Psychonaut's Journal

The late stand-up comedian George Carlin is well-known for his brilliant

skewering of the Christian doctrine of salvation. This series of cartoon video blogs by some grey bloke addresses the same subject in much the same way, and is just as funny, but unlike Carlin's routine, the delivery is delightfully

More some grey bloke ("Graham Murkett") on religion:

Re: Jesus loves you

Graham corresponds with a Christian about Jesus's oddly conditional brand of love.

Talk Radio

"How do we know that [Jesus] felt any pain? How do we know that God processes pain in the same way that we do? God might not even have a central nervous system."

Choosing my religion

Graham decides to get religious, and goes over the pros and cons of various religions the same way people go over the pros and cons of various insurance policies.

Choosing my religion 2

"I would hate to have to give up bacon, but then, with Islam there is the possibility of getting to have a threesome…"

Myrin, an Icelandic film, is playing at the

Prince Charles Cinema tomorrow at 18:40. If anyone is interested in going, let's meet outside the theatre before the film. The Cinema is located at 7 Leicester Place in Leicester Square. Tickets are £5. Here

Jar City (Myrin)
Director: Baltasar Kormakur
94mins, Subtitled
Starring: Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson, Agusta Eva Erlendsdottir

Chain-smoking, homicide detective Erlendur's grim outlook on life is informed by the gradual loss of his daughter Eva to sex and drugs. The murder of an old man called Holberg leads back to a rape investigation 30 years earlier and an intricate web of secrets and lies involving some of Erlendur's colleagues. As he sifts through the evidence, Erlendur journeys to a remote, isolate island where the locals harbour a chilling secret.

A previous

post detailed my (and Frettchen's) adventures at a Bevis Frond gig in Kilburn. Well, the psychedelic acid-rock gurus are playing again, this time in frontman Saloman's native Walthamstow, on Sunday, 14 December. If anyone is interested in joining us, please sign up on the Facebook events page, leave a comment on this entry, or just show up at the

A couple weeks ago, I jumped on the bandwagon and bought an ASUS Eee 901,

   a little netbook about the area of an A5 sheet of paper and
   weighing around a kilogram.  I decided to get one because I was
   tired of lugging my big heavy laptop to and from work every day

The 901 came preinstalled with a customized version of Xandros, which is itself based on Debian GNU/Linux. By default it boots up in what I like to call "Fisher-Price mode", though with minimal tweaking it's possible to get it to display a standard KDE desktop.

The thing I like about the system is that you can tweak it, and in most cases without much fuss. For example, by default the system enters suspend mode when the lid is closed, making it useless as a portable audio player. But after just a few minutes of poking around, I was able to locate the shell script which controls what happens when the lid is closed, and modified it so that the computer stays awake when music is playing. (If you're interested, I've authored a short article on the topic on the community-authored EeeUser Wiki.)

Some outstanding annoyances:

• The touchpad buttons don't seem to be sensitive enough. When in a web browser, I have to hold down the left button for almost a full second in order to get the click to register. I don't know if this is a hardware issue or if the button sensitivity is something that can be adjusted in software.
• Perhaps it's just my lack of experience with Debian-like systems, but I can't figure out how to easily automatically enable system services. For instance, I currently have to manually run sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start from the command line to get the ssh daemon to start; I don't know of any GUI to help me to get it to start automatically upon boot.
• The keyboard is really tiny and took me about a week to get used to. Even still, I make a lot of typing errors. I suppose this isn't really a legitimate complaint, though, since there's probably no way of making the keyboard bigger without making the rest of the computer bigger too.
• By default, the clock in the system tray displays time in 12-hour format and dates in American MM/DD/YY format. This is all well and good for Americans, but a pretty ridiculous setting for the rest of the world. In any sensible desktop environment, one would simply find the "regional settings" module in the system control panel and select one's preferred time and date format. And KDE, being a sensible desktop environment, does indeed contain such a module. But for some inexplicable reason, ASUS actually removed the time and date format settings from the KDE Control Center! And what's more, there doesn't seem to be any way of adding it back. (There are instructions on the EeeUser Wiki, but they don't work for me.) What on earth were ASUS thinking?
• The hard disk is partitioned into separate system and home (user) volumes, with only a few hundred megabytes free on the former. This doesn't leave much room for installing more software. No problem, think I; I'll just remove a bunch of the preloaded software packages I'll never use: StarOffice, all the games, etc. To my surprise, I found that removing these packages don't actually free up any disk space. This is because the system volume uses something called aufs, which transparently retains a copy of the factory-installed file system "underneath" the current one. Getting rid of aufs is possible but tricky, and I'm not sure I want to go through the hassle.
• The default username is user and it's pretty much impossible to change it, since it's hard-coded into many of the startup scripts. This is a minor annoyance because I have to constantly remember to specify the username when connecting via ssh, scp, rsync, etc. to and from my other computers, where my username is different.

