A hundred

His hundredth birthday would have been celebrated. I might have pushed him to tell us more about his adventures during the war. The photo was taken for the Empire of India passport he was issued in Bombay after he managed to get out of Singapore in '42...

Pa encouraged me to be curious, to be playful and to value the insights arising from serendipity.

Okay, Pa, I've discovered a namesake of ours (I'm as often called 'Jim' as 'Mac'), James Thomson was a Scottish Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874), an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment.

"Welcome, kindred glooms! Congenial horrors, hail!"

And Pa, my curiosity lead me to wonder that is happening in my street in Munich; for the past week there has been a cacophony of JCBs and pneumatic drills. It's a short street and they dug a major trench plus individual holes before each of the apartment buildings.

"Now I know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall."

Anyway, in my immediate 'uncaring urban environment' it seems that someone does care... the utility company is installing 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-home. That's the little blue 7mm cable snaking into our basement in the photo below. The web's 'congenial horrors' will soon reach me much faster! Pa would have found that way cool!