For a couple of years now, a new extension to the station has been under construction, intended to lengthen the Thameslink platforms to take 12 carriage trains. Construction projects sometimes seem to reach their finish with bewildering rapidity, and this one was no exception. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed to be just a big hole in the ground. And when I was last in work, a week and a bit ago, I’m sure it was still at that “concrete shell” stage.

Then this morning, my train drew to a halt… in a different station from the one I’ve always got off at. No more cramped Victorian brick structure, hello sleek and cavernous white underground space.

I went back at lunchtime and took some pictures (click on them to get larger versions).

There’s a huge white entrance, opposite the existing entrance (which is currently closed while they complete the rebuilding work, but which will then also still be in use).

And that leads to a huge concourse area:

And you then go down to some nice open platform areas, much roomier than the rest of the station:

These are just the platform extensions. You can go back to the original platform area (which is still in use for 8 of the 12 carriages) by walking under what was once the bridge at the end of the station (this is also how you get to the Underground platforms for the Metropolitan, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines):

Finally, they’ve put up a nice couple of posters showing the “before” picture, and the “where they are now” picture:

People are often very cynical about modern things, but I think this is a really nice development. And of course, when Crossrail is completed, Farringdon’s going to be very well connected.

And just to clarify, I’m only including things with a querty keyboard here. I know that smartphone’s now are basically computers, but given that a modern microwave oven probably has more computing power than Apollo 11′s LEM, if I listed everything with a CPU I’d be including my last few phones, my car, and half the white goods in my kitchen.

#1 Commodore VIC 20

When: 1982

Type: All-in-one unit connected to TV

OS: Not applicable

This was it, the first computer I owned, if not the first that I used. (That honour going to a ZX81 that an after school technology club had purchased the year before). I seem to recall getting it pretty soon after it came out in the UK. This was before the ZX Spectrum and I think possibly before the BBC Micro. (The computer magazines were still full of adverts for the Acorn Atom, the BBC’s predecessor).

It had a simple version of Basic built in, but it was rather crude. (To change the colour of the screen you had to “POKE 36879”, and no I didn’t have to look that up, and yes, I am rather geekily proud of myself for remembering – assuming I remembered it right of course, which is not necessarily the case, given that I genuinely haven’t looked it up).

Depending on your age, you may or my not be able to believe that the VIC came with 3.5 Kbyte of RAM. (To put that into context, it’s less than 0.0002% of the memory on the laptop I’m typing this on, which itself is not that impressive by modern standards).

I had a lot of fun on the VIC, and made a (small) start in programming. I wouldn’t say it’s been the favourite of all the computers I’ve owned, but I suppose it would be up there. But unfortunately, newer better computers quickly arrived (Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro) and it soon went from being an object of pride to an object of slight embarrassment.

(Yes, kids are both fickle and ungrateful and I was a kid).

#2 Acorn Electron

When: Christmas 1984

Type: All-in-one unit connected to TV

OS: Not applicable

When I look back through my “exes”, I’m afraid this is one of the ones that tends to be overlooked. In some way, it was the wrong computer bought for the wrong reasons. It’s perhaps interesting to note that while I bought an Acorn Electron (well my parents did, it was a Christmas present), not many other people did – the Electron was a debacle that drove Acorn into bankruptcy.

The problem was that I wanted a BBC Micro, as three of my friends (Stuart, Ric and Rich) already had – but at £399 that was way above my “present buying budget”. So when Acorn came out with a cut-down version of the BBC I asked for that. At £199, it was still more than my parents would normally have been able to afford, but I argued that I could use it to do coursework for my O’Level Computer Studies (one of the few O’Levels that did have coursework).

The problem was that it wasn’t the BBC. Although I really enjoyed playing Elite on it (one of the few computer games I’ve ever got really into), that joy was slightly tempered by my BBC owning friends pointing out all the features that Acornsoft had needed to cut from the Electron version of the game in order to make it run on the lower-powered machine.

I did use it to do my O’Level project on, which was handy, as those who were using the computers at school all failed after someone formatted the single disk that was being use to hold everyone’s code. But I have a horrible feeling that once I’d got Elite out of my system (and no, I didn’t get up to “Elite” – I think “Dangerous” was as far as I got) the Electron was largely discarded.

(And yes, I know I am sounding very ungrateful at this point).

#3 Amstrad PCW 8256

When: ?198x

Type: Combined computer/monitor

OS: CPM, I think?

