Crazy Like A Zircon

2008-05-29T18:25:00.002+01:00

Jools Holland often brings the new and refreshing to the fore. Such a shame that John Peel is no more ... he was no match for Machu Pichu. Anyway embedded here (because on You Tube the title spoils the surprise ...)

Galley Proof?

2007-12-01T07:50:00.001Z

Like many dopes I am prey to the stupidness of ignoring problems in the hope that they will go away. Of course that is a foolish thing to do.

I hope that I am not guilty of ignoring the problem of my ongoing relationship with World Sims. I have been critical of certain changes which were made without frank and open disclosure of the reason(s) behind them.

My public statements -- made here in my blog and on another forum -- seemingly (to me) brought out an explanation, one that only obliquely made reference to anything I had said. With the benefit of hindsight I now suspect that I was left in more doubt than before I had read it, though, of course, I could not know that at the time.

Now, I find that I am being upbraided by someone I will not name, for my perfidy as though nothing I have to say in my defence will avail (even if I felt that my position needed defending, which I do not).

I never cease to be amazed at the disingenuousness of the average user of the internet. Too often a person creates an account, reads a few messages on a forum, exchanges an email or two and then decides that they have the measure of someone. From there to arriving at the conclusion that they now "own" this cybernetic stranger is a short step, but a dangerous one.

Nothing which happens on a bulletin board has any significance, except that it rarely disappears. Truth is not something which has high currency on the internet, and words are twisted ad nauseum, until all meaning and sentiment is lost.

However one thing is patently clear to me. A great many enmities and brush-wars of words would and could have been avoided if there had not been stupid private discussions of things which would have been better conducted in the open. One of the great boons of internet communication is the unprecedented combination of almost instant transmission with globe-spanning publication. Such a tool is obviously powerful and, sadly perhaps, far too powerful for some to handle.

I have no desire to be party to any bad feelings with anyone at World Sims. Anyone who harbours suspicion or who has lost faith with me because my recent actions must look to themselves for sustenance for their misapprehensions, because I refuse to feed their need for feuding, I deny the existence of an agenda of conspiracy, I refute allegations of hostile intents.

What I do have to say is positive. When Josh asked me to become a moderator at World Sims, I took time, carefully to consider my position. Having previously run a boisterous forum, I knew all too well the pitfalls and general malfeasances to which such offices are prone. I also had to consider the nature of the role in the light of the effect it might have on my freedom to speak my mind. In the end, I made the necessary accommodations and accepted the role. I have, I am satisified -- and I neither need, not ask for any other approval -- discharged my duties with care and dutiful attention to detail. If I have felt, at times, undervalued, then that is my concern alone; although it may disconcert some who might wonder how that could be ... maybe they would ask, but why break a habit of years-long tradition?

The point is that my moderating duties at World Sims are a pleasure to me, and also a task which I take seriously and, because of that, to discharge them to the best of my ability, but only within the parameters I set for myself, which are to be free, occasionally, to rattle the bars, to keep the asylum awake nights when the natives are restless ... in short to wax lyrical and to not take life too seriously.

I make this entry now, because I am pissed off. I am pissed off that my karma has been ruffled. I will not engage in wars of words in private. If you have issues with me then raise them in public. If you find those issues are prone to fading in the sunlight then it may be that they are better left in the trunk under the bed with all the other dirty laundry.

Happy thoughts make happy faces. When your thoughts make you angry, confused, or in some other way distressed it is bad for the health to bottle things up. Better by far to face up to what ails you and to speak up. Tell the world what is pissing you off and why and what you propose to do about it. Then having done so, stand your ground and be proud of having an opinion and independent mind. Loyalty and independence are not mutually exclusive, but both require a serious amount of native intelligence to balance the demands of the former against the needs of the latter. But the demands of loyalty and duty should not emasculate a servant, employee, associate, friend or relative. When duty eliminates independence of choice and decision making then the relationship has moved from a compact between equals to one of simple slavery.

I'm not a slave.

The Eco Friendliness of Clouds

2007-05-03T13:35:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Rob Cockerham at cockeyed.com (a fabulous site of humorousness and general malarky that I first found a few years back while searching for a picture of a attache case filled with money). Anyway I dropped in today and following a link found a talented indie band called Cloud Cult. I liked the song so much I bought the whole damn album. Downloading is way too easy. Cloud Cult's Website

Cute Overload

2007-02-20T22:48:00.000Z

One of favouritist places to hang out and chill is the never tedious Cute Overload where I am glad to see that they have revived my old favourite, the Cute Tracker which is now available for use by any old bozo.

The Gas Man Cometh

2007-02-20T10:45:00.000Z

By ancient custom it has been decreed throughout the land that those persons who are domiciled in buildings supplied with gas burning equipment should have such equipment annually inspected and serviced so that the said equipment and appliances shall not emit noxious and poisonous fumes nor explode inopportunely nor in any way cause injury to any persons who shall from time to time find themselves having lawful or unlawful cause to be present upon the same premises at the same time as the gas burning equipment and appliances. Failure to adhere to this custom hath been by long tradition punished by slow death by poisoning or else by spectacular explosion ….

Here followeth a journal writte dayley with the frefh memorief of a houfewyfe of gude repute and fincere motyvef to reckord all that enfued upon thif dreddful tale of woef.

Monday – The Writing’s on His Shorts

‘Twas on a Monday morning that the gas man came to call …. And thereby hangs a tale or two, if not also that ancient bit of comic doggerel set to music. Trouble is there now seems a danger that the tragedy of that song is in danger of coming true.

The nice young gas-fitter has been and gone and I have no gas at all. My gas fire is a mere fireplace ornament. My gas stove is just a handy cupboard for storing frying pans. My water heater is a merely a daft white powder-coated steel box on the kitchen wall. All my gas-fired domestic appliances are in a state of disconnection and all because of a little black ring of some rubbery, fibrous material that the earnest young man extracted from the joint between the service main and the meter.

“I’m afraid this is knackered,” he said with a professionally polished frown. His neat brown eyebrows puckered quizzically as he narrated this devastating bit of intelligence … mostly because he was, as yet, the sole privy to the additional fact that without the sealing ring the gas could not be reconnected.

“We don’t carry these,” he continued, helpfully twisting the miserable black object between his clean and well-groomed fingers, (whatever happened to grubby-mitted engineers? Men with calloused palms and crack-skinned knuckles deeply ingrained with the greasy black residue of their trade seem to be a thing of the past. These days engineers don rubber gloves before opening their toolboxes; I would not be surprised if one day soon I see a boxful of screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers all neatly packaged in autoclaved wrappers.)

I must admit that I was sorely tempted to ask to ask him why, if he carried no spares, had he removed the damned thing in the first place. I restrained the impulse. Sarcasm has no place in the modern world and—according to the TV this morning—it can also shorten one’s life. That would never do.

It seems that mere service engineers, no matter how qualified and registered they are, may not actually connect customers’ homes to the gas supply. Disconnection is not forbidden, though quite why this is so is a mystery I feel reluctant to explore.

“I have blanked off the supply main,” said the engineer with the surgeon’s hands. He’s also wearing fcuk underpants, I couldn’t help noticing when I observed him with his head buried inside the meter cupboard and his trim backside angled skywards like a terrier with its head down a rabbit hole.

Now call me cynical if you like, but what the heck did he use to seal the blanking-off plug? Surely one of those would do the trick? No. Like the song says. It all makes work for the working man to do. Connections may only be performed by employees of Transco (the name of the company that owns the national gas supply infrastructure). They will be informed of the gas leak and will attend to rectify the situation within two hours.

Oh frabcious joy and other cynical sentiments. As soon as the supply is reinstated I will be able to call my new friend and he will return to complete his job of certifying my gas using equipment as safe and unlikely to explode, leak, or poison me or my cat as we sleep the sleep of innocents.

In the meantime all I want to do is to make a nice Irish Stew …. I’m just the same when I go out without my mobile phone; I start wanting to ring people I haven’t spoken to for ages. It’s the extreme form of having your nose start to itch three second after you have both hands Marigolded and immersed in something sticky, stinky or both.

Tuesday – I Don’t Like Mondays

I gave up yesterday. I lost the will to live and simply went along with life’s farce, taking each smack in the chops like a Bollywood Princess. Mister Transco put in his appearance within an hour and for a short while all seemed to be proceeding according to plan. For a start he voiced aloud his thought concerning service engineer boy not carrying the requisite fibre washer. I ventured the opinion that in a litigious world doing the obvious is a stratagem that leads only into legal quagmires of Byzantine complexity and the hands of Machiavellian characters … if you’re lucky! If you’re unlucky you’ll end up in jail. For a short while, then, Transco man and yours truly shared a brief moment of contemporary peevishness, you know the sort of shambolic, maudlin nostalgia that begins with: they don’t make them like that any more and ends with: whatever happened to white dog poo? Usually stopping briefly at those well known request stops: what became of Olde English flavour Spangles? And: I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm and: of course, in my day we had to walk to school … rain or shine, through wind and snow.

Of course such a placid state of affairs was merely one of life’s plot subterfuges, designed to lull me into a false sense of optimism. I began to suspect that perhaps there was a problem when I realised that he was still clanking and tapping and generally messing about in the meter cupboard twenty minutes later. I asked if there was a problem. Silly me. Of course there’s a problem. The half century old pipe that carries gas from the meter to my bits and pieces is leaking. Not much but too much for safety. He leaves me disconnected. Transco do not service and repair customers’ installations; they stick to their own pipe-work and meters. Time to call back the service engineer. He’s back in minutes. It seems he has just completed another job in a nearby street. He has a whole other list of scheduled jobs to attend to but he can arrange for the job to be done “tomorrow” (meaning today: Tuesday). Can’t you fix it now? I ask. He looks troubled; a good sign, he doesn’t want to let me down. He calls his office and discovers that there is an engineer sitting around doing nothing except waiting for an emergency.

Which is how I managed to have four visits by three different gas men all on the same day. The final visit came at around 2pm and it soon became apparent that service boy #1 did not make a fully successful report as to the nature of the problem. I had to explain what needed doing. I fear I did not make much sense. I had another go. Ah! He got the idea. Excellent. Bit of a problem. Running a new pipe out to the gas fire in the sitting room is going to be time consuming, messy (and no doubt expensive … aghhhh!!!). He’ll have to come back to do that. Oh, good-oh! Thank God for global warming, is what I say. Several times this winter I have been forced to open all the doors and windows to let some heat out … electric storage heating is a royal pain in the arse. At least boy #4 reconnected my stove and water heater. He’s coming back tomorrow to rip up floors and drill holes in walls and so on.

Personally I blame Hitler for all this. If he hadn’t invaded Poland then UK plc wouldn’t have ended up so bankrupt in the 1950s that builders were forced to use steel pipes for gas because imported copper was too expensive … or maybe I am just being silly again by naively imagining that people actually stop to consider the long term viability of their choice of building materials.

Wednesday – Waiting on Mad Hat Droppers

There’s something really quite desperate about waiting in all day for a tradesman to visit. The hours pass in a ghastly but stately kind of predictableness that belies the theoretical passivity of the supposed activity, if a suspension of activity by self-imposed incarceration can be described so positively. The first stage is the one where you leap out of bed and begin a frantic, if rather pointless—not to mention belated—spring clean, designed to confer upon the house some evidence that the residents are, in fact civilized beings who use the bath tub for bathing rather than for the storage of coal … or the brewing of beer. The second stage begins a little later after you call the contact phone number to verify that your house is actually on the schedule. (I mean: ye gods! It’s 5 past 8, practically lunchtime and there’s no sign of your man!) The third stage is the longest and most aggravating. This is the phase during which you dumbly seek to rationalize a working man’s schedule and by means of constant clock watching and internal dialogues concerning every conceivable aspect of a tradesman’s milieu in the vain hope of finding a window of opportunity to slip out for a few minutes … maybe to obtain urgently needed replenishments for my store cupboards (I am, lest you forget, the most overstocked person I know. Two years ago during a Mariana Trenchantly deep withdrawal from reality I subsisted for almost 6 weeks on a diet of basmati rice made savoury and nutritiously flavoursome with Marmite and butter, all supplied from my store of comestible supplies because a combination of agoraphobia, self-loathing and lethargy had lead me into the sort of insolvency that is as annoying difficult to mitigate—in terms of credit worthiness—as it is embarrassingly easy both to avoid in the first place as well as for its pettiness of proportion.)

The third stage of waiting for a house-call commences abruptly at the time in the afternoon when you, quite reasonably, decide that no sensible person would expect to complete the task in what hours remain in the day. For me that time was when Countdown began on the TV. The irony of this was lost on me at the time. The sadder truth is that daytime TV is the most appalling development of human disingenuity [Sic serendipitously apt] but at 3:30 the evergreen king of quizzes comes on and for a while one can stretch a brain cell or two (I beat both contestants today by solving the final conundrum on sight … but that’s not part of this narrative … yet).

At half past three, I concluded, the chances of being able to complete the job of reconnecting my gas fire before bad light and anti-social hours make employment too expensive for employers were vanishing into the realms of the reciprocally infinite. Ha-bloody-ha! I have been “Neighbourhood Watching” all flaming day. I have observed a suspiciously shady character ringing doorbells of houses whose occupants are out (he left, but I have a description and his car’s number.) I’ve seen a truck with a Hi-Ab deliver a couple of tons of gravel, neatly packaged in two non-returnable sacks—for the convenience of the Hi-Ab to grab for easy off-loading—to a neighbour who appeared, paid with cash, and who then gaily slashed the bags with a shovel to release his precious limestone chips which he then raked out over his driveway. An elderly couple were also seen to depart in a mini-bus that arrived to collect them. I don’t know if this a regular event … maybe I should keep a regular watch … what am I saying.

At four o’clock I was crudely distracted from Countdown’s tea-time teaser by a knock at the door! The gas man hath cometh … again … at last!