Various updates:

• Last Saturday I went to a screening of an Icelandic film, Duggholufólkid, with Jenny (a Dutch girl from my Icelandic class) and her boyfriend. Frettchen came too. The film is a sort of a modern-day fairy tale about a boy who is sent to stay with his father and "wicked" stepsister in a remote part of Iceland. While his father and stepmother are away for a few days, the boy tries to escape and gets caught in a blizzard. His stepsister, who is not so wicked after all, sets out to rescue him, and together they have many interesting natural and supernatural encounters, including a lost lamb, a polar bear, and a two-hundred-year-old ghost. We liked the film because it was easy to understand—especially the stepsister, who, being played by a particularly inept child actress, delivered all her lines as if she were very slowly and carefully reading them aloud.

  After the film we decided to go out for dinner, but after wandering for over half an hour couldn't find anywhere open. Near St. Paul's we came across this bar/restaurant bustling with activity in an otherwise deserted square, so we went in. Upon sitting down, we noticed that practically everyone else in the place was wearing either a tail or pointy ears, or both. I went to the bar to place our orders, and was immediately surrounded by these folks, who were snapping pictures of me and complimenting me on the ferret. One girl told me it was great that I brought the ferret and asked if I was coming to "the dance" later on. It was then, after some queries, that I discovered we had accidentally wandered into a private conference for furries—specifically, the London Furs. So expect to see photos of me and the ferret appearing soon on furry websites, but please know that I am not one of them! :)

• On Monday, another Icelandic film—this time Sveitabrúðkaup with Giusi, an Italian girl from my Icelandic class; Svava, our awesome Icelandic teacher; Svava's friend Liam; ruthi; and purplekaz. The film is a road trip comedy about a couple families on their way to a wedding. The Icelandic was very difficult to understand; the characters spoke too fast and used a lot of colloquial languages. I much preferred Duggholufólkid, at least from a learning-Icelandic point of view. Afterwards I introduced Giusi and purplekaz to bubble tea which (shock! horror!) they had never even heard of before! Fortunately they both liked it a great deal. Afterwards Giusi and I raided Chinatown for root beer.

• The enchanting ladymysla wrote to let me know she'd received my postcard from St. Petersburg. Yay! Still no word from crankydoll though…

I have another spare ticket to one of the BFI Film Festival movies.

This time it's Sveitabrúðkaup (Country Wedding), which is playing Monday at 16:00 at the Odeon West

I have a spare ticket to one of the sold-out BFI Film Festival movies, Duggholufólkid (No Network), which is playing Saturday at 13:45 at BFI Southbank near Waterloo. (As I mentioned before, I'm going with my Icelandic class, but one of my classmates had to cancel.) Is anyone interested in coming with us?

Some friends from my Icelandic course are planning on seeing two Icelandic films at the BFI Film Festival. The details are as follows:

Title:

No Network (Duggholufólkid)

Synopsis:

Kalli discovers that living in an icy area with no phone network is no fun. With a wild polar bear, a restless ghost and a blizzard approaching, life's about to get worse.

When:

Saturday 25 October at 13:45

Where:

BFI Southbank (nearest Tube: Waterloo)

Cost:

£8.50 (adults) or £5.00 (under 16)

Title

Country Wedding (Sveitabrúðkaup)

Synopsis:

A couple thinks nothing could be nicer than a wedding in the country. It's only an hour's drive from the city but, of course things don't go as planned.

When:

Monday 28 October at 16:00

Where:

Odeon West End 1 (nearest Tube: Leicester Square)

Cost:

£11.00 (adults) or £7.50 (concession)

Both films are in Icelandic with English subtitles.

