Mugging muggins for a mug II

I had arrived at the eponymously named venue at around 11am. My first intention had been to get there at 9:30 but a rare streak of stinginess caused me to abandon the plan because bus fares are less after 9:30 (I am normally much too lazy to be a miser. Chasing pennies takes effort.) Needless to say I missed the 9:36 and 10:06 buses; I won't even mention the 9:27 and 9:57 that actually stop nearer to my house — 50 yards away — because that bus stop is a pole with no shelter or seating ... if I am going to have to wait I expect to do so in as much comfort as possible. Any doubts I might have clung to concerning whether or not I had chosen the right day, time, or place were dispelled as I rounded the corner to be faced by a young woman clutching a bunch of helium filled balloons all bearing the NHS logo. Artfully I dodged past her, sidestepped a leafleteer and ducked through the nearest double-width door into the cool interior of a converted baroque cinema foyer. A discreet gesture by a uniformed security guard directed me toward a table where I was greeted.

"Are you a member of the public?" A businesslike woman said with a reassuring smile of condescension. The subtext was obvious. My clothing comes mainly from charity stores; I pay about as much attention to haute couture as I do to Estonian arm-wrestling league tables. I can look smart, I often look scruffy, but I ceased aiming for chic after I saw myself described as statuesque in a chic suit. I can't explain why I found it annoying to be described for my height ahead of my choice of attire, it just pissed me off.

I told her which team I was with and while I signed in she pulled out a large plastic carrier bag — also emblazoned with the NHS logo ... isn't corporate hospitality marvelous! — and directed me to our allocated patch of floor space. It was in a corner and I would have taken an age to find it if I hadn't bumped into the boss who claimed to be on her way to check for late arrivals but admitted that she was also looking for an exit beyond which she could have a smoke. She aimed me in the right direction and I collected a nondescript coffee from a plastic pot. The cup and saucer were china. (My first choice of cup was dirty. In the twentyfirst century is it really so difficult to get things clean?)

I found my fellow volunteers huddled around our exhibition display board. It looked pretty good. It was artfully laid out and the elements all looked very professional; it is actually a challenge to produce crudeness these days with all the power of Microsoft wizards at everyone's disposal. I had done my share of gawping at the rival stands on my way through the room — there were more categories than an oscar ceremony so I couldn't actually tell which stands we were competing against — and our small but perfectly formed display did not look out of place. My own contribution was nicely positioned at eye level; I took rather too much pride in that, but as is usual with me, my trumpet remained spitless. So crudeness is dead and gone in the world of exhibitions in the third millenium. The passing of hand drawn posters is not actually worth boasting about. Unsophisticated can be charming, too.

The big problem with computer wizardry is that everything is mundanely reduced to a stereotyped conformity. Mastery of computer artist software is no mean feat; easier by far to let the approriate wizard perform the task and oh! how those wizards screw it up. They screw up because they make everything come out looking the same as everything else. What else might we expect when a task with an infinite number of possible results is reduced to a formulaic step by step process each consisting of the least number of choices the wizard's creator decided upon as indispensible? So, rustic charm has been banished; there was none on show where I was last Thursday. In place of sincere, gauche and naive there is nothing but glitzy uniformity. And yeah! There were even a few laptops hooked up to projectors putting out Power Point shows that their creators imagined were ground-breaking, if not breath-taking. If I'd had access to a fancy projector I would have made a rather jolly animated film for the occasion. It would have been wrily funny and original ... and would have taken a week to make so I couldn't be bothered to make it just for the sake of it, for only me to see.

There was one such Power Point display next door to us. I was endlessly mesmerised by it as it cycled around and around through its message made dull by its pedestrianism. I was fascinated because the projector was set up at an angle to the wall that team were using for want of a proper screen. The resulting image was a sideways trapezoid, taller to the right than on the left. The ratio (of left side to right) was close to the golden rectangle ratio (1:2^-²) which had an unidentifiable pleasingness of its own that distracted me from the overall message for a while. When I did look properly at the theme I was amused to see that it was about diet, obesity and modern portion sizes. A series of frames showed an old fashioned portion on the left and a super-sized modern one on the taller right hand side of the image. Was that the fragant aroma of serendipity I sniffed? Or had someone in the team had an original idea the better to warm over the stale, leftover-stewiness of a modern standard already well past its Best Before date? But how to ask?