In some ways this is interesting, because it was bought at a time when my interest in computers was probably at an all-time low. I had no interest in either “playing” with a computer, not making a career out of them. The interest that drove the purchase of this (which I think might have been a birthday present, perhaps combined with something else) was writing.

The PCW (which at the time was a huge seller) was marketed very much as a typewriter replacement. It was a “word processor”, not a computer, coming as a complete package with word processing software (Locoscript) and a printer. Like modern Apple products, it just “worked”, allowing computer novices to be quickly up and running.

I know I did at least some college work on it, and I can recall using it to write at least one short story (“Living Stones”, set on a future terraformed moon). But I think it too gradually fell out of use as I lost confidence in writing, entering a period of apathetic writer’s block that would last some years.

#4 Reeves 286/20 (later 386/25)

When: 1990

Type: Desktop

OS: MS DOS 3.x (later Windows 3.0)

A couple of firsts here: the first PC, and the first computer I’d paid for myself.

After college, I’d got myself a job working as a digital cartographer (map-making using computers), working on a pair of what, for the time, were monster Compaqs. They had top-of-the line 386/25 processors, something like 4 Mbytes of RAM, and 300 Mbyte hard drives – when I used to tell friends of this they would accuse me of being a monstrous bullshitter.

(At the time, MS DOS couldn’t handler a drive of more than 30-something megabytes, so to avoid having to partition the hard-drives up into C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L, Compaq had produced a modified version of MS DOS, 3.31, that could handle these giant sized drives).

My new PC wasn’t as powerful as these, of course. It was based on the older 286 chip and had 2 Mbyte of RAM and a 40 Mbyte hard drive (partitioned into two 20 Mbyte drives). The 2 Mbyte of RAM was a bit pointless, as DOS could only access the first 640k (you could use the next 384k with a bit of faffing around), so I set it up to use a 1 Mbyte RAM disk (where a bit of memory appears to the system as a very fast hard drive called E, which you can set applications to use for temporary files).

One of things I find interesting when looking through my computer history is that while owning a computer has been a constant in my life since 1982, the reason for owning a computer has changed several times over this point. (By contrast, I have owned a total of four televisions since around that time, and every single one has been purchased for the exact same, single reason: to watch television on).

My previous PCs had been bought for reasons of first general fun and games, and then word processing. Later PCs would be bought to access the Internet. But I bought this PC for two quite specific, and different, purposes. The first was to teach myself to program. The second was to serve as a desktop publishing platform.

I was quite an activist with the Liberal Democrats in those days (I’m am still sort of a Lib Dem supporter, but now much more of the, “Well now, look, yes, I mean obviously I’m not happy with an awful lot of things, and I’m not saying I’d actually call myself a supporter now, I seem to recall my membership’s lapsed, and I actually tactically voted Green at the last parliamentary and council elections, but obviously, it’s difficult, things are difficult, you have to work with what you’ve got, even if they are Tories, and well, hey, Greece, eh! Wooh! So, do you think it will snow?” type), and a big part of the Lib Dems in those days was producing leaflets, both for internal party communications and for external political purposes. At the time, we were producing leaflets by printing out the stories on separate sheets, cutting them out, and prit-sticking them onto one master sheet, which the printers who printed the leaflets could photograph. (i.e. We were literally doing “cut and paste”).

I’d seen adverts in the Lib Dem party newspaper for a company who were supplying complete DTP packages: a PC, a high-end dot-matrix printer, and some software called TimeWorks Publisher. TimeWorks was a really nice package, both simple and effective. It ran on the GEM GUI platform, although later versions (renamed to PressWorks) ran on Windows. This company also sold packs of Lib Dem themed clip-art. Put together, the whole package was capable of producing some really nice leaflets.

I’d like to think that the people whose letter boxes had our leaflets stuffed through them appreciated the jump in quality. (I’m sure they didn’t, but I’d like to think they did).

To teach myself programming, I bought a couple of compilers, ending up with the final, pre-Visual C++ version of the Microsoft C/C++ compiler. This was still a basic DOS product, but it did have the first version of MFC. I know a lot of people hated MFC, but I really liked it, and together with a copy of Charles Petzold’s classic “Programming Windows”, I was able to make my first (baby) steps into Windows programming.

I can’t say I ever produced anything of any great complexity, but I did learn enough that when I got made redundant from my digital cartography job at the start of 1994, I was able to talk my way into a job as a C++ programmer.

