In to the unknown

London today for a haircut and a visit to the Royal Society for the Arts. I've been wanting to take a pic in the barber shop in Roupell Street, near Waterloo Station for a while but have been too shy to ask. Today I asked and they were fine. In fact they were chuffed and wanted to see what I'd done.

I didn't put it up it up at first because it wasn't quite as I'd imagined it (I would have tried flattening the depth of field if I repeated it) ought to be, but looking at it again I thought it was OK (Lazooligirl said so too), so the chimneys I put up first are confined to the gallery. I still like them though and sorry to break my rule that, once blipped, that's it.

I went to a talk by John Lloyd, the TV producer behind so many well known series - Spitting Image, Black Adder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and, latterly, QI. The proposition was that general ignorance - the stuff we don't know - is no bad thing since we can't know everything and it's better to approach learning from the point of view of the question rather than the answer.

"Any fool can find answers. It's the people who ask new questions who are the geniuses," he said.

He said that his son, Harry, as a three year old, once asked him: "Why is there something, and not nothing?" Out of the mouths of babes, hey.

Lloyd also said he'd been approached by a university that wanted to make him a professor of comedy. He said he didn't know what comedy was and asked if he could be professor of ignorance. "They didn't want that because they didn't want to be associated with ignorance. But that's the whole point."

He said he knew two things for certain, one: " That there's more going on than meets the eye." And two: "That it's important to be kind."

I was disappointed when he said he'd read a book on Hull and found nothing interesting in it. I can think of at least three quite interesting things about Hull. While I'm all for a questioning approach to life I would worry about a world that was comfortable in its ignorance. Such a world would be a bullshitters' paradise.

I'm with Donald Rumsfeld. He revealed the power of general ignorance when he said: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." Pick the bones out of that.