My reader will be immensely—if cynically minded—relieved to be appraised that the gas man hath no clear and well-defined idea concerning what he is here to do. I explain. He looks perplexed. I feel apoplexed. He has a clipboard-folder, the sort you can get in Staples, the sort you get when you enrol on a course—or take a job—that involves lots of loose papers that need filling in. He opens his folder to show me that he has been led to expect, by an uncaring dispatcher and issuer of work-sheets, a simple job involving the connection of a gas fire. I show him the fire and then I show where the gas is. They are separated by a number of walls, all of them made of stout English bricks, most of them being at least 12 imperial inches thick. Crudity alert. My visitor feels obliged to confess that his drilling equipment is deficient to the tune of several inches.

This is where it starts to get a little Faustian … or do I mean Flanders and Swannish?

Thanks to the miracle of cellular telephony he announces that he’ll call around to locate a fellow engineer in the vicinity who has a nice long one (I said it was going to get a little crude …). He tells me not to worry and returns to his van. From my bedroom window I can see him eating a sandwich … thanks to the miracle of Bluetooth technology I have no bloody idea if he is using his phone or not. Momentarily distracted in my simmering rage of abstraction, I solve the show-climactic Countdown Conundrum and it feels apt because my sort of intellectual greatness needs powerful emotional stimulation as fuel. I glanced at the conundrum—something like UNLOGSIDE it was— and I snarled, “delousing” before the countdown clock even started to tick … both studio contestants failed even to buzz within the 30 seconds. I felt a hollow sort of pleasure in my pointless triumph. What I wished for was release from the tyranny of tradesmen; solving that flaming anagram shows how mad I am. What really pissed me off at that moment was the irritating knowledge that Countdown is derived from a show named Des Chiffres et des Lettres … bloody cheese-eating surrender-monkeys! Can’t even manage to come up with a decent name for a quiz show!

The show is over and I take an opportunity to go make some tea. When I get back to my window, Deal Or No Deal is starting on the TV and the gas man’s van has gone! Ah well. He was probably too embarrassed to tell me in person. I suppose I should anticipate a phone call …. On the TV, Deal Or No Deal is shaping up to be entertaining. The contestant du jour is a fabulously camp man who goes by the name of Bunney I have lost the will to do much else, but Bunney is amusing me and I am, slightly to my chagrined and reluctant surprise, really wishing good will toward him. I am glad that I am seeing this show. I only catch it now and then and when I first saw Bunney a few weeks ago I was taken by his personality and hoped I’d be around to see his turn in the driving seat. It’s my mum’s fault that I started looking out for the show at all and as it hasn’t come up in phone natter since she was here over Christmas I decide to phone her to ask if she is also watching (and to find out if we share the same sympathy for Bunney). She is; she does. I have to curtail the call. The gas man hath cometh once more unto the breach betwixt my gas and the fire.

He has returned to let me know that he drove away to get a drink (presumably at the local convenience store a mere two minute walk way—and we wonder why CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere with bozos like that making free with the planet’s precious resources—and that he is waiting on the arrival of a colleague with a long drill. It is now half past four and even if gas man #5 appears, like, now! and both work together until seven—unlikely—it’ll be a miracle if the job can be finished today. Wisely I keep this surmise to myself. In the good olde days, before Nokia et al, I could’ve made him a cup of tea or a glass of lemonade while he phoned around. OK, he would’ve been using my phone but at least I could’ve eavesdropped on the ensuing conversations. (Planet Earth would also be one or two grams of CO2 lighter … but hey I’m not willing to be that picky at this stage.) Damned technology. We’d all be better off without it … well, except for those bits which are useful ….

There are no miracles in this age of reason. G-man number five appears at the three-quarter hour. He looks a little like the younger brother of g-man number one (remember him? Back in the good old days of Monday?) This one is so young he probably missed seeing the collapse of the WTC towers because he was in school at the time. What he does have is a long drill. They confer in muttered tones, using that dreadful vocabulary that is peculiar to the artisan professional. Words like slash, rip and chop. They’re designed to make a tender householder quake and fret concerning the consequential, necessary redecoration and cleaning up … their tools and hands are clean (and it goes without saying that all brick dust and detritus will be removed) but who gets to put back the wall paper?

The council of war concludes and they are of one mind. The job must be finished tomorrow. I’m not here tomorrow, I inform them. Damn my eyes for confounding their plans and fuck them for excluding me from their counsels and council. Their hasty reconvention is risible and pointless because I have the answer ready: Friday? Their gratitude is touching. Any time? They want to know.

Morning, I say, more inspired by insane mischief than by necessity. Of course, morning it is, they agree as gas man #4 confers with his office on the ubiquitous phone. Before they leave the new guy hangs around to drill out all the required holes. Oh! This’ll be no trouble they tell me. A mere bagatelle.

A short while later the newbie reappears in my hallway with a power tool equipped with an impressively long drill bit. It might just be my febrile imagination but it is possible that he seems a little more cocky with his big tool in his hands … sorry but I can’t help it. When they are finally ready to depart I feel sufficiently well acquainted to be so chummy as to offer to write to their boss with the intention of recommending that they all be supplied with a big drill rather to have to share. My suggestion is met with a silence which shatters the fragile camaraderie that has so recently flourished under my roof. I am informed that their tools are their own. The company’s largesse is limited to the supply of the van and of the amusing little red and black R2D2-ish vacuum cleaner with the comic eyes and the name Henry emblazoned upon its rotund side … yeah, well, those and the Staples clipboard folder (I think sullenly). Honestly! It’s bad enough that the firm is sending out its operatives with incomplete instructions but it seems altogether more reprehensible of them to send them out without the equipment to do the job (even though it—the company—hasn’t actually the foggiest idea what actual job it is sending its operatives out to do). Tomorrow is a day called Thursday. Apart from not being at home to receive gas men the day is entirely mine to think up ways of entertaining myself. Sadly I shall probably waste the better part of the day in worrying about the impending visit scheduled for Friday ….

I can’t wait.

Thursday - Send in the clowns.

It is half past eight at night. It’s dark and there is naff all worth watching on the four channels of TV that my TV aerial is capable of receiving. What is it with Thursday nights and the TV schedules? Thursdays are traditionally and most emphatically not the most notable night of the week for going out and sloshing red paint around in the fleshpots and watering holes of civilisation’s townships’ pubs, clubs and other dens of iniquity. I am possibly the most cynical person I know but surely it cannot be true that on the one night of the week when most people are at home with nothing on their minds but a heavy weekend of conspicuous consumption that the TV schedules are stuffed with the most appallingly pseudo-intellectual crap and other brain-deadening pap that even the most charisma-challenged Oxbridge clone is hard pressed to justify on any grounds other than the least appealing one; that one being that the transmitter was on and using electric power anyway so it seemed a shame to let the energy go to waste.

The pinnacle of Britland televisual entertainment of a Thursday night is the never less than suicidifacient Question Time, where a carefully balanced panel of imbecilic political has-beens respond to the most disingenuously contrived raft of questions—on the hot and simmering issues of the day—all posed by a studio audience which consists of members of the great British public, none of whom one is likely to meet in a checkout queue at Asda. No. The audience is chosen from that rarefied breed found only in closed-membership (read: invitation only) cliques around the arts campuses of universities, and—in this brave new world of rational multi-ethnicity—a carefully selected sample might also be drawn from those back-street fundamentalist theological clown-schools whose representatives wear their badges of faith not as a sign of zeal but as a challenge to other adherents exactly the same as themselves except that they wear a different clown costume.

I am not sure where it started but there exists today a strong undercurrent of antipathy towards circus clowns. Many people are openly and expressively willing to admit to a phobia of clowns. Maybe it began decades or centuries ago or maybe it started in earnest after Stephen King’s novel: It, which featured, amongst its horrors, a clown and—pre-Harry Potter—it was for several years, in the UK at least, the principal must-read novel for 9-13 year olds. Whatever the case, clowns are now firmly established in the collective psyche as scary beings. I can no longer endure to watch Question Time. If the sight of the panel doesn’t send me retching with fear and terror to cower behind the sofa, then I am apt to risk a serious stroke or some other catastrophic vascular accident as my rage at not being able to slap some self-satisfied prig around the face for having the brass neck to so casually speak for me without first asking my opinion or offering me the right to respond.

I can only be grateful that tomorrow is Friday and that this apology of a week is almost over. I woke on Monday with vigour and optimism that my diary was clear except for the trifling, but mostly pleasing, matter of being at home during the morning to receive a man who would carry out my annual gas safety check. At this stage of the proceedings I feel more inclined to attempt to overthrow the government with barrels of gunpowder and dastardly plot; failure in that enterprise would be an ennobling experience, if nothing else. The only bright spot in milieu is the newly cracked-open paperback at my bedside. The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton … damn, but it’s good!

Friday – My Dreamy Date

I think I’ve finally flipped. Last night I dreamed that one of my many gas man suitors had arrived to wake me from my slumbers. I must be getting old and past it because there was no eroticism. Not even a saucy glimpse of his branded underwear. No, this apparition of my id was intent only on waking me so that I could let him in, and yeah, I was wondering, too, even as I dreamed on frustrated and cross to be “woken” why he needed to be let in if he was already inside to wake me up to ask to be admitted.

Well stage one of the waiting is over. I even removed the unsightly splodges of congealed yellow goo from the hob—the result of some enthusiastic pan shaking during my ongoing attempts to make the perfect omelette for yesterday morning’s breakfast before I set off to my weekly IT class. I kind of hope now that the promised visit fails to occur. I feel one of my angry letters of complaint coming on ….

Later.

Miracles have occurred. Not only has the pipework been completed but I didn’t even have to explain the job to the man who came to do the job—he arrived at 12:15, which is not exactly morning by my reckoning what with it being post meridian and all, but hey! Anyway the guy is stood, standing there and what is more significant he’s the same fellow that I saw on Wednesday. Not the second of Wednesday’s men, the one with the extra-long drill, but nobody’s perfect. At least he knows exactly what the job entails. I leave him to his work and hide in my back room … after leaving him a nice fresh pot of tea and a 25 kilogram sack of sugar to help him maintain fluid levels and blood sugar during his labours.

He completes the job in only three hours. I can’t help wondering how many man hours were wasted in unnecessary and wasted journeys. I’m just glad I don’t have to foot the bill, that liability being the responsibility of the landlord. If I were a mere owner I wouldn’t bother with all this politically correct bullshit. I would just wait until I passed out from carbon monoxide or else found myself unexpectedly in the back yard with a smell of singed hair in my nostrils after trying to light the oven. I mean life is too short for such farcical attention to detail. At one point, I found him with a piece of tissue, tenderly polishing a newly soldered joint; I was just checking to see if he needed a tea refill or may a bacon sandwich, or perhaps—if he was feeling a touch avant garde—a little Beluga caviar on toasted fingers of homemade whole wheat soda bread. He felt moved to explain himself, the way men do when caught red-handed with a tissue in their hands. Apparently the gunk used to make sure the solder sticks to the copper tube is also responsible for long term copper corrosion if not carefully removed after the soldering is done. Yeah, mate. If you say so. Plumbers. You got to admire them: they’ve got more face than Mount Rushmore.