I kept this PC for a quite a few years, upgrading it a couple of times, including getting a one-man PC repair outfit to replace the entire motherboard and CPU. But eventually, even with extra RAM and two extra hard-disks, it was starting to show its age.

#5 Reeves 486/33

When: 1993

Type: Tower

OS: Windows 3.1

And now we come to number five, and the most expensive computer I have ever owned, costing something over £2,800 (£3,988 in today’s money, or $6,361). At the time, it was a monster. It had almost the faster processor you could then buy (a 33 MHz 486 DX, something like 8 or 16 Mbytes of RAM, and I think something like a 200 Mbyte hard drive. But the bit that I was most proud of was its hard drive controller card, which had its own 286 chip with 2 Mbytes of cache RAM.

It meant that I could say that not only was my PC more powerful than all the PCs in my workplace – my hard-drive controller card was more powerful than most of them. (They were 286s with 1 Mbyte of RAM).

I can’t remember much of what I did with this machine. Programming initially, although I think that tailed off once I was programming for a living. I played some games (Doom and Quake come to mind), but I was never hugely into games.

This PC might have been my first Internet connected machine, or it might not. I know I was using the Internet at work from early 1995 onwards, but I think it was about a year before I made the jump to getting a home account. (It seems incredible now that we once had PCs without an Internet connection, when being able to use the Internet is often the reason why we might have a PC. A PC without an Internet connection now seems like a car without an engine.)

#6 Reeves Pentium 100

When: 1996

Type: Desktop

OS: Windows 95

I can’t remember very much about this machine. Whilst its predecessor had been an expensive boy’s toy, this was a much cheaper and utilitarian affair, better that the machine it was replacing, but not by as much as the three year gap might imply.

#7 iMac (1st Generation)

When: 1998

Type: Combined computer/monitor

OS: Mac OS 8.5

There was no real reason for me to switch to Macs at this point. Whilst it’s UI was still pretty cool (despite not having been significantly enhanced in more than ten years), the underlying OS wasn’t terribly good. While Windows 95 now had proper, pre-emptive multi-tasking with memory protection, the Mac OS still had only co-operative multi-tasking of the sort that Windows 3.1 had enjoyed.

(In layman’s terms, if one application locked up for several seconds, then all applications locked up. And if one application crashed, the entire machine – all other applications plus the OS – crashed).

I bought it simply because I fancied a change, and the machine looked gorgeous. Today, in an era of sleek flat-screen monitors, the original iMac looks bulky and old-fashioned. But at the time, it was a revelation – perhaps the first PC that actually looked good, designed to sit proudly in your living room not hide in your spare-room-cum-office.

This was the machine I wrote the early issues of Critical Miss on.

It was my first Mac, although not my first Apple product (believe it or not, but I had a Newton). But it didn’t convert me into an Apple fan. It was fun, but not really more than that.

#8 Dell PC

When: 2001

Type: Desktop

OS: Linux (with KDE desktop)

By this time, we’d started using Linux on some of the work machines. I liked the idea of an operating system that wasn’t from Microsoft, and I was interesting in getting into Linux more. So I got this Dell PC, and put a copy of Red Hat on it, adopting the KDE front-end (instead of Gnome) purely because at the time, it had anti-aliased fonts.

I suspect that if I hadn’t got into Macs, I’d still be using Linux now.

One interesting point: this was the last desktop machine I ever owned. (And quite possibly, the last desktop machine I ever will own).

#9 Hewlett Packard? Laptop

When: 2003 or 2004

Type: Laptop with built-in base-station

OS: Linux (with KDE desktop)

By this point, I was writing a monthly column for Mongoose Publishing’s Signs & Portents magazine, and to be honest, I was finding it a bit of a grind. I’d spend an entire weekend procrastinating over doing it, and then four weeks later, I have to do another one.

Then it occurred to me that I spent eighty minutes every day sitting on a tube (train), and that if I had a laptop, I might be able to use that time to write. Now you have to remember that I had no idea whether or not this would be feasible. I might have sat down and found that I was completely unable to concentrate on writing. I might have found that after five minutes, the movement of the train and the bouncing of the screen was making me feel sick. So I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on something that might well have turned out to be a complete waste.

So I went to Morgan, and spent something like £300 on a reconditioned Hewlett Packard laptop, which I immediately, as per my ideological principles, nuked, and reinstalled with Linux.