If anyone would like to join us I am happy to arrange tickets. Just let me know how many tickets you want, of what type (adult/child/concession), and to which film. Please let me know by tomorrow because they are selling out fast. (There are only 12 seats left for Duggholufólkid.)

Last week at the Pembury, timeplease showed me the following review of the pub from Time Out:

While I was pleased to see Frettchen mentioned in such a prestigious magazine, I'm more than a little confused as to why I have been referred to as a lesbian. Seriously now, do I look like a lesbian?? ;)

So yesterday I took Frettchen to see her first gig: The Terrastock Tea Party #6,

featuring the Bevis Frond, the Left Outsides, and Nick Nicely. I was a bit hesitant at taking her, because (a) I had no idea whether she'd be allowed into the venue, and didn't really want to travel all the way to Kilburn only to be barred entry or to be kicked out after being discovered, and (b) I wasn't sure if it would be entirely safe taking her to a gig. But given that it was the Bevis Frond playing, I didn't think it would really be a big deal. I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that it would be a small audience and that there would be no dancing or moshing or anything particularly dangerous to ferrets, and the sort of psychedelic, melancholy-poetic music wasn't likely to be too loud or startling for

We hung around in the back of the venue for the two opening acts, who I'd never heard of. (Apparently the second act, Nick Nicely, is regarded as some sort of reclusive musical genius who does all his work in the studio and has never performed live, until yesterday. His appearance was billed as his "first and last" performance.) While I was watching the first band, the Left Outsides, I bumped into the Bevis Frond's Nick Saloman himself, though never having seen him before, I wasn't sure it was him at first. I got confirmation of this when he started talking about how he was having trouble with his arm, which was nearly crippled in a motorcycle accident 25 years ago. "For 25 years it's been fine, and now all of a sudden it feels like it's dislocating every time I raise it!" he said.

Fortunately, it didn't seem to prevent him from playing his guitar that night. He and his backing band, who were together that night for the first time in 15 years, ripped through about a dozen Bevis Frond tracks, only about a third of which I recognized. (This is not surprising given the sheer volume of stuff the guy puts out—in 20 years I think he's released more than 20 albums.) Some of the tunes I recognized included "Stain On The Sun", "Undertaker", and "He'd Be A Diamond" from the New River Head album. I fondly remember listening to these songs, with Frettchen on my lap, as I drove to Italy in the spring of 2004.

On their last pre-encore number, Saloman leapt from the stage in the middle of a rocking solo and landed right in front of me. I think he seemed a bit startled when he saw Frettchen staring back at him! Between strumming his guitar he sort of mimed to me, "Isn't it too loud for her?", but I shook my head: Frettchen didn't seem at all bothered by the music, and was eagerly trying to sniff at the shiny orange guitar that had conveniently landed mere centimetres from her nose. :)

After the gig, while packing up his instrument, Frond bassist Ade Shaw, the guitarist for the Left Outsides, and several members of the audience came over to pet the Frettchen. Naturally she was thrilled to get the attention. :)

I'm told that the Bevis Frond's performances have been exceedingly rare in recent times, though they do have another gig scheduled for Sunday, 14 December in Walthamstow. Saloman is slated to perform a solo acoustic set, and then an electric one with the band. Naturally I (and the Frettch!) am thinking of going. Anyone interested in joining us?

As I mentioned in a previous entry, in the spring I took a beginners' ("Level 1") Icelandic language course at the UCL Language Centre. Last week I decided to sign up for the next course, Level 1+, but was told that it was not being offered. (This is not surprising, given that only myself and one other person were in the Level 1 course.) However, my teacher (who by the way is extremely awesome) said she was sufficiently impressed with my performance last time that I could progress straight to Level 2. This will, of course, require some time to make up all the stuff from Level 1+ which I missed, including the following:

• verb types 1 through 5
• personal pronouns, singular and plural, in all four cases
• adjectives in all three genders, but only in the nominative singular
• vocabulary related to occupations, family relations, daily routines, furniture, interests, and colours

That's a lot of material to cover in just a few days!

The Level 2 course is going to be held Tuesdays from 19:00 to 21:00, which means that I probably won't be able to make it to the usual Pembury meetups. Sorry, folks!