2006-12-14T09:59:00.000Z

Misère Ouvert

I noticed when I skimmed through the foregoing blog entry that I was somewhat scathing in my comments concerning the novel, The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisenberger—whoever the fuck she is—and I was amused because I am currently hugely enjoying the altogether better novel, Goodbye Jimmy Choo. Written by Annie Saunders, a Brit, the novel is also set in Britland and has a strong cast of likeable characters … it’s chick-lit in the finest style: self-deprecating and strongly inclined to the British taste for taking a savage stab at establishment icons (from brand names to celebs) . It always amuses me no end to see American stars squirm with ill-concealed glee when guesting on our TV chat shows and the talk turns uncomplimentarily towards an absent Hollywood icon. Whilst the audience shrieks with laughter, the guests generally try to cover their delight with what they hope looks like astonished embarrassment but it takes a truly great actor to do that … or else to recognise that it isn’t necessary even to try: I much admired Robert de Niro’s recent appearance with someone like Jonathan Ross, de Niro clearly got the joke. I suppose it’s why so few Brit comedians succeed across the pond. Being irreverent concerning fellow equity members is strictly verboten. (And I am mindful of the fact the hugely successful Python franchise was built largely on the bankroll of the late George Harrison’s movie funding.)
Meanwhile I have submitted myself to examination under the microscope of a counsellor. Ye Gods! I am having counselling. Is there no end to the depths I am prepared to trawl in my desire to establish that while I conceded I am not sane enough to be left unattended I would, nevertheless, like it very, very much indeedy if the whole of the human race just packed up and wandered over to the furthest corner of the room and kept their backs turned towards me so that when I am feeling in need of a little paranoia, I can fret and fume over whether they are all talking about me.
I am quite worried now about starting counselling. What on earth will there be to talk about? I can hardly talk about my real self … the person I keep locked out of sight because if I don’t like her it seems cruel to inflict her upon anyone else. Better by far to continue to pretend that this simulacrum is the real McCoy (it’s life, Jim, but not as we know it … or was that Mister Spock? Hey ho ….) The point is I am only going to be wasting my time if I don’t first go and—at least—interview my imprisoned ego; better yet I could consider releasing her, but whoa, that’s scary notion.
More news. My MP3 player is eating batteries so at least my drawerful of triple A Duracells will not be hanging around challenging their Best Before dates. The damned thing ran flat while I was trapped on a bus with the twirly brigade the other day. A “twirly” for the uninitiated is a pensioner with a free-travel pass. Such a pass is good for travel all day after 9:30am—giving the hard-working population a chance to get a seat for their journey to work. Anyway at 9:29 this does not stop the old and the confused and the simply hopeful from brandishing their pass at the driver with the mendicant plea of “am I too early?” The other morning the twirlys weren’t and so they were all on my bus. Once seated, the ladies began flirting noisily and with an outrageous absence subtlety with the lone wrinkly male passenger (who took the barracking and badinage in good sporting humour, but …). I suppose I should be cheered by the idea that flirting is as much fun in one’s dotage as at any other time, but instead it was simply depressing that there was such a dearth of targets.
Friday, 08 December 2006
Ripping Off God
OK, so I am devoutly agnostic. I have no inclination to accept any of the religions that have plagued the mental well-being of our miserable species for as long as we’ve been able to look up at the sky and wonder what the heck is going on. Of course, I do not believe that there is no creator—with or without capitalisation—because atheism requires as much of a leap of faith as any other belief. For me belief must have, at least, a trace of substance to sustain it; gospel truth ain’t good enough without a signed affidavit or other suitable provenance. An agnostic simply affirms that she has no knowledge. Funny how the “theists” tut and mutter and—too often—seek to damn one with quotations from their own peculiar book of “truth”.
With that off my chest, I can now bemoan the parlous state of the Christian hymn. Jolly old Krimble is a great time of year to hit one’s local church … or at least to tune in the telly to that old BBC stalwart: Songs of Praise of an adventitious Sunday evening. I don’t care how curmudgeonly and Scrooge-like you are it is pretty darn hard not to get all unnecessary after having your ears filled up with a few tastefully rendered Christmas carols. I mean the good old songs that you can sing along to; songs with simple meaningful verses that are not too heavily clagged-up with sugary, sentimental, flummery; tunes written by someone with an ear for a rousing chorus rather than an innocent—of talent—desire to set a maudlin, greetings card rhyme to music. I listened with despair as the Beeb’s musical director struggled in vain with choir and organ to inject a bit of majesty and joyousness into the variety of dirges that I have just been subjected to and I stared in frank disbelief as the subtitles revealed the full depth of the songs’ collective poverty of poetic= value. I almost lost the will to live when I saw that one songwriter chose to rhyme grass with cross! Maybe that rhyme works in some godforsaken corner of the English speaking world but it sure don’t work in any of the bits I’m familiar with.
What’s wrong with Hark The Herald Angels Sing? Come All Ye faithful? Ding Dong Merrily on High? Even the dreary old-fashioned carols are better than the new ones, We Three Kings of Orient Are was never gonna loosen any rafters but at least it has a decent enough singalonga chorus. Jesus! They didn’t even wheel out all the little kiddies and get them singing Away In A Manger.
Personally I blame it all on the bloody Christians. They’ve taken over the Church of England and now they want to take over Christmas as well. It’s not good enough. Is nothing sacred? We don’t bother them at Easter so why the hell can’t they leave Christmas alone? It was alright as it was, thank you very much. I’ve had more than I am willing to accept. It’s time to take and stand and tell these holier than thou prigs that they are fucking with tradition and doing themselves no favours at all with their sanctimoniously, ersatz attempts to proselytise their beliefs. I am not buying into any faith, which replaces joy with something that only makes me want to reach for the Prozac.
Sunday, 10 December 2006

Rush, Rush, Rush

2006-12-07T09:50:00.000Z

Maybe, maybe … it’s our kookiness?