This laptop is never going to go down on my list of favourite computers. I was never particularly fond of it. I never really managed to get the Linux power-saving / sleep functionality fully working on it, with the result that I had to shut down at the end of each writing session and then restart it at the start of the next – which wasted around five minutes of writing time (reboot plus starting Open Office). And getting the data off the laptop onto my desktop Dell, which was still my primary machine, was a bit of a hassle.

But I guess I owe this computer a lot, because in getting me started writing on trains, it revolutionised the way I write. (Of every single thing I’ve written since then, around 90% – including this very blog post – has been written on a laptop, on a train).

#10 Apple iBook (G3 PowerPC processor)

When: Early 2005

Type: Laptop

OS: Mac OS X (came with Panther, later upgraded to Tiger)

I’d had no plans to move back to Apple. I was vaguely aware that the Apple OS had moved on, with the Unix based OS X replacing the earlier OS. But I was happy in my Linux world. Then, a few months after I bought the HP laptop, I flew to Edinburgh for Conpulsion with my best mate LucidDestiny/Bubba, and he bought his new Powerbook with him.

It was brilliant. Smooth. Good looking. Not Microsoft. And a seriously impressive battery life, resulting in a laptop that was genuinely mobile. But the thing that sealed the deal for me was the way it handled sleep. Finished working? Just close the lid. Want to start working again? Open the lid, and there it is, as you left it. Instant. No selecting options, or pressing buttons, just close lid, open lid.

I knew by now that working on a train worked for me, and so I was ready to make the jump completely to a laptop as my primary machine.

So I bought myself an iBook (the PowerBook’s cheaper cousin, intended for home and student use). I loved it. The new Mac OS (OS X) was a hell of a lot more stable than the predecessor I’d run on my old iMac of several years before.

The iBook was great, and I was more then happy with it. I got quite a bit of writing done on it, including my last set of Signs & Portents columns, and the first chapter of Game Night. I was forced to upgrade it after a relatively short period of time for one reason only – something went wrong in the hinge area, causing the screen to only occasionally work when it opened up. I suspect one too many bouncing runs (on the train) through the fast Hammersmith section of the Piccadilly Line was to blame.

#11 Apple MacBook (Intel processor)

When: End 2006

Type: Laptop

OS: Mac OS X (Tiger, later upgraded to Snow Leopard)

In appearance, the MacBook was identical to its iBook predecessor – although I think it was a little wider, 13” rather than 12”. Since I’d bought the iBook, Apple had switched to Intel processors and renamed their product range, from iBook and PowerBook to MacBook and MacBook Pro.

This was the book I wrote the bulk of Game Night on (all but Chapter One). And it’s still a machine I use.

#12 Apple MacBook Air

When: Early 2008

Type: Laptop

OS: Mac OS X (Leopard)

And now we come to number twelve, the last, but most definitely not the least. This was something of an extravagant purchase. I’d no need for a new laptop of any sort. But I’d fallen in love with Air from the moment I’d seen the advert video of it being taken out of an envelope, had just received a bonus, and my darling wife told me I should treat myself.

Extravagance aside, it has proved a perfect match for me needs. I do nearly all my writing on the train (I’m writing this now on a First Capital Connect train to Bedford, currently just passing through the Southern suburbs of Croydon) and the Air is exactly what I need. A full sized querty keyboard and screen squeezed into the smallest, thinnest, lightest form factor possible.

I’ve had twelve computers in my life, and for me now, the best of them all is this, the twelfth. They’ve all been different, and I’ve liked them to varying extents in different ways, but none has felt quite so much an extension of my thoughts as this one.

Number twelve.

* * * * *

So that’s my number. What’s yours?

Well a clip on the BBC’s website explains:

CLIP: Although a close relative of the meat-eating tyrannosaurs, this pot-bellied dinosaur has completely changed its diet and turned into a strict vegetarian.

I think you can guess why I thought that was pretty awesome. Here’s a picture (from Wikipedia) of the chap:

The World Wide Fund for nature uses a panda for its logo. If I ever start some sort of vegan organisation, I’ll know what I’ll be using for my logo!

It is 1987. With outposts from the frozen moons of Saturn to the burning plains of Mercury, the sun never sets on the British Empire. Peter “Pete” Stone is a member of the Royal Space Force who, together with their allies in the United States Aerospace Force, keep the space-lanes safe from the ever-present Soviet threat.

As a member of the RSF’s Special Investigation Bureau, Pete Stone uses his courage, his clear-thinking, and his arrogant conviction in his general superiority to dispatch the enemies of the Empire with a blend of style, brutality and wit.