What if that team were oblivious of their superb visual pun? Suppose they were constrained by simple structural limitations as to the arrangement of their bits and pieces. There being little else to do — Mr. and Mrs. Joe Public having taken a rain-cheque on this beanfeast (and thank you lord for making last Thursday so balmily springy[Sic]; rain would have forced the buggers inside in droves and the imitation apple juice and hydrogenated vegetable fat shortbread biscuits would have run out before ... well before they did) — I made as thorough a study of the stand in question as was possible without getting out a tape measure. I could spot no obvious reason for the angle of the projector. Annoyingly, I could also quite easily imagine a considerable number of quite sensible and logical possibilities for the status quo. Prime amongst those being the obvious: nobody actually noticed it. Of course I could just mosey over and ask one of them. I rehearsed the process mentally. No matter how I played out the scenario in my head it all ended with my sounding like a smart-arse.

Before we adjourned for the finger buffet we entertained a variety of passing dignitaries each of whom was as forgettable as the next. The most common feature they shared was the word senior buried somewhere within their overlong job-titles. The NHS logo was everywhere but doctors and nurses were as rare as rocking-horse dung ... actually that might be a good thing. It meant that for one day the service was free to operate with an understrength opposition of adminstrators. God alone knows how many lives were illicitly saved during those few hours. I suppose there was hell to pay on Friday morning though.... Anyway, the last person I met was a charming gentleman (and I use that word very sincerely) who, it transpired, was our very own most senior manager. Approachable and very warm, he was a down to earth person who seemed more at home with us plebs than joining the unseemly stampede that was just then getting underway ... but that is a whole other story!

Glad of a new mind to interact with, I chatted to him for a few moments about little of importance and we exchanged a few merry quips before deciding to broach with him my worry about that Power Point presentation (now into its four hundredth repetition!) next door to our own exhibit.

He turned to gaze at it for a moment and turned back to me.

"Good Lord!" He said. "That's rather deep. Do you really think they might have intended it?"

I shook my head smiling. "I haven't had the nerve to ask," I said.

"Yes, yes," he grinned back at me. "I see what you mean. Be a complete bummer if they hadn't intended it, eh!" He then roared with laughter. I love that kind of honesty.

Mugging muggins for a mug.

Dull, dull, dull! With the best will in the world one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and by the same aphorism one cannot magick an entertaining article about one's life when has done nothing. Of course do nothing is a sphere of excellence for me but, all the same, there comes a point when one is forced to the conclusion that nothing is actually the description best applied to what is left to talk about on the subject. Nothing interesting happened today might well be succinct and truthful but it hardly lights any fires, does it?

Yesterday I shook hands with my MP. Actually I pressed flesh with a number of local luminaries but only the parliamentary representative for one of the Black Country's constituencies was already known to me, but only because I live in his 'manor'. It certainly isn't because I vote for him. (At the last general election, I was so disillusioned with the political process I intended to deface my ballot paper with the words 'NONE OF THE ABOVE' ... but at the crucial moment a deeply ingrained conservative streak within me restrained my impulse and I concluded the business of exercising my franchise by depositing an x-less ballot paper into the black steel box. Ha! That'll fool 'em! Not.

There is a computer game I play, sometimes too long and too often. It is called The Sims. It is a deliciously pointless game, there being no need to win and there is no way to lose. One simply guides simulated people through simulated lives; it sounds boring but it is rich with potential for humour and tragedy and I am by no means alone (in my sixth decade) in my semi-addiction to the game. One aspect of the game has always intrigued me. Sims may improve their skills by studying or practicing in various ways. Improving their charisma generally involves talking to and posing in front of a mirror. Now since most of the activities of The Sims are based in real life I have been forced to wonder a lot about this mirror thing ....

Is that something that real people do? It wasn't something I ever did. Mirrors and I have a love hate relationship; mainly hate actually. A mirror was a necessary accessory for the successful tweezing of eyebrows of rainforest luxuriance; it's not safe to rely on proprioception when arranging one's tresses. A full length mirror is also good to confirm that one's overall ensemble more or less conforms to expectations; in my case aspiring to a D- is enough. I haven't much vanity. I have some of the bodily dysphoria of an anorexic in that my self-image is larger than the mirror's; and a mirror image is no more real than the one in my mind and I prefer to trust my mental friend whom I have known for ever.

The idea that people might spend time practising facial expressions in front of mirror is, then, entirely new to me. The only memory I have of any reference to such behaviour is from a novel I read when I had chickenpox; I was a precocious reader and at age 8 I was reading a stack of teen material. I have no idea where it came from. One quote stuck in my mind without engaging any other gears ... it is peculiar the way this happens, but it does, at least to me. The quote:

Gwen was upstairs glued to her dressing table mirror practising trying to look like Judith Chalmers.