I walked down to the local shop to get some tea bags having run out a day or two before and thereby reduced to recycling used bags in ever increasing numbers in order to strain out a semblance of coloured liquid from their soggy paper hides. I was beginning to feel a little like a certain Donald Pleasance character (and I could certainly do with a James Garner type procurer … it would save me the hassle of shopping which is such a tedious chore!) It’s not a long walk to the shop, but it was made memorable by the slow passage of a scrap merchant touting for business. I doubt there exists anything remotely similar anywhere else in the world.
Yes, scrap is universal, and of course people can be found trading in, with and around it … not to mention actually living on it, in it or under it and using it as raw material for the manufacture of everything from shoes to culinary ware (and again I feel the link to that PoW caper that culminates in the lush and sorely missed mister McQueen dangling resignedly in the wrong side of the barbed-wire barrier that separated Nazi Germany from Switzerland’s neutral pastures). However only in the thoroughly urbanised parts of Britland might the rag and bone men have so uniquely developed their trademark business methods. I had thought the practise must surely be extinct, but no. In my neighbourhood, if in no other, there remains at least one family making regular rounds of the streets.
The exact nature of the tatter’s call no doubt varies from area to area (as does the use of a large, and very clangourous, hand bell) but the word iron is an essential part of whatever is hollered. “Any Iron?”, “Old Iron?”, “Any Old Iron?” all might be heard as the vaguely disreputable vehicle makes its stately progress past respectable homes (sadly the transport is no longer powered by a lumpen looking horse of indeterminate pedigree: the archetype of the genus Equus Cartus).
The vehicle in question, a scruffy but sound-looking Ford Transit bore two men, one driving with the crazed but rapt attention that seems to be essential when driving at speeds below the threshold of the speedometer’s register, as if without confirmation from the instrument’s dial that the vehicle posseses a vector, more concentration is required than for other forms of driving. The other bore the heady responsibility of his calling: namely calling out his unique advertisement. It was: bring out your iron, but to write it down is to do it poor justice. For a start no street caller with any respect actually bothers with diction; it’s volume that matters, labial and dental consonants stop the noise and are devoutly to be avoided so the sound was more like:
“’Ring ow’ y’ eye-o’”
I don’t know why, but I really enjoyed hearing it. I admired the way he pushed in the maximum volume whilst inserting the most incredible musicality to the sound. He delivered the phrase as a couplet of two glissandos, the first hitting a crescendo on the second note a fourth higher than the first, the second sound was similar but had three notes so that it crescendo-ed in the middle.
Damn. I just got sidetracked into watching the confoundedly compulsive Deal or No Deal on TV ….
19 September
Parasites Singing on the Horse’s Rump
Oh gawd how amusing it is to feel my spirits achieving escape velocity. If only rocket ships were so easily liberated from the tyranny of the suckiness of Earth’s tera-tonnage. My innate talent for brinkmanship has been sorely tested. So sorely that, now I actually have something to blog about, I have no access to teh intarweb thingus [Sic]. If it wasn’t so fricken apposite (and therefore hysterically funny) it would still be the kind of dumb-funny that has folks like yours truly grinning vacuously as though my teeth are gaudy objects of adoration to be displayed like souvenir scrimshaw at the end of every possible sightline … come on, admit it! You have friends or relatives like that, too!
Where was I? Oh yeah, feeling optimistically maudlin. How long does it take for the wheels of the civil service to grind through the protracted process laid down in law for the purpose of ascertaining the incapacity, or otherwise, of the plebs? I now have an answer: at least nine months. Having a baby would seem to be a quicker and less stressful way of getting hold of a little welfare support … starts to wonder …. Nah!
First comes the form to be filled in (or out, if one is of a transatlantic bent). The initial form is very much the opening salvo in what is destined to become a wearing and wearying campaign (I’m thinking: Paris to Moscow and back again, via Kiev, the return leg to be on foot in winter clad in summer clothes with saddle stroganov for supper — the horse-burger tartare being a fond, but distant, gastronomic memory). The first form is a self-assessment, along the lines of describe why you think you are incapable of working. It is kind of awesome really to contemplate the monumental waste of paper and time involved here. The Social Security gestapo take the form and marry it up with a similar one obtained from the doctor and then utterly ignore everything therein and refer the small molehill of papers up the chain. At each desk the incipient paper mount gains a fresh sheet, duly checked and initialled, to show that some minion or underling has performed a meaningless and pointless task until, in accordance with Treasury demands to reduce the drain on the public purse, the case-file lands on the desk of the individual responsible with saying no.
Of course saying no is expensive. One cannot just gainsay the “client” and especially not her learned medical carer. That would not be democratic. A medical opinion is ordered. This must be seen to be fair so it is an independent medical opinion. No government quack will perform the examination; the whole medical wing is in private hands; it’s a profit-making enterprise. Jesus! My GP charges twenty quid just to endorse a passport application … which can be done with a fountain pen; fuck knows what he’d want for spending half an hour—with a work-shy scrounger who is pretending to have a dreadfully incapacitating syndrome of medical ailments—in a stuffy cubicle of an office that looks suspiciously like the sort of room a civil servant gets when he manages to claw his or her way far enough up the greasy pole to qualify for an imitation leather brief case…where was I?
The medical examination (mine was way back on the first day of March … it seems so long ago, did we travel by pony and trap?) is obviously a formality. Either that or it is a cunning test designed to weed out the genuinely sick, the malingerers, of course, know the correct answers having had lots of practise. Whatever the case the tor of papers reconvene at SS HQ and resume another round of the desks. At some point an junior under-assistant trainee deputy (on the minimum wage plus two pence) has been deputed to number the pages and append an index of sorts. The process takes a fullness of weeks: four of them, a lunar month. Sort of apt in a gruesomely lunatic way, I guess. The decision is made on the 28th day of March and is duly communicated to the client. No more handouts for you, sweetheart, is the message that is delivered to me on the last day of the month. My entitled to the largesse of the taxpayer ceased on the 29th I am told. Handy for the taxpayer, that. The 29th was the day I’d expected my bank account to be credited. I felt a little like I was playing Monopoly … I fancied myself going out and looking for a policeman so I could try to knock his hat off and thereby get to jail. I certainly wasn’t collecting two hundred quid!
The real icing on the cake, a nice touch I thought, was the delivery by mail, on the Saturday morning, of my P45. It was the first of April.
I got pissed. It takes a lot of wine to get me pissed when I’m pissed off.
Afterwards I went into denial. I know! It ain’t big and it ain’t clever. But making like an ostrich is a good strategy. (No they don’t bury their heads in the sand! They evolved in grasslands and they just keep their heads down and concentrate on stuffing themselves on the small fauna to be found on the ground … thus occupied they are not easily seen by predators.) After a week or two I was moved to lodge an objection. Gerry came around and kicked my arse into gear, if I have to be honest ….
An appeal generates an awful lot more paper work. The least of which was the half a ream of form that I had to download from the internet! A form, moreover, whose sole purpose, it seemed, was merely to apply for permission to appeal. The actual substance of the appeal consisted of two enclosures; one being a letter written by me detailing the points I disagreed with in the medical report, the other being a letter from my CPN describing my general patheticness … I read it and immediately felt worse … surely it would help.
I was told that a result would follow in a few days … unless it was felt that a full hearing was needed before a tribunal. Oh wow! I so want to go to a tribunal … NOT. I have experience of too many such event (I was an ‘ornery practitioner who was prone to disagreeing with cheapskate NHS decisions and always appealed … I won better than 66% but that was in a time when I had energy and piss and vinegar … and not winning wasn’t my problem. Oh well.
The summer came and went and in late August I am finally told to present myself, along with representative or counsel, on a date in September. My first choice of companion is unavailable on that date so I tentatively elect to go alone. I have misgivings about that idea but my second choice of companion is eventually not asked because my land line’s been cut off and my mobile has very little credit left and procrastination is easy, well … it is until mañana becomes yesterday. I bolster myself ahead of the ordeal — trial by nitpicking? (and the fine-tooth comb metaphor is too corny by far!) — by consoling myself with thoughts centred around not bothering to go at all. Somewhere along the way a worrying thought germinates and starts to grow through my thoughts like giant bindweed on a chain-link fence. The thought is that not attending may well blow my only chance of recovering my lost benefits. It was hardly worth bothering to go just to get back on benefit; I am fully back to square one already and just gimme a few more weeks and I’ll be back where I was when concerned sister arrived to dig through slovenly domestic kipple in search of mad sibling. No! commencing a new claim would not be problematic.
The “Appeals Service” is also independent. Wahey! It’s a gravy train! Let’s all climb aboard. There is a security guard (read: bouncer) in the reception area which is a wryly amusing datum; clearly some of the ‘clients’ need assistance in finding their way out.…
My tribunal consists of a Queen’s Counsel and a GP. I wonder who’s getting the most money for the gig … my money — assuming I had any — would be on the lawyer. Meanwhile I am feeling a trifle miffed on account of being diddled with a two-man panel. The QC is the chairman so I hope his vote carries the most weight. I kinda like lawyers. At least they’re “honest”; lawyers will believe in anything … depending on circumstances. Most doctors on the other hand are crooks; they pretend to have godlike powers but always begin a consultation by asking you for the diagnosis. As an appellant I have to establish an error of fact, I am not there for a re-examination. I decide to ignore the quack.
Good choice. My appeal is sustained! Now waiting on tenterhooks for a cheque to mysteriously arrive. I anticipate that it will come with a sullen lack of ceremony and fanfare.
Meanwhile the stress of recent months has gratifyingly attenuated and I found myself in nostalgic mood. I have a quite large collection of MP3’s mostly downloaded from download.com, cos I’m a cheapskate and free is always better than not free. One artist I really fell in love with is Ukrainian, Alex Tiuniaev, who had a whole album’s worth of mostly instrumental stuff freely available. One haunting track, Iceland, has a vocal part. I swear the voices are singing: “warbly horse fleas” …. I hadn’t listened to it since early March and then suddenly, this afternoon I found myself suddenly needing, desperately to hear the one about the warbling equine parasites.
4th November
Rub Me Out A Palimpsest
‘S funny, or it would be if it was happening to someone else; only then I would feel shame — and rightly so — if I gave way to the impulse to laugh. More than six weeks after I successfully prosecuted my appeal for the continuance of incapacity benefits I am still mining through the tortured, but otherwise “rich” if you’ll pardon the oxymoronic use of the word, seam of sundry indebtedness that has grown with glacially majestic pace, laying down choice nuggets of financial mismanagement of varying degrees of shockingness over the last decade or so. I hope that I never have the misfortune to win the lottery. With me, money comes in via the front door and passes immediately to the nearest exit at a speed that defies prof Einstein’s laws of physics. If I suddenly came into millions the rate of attrition to my bank balance would risk destabilising the global economy.
I most miss getting the phone line back up and running; more specifically it’s the absence of the wubble-woo-webbage that is most seriously inconveniencing me. I’ll get it sorted eventually, I suppose.
Currently reading The Devil Wears Prada and frankly it is going to be a tedious chore. However I have started it so I will finish it just so I can say (a) how utterly execrable it is on all the significant literary indicators as well as (b) how I found main characters utterly lacking in either likeability or believability. I have read the opening couple of chapters and I was unmoved on so many levels … I prefer to get to know literary characters through their dialogue and thoughts and actions; ninety percent of the DWP’s opening preamble is scene setting narrative and belongs more properly in the writer’s concordance than it does cluttering up the start of a bit o’ pulp fiction. What can I say? I picked it up and having made the error of putting it down I shall struggle to pick it up again … and if I do, I’ll consider it to my credit if I succeed in reading more than a chapter or two before falling asleep (at least I won’t need a bookmark; I like to read in the prone position, propped up on my elbows — I find that my bed is ideal for this purpose — when I fall asleep and drool the page I was reading loses some its papery integrity becoming warped and roughened … nothing that a good pressing with a hot iron cannot fix but what’s the point of trying to fix badly written pulp fiction. Starting from fresh would be the simpler and more intelligent solution. Maybe when I finish the book I should make a palimpsest of it with industrial quantities of ink eradicator and then write a new, shorter and more intellectually challenging bit of fiction.
I know, I’ll write about a woman with no talents except for sarcasm who goes quietly mad because the world has come off its rails and no-one has noticed except for her and precious few others and the real killer is this: the twist is that it doesn’t matter the slightest bit if the world is off-track or not because the future doesn’t exist. Only the past and the present are real and even that is open to debate, but the future is only made, one stitch at a time, like a stocking on a knitter’s pins, and its quality is dependent as much on the flaws left in the past as on the skill of the knitter in contriving to avoid adding more defects as well as in trying to overcome the difficulties caused by past gaffes. So, if the whole mess is now on the verge of catastrophically unravelling, then at least I won’t need to worry so much about settling some of my larger and more scary debts.
Saturday, 11th November 2006
Saving Up Some Ire
Watching the TV show Animal 24/7 and feeling angry. RSPB efforts to conserve Britain’s endangered raptors are constantly thwarted by the game shooting industry whose snipers skilfully exterminate the hens. Bastards! Fines and custodial sentences are not the answer. Instead the law should make the miscreants into the conservators. If a bird of prey is killed by any human within the environs of a shoot then that shoot’s season should be cancelled for the year. The gamekeepers would be under a lot more pressure to follow conservation-friendly methods if their raison d’être was on the line.
Acronyms Force Adoption of Real Keyboard Skills
I have been collecting acronyms for some years now. Casual use of a computer without careful attention to health and safety issues has resulted in the increasingly more troublesome symptoms of some of those unpleasant side-effects that are often found mentioned in the preamble to the instruction manuals that most of us recycle rather than waste time in reading. Keyboards even have irritatingly helpful advice immovably fixed to their undersides … a datum only noticed by yours truly on the biannual occasion of the battery change — I assume that event takes place at six month intervals because the batteries are supposed to have a six month life and I only change them when typing results in a more than usually garbled result.
Touch typing was not one of the skills I sought to acquire in my youth; it’s a deficiency I despise myself for, but until now I always managed to find an excuse not to learn the art. When I started using a PC I was thrilled to see that so much could be accomplished with a mouse. Indeed the only thing I use the keyboard for is to input text. When I bought a proper computer desk with one of those neat, lap-level, keyboard trays on slider so that it can be slid away out of sight when not in use, I soon found a better use for it as my incipient musculo-skeletal infirmities of neglect began to infringe upon the boundaries of my comfort zone. The mouse was too high for the inflamed tendons in my creaking right shoulder and there was no room for the mouse as well as the keyboard on the lower level. The solution was simple. Swap them around.
Excessive use of a mouse can cause all sorts of weird and wonderful inflammatory conditions most of which are acronyms or in some way else unspellable. Carpal tunnel syndrome, tenosinovitis, fasciitis, tendonitis, repetitive strain injury are but a few. Of those I like the last most because it connotes a degree of effort along with a dogged determination and the word injury has a comforting accidentalness about it that helps somewhat in alleviating the distressing truth that the pain is 99% self inflicted.
So I’ve given in, before the damage becomes serious enough to warrant actual intervention with POMs (Prescription Only Medicine) or — heaven forefend — the scalpel. My keyboard is restored to its allotted place and I am taking the trouble to learn all those froody keyboard shortcuts rather than use the mouse to pop-open a handy menu. Funnily enough my typing speed has gone up and my accuracy has improved … who says that old dogs cannot learn new tricks? Me a dog? Bitch more like ….
Meanwhile I give to the literary world a new acronym: AFARKS. Enjoy.
Sunday, 26th November 2006
Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
It has always fascinated me the way that a single random word or scent or sight can trigger a chain of memories. The workings of the human mind are truly labyrinthine…well mine is, anyway. The other day I was straightening the wine coloured, acrylic fleece throw that I use to cover the foot of my bed so that Little Mad has somewhere to sit and primp. I have been known to refer to this eminently washable item as L’il Em’s Flea Factory but on this occasion a different thought occurred.
Mirelly was already ensconced thereon and I was attempting to perform my make-work efforts with minimum disruption to her decorum. My efforts were successful—in not disturbing the cat, although the blanket was still a little too rakishly askew to qualify for house-proudliness but not raffish enough to quite make the grade as bohemian, a state of affairs that disturbed me in unfathomable ways that I don’t care to examine in too much detail. I was still thinking about the matter for all of a second when the morning sun emerged and blazed though the window like a supernova.
Mirelly Lyra’s silky black fur blazed in the glare, revealing the myriad shades of gold and orange and tawny russets that make up the hidden tiger stripes that her otherwise almost-but-not-quite tuxedo design normally conceals. (Her ancestry is entirely farm-cat mongrel and we both it like better that way; she because her rock solid genetic heritage is proof against the predation of ailments requiring the sharps stings of veterinarian attention and I like it better, too because vets’ bills are more outrageous than dentists’.) So as she languidly licked at a paw while her flanks blazed in all their feral splendour I murmured to myself the corny words: tiger, tiger, burning bright…and damn it! I confess I remember little more, not even the author’s name.
During the rest of the morning tigers continued to occupy my thoughts. As a cat lover I am stupidly fond of all the various species, with my favourites including cheetahs and tigers. A sudden whim had me begin a trawl though my computer files in search of cat images because I suddenly wanted a change of desktop image.
Suddenly I was looking at a small monochrome thumbnail of a former employer, that I’d found and saved from a BBC news item (he’d encountered a little—ahem—legal difficulty). I had saved it because there are numerous memories associated with him, mostly funny ones and a snapshot is a fabulous way to rekindle a memory. With tigers being very much at the forefront of my thoughts it was no accident that the tiny image of my former boss’s frowning visage reminded me of his account of his visit to Harrods, back in the days before it became the property of an Egyptian who would, one day, aspire to be the step-grandfather of the heir to England’s throne.
Thomas (not his real name) was as louche as I was naïve; he was big city urbane and he always cut an immaculate figure in expensively tailored suits with all the trimmings all of which came from the right places. Places like Yves St. Laurent, Ted Lapidus and Herbie Frogg. He was not hugely wealthy, but he wanted for little…except, perhaps for a visible partner and there was that ambiguous side of him again. Was he gay, or not? It was a favourite topic of conversation when he was not present and I was always interested to note that most men declared that he must be a raving poofter because (a) he never showed up with a girlfriend in tow, and (b) he spent far too much money on clothes. Very much a knee-jerk reaction there then, methinks. Rather more curiously most women thought he was gay because they found him oddly and indefinably repellent. I have found that to be more and more curious as I have grown older because, on the whole, women—who do not hold strongly homophobic opinions—find gay men to be highly attractive and personable people who make great friends.
None of which enlarges on the topic of Thomas’ account of his first visit to Harrods. He had begun with describing the gloved hand that emerged from the window of an illegally parked Panther de Ville, to snatch a freshly written out parking ticket from the hand of the meter maid just outside the store’s main door and, after a short and scathing account of the lamentable gentleman’s department (not nearly fashionable enough in his no so humble opinion), he brought us, wet-eyed with laughter at his histrionic and heavily animated narrations, to the Indian room.
Here was assembled an eclectic selection of objets d’art from the subcontinent, both antique and new. Bric-a-brac to suit every taste if not at prices to suit every pocket. At the centre of this 1970s display of grotesquery was a tiger skin complete with teeth and claws and Thomas spared no hyperbole in relating the manner with he was humbled and seen off by a haughty Jeeves-esque assistant after he had the effrontery, first to lift an edge of the hide in the hope of finding a price tag and secondly—with uncharacteristic naivety—to enquire after the price in an effort to save face and to avoid acknowledging that he had either failed to see, or else ignored, the discreet “do not touch” notice. The price of course was irrelevant; the need to ask is the only knowledge one needs: you cannot afford it! For once the joke was on Thomas, although just how keenly he himself appreciated this fact remains a mystery. I always quite liked the chap and—perhaps because I worked with him for several years—got to know him better than most and I fancy that he very much appreciated the fine line he had crossed from the urbane to the gauche.
So there I sat, the other day, with sunlight still streaming across my back in slatted shafts of dust-moted gold as I gazed at Thomas’ enigmatic and sad-looking eyes beneath his decidedly floppy bangs and I wondered again. Even three decades ago I was a cat lover and tigers were my favourite wild cat and although I had not considered the possibility of personally owning a tiger skin rug I was not immediately overly concerned by the idea that such a trade was active. So far as I know, none of those present that day were upset by the tiger skin.… Thomas might have pissed off a few just because he couldn’t seem to help it but not because of the subject of his tale.
So much can change in such a short period of time. The very idea of displaying an animal skin solely for decoration is anathema, not just to me but to most of my contemporaries. I’m no tree hugger and I will not live without meat, although I do avoid chicken (far too much welfare related pathology is visible on 90% of the carcases and even so-called free range, corn fed birds have less flavour than a factory farmed guinea fowl. But enough of my prejudices!) Poor old tiger. How I grieve for thee. Too beautiful thou art; too good to share the land with the likes of us. How fortunate for your DNA that you breed so readily in captivity…what a pity you cannot teach the same trick to your geographical neighbour, the giant panda. Now that would be a neat trick!
Monday, 27 November 2006
Dotting The Eh’s
I was thinking about someone I hadn’t seen since I was ten years old. She’ll be dead now. When I was four, my father got a new job in a town 70 odd miles north of where we lived in Windsor and for a good few months, while houses were sold and bought, he stayed near the new job in a guest house only coming home at weekends. When we did eventually move, his former landlady, a formidable woman with delusions of grandeur, kindly adopted my mother and guided her as to the best schools, shops, doctors etcetera. So far so good. However the poor old dear was soon to become a minor nuisance.
She must have been a little lonely, I suppose. She certainly wasn’t an easy person to have a conversation with, seemingly rarely to pay attention to much that anyone said, and rarely noticing replies to her questions. As my baby sister grew up we used to take great delight in mimicking her idiosyncrasies. She would arrive on a visit and greet us with, “hello! How are you, then? Eh, eh, eh?” If we got three eh’s, mother was apt to prompt us to reply, but that was the problem: the silly old bat left no room for a response. Despite mum’s best efforts to curtail the relationship, ‘auntie’ Dot—as we were obliged to call her—continued to visit practically every week for tea. A state of affairs that did not come to an end until we moved a short distance a few years later…a little further away and up a steeper hill. The first week we were there Dot arrived at the usual time, and in her usual manner: on foot. It was a wickedly hot day in high summer and I had just got home from school. Mum was already there with my sister and the windows were all closed. We pretended we were out. It was a little cruel, I guess, but she never called again.
So the other day I was preoccupied with my keyboard rearrangements and what happens this morning? The batteries died and that was when I found that I had a drawer full of triple As and no double As at all. I was, therefore doing an “auntie Dot” muttering into the drawer “eh, eh”, over and over like a broken record. It would have been funny had it been someone else who was up that particular creek without a paddle, but as it was me I merely felt persecuted by an uncaring material world which strives without pause to place in the way of my smooth progress as many humorous obstacles as conceivable as possible.
The reason it was so risible that my battery supply was poorly stocked bears telling. A week ago I was passing a branch of Currys at the local mall and I was tempted within by virtue of its intriguing new name: Currys Digital. Maybe they renamed it lest anyone pass by in the mistaken belief that they only sell white goods. It was time I sought out a new mouse; preferably one that was ball-less, wireless and rechargeable…the latter feature being essential because the one in use was eating up triple A Duracells at an unconscionable rate. Also, its ball was always getting kludged up with a composite material made from cat hair, household dust and drips of best British tea. I left the store with a nice new laser mouse…underneath it has a warning sticker advising the reader not to look underneath cos laser light can do extreme badness to delicate retinal tissue; amusingly there’s also a red LED next to the laser aperture which—apparently—will light up when it requires recharging. For heaven’s sake! How often am I expected to take chances with my valuable eyesight? I wouldn’t mind but the product was sealed into its carton with tape that carried the warning: Please Do Not Open The Packaging Before Purchase, else I might have persuaded myself not to buy a product of such oxymoronic design. Being too idle and timid to return the item for refund, I have decided to just take a quick gander now and then, using only my dodgy right eye … if that one’s retina gets incinerated by a Star Wars phaser blast I shall still have one good eye to see my way to the phone so I can call a lawyer.
So there we are. New mouse needing no batteries, drawers full of batteries that only fit the mouse and no batteries at all that fit into the keyboard. In my search I did find a box containing a number of old, and otherwise forgotten, rechargeable AAs and after a sweary half an hour I also located a charger. Charging the cells only took two hours; it would’ve been quicker simply to walk into town and buy some, except I don’t really do simple. If there’s a hard way that’s they way I go, every time.
I just remember that my microscopic MP3 player uses a triple A, although I suspect the battery life in that li’l gizmo is probably utterly epochal. How the hell is it possible to fit 20 hours of music into a device no larger than a packet of Tic-Tacs…including the battery? The bloody battery on my first mobile phone was bigger than my MP3 and I thought it was a neat phone because I could clip it my belt and a full charge lasted nearly 16 hours. Oh God! Now I’m talking about progress…won’t be long before I am eyeing up a blue rinse.
Tuesday, 28 November 2006

Oh Dearie Me

2006-11-30T11:39:00.001Z

As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted ....