Well the cover has just been revealed, and my protagonist Pete Stone is there, along with every one of the fourteen iconic heroes.

I think it looks great!

The Boy Scouts of America are very blunt about it. Their web site first makes it very clear that child members really do need to believe in a God:

In the Scout Oath, a Scout promises to do his “duty to God,” and in the Scout Law he promises to be “reverent.”

The Boy Scout Handbook (11th ed.) explains a Scouts’ “duty to God” as “Your family and religious leaders teach you about God and the ways you can serve. You do your duty to God by following the wisdom of those teachings every day and by respecting and defending the rights of others to practice their own beliefs.”

The Handbook explains “reverent” as “A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.”

All levels of advancement in the Scouting program have requirements recognizing “duty to God”.

…before becoming very explicit when it comes to adult organisers:

Boy Scouts of America believes that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God. Accordingly, youth members and adult volunteer leaders of Boy Scouts of America obligate themselves to do their duty to God and be reverent as embodied in the Scout Oath and the Scout Law. Leaders also must subscribe to the Declaration of Religious Principle. Because of its views concerning the duty to God, Boy Scouts of America believes that an atheist or agnostic is not an appropriate role model of the Scout Oath and Law for adolescent boys. Because of Scouting’s methods and beliefs, Scouting does not accept atheists and agnostics as members or adult volunteer leaders.

http://www.bsalegal.org/duty-to-god-cases-224.asp

The UK scouts appear to be less blunt, in that if you do a search for “atheist” on their website you get no results, but the effect is still the same. They say:

The Scout Movement includes members of many different forms of religion. The following policy has received the approval of the heads of the leading religious bodies in the United Kingdom.

All Members of the Movement are encouraged to:

make every effort to progress in the understanding and observance of the Promise to do their best to do their duty to God

belong to some religious body

carry into daily practice what they profess

[link]

Now they might say that “encouraged” is not the same as “required”, but children are required to swear an oath to God to join the scouts. There is no opt out allowed.

This is something that the British Humanist Association is protesting against.

Now, some might say that atheists have no right to complain, that this would be like complaining that atheist children aren’t allowed to go to Sunday School. But I’d say that the two are not comparable. Sunday Schools are inherently religious organisations. Their entire purpose it for children to be worship and be educated in a particular religion.

The scouts are not a religous organisation and being a scout isn’t about religion. After all, people of all religions can join. They have an entirely secular purpose: educating and entertaining children with the goal of helping them grown into responsible citizens.

They just don’t let atheists join.

Religious people might say that atheist parents should just let / tell their children to make the oath. They might ask what they harm is, or say that the parents are selfishly stopping their children doing something nice simply over a point of principle. But would those same people instruct their children to make an oath to a different religion (Christian children swearing an oath involving Mohammed, say)? I suspect not.

People might also say that since I haven’t bothered to get involved and help out as a scout master, I have no right to criticise those who do devote their time and effort to what’s a very noble task. I feel this would be very fair criticism to make of me were it not for the fact that if I did decide I wanted to volunteer, I couldn’t.

Because I’m an atheist.

It’s also a bit weird knowing that if my wife and I do have children, those children will not be able to join the scouts, simply because they don’t happen to be followers of a religion.

Oh well, sod it. I think I’d much rather they joined the Woodcraft Folk (basically, hippy scouts), anyhow. Then all they’d be required to pledge would be:

This shall be for a bond between us,
That we are of one blood you and I;
That we shall cry peace to all,
And claim kinship with every living thing;
That we hate War, Sloth and Greed,
And love fellowship.
And that we shall go singing to the fashioning of a new world.
PEACE

Can’t see how anyone could disagree with that!

Imagine you have a man who thinks that motorways (freeways) should have no speed limit, as used to be the case in the UK until 1965, and is still the case in Germany. And imagine that he then goes for a drive up the M1 at 85 mph per hour, 15 mph above the speed limit, and gets fined by the police.

I would expect his reaction to be something like:

“I accept that I broke the law. The limit is 70 and I was doing 85. But it’s a stupid law. The road was empty, the weather was good, my car is well-maintained and designed to drive fast, and I’m a skilled and careful driver. I don’t believe I was putting anyone in any danger.”

But I wouldn’t expect him to say something like: 

“I don’t understand why the police stopped me and fined me. I don’t see how they can argue that I was breaking any law. They said I was breaking the “speed limit” but surely the speed limit is the limit within which your speed is safe, and that is dependent on the weather conditions, the traffic conditions, the nature of the car, and the skill of the driver? Given those, I don’t think I was exceeding the limit, and the fact that they still fined me shows that this is a corrupt system!”