So, I was aware that people used mirrors for purposes other than to assure that their parting is straight. I just never enjoyed seeing myself in a mirror; so much so that it never occurred to me that if I could only stomach the horror for a while I might make myself over into a something I could come to like. I hate being photographed for the same sort of reasons only with a photo the image is more alien. Not being a mirror image, a photo shows me exactly what I look like. If I am smiling I look hideously deformed and if I try to look serious the image is too uncomfortably reminiscent of Myra Hindley's hauntingly arresting police mug shot. And that is not a comfortable thought ....

Imagine then how fascinated I was as I observed the honorable member for my part of the world posing for the camera. His face was the model of studied conentration as he gave his full attention to the photographer's intructions. As he and the fawning lesser celebrities arranged themselves he was serious-faced as he ensured that each element of the picture was in place and then at the crucial moment a smile appeared on his face as unexpectedly as sunlight bursting through a slim gap in a cloudy sky. It was a comfortable smile. Its wearer felt supremely confident behind it. I had seen it before, of course, it was on all the posters last election time, but then it had looked like it was permanent; it was a winning smile. It was very apt for the occasion as he handed out the prizes ... but more of that another day.

Farty But Arty?

It seems to me that a blog should be about something; it ought to have some sort of core substance, a backbone that holds the parts together. I have no idea what this blog is about at all. I do have a profound urge to make a record of my recognition that I have no volition regarding productive work, and at least one correspondent has made wry comment concerning certain philosophical contradictions regarding my self-imposed brief. I have been spending time lately getting to know some bloggers in greater detail. Kristal, for instance, talks about her various problems with candour and a genuine lack of self-pity ... except maybe when she gets onto the subject of her witch-like mother in law! I find Kristal's dignified reporting quite humbling. More so because when I looked up the symptoms of her condition I immediately realised that I had it too.

Perhaps I am a hypochodriac. I already know that I am borderline autistic as a result of internet research consequent to reading Sharon's amazing blog. It really is a pain to be so ill without any actual symptoms to show anyone. The only time I've ever been close to a critical condition was when my appendix and I had to part company ... and then I drove nearly 180 miles in agony so that I could be operated on in my local hospital. It goes without saying that as an experienced hypochondriac I was certain of the symptoms and confident of the need for urgent surgery. This did make passage through the emergency department a bit tricky. I suspected that they thought I was a classic Munchausen's — even though I had a temperature that was dangerously close to 40°C — because my symptoms were so text-bookishly classic.

None of that explains in any way why I am now going to ramble on about equality and farting in baths. It all has to do with the way my mind works. Equality goes with farting for me. Years ago there was a TV show called The Equalizer. It starred the British actor Edward Woodward who like to joke that his name sounded like a fart in a bath. Since I first heard this weak joke I have kept the two concepts firmly linked together in what my mind uses for RAM ... the stuff that carries the trigger association memories that unlock the deeper and more important memories that I don't need cluttering up the front yard where I leave all the trivia ... the mental equivalent of junk mail. Also United Kingdom vernacular gives fart an extra meaning. To fart about is to fool around or fritter time away ... it is a little less sinful than bumming around. But that is a whole other subject. Anyway, I am farting around right now trying to avoid confronting an issue so it is time I stopped and got down to business which is, I am perplexed to note, a reprise of my last blog.

My post of haste the other day attracted a curious reply from Moogie. The comment was brief:

LOL! I was reading this and thinking, I really hope he's just kidding. You are, aren't you? Really?

Well first off I am a she. That may or may not explain all. If I'd read a similar piece and thought it was writen by a male then I might have found it potentially wrong-headed if not risibly offensive. The fact is that it was a simple throw-away comment. A passing thought that may be more relevant in my part of the world than in some others. There is in Britland these days a drink culture that as worrying because of the fact that so much drinking is done by so many young people as it is that half of them are female.

In the past — meaning my own youth — the guys were the ones who regularly got wasted; it was the men who got into fights when drunk; only males got arrested for public disorder. Yeah, I know that some females did it too and that most females got drunk — some more often than others — but the crucial difference was that women rarely became obnoxiously inebriated. They (we) retained a semblance of decorum; we might be smashed but not so out of it that we were willing to give up every last vestige of diginity.

So I am happy to nail my colours to the mast. In my part of the world there is every possible legal and social recognition of the rights of everyone to be accorded equal treatment. No-one seriously objects to women truck drivers or plumbers and no-one objects to male midwives ... at least in principle. Women have equal rights here, though a glass ceiling undoubtedly still remains. Of course there remain areas for improvement but the point is that progress has been made on a wide front and that the progress has been substantial. I, personally, have enjoyed many benefits from the more open and more equal society. But!

