He speaks of senseless things

We lost the hour last night.

That’s not a complete explanation for why the blog is later than usual this morning, but it’s part of it. I can’t tell you exactly how much, because I’m not a mathematician. If I were, I be sitting here this morning writing about linear algebra and trying my hardest to regale you with funny stories about vectors.

“This vector walked into a bar. The barman says, A! B-have yourself.”

See, it’s good job I’m not a mathematician. Or a comedian. Instead, I’m just a guy who slept a bit later than normal because of the lost hour. Are there comedians who make jokes about maths? It’d be very niche, I reckon. I guess your remit needs to be wider, unless you become the guy who does the entertainment at conferences where mathematicians come together every year to discuss the latest advances in the field. Now I’m wondering if there are advances at all? Surely we know everything there is to know about maths at this point.

There are numbers, you add them, subtract them, divide them, multiply them, and do the triangle stuff, and then what? I feel like there’s very likely a lot more to it, in the same way everyone thinks it must be great to be a vet because you help cats and dogs and hamsters, but then someone will walk in one day with an osprey, and few people consider that side of things. I will state for the record that I love animals, but I never want to be alone in a small room with a large bird.

Just me and the bird staring at each other. He’s not in his natural habitat, and that’s likely to make him dangerous. He’s got nothing to lose. I’m in rooms of varying sizes all the time, so I’m comfortable with the environment if not the scenario. He typically exists in the vastness of the sky, soaring from one place to another, and it’d be just my luck to find myself in a room with claustrophobic bird which simply makes him even more anxious and potentially violent. The only thing you can do is strike first. I’m not advocating the idea of punching a bird in the face, but if I had to, I would. I think I might just start carrying a canvas bag with me everywhere in case I’m faced with this scenario, because what you can do then is simply drop the bag over its head, and run out the door. The pacifist in me prefers this. He won’t know what’s happening because it’s all dark, and he’ll either think it’s night-time or he’s been transported into another dimension where everything is incredibly dull. By the time he realises, I’ll be long gone.

Catch me now, you flappy twat.

The point is though, you begin with time, you start thinking about quadratic equations, then numbers based stand-ups, before you pivot to veterinary methods, and how to escape from a feathery raptor. You can do a lot with an hour. Some might read this and think ‘You can also do nothing in an hour and honestly that might have been a better use of your time and mine today’, and I fully accept that. But one day, when you casually saunter into a room, not a care in the world, the door closes behind you, and you find yourself face to face with a harpy eagle, you’ll think ‘You know what, everyone said I was a fool for carrying this bag around with me all the time, but Arseblog was right’.

Anyway, the upside is that we get brighter evenings now. A ‘grand stretch’ as we say here in Ireland, so whatever you get up to today, enjoy that part of it at least. And the hour that is lost now straddles the planes of time until the clocks go forward again. He’ll be back, don’t worry.

He’s waiting in the wings.