To which, of course, the answer is: “No, the limit is 70 mph and you were doing 85!” 

The point is that there is a very big distinction between what you think the law should be, and what the law is, and if you think a law is wrong or unfair it ill-serves your cause to totally blur the two. Now I know that copyright law is confusing, with many grey areas – but some people still manage to stand way beyond the grey and yet still argue that black is white or white black. If something is illegal and you don’t think it should be then complain about its illegality. Don’t instead try to argue that it’s legal, when it isn’t.

I came across a classic example of this yesterday, when reading some comments about the takedown of http://peanutweeter.com. This was a site that took Peanuts cartoons (minus the speech bubbles) and put in tweets that the author had come across (for humorous effect). Unfortunately/inevitably the lawyers for the Iconix Brand Group who own the Peanuts estate found out about it and sent in a DCMA takedown notice.

Many of the responses stated that this was an abuse of copyright law, in that PeanutTweeter should have been protected by two aspects of the “Fair Use” provision:

a) Because it’s parody.

b) Because it’s non-commercial.

Now I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that neither of these apply.

Firstly, I’d say it’s not a parody. A parody is something that takes the piss out of the thing it is copying. While that might perhaps be true of Garfield Minus Garfield, I can’t see that it’s true here. It’s not taking the piss out of the Peanuts cartoons. It’s simply using the Peanuts cartoons as a building block of a new piece of art. That makes it a derivative work, and derivative works need the permission of both artists to make a copy. (If I take a painting you painted and digitally manipulate it in Photoshop, the resulting piece is part mine and part yours, and not 100% mine).

And secondly, it doesn’t matter how often people say “but they’re not making any money”, because that’s pretty much based on a myth. If you don’t have the right to copy something then you don’t have the right. Whether or not you intend to sell it is irrelevant. In fact, I believe that making copyright only apply to commercial copying is one of the things that Cory Doctorow et al want to change about copyright law.

Copyright is a hugely complex and emotive subject. I don’t myself fully agree with either copyright law as currently written nor how it is currently applied. And I very much enjoy things like Darth and Droids which are, strictly speaking, in breach of copyright. But I think the debate would be much more productive if people would distinguish between what is and what they think should be.

And at that point, having probably alienated half the Internet, I’ll shut up.  :)

I witnessed a grotesque failure to do this just last weekend. My wife and I had gone for a ride on the Swanage railway, a preserved steam-railway in Dorset. While waiting for the passenger train to take us into Swanage, we saw a short freight train draw up, pulled by this locomotive:

As you can see, it’s a medium-sized engine that is technically described as a 2-6-4, meaning that it has two small, un-powered wheels at the front, six large driving wheels in the middle, and then four small un-powered wheels at the back. We got talking to the guys who were driving it, and found out that they were on a “drive a steam train” experience that had been a gift from the sister and brother-in- law of one of them.

A few minutes later the passenger train pulled up. This was a much bigger, grander affair, a 4-6-2 with a separate tender, and was of the sort that would once have pulled main-line trains. Unlike the smaller freight engine, this one had a nameplate on its side: “Eddystone”.

We travelled into Swanage, spent some time there sheltering from the rain in a rather nice dog-friendly cafe, and then got on the train to head back. A little way down the carriage from us were a man and a woman and their small daughter. A few minutes after the train set off, I heard the man utter the following line to his daughter:

“This is a real-life Thomas train.”

Consider that line for a moment.

“This is a real-life Thomas train.”

Here he is, with a young mind before him just waiting to be filled with facts and understanding, and that’s what he comes up with.

“This is a real-life Thomas train.”

I leaned forward and whispered, perhaps just a tad too loudly, at my wife. “That’s not right!” She shot me a warning glance but I wasn’t to be halted. “It’s not a Thomas train at all. Thomas was a tank engine. That’s why they call him Thomas the Tank Engine. This is more like a Gordon, or a James or something!”

You tell me. Does this 4-6-2 tender locomotive:

…look anything whatsoever like this 0-6-0 tank locomative:

I think not!

A few minutes later the train stopped, and I heard the man telling his daughter that, “…the train has to stop until the red light turns green.”

Don’t even get me started on that.