If equality consists in drinking myself stupid, in public, and having incoherent, antagonist confrontations with everyone I come into contact with until I finally keel over in a pool of vomit, unconscious ... then I say that is a touch of equality too far. Besides I am not sure that most of the women I know today are any happier than their grandmothers. My grandmother never worked a 70 hour week in her entire life; I have and I did 90% of the cooking and washing and vacuuming because my partner was working an 84 hour week at the time. My grandma also made a point of taking Sunday off; I didn't have a Sunday off for ten years. It was choice. Mine. I wanted the money. Guess what? It didn't make me happy.

So I'm sorry Moogie but I was being mostly serious in a flippant sort of way. My comments were vastly broad brush-strokes, intended purposely to be seen as sweeping generalisations. However I recognise that in my haste I saw more merit in the words than perhaps a more sober eye might have done. Damn it now I just admitted to being drunk in the morning. (Joke!)

Daft Evasion

This morning I took a look through my little archive of unposted drafts. I just decided, on a whim, that the following should be published without alteration. It isn't just an example of my political thinking but it also shows how crappily I type as I am posting it in the raw without further comment.

time was that men were men and women styayed by the kitchen sink. The men were 'appy but they didn't get laid as much as they thought they wanted to but at least they had a place and they new what it was. the women weren't happy, hated sex but put it with it in exchange for a roof over their heads and er ... other stuff.

then the girls got the idea that monogamy wasn't compulsory and that equality was manybe a good idea ... since then men have been unhappy but ... starlingly ... so are the women. Never really happy from the word go (look at eve!!) the girls decided that equality was an excuse to behave like the men. First it was promiscuous sex then it was walking out on the family (or more commonly just booting out the unwanted man) and then it was binge drinking .... No equality dind't bring us girls any benefits. It just gave us a fairer share of the misery.

Um, so I lied about the no further comment. It just occurred to me that it could be suggested that this is just an example of laziness ... but I do have to go out this morning and this was easier than thinking or gettting up earlier.

Is the absence of capitalisation to those paragraphs a Freudian something or other? Now that is something I am going to worry about all day!

Camp Analogy

Short note to observe that I have been ringing a few changes over the last day or so. Nothing major in terms of appearance has been altered. I fixed a broken link and neatened the sidebar. I also created two new blogs (links in sidebar) because I felt squashed-in within this format where I feel the need to be seriously funny or amusingly serious ... or maybe comically introspective serves better. Mainly, I suppose, what I really wanted was to separate out my desire to rant and my intention to resume creative things from my more personal scribblings about my past, present and if things don't go completely pear-shaped maybe I'll eveb consider the possibility of a future. Anyway I have made a start, which is something I suppose. Another way of looking at it — cynically — is to recognise that I clearly have a lot of important things to be done; messing about is good way to avoid noticing that I haven't started on them yet.

Lie On The Beach

I think I was six years old when I first remember seeing the sea for the first time. I'm positve that my parents must have taken me to the seaside before then but if so I had no particular memory of it. At that time we had been living in the midlands for a couple of years and so we were as far from the coast as it is possible to get. Also my sister was four by then; more transportable than before. We had no car in those days so long family journeys were expensive and potentially traumatic (my little sister hovered on the bondaries of mania as a toddler. Anything that wasn't bolted down when she was awake was in danger.)

I am not sure exactly where it was that we stayed. It was a guest house, rather than a hotel, basic but comfortable, except on the days that it rained when it seemed as cold and bleak inside as it did out. "Out" was somewhere on the Anglian coast. Great Yarmouth probably ... it was definitely the kind of place where the tide goes up and down more than in and out. At Weston-super-mare, for example, the sea retreats more than half a mile at low tide. Outrageous.

Anyway, the resort's limited horizontal range of tidal movement would be significant. I remember with perfect clarity the day I first set my bare feet upon that golden sand. It was cold. There was a fairly bracing breeze (a nor-easterly I would imagine, that being typical North Sea weather for August). It kept the temperature down but the sun was out more than in because the clouds scudded across the beach quite merrily with the wind at their backs. The cool air I accepted as fact, but inside the mind of a six year old the associations are still fluid and subject to less rigorous laws ... the sand could still be warm if wanted to be, couldn't it? Of course as a child I absorbed this data at the sub-conscious level and I feel now that it is significant, although I am not sure how, that I don't remember what I was wearing nor my mother. My father had on his usual holiday costume that consisted of a polo shirt and smartly creased slacks; Sundays and holidays were the only days he never wore a neck tie ....