Been out of the mill-race for a while, but hope to get back online soon. Meanwhile I blog this by pigeon post just because it's neat and to prove to myself that I can still remember the highly secure password.

Draft Invitation

2006-06-09T20:42:00.000+01:00

It seems only days ago when I suggested to my mum that the thermal poverty of aughty six's vernal sector in this part of the world was a good enough reason to postpone her visit for a short while. She feels the cold. I have long suspected that the God of Moses is a comedian because no sooner was the decision made before I was reduced to throwing off clothing and bedding and seeking ways to increase airflow through the building without inconveniencing the cat or facilitating ingress of insects of the aerial kind. It is still early in the summer; I have seen off the groggy and confused first wasps ... large, lazy, slow-buzzy beasties, the sort that has a glinting, case-hardened sting spike; the first carrion flies freshly imagoed from whatever smelly mound of slimy rottenness that such nasties hatch from have also been warded off. I am not especially phobic concerning flying insects. I just don't want the little buggers indoors ... if only because they display every intention of wishing to leave but none of the wit to take advantage of such opportunities as might arise.

So I have something of a sympathetic if oxymoronically anti-empathic attitude towards my fellow lifeforms who fly without fur or feather. I wish I was as equitable in regard to Charlotte and Boris. Spiders are not natural. Eight legs are at least four too many. It has been scientifically proved (by me) beyond all doubt, that the maximum number of legs that a successful lifeform needs is four. One at each nominal corner. The magic number of four provides for all eventualities but mostly it fills the needs of three legs to defeat gravity while the fourth one is finding a new place to stand on. How in hell does having four more legs assist the animal?

I have had some days to consider the problem. Charlotte is trapped beneath a glass in my bathroom. Every time I take a pee she's there, watching me. She takes a turn or three around the glass; three feet on the tiles of the floor, three pawing with crazy optimisim at the unreasonably slippery glass (but nevertheless conveying some sort of bizarre sense of locomotion if only because my mind demands to make sense of what it sees), always keeping two legs in reserve, waving them around in space ahead its progress ... ah, shit. I guess it makes sense. I shall not be able to keep Charlotte a prisoner for much longer. Sooner or later I must take her outside and send her on her way. Meanwhile. Sorry, Boris. It was you or me and the kitchen sink wasn't big enough for both of us. Whatever were you thinking when you abseiled into it?

Mirelly joined me in bed the other night. She hasn't done that for a few weeks. I came awake with a facefull of tickly whiskers investigating my nose. I mumbled a sleepy greeting to her and she chirpled and purred her agreement that it was a fine night and set about the protracted catty business of deciding upon an orientation and position for sleeping. Her fur smelled of tree bark and pine tar and grass; I fell asleep again thinking that heaven could not offer a better atmosphere.

It occurred to me later to wonder if Mirelly is the one bringing home the spiders. I shall have to have a serious word with her. Who's the one who brings home the pigs' liver and chops it into bite-sized pieces here anyway? (And let's not even go down the mussels road. I treat myself and just before I serve she materialises like a ghost and proceeds to compete with me to see who can eat the quickest. I have to buy two adult portions just to get my fair share.

Meanwhile I am hot and sticky and a draft would be rather nice ....

Nothing Important

2005-11-30T21:57:00.000Z

I found the website that is linked to in the title above by one of those serendipitous chains of events that are so much more apt to occur during web-surfing than in any of life's more tangible experiences. I am still undecided regarding my distinct lack of awe that philosophers and mathematicians are still arguing so fiercely over the status of zero. Why the hell is it so problematic? You have to have a number that fits between plus one and minus one and, for want of a better candidate zero is not only the best choice, it's the only choice. Mind you, Constant Reader, it just about freaked my chicken to read those pages and find that (a) the universe's existence is in doubt and that (b) I am not the only one to have figured this out. God knows what'll happen if everyone else comes to the same conclusion; maybe so-called reality is only actually held together by the faith of its own compenent ephemera. Oh now I have a pain ... no hang on that's a real one.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. This afternoon I returned through the unseasonal (read: too early) snow in triumph. I had secured a superb coat for a mere thirty five of my English Pounds and inside its perfectly proportioned pocket I located a printed brand card bearing a bar-code and the information that the product's intended sale price was €232.41. How's that for precision? (In case you have a gas-powered browser that was 232.41 Euros ... get Firefox now and see the web as it is meant to be seen ....) Precision European pricing aside it was a double bargain because it came as two full coats that can be worn zipped together or individually according to season. I am so pleased I feel like going outside to play in the slush —

— or I would be if my left upper second premolar hadn't chosen this afternoon to have a pet of the peri-radicular septic variety. If I do not now need to submit to some urgent root canal work I may as well mail my certificate of competence back to the Royal College ... not that I was planning upon relying on the thing anyway, although it does look awfully pretty with all that copperplate script and wax seals and the heavy striations of machine-made cartridge paper. Having said all of that the pain has become bearable and (she asserted with the baseless confidence of a true professional) another couple of aspirin will be sure to do the trick. Although the bottle of red Californian plonk may also have assisted in the dulling of senses, if not of my wits.

Meanwhile I am in for a stormy night. Little Mad is slightly discombobulated. So excited was I with my bargain acquisition that my subsequent tour of duty in the nearby Asda was less focussed than it might have been. I returned home with all the accoutrements of a successful hunt but a closer examination of the spoils revealed a shocking omission. No cat food. I attempted to gloss over my sheer stupidity by gaily bringing forth a box of Go Cat from the cupboard by the back door where it had been consigned since the time, six months previously and another house entirely, when it had first been the subject of a refusal by the "Lady of the House" who, then, deigned to approach it closer than a cautious sniff-distance. I shook the package with as convincing a display of candorous "I'm not trying to con you"-ness as I ever imagined I could muster. Little Mad wasn't fooled for a second. She is on hunger strike and my bad tooth must take second place in the agenda for tomorrow.

I know. It's my own fault. It's that old rascal, Beadle Bumble's assertion in paraphrase rearing up to bite my arse. She knows what she likes and that's what she eats. All the same I wish she would stick to her diet and not supplement it with spiders, mice and birds. I am neither squeamish nor overly sentimental and for all my capacity for enduring messiness I really do draw the line at treading, barefoot, in a litter of the discarded and inedible body parts of a sampling of my locality's vertebrate and invertebrate fauna.

I think I'll have another glass of that vintage the Joad's were hoping to stamp out ....

Racked Off

2005-11-24T20:08:00.000Z

Disembowelled might be just as good a title. Until this morning my new, simpler, life style has been mostly plain-sailing. Today I found the inevitable aerobatic member of the order insecta in the emolient grease. Oh! How bitterly did I lament as I fought my umbrella while battling the squally blasts of rain during my race up a street with the word green in its name, no doubt a reference to a bygone age before mister Macadam did his thing with tar and crushed stone thereby sealing the deal on the transition betwixt rural and post-industrial ....

Oh my gawd! This seasonally affective curmugeonliness is seriously unbecoming!

Not owning a car is such fun really. Driving is such a right royal pain in the arse, and I should know. This morning I ventured out of my little house to ride the lovely bus into town. I had a meeting to attend. Can't miss a meeting. Committees, eh ... what would we do without them? The weather was ... well pretty 'british'. The wall by the bus stop was wet; it's as good as a bench in more clement conditions, but this morning it was just a heap of wet bricks. There were a lot of locals waiting for the bus. It was that kind of morning: nobody in their right mind would be walking when conditions were as apt to change — for the worse, natch — as rapidly as the fortunes of the chief protagonist of a gritty northern soap. I wish I had been a passenger on the bus that duly arrived, ontime and visibly filled to capacity because then I would have been able to write at length on the subjects of schadenfreude, guilt and empathy because the damned thing didn't bother to stop. Worse it appeared that the driver slowed down as he approached we damp and dispirited mendicants for transportation the better to torture us. I am sure that I wasn't the only one who was thinking how nice it would be to spend a few minutes wedged in closed proximity to a lot of nice warm .... Cold does odd things to one's pleasabilitiness.

So being separated from my meeting by five miles or twenty minutes I was faced with a dilemna. Should I phone and feign illness? Maybe I could phone for a taxi ... but full buses do not a rapid taxi service make. This left me a single option. Phone a friend. OK the friend lives halfway between my house and the meeting so they'll have to double back but, hey! What are friends for? I'd do the same for them if I had a car .... Oh my god! I just turned into a sponger and what's worse I am making a truly terrible job of my attempt to gloss over this shameful shortcoming.

I did not have to worry about scoring a comfortable and fragrantly warm ride home. My friend had to leave early and that was why I ended up on the road with a green name and a greyer than soot character and fighting wind and rain with umbrella and mostly losing.

It was kind of par for the course that was today's eighteen holes of hell that the bus I was aiming for left the stand just recently enough that the nearest bystander was able to confirm that it had indeed just gone in spite of the fact that I was wet and windblown and had only missed seeing it go as I approached because I was hiding behind a quivering mass of multicoloured nylon and flimsy metal spars. If I wasn't already on anti-depressants I would have begun to feel a little depressed. Instead I chose to experience a little paranoia. Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

Plan B called for a bus of a different number. It was too bloody cold to hang around doing nothing but wait thirty minutes for the next scheduled useful bus. The smart traveller takes a setback and turns it into an opportunity. I waited a few minutes and leapt on the next bus that stops at my local mega-mall (that is closer to my home but a nicer place to be). I planned to hit a store that had some serious yardage of racks that were groaning with coats that ranged from the cheap and cheerful to the top of the range label. If the coming winter lives up to predictions then a good coat might be a sound investment.

I get racked off very easily. One thousand coats later I discovered that I am not as easily pleased as I am racked off. Too pale and easily soilable, too flimsy, too young, too old, too tight, too baggy, too dressy, too casual, too much decorative flim-flam, too plain. The only coat I found that I really wanted was a nice black wool coat that had been reduced from £300 to a mere £119. Nope that doesn't do it for me. I'd rather freeze ... besides it was a size too small, dammit. Worse I was experiencing pain of the urgent bowel movement variety.

Hey I can handle this. Clench and concentrate. Clench and concentrate. It makes a total nonsense of shopping. Of course everything looks like shit. It's all one can think about. I can hang on for ever. It isn't easy and it isn't at all pleasant in the sense of comfort and painlessness, but it is possible. I just have to avoid public toilets. My insides will obey my conscious control as long as they do not apporach the vicinity of a toilet bowl. I dare not enter the ladies room in case there is a queue; no way would my large plumbing comprehend the concept of waiting in line for a turn at ... [ahem] ... stool.

So I came home without a nice new coat and I am, as they first started saying in Australia, racked off —

— and it gets worse. Almost as if I had transformed into a barroom drunk who promises undying affilition to anything that doesn't run away (eg a hat stand) I now recall that I volunteered at the meeting to produce a script for a role-play exercise. If life can get worse I would really like to see it try ... on second thoughts I retract that wish.

Patty Cakes

2005-11-20T23:14:00.000Z

Little Mad has become such a darlin' .... She is rarely far from my side, unless I connect Mister Dyson's infernal machine to the national grid. Lucky for her that I am such a slattern.

I am writing because I am reminded of the comic verse I threw (spewed) out back in the mid nineties partly to prove that any collection of words made poetry and partly to see if I could prove my own unproven theory. Yeah, it was as glib as that.

What emerged was such suitably comic stuff as: I like my cat/Cos he's a little catty/If he was a Beatle/He'd have a girlfriend named Patti ...

The points of ellipsis being deliberately left un-stopped with a period.

How arty-farty is that? (Given that the verse is just ghastly anyway.)

Little Mad is doing her laundry.

To be honest Little Mad is utterly careless of my concerns.

Saturdaylia

2005-11-19T10:13:00.000Z

For the third day in a succession the day has begun with brilliant sunshine. The street has been dusted with liberal layer of frost and if you're planning on driving out of here in the next half hour I'd recommend heading north because south is downhill and stopping might be problematic at the tee junction with the main road. It's been a funny sort of a week really. Most often weeks merge into months and there is little to separate one from another ....

This week began with my slow emergence the muddy fugue of a spiritual crisis (previous post). I have so often wished for the solace of religious comfort, a belief that everything is in order and that everyone and everything has a purpose and a place in a greater plan. Unfortunately the individualist in me quails at the very idea; far too deterministic. I am at one with that mad woman in the Terminator movies: there is no fate but what we make. It's just a little tough sometimes to keep that idea in focus. In the end, of course, the only sane choice is to set aside the unresolvable and mark it carefully so as to avoid treading on it again in error.

On Tuesday I planned to spend the day tearing around with Dyson and duster and Spontex. However I was barely out of bed and dressed when I saw a guy standing in the street right outside my house. He was standing beside a large reel of yellow tubing and he was wearing a da-glo yellow high-visibility vest. Ooh workmen digging up the road. What fun. I went through to my kitchen to put the kettle on and returned to my living room to take a better look. The guy was now in my front garden, gingerly probing about under the unkempt roses. I was also able to read the name on the back of his safety vest. It was my cable company. After three months of waitin they have finally come along to lay me a new connection under ground. Wonders never cease. It turned out they needed power and later they also needed access to the phone socket inside so I was glad I didn't bother cleaning up.

I got up early on Wednesday to tear round cleaning up. The task occupied less than a quarter of the hours it was spread over because I multi-tasked a few other chores into the schedule, for example taking a poke about in the remaining packing cases to see if anything utterly useful remains before I decide to drag them up the garden and put a match to them. I decided to leave them another month. Not certain if that was the best decision I made this week but it's hardly a fatal one.