At the time, then, I could scarcely comprehend the words my wife was saying. As I type these words, now, nearly a week later, it’s still no easier to accept that she’s gone. To lose anyone is hard; but to lose someone whose entire second half of their life was yet to be lived, is harder, doubly so when it’s to a cause that seems both trivial and preventable.

(Of course, it’s not trivial, as Jo’s death so tragically demonstrates. Asthma kills. If any good can come of her passing then it will be from people reading these words, and the many others that will be written about her, and treating asthma with more fear, and respect, than they had previously done so.)

My wife and I are going to miss Jo tremendously, not because she was perfect, but because of the ways in which she wasn’t. How could I describe Jo? There are as many ways to describe her as there are days in the year, but the words that come to mind now are that she was often mad and frequently exasperating, but always fun, engaging, warm and compassionate. Some people live life with its accelerator mashed down hard against the foot-well, careering through corners in a manner likely to cause a certain degree of consternation in those friends and family following on behind. Jo was one of those people.

Jo was my wife’s friend before she became mine. They met in the early part of the last decade when they both worked for the League against Cruel Sports and having become firm friends (my wife described Jo as her “vegan sister”), they stayed in close contact as their professional lives moved on.

After working for Leonard Cheshire Disability and Médecins Sans Frontières, Jo ended up at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, where she worked in fund-raising. Unlike my wife, I never worked with Jo, but I know she was very highly thought of, with her charm, intelligence, diligence and professionalism being the perfect tools for persuading people to donate generously to the organisations she represented.

Animal welfare was a cause close to Jo’s heart, as her choice of employers indicates. If someone close to her had an elderly cat that needed rescuing, it would usually end up with Jo. And she was a devoted step-mum to our own little four-pawed bundle of canine joy.

But when I think of Jo and animals, it’s her dog, Claude, who I think of. Claude was Jo’s closest companion for all of the years in which I knew her, and she doted on him. He might have had four paws and a flat nose, but he was very much her little baby, and this showed in the dedication she displayed when facing the health problems with which he suffered over the last years of his life.

Claude suffered not only from diabetes, but a number of other ailments. Keeping him on four paws was neither a cheap nor easy undertaking. He required twice daily injections of insulin, made harder by the fact that he also suffered from – as one vet put it – “small dog syndrome”. Add to this pills, inhalers and operations to restore his eyesight, and you had a monthly bill of significant proportions. But it was a bill that Jo never hesitated to pay. When Claude finally reached the end of his time on this world a few months ago, Jo was devastated. But sad as his passing was, it at least means he’s not faced with a life without his mummy.

Jo had an eye for taste and style apparent even to someone such as myself, universally acknowledged as something of a style desert. She always looked good, even on those occasions where she was convinced she didn’t. And each of her homes were not so much decorated as designed. Where the rest of us might think in terms of what colour to paint the walls, Jo would see a room as one big art, craft and design project.

This didn’t involve lots of money When it came to decorating a home, Jo could make a budget stretch further than anyone I know, although being Jo, that budget would still be slightly larger than the sum of money she had available. She had an eye not only for a bargain, but for a bargain that with a bit of work, a sand, a repaint, or a replacement cover, could be transformed into something fabulous. She was a demon ebayer, buying and selling, although I fear half the things she was selling were things she had previously bought. My wife would often return from a visit to Jo’s with a story of finding a new sofa or bed or floor, justified by the previous one being slightly too big, or too small, or just the wrong shade of whatever. (The story’s telling would usually end with an exasperated cry of, “But there was nothing wrong with the old sofa/bed/floor/curtains/rug/house!”)

I met Jo before I met my wife, at a London Vegans event, which she’d attended with Paivi, a mutual friend of hers and Jules. It was entirely down to those two that I met my wife. Thinking I might be right for their friend, they arranged for us to meet at a small party hosted by Paivi. It all came from that: dating, moving in, getting married.

I couldn’t say that I own Jo everything, but I owe her and Paivi my wife and soulmate, and if that isn’t everything then it’s not far off it. Initially, Jo was my wife’s friend and I was her friend’s other half. But gradually, imperceptibly, and with what I’d like to think was the ease that marks all true friendships, Jo became my friend too, and I’m pretty sure I became hers.

That Jules and I are going to miss her terribly is a truth so obvious it scarcely needs saying, but some truths deserve to be spoken, and this is one of them. Jo was not a person to pass though a person’s life unnoticed. She occupied a place in my wife’s life and she occupied a place in mine, and in her passing she leaves a Jo shaped hole in both of those lives.

