Thursday, March 17

I spent the morning alternating between writing and walking around the house thinking out loud. I remember I used to work like this at Mediumwave: often walking around seemed a necessary part of getting thoughts straight and down on paper. Sometimes Dermott and I would take turns walking and sitting at a computer typing. It worked very well.

After a trip to the postbox to fail to find any mail I walk into the kitchen and notice the clock on the cooker saying 15:51. It reminds me instantly of Auo who used to have a fascination with palindromes and any other things of that kind. She would sometimes glance at the clock while we ate and nod her head significantly to me. sure enough, when I looked, the clock said 12:21. She would smile and say, under her breath, “Palindromic Time”.

She once asked me if I thought 11:11 counted as a palindrome and I said “let me think about it”. She went away and came back later with a pen and paper to explain why it didn’t count. She wrote down some numbers like 123321 and then 112233 and 332211 and 211233. She pointed out that only one of them counted as a palindrome and therefore “a palindrome is a one special way of writing the numbers”. She then drew 111111 and said, rather smugly I thought, that however you wrote the ones they always read the same. “So there is no special way to write them. So it isn’t a palindrome, it’s just a bunch of ones”.

I admired her logic and her conviction so I didn’t point out that she had produced a definition that excluded 1111 rather than proved it didn’t count. Later I thought that perhaps these amounted to (almost) the same thing.

I intended to have this conversation with Auo later but time ran out and it didn’t happen.