At midday I had visitors. How unlikely is that? That people visit just after you have cleaned your rooms to a shining, sparkling example of domestic perfection? The answer, of course, is that it is beyond any belief and any cynicism is entirely apt. I'd cleaned up because I was expecting a visit ... which is utterly pathetic but I'm not too proud to admit to having some vanity.

Thursday and the fun continued when a pair, no less, of engineers arrived to perfom the annual safety checks and servicing of my gas fixtures and fittings. I had the distinct impression that they believed I was expecting them but with a clean house to show off I wasn't about to quibble over such a thing as an appointment. They bore the right ID and so I let them in and continued to work on my laptop while watching out the corner of my eye as work-experience boy dismantled my gas fire under the watchful direction of wise old bird who looked a little like he maybe ought to be standing over a camp-fire with a pipe clamped between his teeth as he stirs a pot of beans. His sagacious advices were all succinctly delivered.

"Yep, just wriggle it out ..." Like that. It was an impressive act.

I am though easily pleased. I used to adore watching engineers and fitters at work whenever we had any work done at home. I was always especially fascinated by the magical skills of the TV repairman who could turn on the set gaze for a few moments at the scambled mess on the screen before unerringly gripping the dusty glass bulb of a valve and yanking it out before replacing it with a new one from his commodious tool box.

Oh damn! This wasn't going to be a long one ....

Roe, Row, Rho

2005-11-18T12:22:00.000Z

I suppose we all have a number of books on a shelf somewhere (or even packed, hidden away, in boxes in attics) that were bought or gifted and kept with the intention that one day they would be read. Perhaps some of these are books that did not quite fit the category of un-put-downable. I am certainly one of those who is more than capable of setting everything on hold to read to the back page without stopping. In extreme situations I have been known to unplug the phone. I am not an especially fast reader; I like to savour a book, fiction especially, and am prone to breaking off actual reading for short daydreamy asides the better to adsorb a particularly chewy philosophical nugget. Unpacking, therefore, has uncovered some interesting items: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead for example.

I bought both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged at the same time from Amazon a few years ago after coming into contact with someone who repeatedly made reference to objectivism and to his own adherence to the same philosophy. I am not and never have been much of a philosopher ... at least not in the academic sense. My education lamentably was all in science subjects, as if the study of human thought and society is not the grandfather of all science! Sheesh. Anyway I got Rand's two major works and for no particular reason I opened first Atlas Shrugged and began reading that. Sadly it proved what I suspected: that an objectivist hero might prove a little too impervious to the warmth of a Constant Reader's earnest desire to engender some affection. Maybe that was the point ...? In any event I put the book down and as days rolled into weeks it gathered dust, first on the bedside table, then on the stand beside the bathtub — because I used to adore to read in the bath — until eventually I gathered it up with a load of other 'stuff' that was doing nothing for the feng shui of my various domestic tantiens and lost it in the back of some dark cupboard.

I lost the plot, so to speak, because I couldn't find a single protagonist in there with whom I could identify other than in some vaguely risible sense: for example by likening the characters to the playing pieces in a game of Monopoly ™ and thereby finding they have as much personality as the little alloy shoes and hats and cars. It was sad to use the modern vernacular with a punnish nod to the adjective's principle definition.

I refound The Fountainhead a few weeks ago (I still haven't found Atlas, maybe he shrugged too hard and lost his ball ...) and after it had been moved from here to there and back again, gaining an unsightly coffee mug ring in the process, I finally deigned to open it last week and to commence reading. I cannot say that I find it hard to set down. It is too challenging for me to maintain a long sessions with my eyes in focus and brain in gear. For one thing the woman's literary style is a little too 'artsy' for my simple taste. And, although the protagonist is rather obvious in his selfish devotion to his ambition, at least I can empathaise with his idealistic opposition to the establishment that is holding him back.

None of which explains why I passed much of the last seven or days in a fugue of amorphously colourless despondency. The foregoing perhaps might go some way to explaining that I am a somewhat lazy reader. I read firstly to be entertained and only secondarily do I expect to be informed. Most times I suspect the information, but entertainment is perfectly real, absolutely tangible. If you fall asleep before the fat lady starts to warble then you should get a refund!

It is perhaps no surprise then that my favorite literary entertainments come from the giants of science-fiction with side-orders of other stuffs like Steinbeck, King and P.D. James. Such stuff is light and easily digestible reading. Its only purpose is to be highly entertaining and only infrequently does it disappoint by running against the grain of its own genre-specific raison d'être. However sci-fi is more unusual in that it much more often carries a weightier philosophical conundrum as a plot-sustaining strut. One of my long term fascinations in this field is that of the idea of non human intelligence.

I have no belief whatsoever that humans have ever been in contact with extra-terrestrial aliens and little faith we ever will. The idea is too silly even if the notion of extra-terrestrial life isn't. Ask any biologist how many species of plants and animals in their locality are threatened by 'alien' species imported by humans from another continent and the answer will be too many! How much worse would the situation be if the Things from Alpha Cenaturi decided to pop over and say hello? Even if they didn't care about what might happen to our planet they wouldn't want to muck up their own unique ecology with a load of accidental imports. Or maybe I just want to believe that aliens would be more ecologically advanced. Wells made the first effort to expound this idea in War of The Worlds but he overlooked the possility of importation of infection. Whatever. As far as non-human intelligence is concerned it is much more likely that we will make it ourselves.

Over the years of the twentieth century sci-fi struggled, more or less in vain, to keep pace with science. Various writers made varying yarns out of in vitro fertilisation and gestation and some even debated the legitamacy of the humanity of such people. Imagine!

A good argument can always be had on a religious forum by asking the question: "could a robot have a soul?" These questions have been asked over and over and are not even the perquisite of sci-fi. I'm literary hack but I bet that even the Pinocchio story is not even the first example of this time-worn argument with no definitve answer.

Meanwhile it happened that I was channel-hopping on my TV a week or so ago looking for something light and I chanced on an episode of Star Trek Voyager, a programme I normally shun because that franchise lost its freshness long before Rodenberry's heirs noticed. There wasn't much else on at the time so I stuck with it. By coincidence the plot referred to a previous incident in a prior episode that I had also seen and remembered (what are the odds of that? Out of a hundred or hundreds of episodes I doubt I have seen more than 5 or 6 all the way through.) They had been to a place where some of the crew had been duplicated by a weird quicksilver substance and now they realised that they, and the whole ship, were all duplicates and that they were therefore not the real versions of themselves. As if that wasn't bad enough, they were also decaying back into a silvery goop so they decided to race back to their home planet. Unfortunately they blew up before they got there, their final attempt to leave a record of their existence failed in the last moment and those still alive just before the end died with the shatteringly distressing knowledge that everything they knew about could never even know they had ever existed.

It's just a 15 minute, coffee time fiction in the middle of your weekly magazine. Nothing to lose sleep over and yet it does actually pose the same great question. If I think then I must be. Period. If we take that indefinable element that distinguishes a live human being from a beetle, or a cat, or a computer and call it a soul for want of a better and more meaningful word (mainly because ego is too easily misunderstood and too anthropomorphisable: Little Mad has more ego than an army of Samurai!) then it is not just possible, but undeniable, to argue that souls must be capable of spontaneous self generation. I stipulate that because to ascribe the allocation of souls to God is merely to pass the blame or else just to fudge the question.

A beginning a middle and and ending is what I desire. You cannot have a chicken without an egg; nor the egg without the chicken. Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty are the benchmarks of sanity in a universe so cock-a-mamie that if I'd had it designed to order I would want my money back. So I'll just carry on waiting for armageddon to come in my pleasant little dream world.

Dark Fillage ...

2005-11-17T14:34:00.000Z

.... was — or maybe still is &mdash the working title of my widely ranging and wildly ambitious novel project. It also seems apt to describe a feeble attempt to expiate my seasonally consonant shadowy mood, which crept in under the threshold of my careless attention to such matters. I never much cared for autumn. It was the season when school resumed after the summer break ... and I never grew bored of setting my own agenda; by contrast I could easily lose the will to live before I even finished scratching in the names of the various classes on my school timetable card. Timetables and deadlines are the spawn of the devil ... and as good a reason as any for supposing that holy grail of the mythical WASP — the work ethic — is merely a satanically peverted hijacking of a previously less onerous doctrinal aspiration.

By God! I got it bad, ain't i?

For me, the seasons are not equal. Partly this is geographical. In these fair isles we don not endure much in the extremes of season. Mostly the climate is variably damp. If the grass is green it has rained recently, if it isn't expect rain. The sun will shine most days and when it does it mostly gives pleasant warmth and only at the extremes of its solstician variations is either truly feebly wan or hellishly fierce. It seems to me that most of my countrymen divide their years into four equal portions and call each a different season regardless of appropriateness. I am a little more pedantic.

Autumn begins on the Tuesday after the last Monday in August because that day marks the last week of the school holiday. From then on the trees begin their preparations for winter. The adults slowly wean themselves off cooking and eating outdoors and demonstrate this wimpish fear of Brittania's creeping damp by losing their Balearic tans and opting for a slightly paler orange shade of spray-on dye. Kids prepare to punctuate the long and drearily dreadful autumn school term — which of course ends in the ultimate child-spoiling fest — with the mid-term beano of legalised begging, which in the UK culminates in the drawn out firework season fusion of Guy Fawkes bonfire night, Hallowe'en and in many areas, Diwali and last year and this we had Eid as well. Well it's as good as night as any to mark the end of cook-out weather so for me, autumn ends on on November fifth.

At first sight this might make it seem that my winter gets a longer innings than it deserves and I admit that counting most of November as winter is certainly a problem; mostly because the weather is very rarely wintery. Proper winter begins in January but luckily it also ends there. My eldest son, my sister and mother all have birthdays in February and winter is no time to celebrate something as gay as a birthday so even if there is three feet of snow outside I, at least, do not lose grip on the sure knowledge that there be crocuses 'neath that cosy white duvet. And no thing of such fragile, simple beauty has any place in a dead season of frozen mud and bare-naked trees.

Spring then fills the gap betwen the rash of February birthdays — I mark its exact beginning as the day I see my first gold and purple carpet of crocuses — and it ends on the day before my own birthday, which is pretty close to the summer solstice. This gives the great Brit spring the better part of five months to demonstrate all the glories of nature, from the first crocus, through the first cuckoo, the first new potato, and culiminating in the first strawberry as the mounting pressure to declare the season formally ended becomes unbearable.

Summer is okay ... ish ... but, frankly, even if it lasted twice as long it would still be over too soon. Too often summer is a let down. Whether it be too hot or not hot enough it is always something of a relief to get to autumn and not have to worry about being short-changed.

So my current convention is better than the one I grew up with where autumn lasted until Christmas and winter reigned until Easter and spring was the term of school or university exams and summer was still not bloody-well long enough.

Besides autumn is a fine season for melancholy and I always drew an unseemly amount of pride from my restraint in setting a short span for having the blues. Winter would seem to be a much better time to have a raging depression (if that isn't an oxymoron I wouldn't know one if it bit me!) but I love winter with a perverse kind of joy. I love to watch the slow, rank, mildewed decay of the world. Drifts of dry leaves become a slimy mess, hedgerows, stripped of their greenery display their knotty, tangled, varicose legs buried knee-deep in a midden of nature's discards ... and, yeah, the odd chocolate wrapper, beer-can or condom too. But then if we aren't, too, a part of nature then I declare I have seriously misunderstood everything. Oh well.

It is truly weird then that I have been uncommonly dark in spirit these last couple of days. At first I was bemused by it, then I thought, what the hell, and decided to have a wallow in it. Then I realised why I had it. It isn't an organic thing. It isn't a return to my prior psychiatric crisis it's a genuine melancholia brought on by a sad idea that I picked up on and chewed over and over until I felt I had gotten as near as I could get to grokking it.

I put it away and slowly but surely my mood has lifted but the unencompassable breadth of the original idea .... Ah that needs telling too but maybe not just yet.

Lap Top Cat

2005-10-03T18:57:00.000+01:00

Little Mad is still exploring her new environment and this has caused me to abandon a long extablished pattern. I have been forced to turn on my heating because I cannot stand the cold drafts caused by her rigid ever-open door policy. Until now I have been in habit of avoiding the act of flicking that little switch from HW to CH/HW until the glorious sixth day of November ....

(OK Parenthetical paragraph to explain Nov 6. The fifth, of course, is Bonfire Night and for some longish spell of years during the '70's and '80's a certain school's annual bonfire, pig-roast and firework display marked the last day of the year when it was possible to stand outdoors, drinking alcohol and eating chunks of dead animal, without either becoming a victim of hypothermia or else sinking into a muddy quagmire ... although the latter calamity was always the more likely. As the years turned into decades I grew more and more cantakerously miserly in my determination that no heating was required until the bonfires' flames had died.)

So ... Mirelly was born in a barn, a true wild thing (but with a soppy fondness for having her belly fur ruffled so long as the ruffler is prepared to accept the occasional need for reconstructive surgery of the lower arm). Mirelly hates to be on the wrong side of a closed door. In case I need to make matters clear, any side of a door is the wrong side if a cat decides there is an urgent need to be on the other side. Anyway. She is still exploring and finding her way around. With the heating on, there are now more doors left ajar and so there are more places for her to explore in search of that feline grail: the Ideal Snoozing Spot.

So far, today, she has utterly ignored her previously established ISS (an old banket on an Ikea special) because she can now wander around without me leaping up to push the door as close to the frame as I dare behind her in the vain hope of keeping out the autumn chill. No. Today she has sought to leap onto my lap the moment I sit down. Being a lazy cow I tend to do a lot of sitting down but having Mirelly on my lap is not just uncommon it almost amounts to a cause for concern. Almost but not quite; sometimes she can be quite affectionate for a cat. Then, when my back was turned, she found a new fun place to sit. Notebook computers get quite warm and the keyboard turns out to be a nicely sprung platform for a fussy felix to use as a bum-warmer while shaking out the chaff and trail dust preparatory to searching out an ISS.

