when you consider that our sun has a lifespan. One day, millions of years in the future, all life on earth will cease, and what significance will our lives have then? None.

The idea of evil was also something of a problem to me, but not in the way you might think. With God out of the picture, I did not become more evil, I became more good, because I did not have God to lean on for strength and forgiveness. I knew it was all up to me not to make a mess of my life. As human beings, we all struggle against the temptation to do wrong, but I could never quite shake the idea that there was something more to some of those wrongs than mere “bad behaviour” - something almost demonic. I couldn’t categorise every sin in my life as mere mischief. But this knowledge didn’t make sense in a universe without a God (and a devil).

Another thing that would not sit right with me as an agnostic was that popular opinion told me I should side with the pro-choicers and the gay rights people. Looking around me, it seems to be fairly constant that if you’re an atheist you’re pro-choice and if you’re a Christian you’re pro-life. Likewise with homosexuality. It’s beyond the scope of this article for me to go into any kind of debate on those issues. Suffice it to say that here I was as a lonely agnostic, still believing that the Christians had got it right.

It’s almost funny that I found myself as an agnostic who had taken hold of the entire Christian ideal for living, but left out the faith.

But the worst thing about agnosticism is the depression. It’s not a big thing, just a minor irritation that gnaws at you. I could be out on my bike, enjoying a cycle through beautiful countryside on a warm summer day. All five senses in my body are feeding me pleasure and telling me to enjoy myself, but my joy is crushed by a subtle sense of gloom that never quite goes away. It’s a nagging voice that says, “Someday you will be dead, and it will be as if you had never been here doing this.”

And that gloom, friends, is one of the reasons why agnosticism (and atheism) is the wrong philosophy of life. If you learn one thing from an experience like mine, learn this: surely man was not meant to live a depressed life. Surely the depression is a signal that I’m not living the way I’m supposed to be living, a pointer to the idea that life must have ultimate meaning. And for that to be possible, there must be an afterlife. And for that to be possible, there must be a personal God.

Encounter with a dragonfly

Here in Northern Ireland there aren’t many exotic bugs going around, so it was with surprise that I noticed this little critter sitting on the pavement during a Saturday morning walk. It is, of course, a dragonfly. I haven’t seen many in my lifetime, and never one this big (take a look at my thumb for an idea of scale). At first I thought it was dead, but on closer inspection I spotted the occasional tiny movement on its head.

I decided to go home and return with a camera. Five minutes later I was back on the scene, expecting the bug to be gone. It was still there; something must have been very wrong with it. My only other experience with bugs was encountering a bumble bee that had run out of steam; it was walking along the pavement, unable to fly. I fed it a bit of half-chewed apple, and watched with fascination as its little proboscis came out and sucked up the fuel, after which it took off. I tried the same tactic with the dragonfly, not knowing anything about its diet. Although the photo shows it on the apple, it is merely sitting there, completely disinterested. On closer inspection, I noticed it had mandibles similar to a caterpillar, so I went home a second time and came back with a spinach leaf from my fridge. Again, I found the dragonfly exactly where I had deposited it. It showed no interest in the leaf whatsoever.

At one one point, when I was on my knees on the pavement, with my head close to the ground and my butt in the air, and my bike lying next to me, two older women stopped their car next to me. I thought they were looking for directions, but when I approached, one of them said (with a look of grave concern), “Are you all right? Did you fall off your bicycle?”

I had a brainwave. I remembered witnessing massive dragonflies on a holiday to Majorca when I was eleven; so they thrive in the heat, I supposed. Maybe this guy was just plain cold. So, after getting the fly to crawl onto the leaf, I carried it over to a nearby copse of trees. It was much warmer in there, and sheltered from the wind. No sooner had I put the bug down than it started walking about and flexing its wings, clearly much more comfortable. And that was that. Diagnosis correct.