So the sand was cool to my little kiddie feet and I still remember the feeling of surprise and the pang of disappointment. It was so fixed in my mind's imagination that seaside sand would have to be warm. I had no reason to expect otherwise and although I had no reason for the belief, it was just an opinion of the kind that kids form about everything. It happens, I think, about time that schooling begins and little proto-adults suddenly become smart-arses over night. Anything we don't know we make up. I always imagined this was probably because that was how it seemed to us kids when adults came up with answers to our questions. Why do kids ask questions? It's a good one that! Can it be possible that the answers they seek are more for entertainment than for knowledge. It certainly must seem to a child that the exactness and correctness of an answer is a lot less important than the fun gained from the revelation.

So theory number one bites the dust. I guessed, not for the first time nor for the last, that I wasn't nearly so clever as I imagined. Sand is not always magically warm. Kids are resilient little buggers and two steps onto the sand were sufficient to cast aside the disappointment and turn instead to the serious business in hand. To impress my sister with my skill at building sand castles. I knew all about sand castles. Had I not read the definitive guide to sand castle building, the unforgettable: Janet and John Go To The Seaside? Besides it was hardly rocket science. I had all the necessary tools, a little spade with a steel blade painted bright red and a small tin plate bucket painted, inside and out, in a riot of colours. Sand castle building was so simple a child could do it. Fill bucket. Turn bucket over. Tap bottom of bucket gently. Lift off bucket and ....

Oh!

Hmm. This is gonna take some practice, I can see that! Must make sure that no sand falls out while tipping bucket over. Nope that doesn't work either. Maybe I am tapping too hard. No. Tap harder then. No, again. Argh! I'm an idiot! I can make a sandcastle stand up. By now I had half a dozen conical piles of sand forming, well, nothing to be honest except little heaps of sand. In retrospect I can see now that I was also missing out on the fun of the delicious irony that my pointy cones of sand were pointless. Being a kid isn't half the fun it is cracked up to be.

It was at this point that my father spotted my problem having finally relieved himself of the burdens of baskets and bags and towels and rugs and bottles of pop. Smiling he explained that the sand had to be wet.

Duh!

I have been like that all my life, I think. I rarely bother to ask how, I just do. Half the time I figure it out for myself and then feel pretty good and smug about it. The rest of the time is the problem. Either I will just give up, maybe I will decide that I like what I've achieved so far and call that success anyway (like my attempts to play a keyboard for example), only rarely do I go in search of human assistance. I think it's because I have this powerful need to be in control; I hate to surrender any aspect of my life to someone else for any reason. Lately I have been forced to give up some of my reluctance on that matter and on the whole the experience has been less than fun but not as terrible as I might have anticipated. I suppose that's a good sign. I should be more trusting, more open, more willing to ask for (and take) help when help is needed. Besides, smugness isn't pretty either and I am now living proof (to myself) that pride indeed goes before a fall.

In Strop Action

So I found a way to kick my own arse: get angry with myself. All my life I have been getting angry with other people and it wasn't they who were the problem. I have known many who rage against objects. Folks who swear at machines as if to direct enough emotional venom toward an inanimate artifact will suddenly imbue it with at least the capacity for shame, if not reformation and rehabilitation. Objects don't do those things and shouting at them doesn't improve the atmosphere.

I just don't get angry at myself. If I get hurt, stub my toe for example, I just feel idiotic (and how insular is that - etymology so often forces me into Freudian exposures ... careful dear, your slip is showing!) I will curse my stupidity for failing to remember the obstruction my foot collided with but I won't do anything else about it.

My former partner once dropped a whole plateful of spaghetti bolognese on the carpet. The plate was hot and he was burning his fingers. He was six feet from a table he could have placed it on before waving his hands about and giving in to the pain. I chastised him royally ... no wonder he ran away with a woman he met on the net.

By contrast I soak up pain rather than to spoil a moment or waste effort. On Christmas morning I stubbed my toe on the table leg as I brought breakfast to it; my Mum and I were sharing the day together. The pain was sharp, instant and had the immediate association in my mind with broken bones. I have cracked enough over five decades of clumsiness to know these things. Naturally enough I instantly felt remorse for choosing to go barefoot. On the other hand the scrambled eggs were just perfect; the exact degree of creamy sog that I like (there was a very generous amount of double cream in there ... as well as a lot of expensive Normandy butter) and the mounds of smoked salmon wouldn't long remain at a cool 5°C for long, the radiators were smoking and the breakfastplates were warm. The homemade wholemeal toast wouldn't remain warm and crunchy for long enough for me to have a fit of self-pity ... and anyway hopping about holding a hurting foot is more likely to result in additional and maybe worse injuries. And besides ... hopping mad is such cliché.