Inspired by this week's Dinosaur

Comics on losing and gaining

I was browsing Wikipedia today and came across a picture of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovitch as a young boy. I couldn't help but submit it to TotallyLooksLike.com:

If you like it please vote for it and maybe it'll make it to the front page. :)

I take it that by now everyone is familiar with Dschinghis

Khan, the 1970s German disco sextet whose kitschy performances of their eponymous song and its follow-up, "Moskau" (see below), became a minor Internet sensation back around 2004. What's less known is that the group actually had only two German members—three if you count frontman Louis Hendrik Potgieter, who came from a German Boer family in South Africa. The other members included a Dutch woman and two Hungarians named Leslie Mandoki and Edita Pop. None of this is news to me, as back in 2004 when I first encountered the Dschinghis Khan videos I dutifully read the band's Wikipedia

While conversing with a friend of mine on the subject of famous relatives, I jokingly claimed (as I am wont to do) that my father was actually "the bald guy from Dschinghis Khan". At first my friend wasn't sure whether to believe me, but within a few minutes said she was quite sure I was pulling her leg. I figured she had looked the guy up on Wikipedia and perhaps discovered that he had died and thus couldn't be my father, whom she knew to be alive. To verify this hypothesis, I went to his Wikipedia article myself to see if this was true, and sure enough, Herr Baldy had kicked the bucket back in 2006. Since I had some time to waste, I started poking around the articles for his colleagues, most of which were written long after I had last researched the group.

To my surprise, I found that "Edita Pop" was only a stage name; the performer's given name is Marika Késmárky. Now, Késmárky is a pretty rare Hungarian name (meaning "from Kežmarok", a small town now within the borders of Slovakia), and it also happens to be the family name on my mother's side. Could it be that my silly little lie about being related to a member of Dschinghis Khan might actually turn out to be true? I have e-mailed my grandfather to see if he knows anything about this Marika!

I arrived back from St. Petersburg on Sunday. Photos are now available. Here are some highlights:

• My hotel was actually very nice despite the negative online reviews. True, the staff didn't speak any English, the stairwell roof leaked, the shower had exposed piping and no curtain, the hot water took a few minutes to start, and my room didn't have a working telephone, but none of that really bothered me. My room was warm and comfortable, and it was kind of a fun adventure communicating with the hotel clerks, who seemed genuinely interested in helping me. A typical conversation with them went like this:

  Do you speak English?

  Nyet.

  Parlez-vous français?

  Nyet.

  Sprechen Sie deutsch?

  Nyet.

  OK, let me see if I can draw a picture…

  One thing that was a bit of a shock (literally) was when I first walked down the corridor to my room and accidentally brushed my arm against a cupboard door on the wall—I got zapped something fierce! Upon opening the door (and getting zapped again) I discovered that it housed some sort of electrical wiring, with lots of exposed (i.e., completely stripped) live wires! Yikes!

• I took a trip to the Zoo. For some reason there were lots of cats wandering around the place. Unfortunately, the wild Frettchens were sleeping indoors when I visited.

• The Zoological Museum had a number of interesting exhibits, including thousands of stuffed animals (including vampire Frettchens), several preserved mammoths, mounted mammoth and whale skeletons, and a live insect museum. The strangest exhibits were that of domestic dogs. They had so many of them that they even started throwing them willy-nilly into other dioramas! It reminded me of the Pyongyang Central Zoo, whose cages are said to be filled mainly with half-starved domestic dogs.

• The Geological Museum contains aisles upon aisles of rocks and gems from all over the world, but the real attraction is an enormous map of the USSR made entirely from precious gems and stones. There's a small plaque nearby explaining that it won some sort of prize at the 1937 World's Fair, though the map must have been updated since then as it shows Königsberg and the Baltic states as part of the Soviet Union.

• The Museum of Political History contains a similarly large map, except made from silk. Also of interest there is a huge painting of Lenin addressing the crowd upon his return to Russia during the Russian Revolution—note the disaffected members of the bourgeoisie, higher military ranks, and clergy in the lower right.

• Don't miss my gallery of delicious Russian and Georgian food! Sampling the local delicacies was definitely my favourite part of the trip.

• Last but not least, I snapped a photo of Frettchen rejoicing at my return. :)

Help!