We’re going to miss her terribly, and while time will blur the edges of that hole it will always remain, a gap in what could have been, and a missing part of what should have been. Jo might have gone before we were blessed with the children she so wanted us to have, but if time does bless us with those children they’ll grow up knowing about their Auntie Joanne. We will never forget her.

Jules and I were apart when we heard the news, she with her mother in Yorkshire, and myself travelling to Eastercon (the British National Science Fiction convention). My first thought was that I should abandon Eastercon and head to Kings Cross to get myself on a train to Leeds. But Jules told me to stay at Euston and head for the convention. Eastercon was where I needed to be if I wanted to meet with agents, writers and the people who will hopefully end up buying my books. She reminded me that Jo had always been one of my writing career’s biggest supporters, always urging me to stay confident, always declaring her conviction that I would one day make it big. She told me to go, that it was what Jo would have wanted.

I was originally going to stay at Eastercon until Tuesday morning, and then head straight to work, finally meeting up with my wife on the Tuesday evening. But we altered our plans so that Jules picked me up from the convention on the Monday afternoon and we drove home together.

That evening, really for no reason other than wanting something to take her mind off things, Jules got onto the web in search of the new kitchen table she’s been unsuccessfully searching for over the last couple of months. She found something on Gumtree that looked perfect, and having texted the owner and received a reply, we found ourselves driving over there to take a look at it.

On the way, Jules asked me if I thought we were doing the right thing. We didn’t actually need a new table, and this perhaps wasn’t the best time for us to be making decisions. Maybe we should check around a bit more, she said, and see what else was out there, or perhaps just stick with the one we had?

I only needed a moment to consider what she’d said, because the answer was clear. What better way was there to remember Jo than for us to make an impulse purchase of a table we didn’t actually need?

After all, it was exactly what she would have done.

Last year I had a really great time, so much so that I wrote it up in a long, but hopefully interesting con report.

Like the Olympics, Eastercon (which is the British national SF convention) is held not at a fixed location by one set of organisers, but is instead hosted by different committees from different regions who bid for the privilege. This year, it’s heading to the Midlands, to the same Hilton Birmingham Metropole where Jules and I attended Discworld 2010 last August.

It’s probably a bit late to be booking hotel rooms, but if you’re in the Birmingham area you can join on the door, either for a day or for the whole four-day weekend. Click here for rates.

If you want to catch up with me, then the best way to do so is to drop me a message on Twitter, to @jonnynexus. Alternatively, I’m one of the two co-hosts of a vegan / vegetarian meetup happening on Friday night at 10:30pm in the Churchill room. It doesn’t matter if you’re aren’t of the veggie persuasion: if you’re around, feel free to drop by and say hi.

Looking forward to seeing any of you who are attending. See you there!

But that’s not all: they will play next season not in their current Withdean stadium home, but in the £93 million, brand-new, out-of-town American Express Community Stadium at Falmer, situated on the A27 bypass, adjacent to Sussex and Brighton Universities. Now such a move generally leaves football fans with mixed feelings at best. Sure, a new stadium’s nice, but it means leaving behind history and tradition, and exchanging something with character for something possibly more souless.

I knew that Brighton fans were strongly in favour of the move, but I was still a bit surprised to hear the following snippet of conversation from the two fans sitting opposite me:

Fan 1: [Musing] Do you know… this will be the last evening game we ever go to at the Withdean.

Fan 2: [Emphatically] Good!

That might seem a strange reaction – until you read a little of Brighton and Hove’s recent history.

From their formation in 1902, the club played at the Goldstone Ground, opposite Hove Park.

Unfortunately, the then board sold that to developers in 1995, and after the club’s eviction in 1997, the site was transformed into this.

The club were forced to groundshare with Gillingham FC at their Priestfield stadium. This doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that Gillingham is 73 miles away from Brighton.

After two years in exile, the Seagulls were able to return to Brighton, as tenants at the council owned Withdean stadium. I think that perhaps the best that could be said of this was that it wasn’t 73 miles away.

It was an athletics stadium, complete with running track, had mostly temporary stands, and was even declared to be the third worst football ground in Britain by the Observer (interestingly enough, their previous temporary Priestfield home came in at number one).

And now they’re movin to this:

I’ve seen it several times as it’s being built, while taking the dog to nearby Stanmere park, and it looks absolutely stunning, both in its architecture and its location. I can’t wait to visit it once it opens.

I can see why the fans are so happy to be moving. I think they deserve it.