We ate breakfast without a word about feet.

After breakfast as we raced each other to the bottom of the cafetiere and argued aimiably enough about whose job it was to load the plates into the dishwasher, the pain in my toe seemed remote and irrelevant. It was only later that it was observed that I was limping. I explained the cause and we laughed about my stoicism. I limped until my sister's birthday in early February. It was easier than going to the hospital and, likely, to have a cast ... I'd have to limp then!

So why do I choose now to write about it, I have to ask myself ... mostly because I have for the moment lost the plot and this is the keyboard equivalent of woolgathering. In part I have to write about something. It isn't in my nature to make resolutions and still less to keep them. However I desire strongly to make an effort to write more often. So this has to be it, for today, anyway.

Another element that has been jostling at the back of the unruly mob of ideas at the stage door of my mind's theatre of the ridiculous is the whole question of why blog or journal. Those of us who try it and fail are not likely to have a ready answer. Too many of those who do and who then get published seemed only to be in the art form for the purpose of fame. I do not really subscribe to the concept of accidental celebrity. God knows I could use some money right now. A lot of it. But this blog isn't for sale and it wouldn't be if it was getting hundreds of hits per day, although I would fill up a column of screen real estate with some advertising. Advertisers and their money are always willing to be parted if the demographics fit.

The whole why blog issue is a subject that has had me winding up slowly into a high gear since I plopped down a long-winded comment on the general subject as a comment to a post Sharon made. The post was titled "An Open Letter" and I commented via Haloscan.

At the time I wrote that item I was quite animated and it felt good. I was only expressing exactly what I am instinctively drawn towards but the strength of the feeling took me by surpise. I can get angry about kinds of issues that relate, eventually, to a person or persons known or unknown. I knew that already! But using that ire to catalyse my thinking hadn't actually occurred to me before. But then I have always described myself as a slow learner. Thinking back, all of my best creative efforts have come from a strong emotional antipathy toward some aspect of the world around me. I've even succeeded at writing tender emotional dialogue, mostly by hating one of the characters for having the other all to herself.

Beside I really do believe that we can all tell when a writer is writing for glory or just for the hell of it. The latter is always better. I have looked at some of my posts and frankly I am not sure. How the hell can we judge ourselves? (I mostly try to avoid query marks with rhetoric but I really do not require an answer.)

So, strictly for myself then .... I enjoyed being told by a website test (a few days ago) that I am a "Word Warrior". It is what I like best to do. My vocabulary isn't huge but it is pretty capacious and I just feel pretty damn fine when I add a new word or five. Even greater is the pleasure of piling up some words and juggling them about and then leaning back in my carret and taking a gloating moment of pleasure over the arrangement: Look what I just did! It's a command only to myself. Of course I bask in the warmth of the praise of others. I am only human. Well I was the last time I checked. But it isn't for the reward of being told that I make others happy by writing well that I hit the keyboard. I am writing now only to make myself happy and if anyone gets splashed in the backwash and shares a little of the fun that I'm having I can only say that I understand exactly how you feel. It is why I have your blogs listed in that column over there on the right.

Maybe I chould add a few more blogs to that list but time is my greatest enemy. I could easily spend most of every day just reading, everything from blogs to colour supps to the Solzhenitsyn that I keep by the toilet for those occasions when I have weakened and bought in white bread instead of making my own wholemeal. Any more and I would never find time to write!

Ma Carrell

Twice in one day! I am clearly hyper and maybe someone should shoot me up with some kinda hypo. Truth is I haven't slept much this week. I have never been a dormouse type even when I am fully relaxed in mind and body, for example on the few occasions that I can recall having a particularly idyllic holiday. Times when I have been as close to at peace with myself as I could reasonable ever hope to be. At such times 5 or 6 hours of sleep seemed both a delicious luxury and also a rather tragic waste of good time.

Mostly I stagger between periods of something I do in a bed under a duvet wondering why I feel the need to to have more of the bed thing even though the bed thing is too often confined to falling asleep only to jerk violently awake too quickly and too soon after losing consciousness because some daft event in dreamland has stirred me to frustrated action.

This week has been almost nightmarish. By yesterday I was too tired to function. My eyes weren't drooping, still less stinging. My cognitive functions were hot and froody. But my head had that swoony feeling ... that sensation that loss of consiousness is imminent. Not a fainting sensation, just unpleasantly, tiredly sleepy. Until I made myself horizontal. Then I wanted to read. I read for an hour or three and then consulted the clock and got up to drink tea and to watch Groundhog Day which had just started on the TV.