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm off for a holiday in St. Petersburg on Sunday. Unfortunately, the friend who was to look after Frettchen is in hospital! Would anyone be interested in looking after the fuzzweasel for a week beginning Sunday? She is very easy to look after: just fill her food and water dishes once a day, and play with her for a bit in the mornings and/or evenings. She's litter-trained (provided she's within sight of a litterbox, which I can provide), does not bite people or destroy furniture, and absolutely loves cuddles.

If you're able to help, please let me know ASAP!

On Sunday I'm travelling to St. Petersburg to visit a friend of

mine, Olga, with whom I attended an AEGEE Summer University in Kiel and Kaliningrad in 2004. Olga is from Kaliningrad originally but is

Check out my visa below. It's much nicer than the one from 2004 (also pictured); they've completely changed the design and added a nice hologram:

I'm staying in a centrally located hotel called the Neva. From all reports it's a dismal Stalinist hellhole with decrepit furnishings and rude staff. Should be fun! Check out the lovely photos of a typical suite, complete with exposed water pipes, peeling wallpaper, and light switches surrounded by a "delightful rosette of grease". :)

One good thing about the hotel, which I discovered by accident only after booking, is that they allow pets. This got me thinking that it might be possible to bring Frettchen along on my trip. I checked the website of my airline, Rossiya, it turns out they allow ferrets in the cabin! Practically none of the major European airlines allow pets in the cabin, so this was a pleasant surprise. The next thing was to check was whether the Russian government would allow the import of ferrets. And yep, Defra confirms they're one of the countries participating in the Pet Travel Scheme! It wouldn't be a problem bringing Frettchen to Russia. This was beginning to sound almost too good to be true.

As it turned out, it was too good to be true. In order to bring a pet back into the UK, you need to use one of the "approved carriers" listed on Defra's website. Unfortunately, Rossiya is not approved for transport of ferrets into the UK. In fact, the only carrier approved for transporting pets into the UK from St. Petersburg is British Airways Cargo. :(

So it seems Frettchen must stay in London next week while I am on holiday. Too bad; she would have been useful to help meet the locals! I'm sure she'll have lots of fun with her babysitter while I'm gone, though.

Apparently this video has been around since around 2004, but I discovered it only recently:

Yesterday at the Pembury much chess was played. First, I played against abigailb and lost.

Then abigailb played against CHEOPS, an AI chess engine I had written about ten years ago. The only change we made from the default settings was to set the lookahead to six moves (three full turns), as computing power had increased significantly since the time I wrote it. abigailb played white and CHEOPS played black. After a somewhat questionable

Here is the full game in coordinate notation, plus a snapshot of the final board configuration:

1. D2-D4 E7-E6
2. C1-F4 F8-D6
3. G2-G3 D6-F4
4. G3-F4 D8-F6
5. C2-C3 F6-F4
6. G1-F3 G8-F6
7. E2-E3 F4-G4
8. F1-E2 G4-G2
9. H1-G1 G2-G1
10. F3-G1 B7-B6
11. E2-F3 D7-D5
12. D1-A4 C8-D7
13. A4-B4 A7-A5
14. B4-B3 A5-A4
15. B3-B4 B8-C6
16. B4-A3 E6-E5
17. B2-B3 D7-F5
18. B1-D2 A8-A6
19. B3-A4 F5-G4
20. H2-H3 G4-F3
21. G1-F3 F6-E4
22. D4-E5 E4-D2
23. E1-D2 G7-G5
24. F3-G5 C6-E5
25. F2-F4 E5-C4
26. D2-C2 C4-A3
27. C2-B3 A3-C4
28. A1-D1 C7-C6
29. E3-E4 H7-H6
30. G5-F3 D5-E4
31. F3-D4 C4-A5
32. B3-A3 C6-C5
33. D4-B5 A5-C4
34. A3-B3 C4-A5
35. B3-C2 E8-G8
36. B5-C7 A6-A7
37. D1-D7 F8-C8
38. F4-F5 A7-C7
39. D7-C7 C8-C7
40. H3-H4 C7-C6
41. white resigns

Another exchange regarding Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend:

   Date: 16 November 2007 14:20
   From: Mary <––––––@acadiau.ca>
     To: Tristan Miller <psychonaut@nothingisreal.com>
Subject: finding a girlfriend

Hi, had any luck yet?

mary

   Date: 23 April 2008 10:49
   From: Tristan Miller <psychonaut@nothingisreal.com>
     To: Mary <––––––@acadiau.ca>
Subject: Re: finding a girlfriend

Nope.