Afterwards, I did a little research on dragonflies. This from Wikipedia: “The life cycle of the dragonfly, from egg to death of adult, varies from six months to as much as six or seven years. Female dragonflies lay eggs in or near water, often in or on floating or emergent plants. Most of the life cycle is spent in the larval (nymph) form, beneath the water surface, using internal gills to breathe, and catching other invertebrates or even vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish. In the adult (flying) stage, larger species of dragonfly can live as long as four months.” (Read full article.) What a cool creature! Reminds me a bit of TV’s Invasion. The species I found is called the Libellula quadrimaculata or Four-spotted Chaser. Turns out it’s one of the commonest dragonflies in Ireland after all. Still, it’s new to me, and it was a great photo opportunity.

Maybe you think it’s weird that I should invest so much time in a tiny insect. Well, if you’ll permit me to go a little spiritual on you: the whole animal kingdom, large and small, is wonderfully diverse and complex and beautiful. And it’s a reflection of God’s creative power. I love it. Think about that the next time you’re about to put your foot on a spider.

God’s free gifts

I’ve been swindled three times this year so far. Back in January an eBay gangster refused me a refund to the tune of £70. Lately, when I moved into my new house, I had to pay £310 to get the oil burner replaced due to the negligence of the previous owner. Then I purchased a wardrobe, which turned out to be so badly made that I arranged for a refund, and the shop held back a £50 “handling fee” (so called). Pah! But you know something? None of it really matters.

I’ve been doing a lot of cycling lately, winding my way around the country roads not far from where I live. I like nothing better than a warm day, with the sun shining down, the wind in my face, and the green countryside all around me. This kind of thing is one of God’s many free gifts to mankind. And we take it for granted, don’t we? Actually, having greatly missed living at this end of town for the past three years, I’m certainly not taking it for granted at the moment. I’m realising afresh just how important these gifts are - way more important than how much money I’ve got sitting in my bank account. Those small financial losses I suffered seem even smaller when I think about the things that God gives freely to us. You can’t put the countryside in a cage and call it your own; it’s a feast for the eyes that God gives to everyone, and it seems much more important to me than all our obsessing over wealth and the ownership of things. There is so much enjoyment to be had in life that has nothing whatsoever to do with getting.

No green screen? No problem

Green screen (or blue screen, which used to be more common) is a method of transforming the entire background behind an actor into something else, usually something so elaborate that it couldn’t be done using ordinary props on a set. Much of the modern Star Wars trilogy was filmed in this manner. It’s actually a fairly simple process, but requires some technology. Basically it involves actors acting in front of a big green sheet hanging from the wall. The main consideration is making sure the actor is not wearing anything green, because later you’ll get the computer to remove all traces of green from the picture so that it becomes essentially see-through. The computer is then able to fill the entire stage behind the actor with anything you wish; usually it’ll be some elaborate vista created with animated computer graphics.

For the purposes of the 2003/04 Film Club at Clounagh Junior High, we needed to show the school in the wake of a bomb blast. Forget about green screening for a moment. First things first: how do you show a demolished building without demolishing the building? Having some experience with Adobe Photoshop, I showed the kids how to use the Clone Stamp tool, and let them loose with a digital photo of the school. I chose the best result, then I imported the photo into Apple iMovie and applied the program’s smoke effect. Presto. One minute (or whatever length desired) of usable footage of a school in ruins.

We could have used the footage as it stood, and simply cut away to the actors’ faces, but I was determined to make the thing look as real as possible, and that meant showing actors in front of the wreckage. I cast my mind back to the days before green screening, to memories of those old movies where you’d be looking directly at the driver of a car. You’d see him moving the steering wheel left and right - rarely in proper time to the weaving of the road behind him, because, of course, the road isn’t real. The car is on a set, and there’s a projector behind it, out of sight, beaming an image of the road onto a screen. And that is exactly what we did at Film Club.