Part of the problem I surmised was down to the fact that my medication had run out on Sunday. With my usual sang foid in the face of tasks that require concerted series of actions I postponed the inevitable (and dreary) oddyssey that ends at the pharmacist's counter by ekeing out the weekend capsules. The supply became critically acute on Wednesday evening when I dosed myself with the last of the drugs. I would have to take action ... and a bus first thing on Thursday morning ....

I am that procrastinatory as well as that glibly stupid. I actually believed that I would make the trip. I finally succumbed to sleep at around two a.m. and woke again six. Tea first. Second cup, very useful. Oh look! Two sausages in the fridge. Better cook them .... Yum. Can't bath now. Not on a full stomach. Can't shower either. Hard water has sealed shut every shower head I every tried. Lime scale remover is an oxymoron. I will surf the web, check email. Maybe play a little Sims; just to pass the time for an hour or so ....

Oh my bad! It is 12:30pm. Too late now. It is early closing day. I will have to go tomorrow instead!

I did not do it deliberately. OK I did. I did. I did. An hour or so later my brain decided that psychosomatic punishment for my dilatory antics might be fun. Hence the fun symptoms of extreme tiredness. Hence the insomniac Thursday night. I know that I don't need much sleep. I am over 50 for godssakes and I just know. I also know that I like to have my 'ration' and that when I am deprived of it I feel depressed and morose; well more so than usual, anyway. Last night I had no sleep at all. I fell asleep but immediately woke again thanks to dream interference.

I have always dreamed fantastic and vivid epics. Often I know that my dreams are just that: dreams. Sometimes I even succeed in so-called lucid dreaming. I have rarely had nightmares, though I have scared myself silly with a few dreams. I dream massive Hollywood productions. The detail is tremendous and even a little humbling. The fatal flaws of dreams are the fantastical absurdities; for most of us those are the signs that help us to relax and recognise the dream for what it is: it is so silly that common-sense forces us, even while still asleep, to reject complete acceptance of the seeming reality in which we are immersed. In my dreams the continuity errors are so subtle that I sometimes do not spot them until days later. The trouble is that I then realise that the goof is so damned obvious that I am a total dummy for not realising it earlier ... and so the self criticism goes on.

I can't write (to order) and even my dreams are just the same humdrum nonsense as everyone elses' except that I am crazy enough to believe that each of mine is a masterpiece until I realise belatedly that it isn't.

Anyway. I had to wait 20 minutes while the pharmacist filled my prescription. Why the hell it takes twenty minutes to put three boxes inside a paper bag is a mystery known only to a select few ... it forces the sick to hang around and spend money on false finger nails and vitamins and Sponge Bob bath-time accessories. They also get to share any communicable diseases they might have thus requiring further precriptions and more waiting and more spending. Capitalism is healthier when the capitalists are sick. Doncha just love the irony of that!

So I was feeling sour and hungover (non-alcoholically) and ill-disposed to spend in Jesse Boot's emporium so I wandered out and down the street to share my filthy lucre with Messrs Lloyds & Co. .... All shuttered up. Big pharmacy, two thousand square feet of prime retail space, all vacant and for rent. Is sickness on the wane in my neighbourhood? No chance. The company has relocated to a large local health centre. All the better to capture the script-bearing downtrodden masses before they reach the High Street and a capitalist nightmare: a choice. I sighed and hit Woolworths instead.

I have lived in my house for 8 years. A record for me. I have hardly at all patronised that particular town centre. I have a choice of three. The one with the Woolies is the smallest and nicest and nearest. (It would also be the nicest one to walk to if it wasn't for the fact that it is one and half miles up hill all the way back ... and the hill just keeps getting steeper and steeper. I never want to be that fit!) Anyway I was like a kid all over again in that branch of Woolworth. It was like the store I remember from my childhood in Wellingborough. It sold everything from bicycle brakes to childrens' clothes with the Ladybird trademark. I searched it from left to right and from the street to the back where the paint and nails were but the only thing missing was the toy monkey on a stick. I always wanted one of those, but characteristically I never asked for one. I suppose that I would have been bought one if I had. I am sure that my life would have been utterly successful and incomparably better if I had owned one of those brown-plush simian toys that hung from poles over the Woolies' counters for what seemed an entire childhood. I have no way to prove it and no wish to be disavowed of the notion.

I can only cope with so much failure in one week!