Regards,
Tristan

   Date: 23 April 2008 13:04
   From: Mary <––––––@acadiau.ca>
     To: Tristan Miller <psychonaut@nothingisreal.com>
Subject: Re: finding a girlfriend

Hi,
Maybe it's your timing.
Mary

I had my first Icelandic class on Monday. Our teacher's name is Svava, and there are just two other students besides myself, both men. One of them wants to learn the language because he recently took a holiday in Iceland and wants to go back; the other one has an Icelandic girlfriend, which Svava says is a very common reason for taking the course!

The language, or at least some aspects of it, is more difficult than I expected. The vocabulary isn't too problematic, as it's Germanic, and I can easily deduce the meaning of words by their similarity to German or English equivalents. For example, Icelandic skrifa and lesa are similar to German schreiben and lesen ("write" and "read", respectively). However, the phonology is a bit problematic, on two counts: first, the correspondence between written letters and sounds isn't as regular as it is in, say, German or Hungarian. For example, l is pronounced as in English ([l]), except at the end of the world, when it is unvoiced, and except when geminate, in which case it is pronounced as [lː] in pet names and words of foreign origin, and [tl] otherwise. Some digraphs and trigraphs have unexpected realizations, such as [mt] for fnd and [kʰv] for hv, and there are occasional silent consonants.

The other problem is that many of the phones themselves are quite difficult, either because they don't exist in English (or French or German or Hungarian) at all, or worse yet, they are allophones of English phonemes (meaning English speakers can produce them, but are not used to doing so contrastively). Even Hungarian, a non–Indo-European language which is notorious for being difficult to learn, at least has a phoneme inventory which is very easy for English speakers. In Icelandic, on the other hand, we have such bizarre things as voiced and unvoiced alveolar non-sibilant(!) fricatives ([ð̠], [θ̠]), voiceless nasals and approximants ([m̥], [n̥], [l̥], [r̥]), preaspirated obstruents ([ʰk], [ʰp]), and phonemic consonant pairs which differ only in aspiration (e.g., [t⁼] vs. [tʰ]). I know how to make all these consonants, but training myself to recognize and use them at the right time is going to take a lot of work. Some vowels are even harder. I have some difficulty telling u ([ʏ]) from ö ([œ]). The letter i is supposed to be [ɪ], but when Svava says it it sounds like [e] to me.

I wouldn't mind these complications so much if they were enumerated at the outset, but so far Svava has been teaching orally, which means that we either have to guess at pronunciations or remember them. I'd find this much easier if she'd just write everything out in the IPA on the blackboard—I know she knows the alphabet, because she's occasionally used it—but I suspect that might confuse the other two students, so I don't want to say anything. They say that doctors make lousy patients; I'm sure that likewise linguists make lousy language students. :)

I now leave you with a ridiculous little exercise we are meant to try at home to help us practice our rolled Rs:

Rauðhærður riddari
réðist inn í Rómaborg.
Rændi þar og ruplaði
rabarbara og rúsínum.

I think it means something like "A ginger knight rode into Rome. There he robbed rhubarb and raisins."

My computer, polecat, died the night of Saturday, 26 April 2008. Fortunately, I had made a full backup three days before, so I haven't lost much, though if you e-mailed me between 23 and 26 April then you should probably re-send as it's possible I won't be able to recover the data from those three days. In the meantime, it may be difficult to reach me by e-mail.

Yesterday I made arrangements to obtain a new system. It will be a Dell Inspiron 1525 with a 2.40 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of memory, and a 250 GB hard drive. It comes with Windows Vista, though as I use GNU/Linux almost exclusively I may try to get a refund for Windows. (Back in 2000 I successfully got a Windows refund from, I think, HP.) I'm told it may take two weeks for delivery. The computer has not yet been named, but it will be done in accordance with the mustelid naming scheme I devised. (Besides polecat, names already in use are otter, weasel, badger, ermine, and marten.) The new computer is supposed to be jet black in colour, so I am leaning towards "sable".

Anyway, now I am off to quatsch with German-speaking friends at the Pembury.