A Dither

The closing date for the Bridport Prize is at the end of this month. I have just unearthed a flyer from my pending folder and realise that I have a ready story, penned but never submitted for the British Science Fiction Association. I need to trim 700+ words and therein lies a problem. No amount of tinkering will do it; I need to lose an entire scene or at the very least several beats.

I may toy with it for a few days. I’m also not sure that the Bridport is the right competition. The piece is SF and may need an SFate audience to get what's going on. Too clever by half, eh? Probably.

Flight to Singapore - 2008

I had plenty of time to get across London and hang around Heathrow, not my favourite of airports but I’m an inveterate people-watcher (well, mainly women), so the hours flew by. I didn't register much until the plane crossed the Black Sea, when city names began to get more exotic. We had been in darkness for ages and only the seat-back map gave any clues to the lights passing below. They thinned the further east we flew, Romania seeming like the last outpost of civilisation.

I was sneaking glimpses under the window shutter, down as usual for the benefit of sleeping passengers. I had grabbed a couple of fitful hours of wine-induced doze but couldn't manage any more.

We may have passed the Crimea and crossed Georgia and Azerbaijan. The names on the map weren't helping much. The Caspian Sea was obvious as we flew to meet the sun, then Turkmenistan, dusty mountains and not much else, which carried on into Afghanistan. Why fight over these arid landscapes? Surely no one could want, or be able, to live there? I could trace the possible courses of rivers but all seemed devoid of the slightest moisture, even any hints of growth along their banks. 35,000 feet may not be the ideal vantage point for such detail.

The country prefigured parts of the coming Australian experience. Its camels and riders opened up the similarly desolate outback and part of the name lives on in the train from Adelaide to Darwin.

Kabul passed, hidden, under our port wing and the bleak, unforgiving terrain continued into Pakistan. Finally, Lahore, with the obvious concentric, spoked arrangement of Model Town, showed signs of life. The mountains slid away to the north, gained snow-capped peaks as the Hindu Kush became the Himalayas, which accompanied us over the plains of northern India. One of the summits must have been Annapurna, another Everest but I knew not which.

Burma came and went without a trace of the fires that had dotted it on my flight west in 2003. Had they finally razed the entire jungle or had economic activity ceased with the suppression of the Saffron Revolution?

Thailand slipped by and we found ourselves over its Gulf and heading into cloud. The captain announced monsoonal rain in Singapore. We juddered down through one layer to come at the airport in a spiral from east to south to west to landing in a zero-visibility downpour. I reflected that it was at least warm rain and certainly beat the snow that was likely back home. ⇐ ⇒

To Play or not to Play

This morning I broke a 32-game losing streak (punctuated only by three trivial gains).

I had expected downswings to last maybe a dozen games. Indeed the longest stretch with no return at all amounted to thirteen. However, I've been having the sort of sequence that forces a re-evaluation of strategy.

OK, so I was basically playing multi-table tournaments with upwards of a hundred players, sometimes nearly a thousand. The odds of hitting even the final table, let alone the big money positions, were contributing to the persistent failure. This is not good for building a bankroll, which is what I need now. I can gun for the big prizes later.

Despite that, I have identified most of my exits as being down to running out of stack in the face of rising blinds. I’m fine for the first hour and on into the second but, as the bubble approaches, I have to shove with increasingly desperate hands to stay in. And of course I don't survive. This is symptomatic of playing too tightly. According to PokerStove, not even 7% of my hands. Given that, playing randomly, I should win 10%, I clearly wasn't giving myself much chance.

It is a balancing act. Play too much and your stack disappears in false starts; play too little and the blinds catch up with you. There's a happy medium somewhere. I’m still working on finding it.

Curlew Sandpiper at Upton Warren

This is an attractive bird in breeding plumage. I've seen individuals pass in the autumn when they don't have the red colouring or the black mottling on the back. This picture of a juvenile only does part justice to the plumage, which was on full display at Upton this afternoon. Also present were redshanks, lapwings, little (ringed) plovers, a (big) ringed plover and avocets, some with offspring.

The powers-that-be have decided that the little ringed plover (LRP) is not to be ringed any more but is still to be little, despite not being appreciably so. It all sounds a bit dubious to me. (Ho-ho! LRP is charadrius dubius.)

Such was the scene at the Flashes, the southern end of the reserve. At the Moors Pool, late sand martins joined the local house martins and swallows. Perhaps the sand martins are breeding nearby, they're so late? I wonder where? And perhaps they always did: I have June and July records from 1998. Anyone any ideas?

North of Atherton, Queensland - January

Now, for a couple I met at the raptor watchpoint in the North York Moors, and for all the birds of prey we missed, here comes a discontinuity in the timeline of my Australian trip...

Sunday, the 25th, saw me take my leave of Atherton and head north for Mareeba Wetlands. As ever, my van wasn't supposed to tackle the dirt road and anyway the reserve was closed. I carried on past Lake Mitchell, which also didn't deliver, and stopped for lunch at Mount Molloy in the heat of the day. The pub provided a surprising array of dishes, so I knew I had only to snack it that evening.

The settlement itself – hardly a town – held good birding habitat but I elected to try the Peninsula Development Road to Mount Carbine, for a taste of drier Queensland. I had already scrubbed Cooktown from my itinerary, so I wasn't going all the way down the Road.

Various clouds threatened but no rain materialised, nor did any birds – only yet another lolly from the hamlet’s roadhouse. I headed back for the coast and Cape Tribulation. I was keen to spend the night in the relative coolness of the mountains, so Kingfisher Park, at the edge of the Tablelands, was a logical choice for campsite. Unsure how to find it, I was driving slower than even my customary snail-pace when yet another red-neck vehicle roared up behind me and overtook on a blind bend with horn blaring. A thousand heart attacks to you, scum!

As it happened, the Park was obvious but with only just room for me: it was hosting the annual long weekend get-together of the North Queensland branch of Birds Australia. This was a good thing: at last someone who could tell me what I was looking at! ⇐ ⇒