The title? I bought a couple of fresh mackerel in town and I am going to eat both for my supper. They are half the size of the ones I would have bought in the seventies from the little fishmonger in Balsall Heath and they cost more than fillet steak did back then. And I bet they did not come from Cornish water either and if they did I bet they were landed by a Spanish trawler ... maybe I will give them to the cat. She has no scruples at all. A 'carrell' is a study nook in a library by the way ....

Martyr Dumb Enough To Cry For

Ok so I am feeling more than usually melancholic this post meridinal Friday. Who cries for thee if not thine own self and thy mother? I hate it when people pity me. Mostly because they do it so earnestly; and isn't sympathy like pity and are not both empathic extensions of self-pity? How else can human sympathy and compassion work unless we imagine ourselves in the same plight. Self-pity, it seems to me, is the only human emotion that is shared by no other animal ... although no doubt there are many contrary opinions. One thing only is certain: we cannot ask them and get an answer!

I began with the premise that a good way to begin would be to examine that which clutters the My Music labyrinth of goodness on my PC. I have a truncated selection to choose from; a larger selection is available on my older computer which is currently gathering dust in my other living room. It shares the space with an exercise bike (used once -- literally! The saddle was far too uncomfortable); a Yamaha keyboard that is played far less often nowadays I regret to admit (although I hasten to correct any impression that I ever possessed a scintilla of actual talent! My musical skills are solely of the appreciation kind. On the practical front I possess as much of a sense of rhythm as a badly tutored, under-rehearsed elementary school orchestra. I was, however disconcerted to discover more of a talent for pitch than I previously suspected, having been labelled, more than once in my youth, as criminally tone deaf.)

That room is a clutter freak's paradise. There are encyclopedia covering wildlife and wars and technology, posters depicting Celtic culture, curious brass objects, bags and baskets and piles of clothing, boxes of files, cases of music cassettes, a cupboard full of towels and household linens ... and a fully articulated plastic miniature industrial robot. The latter serves to remind me that my brain is the last refuge of my essential me-ness as it is rapidly becoming apparent that all other human functions can be performed as easily, if not actually better, by machines.

None of this, of course, explains how or why I came upon the My Music sub-folder named Earrings For Susan and its sole occupant, the darkly morbid mp3 named "Respect For The Martyr". I first found this choice morsel of introspection some time in 2003 when I was still going through the motions of pretending that the status quo wasn't as scary a state as a post-Perrinesque existence that has been as utterly stripped of its camouflage as a Victorian pine dresser with a colourful and eventful history that has been boiled in lye down to the knotting compound ... or deeper!

Recently I have been reading a biographical account of life in German occupied Picardy during WW1 and one passage seemed especially apt. A matronly woman whose complexion belied her years claimed that her fresh complexion was bequeathed to her as the result of a serious burn. Her whole face was badly scalded and she was weeks in hospital being treated (palliatively since the accident occurred in the late 18th century ). At length she was discharged with her face a mass of blackened scab; presumably she expected to live out her life thus. However after a few months she snagged her lip on a chicken bone and pulled and "Voila! Merci beaucoup a Notre Dame de Lourdes!" (Presumably!) Because under all the black scabbyness her face had regrown soft and pink and, miraculously, utterly innocent of the capacity to wrinkle. Anyway, I have been trying to shuck off my own "scabs" (both the psychological and those of the ennui of milieu) these last two years. I have mostly been been shirking the job. I hate pain and I hate work. Both of those "mises" are somewhat of a handicap, she said sardonically. What I need is a metaphorical chicken bone; I already know that I possess in spades the stupidity to tug on it.

The artist is, who calls himself 'Earrings For Susan' is actually Dave Rupert whose addictive blog, howdy mr nippon (link in the RH column), is the only known source for this hauntingly depressing and strangely alluring piece. Until recently 'martyrs' was the only song available ... there are now two more but martyrs will always remain my favourite. It's the one that has never yet failed to galvanise my reluctant creation gland.

Whatever the case, it started playing in my media player and since it petered out I have been typing away for 30 or more minutes, performing my usual drunkard's walk through my creation as I shamelessly exploit the largesse of word-processing to rework ad infinitum phrases, sentences and paragraphs as the whim takes me. For me composition is like cooking. The whole is more like a family celebration meal. The guests sit down to dine with no need to know of the order in which the recipes were decided on, the order ingredients were bought in and the dishes cooked. The end can, indeed justify the means and today the means were the enigmatically named artist whose song of doleful melody and mournful lyric has so cheered me as to make me right enough to write today. Cheers Dave. Konichiwa. Kon ban wa! Dozo goziemashita. (Whatever that means, it probably doesn't mean exactly what I think it does which is something like: "G'day mate and thanks very much!")