In the photo, between the two girls, just out of sight below waist level, is a multimedia projector connected to a laptop computer. Windows Media Player is playing the clip of the school we made earlier. The projector is projecting it onto a screen not more than four feet in front of the girls. My camcorder is about six feet behind them, and I’ve zoomed in just enough to avoid seeing the edges of the projector screen. Our actresses don’t have a lot of freedom to move. If one of them so much as raises a hand, it’ll go in front of the beam and cast a massive shadow onto the screen. But they can look at each other and talk, and it’s enough to complete the illusion. If your scene requires more movement, you can consider back projecting, but unfortunately our screen was too thick to allow that.

The final ingredient - and it’s easily overlooked - is the sound. I went outdoors and recorded a minute of outdoor ambience - wind, birds, traffic, etc. - and layered this onto the scene at the editing stage. If you listen carefully to the girls’ voices, you can tell by the reverberations that they’re not really outdoors, but on a budget as tight as ours (i.e. zero), you can only go so far (egg boxes all over the walls is something to consider, if you’re inclined to go the extra mile).

To watch the finished effect, download the movie (WMV, 10.6 Mb), the appropriately titled School’s Out!

Sponsored marathon for orphanage

On Tuesday I was able to fasten my belt one inch tighter, after taking part in Belfast City Marathon the day before. If you’re thinking there’s no way I could carry all 17 stone of myself across 25 miles, you’d be right. I was part of a relay team of five from Clounagh Junior High School. We were raising money for an orphanage in Bulgaria through sponsorship by the ski trip pupils. In September I’m hoping to add a little more to the total raised, through sales of Chionophobia within the school.

Moving house - Part IV

Just after midnight on Friday, after a hard day spent moving all my stuff, I’m finally in my new house. So far, I have only found three things amiss:

1. The oil-fired heating is busted: the boiler won’t ignite and the pump won’t pump. So, I’ve had a chilly couple of days.

2. The built-in fridge-freezer lets out a big shudder once an hour, every hour. I mean a BIG shudder; it’s like somebody rattling pots and pans. Not nice at night-time, especially when the room you chose as your bedroom is right on the other side of the wall where the fridge is fixed. But thankfully this old house has solid walls, so I’ve been able to sleep through the racket. If I’d been moving into one of those new builds, where every wall is like cardboard, I’d be cursing the house every night. As the saying goes, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

3. The bathroom looks recently refurbished - not a trace of dirt in the spaces between the tiles - but whoever decided it was a good idea to fit the toilet so close to the wall needs shot. It wouldn’t be so bad, except the radiator is right where your knee would normally be. Maybe a woman can poop with her legs closed, but for a man, this arrangement means you can’t sit on the loo without rotating your butt thirty degrees to the left. Not comfortable.

But none of the above is a big deal. Everything can be fixed. I felt totally at home in this new house almost straight away, something I’ve never felt about the old house in the three years that I lived there. The internal layout of the old house was just not conducive to feeling good; there was no privacy, because all the houses in the estate were built too close together (which is sadly now the norm for new builds); neighbours wouldn’t take responsibility for their kids’ actions outdoors; worst of all, none of my friends were within walking distance. The new house is private and peaceful and pretty much next door to my friends. I am really happy to have moved here.

The weather was sunny on Saturday evening, so I took a break from working, grabbed my mountain bike, and went for an aimless ride, as was my custom when I used to live in the neighbourhood. Ended up cycling around Craigavon Lakes. I wish I had one of those camera-phones to show you how beautiful some of the scenery is around here (this blog strikes me as a pretty good reason to buy one). The ride felt wonderful, especially the journey home, knowing that I didn’t have to go through the town centre or head through the school neighbourhood. It’s hard to convey exactly why living back in my childhood neighbourhood is so important to me. I think there were just certain simple pleasures I had taken for granted all my life, like my old cycling routes. Three years ago, when I moved to the opposite side of town, these pleasures disappeared and were not replaced by anything better. There’s nothing like being denied something to make you appreciate it all over again.

Glad to be home.