Little Mad has had no IT training whatsoever and yet I found her washing a paw languidly whilst my laptop obligingly went about the unexpected chore of upgrading Window's Media Player. Hey! It wasn't me who did it! I'm just a big pink thing who keeps the food coming.

Three Cubed Answers

2005-10-02T17:19:00.000+01:00

I saw this meme on Heather's blog and I thought I should try it. The results have been interesting ... even to me and I thought I knew who I was. Go figure.

Do you try to look hot when you go to the grocery store just in case someone recognizes you from your blog? Oh yeah, like that is gonna happen. The question is silly, surely. Anyway you can be sure that if I could still look "hot" I would go out at least once with the intention being attraction solely so I could fight off the attention with a big stick ....

Are the photos you post Photoshopped or otherwise altered? Bearing in mind my answer, above, and the admitted fact of my own idleness I am torn between two camps. The first being that no improvement is too slight bother with, the other is "why bother". The plain answer is that photography requires actual effort without a digital camera and mine is broke.

Do you like it when creeps or dorks email you? I am so sad that I like any email. Hate mail is the sincerest form of flattery. But creeps and dorks ... those are ... ahem ... hapless suitors? I should be so lucky.

Do you lie in your blog? No. Though I might succomb to a little literary license occasionally to embroider around the edges.

Are you passive-aggressive in your blog? I don't like psycho-babble so I'll ignore that one on the spurious grounds of incomprehension.

Do you ever threaten to quit writing so people will tell you not to stop? That would be silly.

Are you in therapy? If not, should you be? If so, is it helping? No. Probably ought to be but have had "help" in the past and look where that got me?

Do you delete mean comments? Do you fake nice ones? Both would be silly. All comments are valuable. Faking praise is even less admirable than hiding £500 notes under the board when playing Monopoly.

Have you ever rubbed one out while reading a blog? How about after? Is that a question about masturbation? OK, I'm old enough to be honest. I might if I read that sort of blog. Mostly though that sort of blog just makes me jealous and that's kinda counter-productive I find. That's as much as I wanna say right now, 'k?

If your readers knew you in person, would they like you more or like you less? I am not very reliable in estimating others' opinions of me. Frankly I find it faintly ridiculous that anyone would like me in person ... I am as selfishly lazy as a very fat and lazy cat and as selfishly self-important as a poorly house-trained adolescent puppy.

Do you have a job? No. My self-indulgence takes up far too much of my time to leave room for anything so dull and mundane as a job.

If someone offered you a decent salary to blog full-time without restrictions, would you do it? That would be a job, wouldn't it? Sheesh! When even the memes are trying to outwit us maybe it's time to wave the chequered flag on the human race!

Which blogger do you want to meet in real life? Most of them but I can spot a singular when I see one and I won't shy away from this one. But allow me to take a turn around the block. I'd love to meet up with Dave Rupert because I have been reading his blog for a dog's age and I've never commented because I fear to start after all this time. I would also like an opportunity to share a pot of coffee with Sharon whose writings over the last year have given me such insight into her mileu that I am happy to count her as a friend. But if I were to be pressed I would leap on a Eurostar and travel to Waffle Central for a chinwag with Chameleon.

Do you usually act like you have more money or less money than you really have? I am not conscious of acting but I suspect that I behave as though I have more money than I have.

Does your family read your blog? No.

How old is your blog? Rather older than the paucity of posts might suggest.

Do you get more than 1000 page views per day? Do you care? No. No.

Do you have another secret blog in which you write about being depressed, slutty, or a liar? I don't have a secret blog. I write about being a depressed, slovenly (aka slutty), liar right here in public. Now ain't that a shame?

Have you ever given another blogger money for his/her writing? And I would want to do this, because ...?

Do you report the money you earn from your blog on your taxes? I do not earn money from my blog ... but if I did I would be sure not to report the fact to anyone.

Is blogging narcissistic? It ought not to be but for some I think think that it may be ... oh was I expected to answer for myself? No ... yes ... er can I think about it?

Do you feel guilty when you don't post for a long time? Laughed my arse off at that one!

Do you like John Mayer? Hang on ... (google google) No. (Terrible control freakery of a website!)

Do you have enemies? That would imply that I have allies, wouldn't it.

Are you lonely? Everyone is lonely. I like my own company better than most folks. On the other hand, most days I miss having someone to talk to. Is that loneliness? It's not a big deal. I talk to my cat and I talk to myself and I shout rude comments at the TV and I laugh when I see or hear something funny. Is that lonely? I don't think so. My therapists and social workers think I should get out more and meet people but most people are arseholes.

Why bother? Exactly!

Who am I gonna tag? Nobody.

Ramble In Rows

2005-10-02T11:45:00.000+01:00

Good lord! How did it get to be October already? So much of my life is racing by me unregarded, like the star field that whizzes by the starship Enterprise. Things happen and I think how cool it would be to waffle to my blog about the significance of them and then .... What? Well tempus ceases its fugitive property and simply frangits [Sic] with the result that I find myself passing on to the next fascinating tableau and contemplating the griste worthiness of that instead. And oh! Lordy, Lordy! Lookit me making unconscious associations: tableaux versus the tabular (in the keyboard sense) nature of my sense of time's careless passage.

Last night, for no good reason other than because it was on the TV schedule, I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption. I have loved this film since I first saw it and found to my delight that it had captured every drop of the essence of Stephen King's orignal novella. It is a delightfully brooding and horrifying plot full of shockingly naive little deux ex machina that somehow seem plausible anyway and the film extends the liberties taken with our credibility exactly far enough to add the seasoning that a movie demands; the richer meat of words on paper needs no such condiment of course.

It's funny in a screwy kinda way. King's novella, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption was published in a collection of four such stories that had outgrown short but had somehow miscarried in the gestation period leading up to full-blown novel. Three of the stories were simple tales of human-scale experience but the fourth, to be oxymoronic about it, was so larded with salt it was neither believable as real horror nor especially horrific in any gothic sense. Or maybe I am just cynical .... Maybe I just think that King had three good stories and a notion of attaching a seasonal theme to them: Hope Springs Eternal, Summer of Corruption and Fall From Innocence. The first and last of these — the Shawshank story tied, seemingly with irony, to spring and hope, and The Body (which was made into another great film: Stand By Me) which was a fabulous metaphor for the loss of the innocence of childhood ... and its lasting effects — qualify as great fiction. (The middle one, Apt Pupil, was, well ... ok but a little ditsy). It was a shame that the fourth and last story was so unsatisfactory. Winter of Discontent: The Breathing Method was risibly out of place and skulking around at the back of the book practically screaming, "I don't belong here!" (like the new fish at the start of the first story in the volume) ... perhaps that's the point.

Hmmm.

I shall adjourn to the kitchen to contemplate while concocting a bacon sandwich and to fret over my unweeded garden and the horrors that will be revealed when the volunteer flora dies back for winter .... Uh oh! Maybe I ought first to worry about the quantity of leafage to be harvested from two rather large sycamores; leaf mould is an excellent compost but where to build a heap? Decisions, decisions. Why could I not have been born royal and pampered? I am sure I was never meant to fret so over such mundane things. Surely I was meant to concentrate more about the artistry of pruning roses than with what to do with the prunings ....

And now I am suddenly thinking about the imitation Lalique specimen vases that I saw in the window display of a local hospice's charity shop all reasonably priced in the one or two pound bracket. But why break with habit? The triptych of peach coloured blooms on my windowsill looks just as good in their sherry schooner.

Trillian Is No Angel

2005-08-09T11:09:00.000+01:00

Somewhat belatedly I noticed Heather's comment on my answer to the rites of passage list. Specifically she was amazed that I hadn't been able to check off the making a snow angel. The UK is a deprived bit of civilisation. Snow is an infequent annoyance for Brits, rather than an occasion for fun.

Most often when snow drifts out of the sky it fails to to settle but when it does it brings chaos and frustration rather than any great degree of opportunity for recreation. Mostly this because a fall of British snow is rarely more than an inch. Greater amounts are mostly a once a year event and accumulations greater than a foot are memorable. Needless to say, half an inch is sufficient to completely disable the nation's transport infrastructure. Two great leviathans of inertia are the principle cause of this shameful fact. The first is the built-in corporate incompetence of the public authorities that, in theory, should be able to predict the weather and to coordinate a response it. In practice what happens is the workers who are needed to grit and plough the roads are unable to leave home because they are snowed in. The second reason is British phlegm which is only properly propitiated if the maximum credible chaos is encouraged, by masterful inaction, to develop.

The last truly spectacular snow I remember affecting a great swathe of the country was over a quarter of century ago. I was part of a foursome who had decided on a novel way of bridging the gap between Christmas and New Year by taking a short break in Cornwall, where the weather is always nice and the beaches are spectacular. Money was tight — when is it any other way, I wonder? — so we had to be careful in selecting our accomodations. In the end we found a hotel in King Arthur country where we were promised comfort and a welcome even though it was closed season. The proprietor had newly bought the business and, he told us, was keen to show us some old-fashioned Cornish hospitality. It was old-fashioned alright!

The hotel was ancient and very run down but it was cheap. We were only offered bed and breakfast but that was OK because there were plenty of restaurants nearby. Our first day was fabulous. The weather was mild and we had a fabulous time picking our way from one craggy promontory to the next via short, steep, shingly beaches. On the second day we drove a little way inland looking for a different venue for our evening meal. It did not take us long. We spent the rest of the day touring the area's principle tourist traps and enjoying the bright sunshine and the extra ten minutes of daylight afforded by the latitude ... we did not register that the temperature was plummeting. We returned to the hotel at dusk to play a game of hearts; loser to be the nominated — alcohol free — driver for the night. It was 30th December and the next day we were planning to hit the nearby town and stock up on party food and drinks and have our own private new year's party in our rooms.

I lost the card game. Mostly because I am the eternal optimistic pessimist and so, when playing hearts, I always aim to clear my tab by consistently and far too predictably aiming to collect all the penalties. By the time we set out for our meal at seven it had started to snow. The snow was outrageous. The flakes were the size of postage stamps and they were sticking. Before long we had left the little coastal village and turned onto the narrow lane that winds its way inland between the high banks that are so characteristic of the area. I very quickly found that I couldn't actually see where I was going. Soon, there was a thick accumulation of snow on the windscreen that the wipers were struggling with and visibly losing ground. In a hastily convened counsel of war we took no time at all to agree that further progress might amount to suicide. More by luck than judgement I turned us around and we regained the hotel before the snow was more than four or five inches deep. We abandonned the car in the hotel car park and staggered through the blizzard toward the multi-colored Christmas tree lights that beckoned us from the window of the bistro where had dined the previous evening.

Unsurprisingly the restaurant was able to fit us in and we ate and drank and were generally merry. Getting back to the hotel was problematic. High heeled sandals are entirely the wrong footwear for blizzard conditions. The wind had risen and the snow was drifting. Where it was thinned the snow was only inches deep but in the lees it was as deep as the wall it hid behind. We all passed an uncomfortable night.

The heater in our room was woefully inadequate. This became a less apt description around 3am when my companion woke to the discovery that the feeble emissions from the heater had succeeding in melting the snow that had blown under the roof tiles and which was now dripping through the ceiling's plaster onto our bed. We dragged the bed further from the outer wall and placed the room's metal waste bin under the drip. (I employed a trick, learned as a student in slummy accomodations: that of placing a towel over the bucket to deaden the sound of the drips.

The following morning dawned bright and clear. But it was soon apparent that our village was as good as on the moon. England's entire south-western peninsular was snowed in. We got most of this news from the village postman who — as cut off as we were — had nothing to deliver and was making use of his time to check on the welfare of the elderly and housebound. Oh well. It was New Years Eve, so we hiked about in the snow. I don't know if we were aware of the hallowed art of snow angel making but it wouldn't have been easy if we had. The storm that had lashed across the land had scoured the snow from any open space and just dumped it behind walls, against buldings and into the narrow lanes where it lay up to ten feet deep. It would be days before every road was re-opened. We did discover snow diving.

For people raised in a land where extremes of weather are unusual we had a heavenly time exploring the drastically altered lanscape that we had so scantly gotten to know the preceeding day. I was the first idiot to conceive of the notion of throwing myself into a deep drift. I disappeared utterly and lost contact with the world and with gravity. I instantly discovered how disorienting getting buried in an avalanche might be. Shrieking with laughter I squealed and screamed with histrionic panic to be rescued. After a few minutes I was pulled clear and accepted the sober rebukes of my friends who'd had time to compile a whole catalogue of what ifs that began with a milestone and ended with an schadenfreuden-ly misplaced hay-tedder. It wasn't long before we were all doubled up with the intoxification of uninhibited laughter. Inevitably someone else felt the same compulsion and the rest of us rolled our eyes and shouted derisively into the snow that we would come looking for her after the thaw ....

I won't drag on. The rest of the tale isn't so pretty. Our New Years celebration was grim because we were unable to lay in the needed supplies and our Cornish hosts did not see fit to extend their Cornish hospitality to their guests when it was obvious we had nowhere else to go. We ended up crashing their private New Years party and bogarted as much booze as we could.

New Years day had recently become a public holiday for England and Wales but we all had jobs to be back for on January 2nd so we had to leave, as planned, the following morning ... whether we wanted to or not. It wasn't easy. The only road out of the village that was open was headed the wrong way. Still a way out is a way out. I also remembered a summer holiday in the same general area when I was a child and flash floods had caused my father to take a similalry circuitious route of escape from a county that is surround on 3 sides by water. It took us 12 hours to get back home; the trip down had taken 4.

It was a good experience. Thanks again to Heather for her comment that reminded me of it!

