unexpected colour schemes

I am endlessly amused that V and my mom have the same birthday. This is all the proof I need that astrology is unreliable: I could hardly imagine two more different people.

V liked the present I got for them, a t-shirt that says "All done" on it, under a sheet ghost who is apparently doing the bsl sign for that thing? I didn't even know that, V told me. I already thought sheet ghost (which they love) plus sentiment they find very relatable was good enough, but they're even more delighted with it than I expected.

And the flowers I ordered for my mom actually did turn up (doing this kind of thing internationally when you're sending them to the middle of nowhere is always an ordeal and I had to use a new company this year so I worried)!

Mom sent me an email thanking me. I even got what was clearly meant to be a photo attached, but is instead a two-second video of the flowers sitting on their kitchen counter. Which is even cuter if anything.

(I only get like one photo from my parents a year, because in between they forget how to attach them to emails.)

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.

After how much I thought about car headlights being too bright yesterday, I helped D with the problems of some of the lights on his car -- mostly tail-lights but also headlights -- not working. I helped by putting the car in reverse (but not moving of course) so he could stand behind the car and see which wasn't working, by hitting the brake pedal when asked, by keeping him company on two trips to the auto parts store, and by giving him various kinds of surprising feedback on which lights were or were not working.

I also failed to help by abandoning him to get a much-needed haircut, oops. My head is less uncomfortable now! But it did mean V had to stand outside holding a torch(/flashlight) instead.

I have learned so much about how car lights work! What I still think of as high-beams and dims (which of course have different names here because everything does, which is even more confusing) are complicated! Made up of multiple bulbs, including the ones that when I was trying to identify them to D in the car I called "the sad little one" and "the big shiny one." Big Shiny turns out to be the full-beams/high beam one. Sad Little is for dims/side-lights.

Also I learned that I do not remember what order the pedals (accelerator, brake, clutch) go in on cars in the U.S. (because I've only driven my dad's car a couple times on his own land when he was convinced I could learn to drive even though when he said "put it in drive, that's the D and I said "which one's the D?" because I couldn't see the letters on the dashboard, he still said, like "third one along" or whatever it was instead of "get out of there, no one who can't tell that those are letters should be driving" which is what I thought) or on the tractors I used to drive.

Mostly what I remember about the clutch on tractors is I have to practically stand up to press down on sufficiently. And the same is kinda true with D's car because I didn't want to move the seat and he's a foot taller than me. When I had to press down the clutch for a while, or when I had to do that and the brake, I was just leaning forward in a weird gymnast-like way that I'm sure makes good use of the core exercises I was doing at lift club this morning.

Handily, the car was safe to drive at night by the time it was dark so we went to get stuff for other DIY projects (plumbers tape and some fittings to allow us to fasten brackets for our bikes to hang them on the wall). On the way to and from, we of course couldn't help but notice everyone else's car lights: many too-bright ones, but someone else who had a headlight out. D could by that point identify the technical name for the bulb in question.

I agreed to do a favor for someone at work that meant going to Sheffield this afternoon.

I was briefly filmed answering a few questions that the interviewer thought I had in advance but either I didn't, I didn't read the email that contained them, or I did read them but they were so boring and generic I forgot that they existed. All seem about equally likely.

It was very quick and dull but then I got to do something way more exciting, which was see sfred and actually catch up in person, something we haven't done in so long we don't even remember when it would last have happened. We agreed that Dreamwidth is a great way of keeping in touch, but also being able to hug was better. I was not prepared to be able to be gracious in response to being told that the gym has made me noticeably more hench, heh.

We talked a lot about how good the Springsteen movie was, of course.

Getting home was going far too smoothly (I got on a train with plenty of time to spare despite it arriving only three minutes after I got to the station! I'm not used to this) until we got delayed and then diverted around some kind of ominous-sounding incident in or near Stockport. By the time I finally got to Piccadilly, it was chaos as almost everything departs via Stockport and even trains that don't, like mine home, were held up behind all the other trains.

So I got home just in time to eat dinner and then it's bedtime!

I get to stay home tomorrow, and then I'm off again on Thursday, work takes me to Liverpool this time to do something equally dull but it'll take much longer.

( cancer, child death, suicide [no one I'm close to] )