Boxing Day Make It Easy

2005-08-08T00:00:00.000+01:00

Although the official language of this country is English, the bit of England that I have made my home has one of the most impenetrable accents combined with a medieval dialect which betrays the heritage of language's Angle, Saxon and Jute principal verb: to be. I am, for example might be rendered: I bist, but in the next townlet a few miles down the road it might be I bay. Just add to confusion I am not would be rendered I bay and I bain't respectively. Confused? You aren't alone. By such means we grow to understand that a degree of lateral thinking is needed when a dialogue begins ... even between natives of the same town!

A few years ago I was helping out at a community centre when the following farcical conversation occurred. At the time the EU had decided to demolish its surplus butter and beef mountains by distributions to pensioners and people on welfare benefits. Butter was given out one week and the cans of beef were to be distributed later. So there we were standing at a table loaded with cases of butter — just inside the centre's front door — and an elderly afro-caribbean gent comes in and, spotting us at the table, he approaches.

"I've, um," he said. "Come for me mate."

"It's the butter this week, chick," said the lady in charge.

"Erm," said the old black guy, a look of puzzled confusion on his face. "I just wan'edder pick up me mate though."

"We only 'ave the butter today, though. We won't be doin' the mate till nex' week." By now I had twigged what was going on ....

I stood by and watched in mazement as the verbal rally continued confusedly thru a further couple of rounds of volley and backhand slice return before it dawned upon my companion that they were at cross purposes. The man had obviously arrived to collect a friend. My companion had assumed that mate was meat, which — of course — it is, except when it means mate as in pal, chum, companion.

To make matters more confusing not all speakers use all of the modified vowels and verb. So hills, that are mostly referred to as banks — often but not exclusively pronounced bonk &mdash might have a financial institution at the top: a bank, which is always pronounced bank.

I think my favorite Black Country dialect joke is the Enoch and Eli story ....

Enoch and Eli (pronounced Ay-nock and Ay-Lie) take a holiday by the sea where they see a surfing dude carry his board down the beach.

"'Ere, Aynock," says Eli. "What's that 'e's carrying?"

"That's one of them surfboards, Ayli."

For the next few minutes they watch as the surfer works his way out to where the waves are building. They stare intently as he paddles like crazy to get under way with a big wave. They goggle with amazement as the daring young man struggles to get to his feet while the wave begins to break beneath him. Their faces remain frozen in shock as the surfer loses it and tumbles off. The board flips over and smashes the young guy in the face pulping his nose causing the white surf around him to turn pink with blood. After what seems an age the young man is deposited bloodied and bruised on the beach.

"Wot did you say that thing was?" Eli said.

"A surfboard," said Enoch. "Why?"

"Well, it don't look very safe to me!" Depending on the teller's specific dialect the 'don't' might be rendered as day, doe or even bay.

I spent a long chunk of yesterday unpacking a lot of cardboard boxes. I am about halfway thru unpacking now which is, I admit, not exactly rapid progress, but I am not planning on going anywhere. This morning I suspended my planned activities to make some alterations out in the garden after Little Mad expressed some serious reservations concerning the route taken by a local tabby tom cat on his bi-weekly state tour of his domain. The ensuing cat-fight was short but savage and Tom retreated the way he had come, making a temporary redoubt in the tangle of stick-dry, leafless undergrowth that comprises the far end of my garden. I repaired the hole on the fence panel that otherwise hides the unsightly tangle from view (there are number of items of discarded garbage there, including a rusted sprung sofa). If Tom wants in via that route from now on he will have to teeter-totter on the brink of the knife thin ricketty fence with a savagely gleeful killer waiting in hiding somewhere below. Toms may be led by their glands but they're not completely insane ... beside Little Mad ain't giving out any signals!

List Ye To My Confessions

2005-08-06T16:11:00.000+01:00

I saw this list on Sharon's blog and although I thought some of the events more than a little odd if not trite I thought it worthwhile wasting a half hour on to record my own catalogue of shame and triumph and disaster.

(X) smoked a cigarette. (Far too many but not recently thank God.)
( ) crashed a friend's car (Almost but a miss is as good as a mile, right?
(X) stolen a car (I have a criminal conviction for 'stealing' my ex's motor cycle)
(X) been in love
(X) been dumped.
(X) been fired.
( ) been in a fist fight
( ) snuck out of your parents' house
(X) had feelings for someone who didn't have them back.
(X) been arrested
( ) gone on a blind date
(X) lied to a friend
(X) skipped school
(X) seen someone die (Yes and it was a grisly and pathetically sad event because the lady was a complete stranger and I felt that someone should sit with her while she took her last mortal breaths rather than be alone on a gurney in a busy hospital. She was unconscious but she took a long time to stop living.)
(X) gone sledding
( ) been to Canada (Been to several European countries though)
( ) been to Mexico (But I did take a trip south of the equator to South Africa)
(X) been on a plane
( ) purposely set a part of yourself on fire. (I am too seriously pyrophobic ever to even consider that!)
(X ) eaten sushi.
( ) been skiing.
( ) met someone from the internet (No way José)
(X) been at a concert
(X) taken painkillers
(X) love someone or miss someone right now
(X) laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by
( ) made a snow angel
(X) had a tea party
(X) flown a kite
(X) built a sand castle
(X) gone puddle jumping.
(X) played dress up
(X) jumped into a pile of leaves
(X) cheated while playing a game (But only in fun - I wouldn't cheat for personal gain)
(X) been lonely
(X) fallen asleep at work/school
( ) used a fake ID (Been times though when I would have been tempted to use one if I'd had one handy)
(X) watched the sun set
(X) felt an earthquake (Felt it? I was almost on top of the epicentre!)
( ) slept beneath the stars. (Oh yeah like an arachnophobe would do that without being drugged!)
(X) been tickled.
(X) been robbed. (Been burgled at home, at work and my car has been stolen. City life is a bitch!)
(X) been misunderstood. (Most of the time)
( ) petted a reindeer/goat/kangaroo (I have eaten goat though. It makes a yummy curry.)
(X) won a contest. (The Junior Literary Prize at my Grammar School)
(X) run a red light/stop sign. (It's so wrong but doing it occasionally can feel so right.)
( ) been suspended from school (Can't think why though. I wasn't good unless you count being adept at avoiding notice ... and the blame.)
(X) been in a car crash
( ) had braces
(X) felt like an outcast/third person
(X) eaten a whole pint! of ice cream in one night (I checked this becasue I have gluttoned my way through numerous equivalents.)
(X) had deja vu.
( ) danced in the moonlight
( ) liked the way you looked (I never liked the way I looked. I've gotten used to myself now, but that still doesn't mean I like what I see.)
(X) witnessed a crime
( ) been obsessed with post-it notes (Hate them)
( ) gone doorbell ditching (Eh?)
( ) believe in ghosts (I waver on this one though)
(X) found a stray animal and kept it
( ) squished barefoot through the mud (Ew!)
(X) been lost (Where am I?)
(X) been on the opposite side of the country (That's not difficult in the UK)
( ) swam in the ocean (Can't swim anyway)
(X) felt like dying
(X) cried yourself to sleep
(X) played cops and robbers
( ) recently colored with crayons (Always drawing and doodling though with pencil or pen)
( ) sung karaoke (I couldn't sing in public if my life depended on it!)
( ) paid for a meal with only coins
(X) done something you told yourself you wouldn't
(X) made prank phone calls.
(X) laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
( ) caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) danced in the rain
(X) written a letter to Santa Claus.
(X) been kissed under the mistletoe.
(X) watched the sun rise with someone you care about
(X) blown bubbles
(X) made a bonfire on the beach
(X) crashed a party.
( ) gone rollerskating.
( ) had a wish come true
( ) jumped off a bridge
(X) ate dog/cat food.
( ) told a complete stranger you loved them
(X) kissed a mirror.
(X) sang in the shower.
( ) had a dream that you married someone.
(X) glued your hand to something.
( ) kissed a fish.
(X) sat on a roof top.
(X) screamed at the top of your lungs.
( ) done a one-handed cartwheel.
( ) talked on the phone for more than 5 hours.
(X) stayed up all night
(X) picked and ate an apple right off the tree.
(X) climbed a tree
( ) had a tree house
(X) scared to watch a scary movie alone.
( ) have more than 30 pairs of shoes.
(X) worn a really ugly outfit to school.
( ) pushed into a pool/hot tub with all your clothes on.
(X) gone streaking
( ) gone skinny dipping in a pool/hot tub.
( ) told you're hot by a complete stranger
(X) broken a bone.
(X) been easily amused.
( ) caught a fish then ate it.
(X) caught a butterfly.
(X) laughed so hard you cried
(X) cried so hard you laughed
( ) cheated on a test
(X) forgotten someone's name
( ) french braided someone's hair.
(X) loved someone so much you would gladly die for them.

Rule Of Law

2005-08-05T15:11:00.000+01:00

I think there is probably too much law. Law is just a process for dispensing justice but is it really necessary to cross every i and dot every t? [Sic]

What is so surprising is not that so many people escape the attentions of the judicial process but the fact that so many people of essentially good character find themselves so deeply in the mire because the true essence of justice is merely a system and no system devised by men cannot be subverted by a wily and skillful operator. We all know that the guilty walk free whilst the hapless are damned by their own gullibility. None of this is news, of course, but it's a useful preamble to remind us that, in spite of preconceptions, British Justice is heavily hamstrung by the weight of laws and procedures designed to protect all the parties involved, from the accused via the police and law profession to the victim. Every aspect is governed by various versions of Police And Criminal Evidence Acts and the less formal "Judges Rules", which have been mostly superceded by the statutes but — I am sure — remain in force anyway.

My free legal advocate was one of those men to whom women like myself cannot but help but to like at first sight. He was older than me, but not by much, and he was dressed in a good suit that, although well cut, did not shriek any of the male power game signals that so turn me off. My initial impression, then, of a man who cares — as much about his demeanour and appearance as he does about his work and domestic life. His opening comment focussed on my most recent affectation: a "make poverty history" wristband. He drew my attention to his with the wry observation that his wife had told him he was too old for such silliness. It was an instant ice-breaker. He took charge while leaving me the impression that I was still in control as much as any paying client.

He began by summarising the situation as it had been outlined in the police charge sheet and he then asked for my side of the story. I'd had the best part of three hours solitary confinement to consider my situation. With no experience of the criminal justice system other than as a viewer and reader of television and books I had arrived in police custody in a defiant mood. My intention was simply to deny all knowledge of the bike and to hell with it. I knew I was technically innocent and my guilt had to be proven. For that to occur evidence had to be produced and my "confession" to EP in the heat of a row could never be admissible in a court. But three hours is a long time for a mouthy, opinionated cow like me. I had time to consider how much worse my punishment might be if — against all reason — evidence emerged anyway and then I was found guilty. Frankly the idea was appalling. It seemed unlikely the bike would ever be found (and without habeas rustus I would remain forever in the clear) but likely and certain are beasts of differring hue. I don't gamble, except an occasional irrational impulse to buy a lottery ticket, because I dislike odds of any kind.

I began then by asking TS (The Solicitor) how much trouble I was in. "Am I facing a jail sentence over this?" I asked. Nothing like cutting to the chase! I hate to shilly-shally in conversation.

"Good lord, no!" TS said. "This is the first time you've ever been arrested, isn't it?" I nodded. I was close to tears of self pity throughout much of the next half hour or so, but I shall not mention it again. I chewed at my lip and worked away at the cuff of light jacket I was wearing. I don't swear to it now, but I think it was then that I decided with finality that I would tell everything. Every damned sordid detail.

It did not take long, but I chronicled my life and times with ET through 3 different addresses, bank account sharing and bedroom arrangements. In a few minutes I covered 16 years of my life. When I reached the end he neatly summarised the central and most painful fact of the whole affair. "Goodness!" He said. "You've been involved with him longer in separation than you were as a couple."

I agreed that this was so. I also enlarged upon some of the more salient elements of our financial entanglements that had left me helplessly tied down to the place until EP committed himself to a final deal for transferring the whole title in the property to me. The very last conversation EP and I had had on the deal had been in February or March of 2004 when he had offered me a deal that effectively gave the house to me in return for taking responsibility for all debts outstanding. I'd then told him that I was not working and was under treatment for anxiety and depression and that I would be unable to proceed with mortgage negotiation until I was better.

Over the next seventeen months my mental state ebbed and flowed. My ability to pay the mortgage failed during last summer and arrears began to accumulate. I discovered I was unable to contact him and he — for reasons best know to himself — made no effort to contact me or his bankers. Eventually I was being served with eviction notices by the courts at the bank's behest. I sold the bike because EP still owed me money I had loaned him after we separated. It had been abandonned and untouched for almost eight years and had not been in any sort of running condition since 1993 ... at which time EP himself had estimated that £5,000 minumum was required to restore the machine to a condition suitable for "showing".

My tale concluded, TS told me that he thought the matter was almost more appropriately a civil matter rather than a criminal one. However there was a criminal charge extant and my best approach would be to admit the charge on the same basis as I had just explained it to him.

So we called in the officer and we went through the whole process again, this time on record for the tapes. Little of the procedure is like that seen on TV. Even the standard caution takes on new meaning when I was challenged to explain what I understood it to mean. For the benefit of the tape record I was coaxed into repeating the sentiment of the caution so there could never be any doubt that I knew exactly what it meant.

At last we were drawing to the grisly conclusion. A crime had been reported and an allegation made concerning me. In consequence I had been arrested and charged with the offence and now I was making a verbal statement, cooperatively in a police interview. The important fact, for the cops, was my admission of guilt in respect of the offence on the chargesheet. Such a confession leaves little room for manoeuvre by any of the parties involved ... I kind of knew that much both on the instinctual level as well as on the higher moral ground of that imposter known as natural justice. I did not hear that term employed but it seemed to be singing sweetly out of every pore in the sound-deadening tiles of the interview room (tiles, without which, tape-recording would have been a far greater technological challenge in a 1950's police station at a busy city intersection.)

The officer told me that he was satisifed to terminate the interview and I could be released. He also told me that he would consult with his inspector concerning the next action, which I understood to be the preparation of a report for the Crown Prosecution Service who would decide if I would face trial.

After a short phone call the officer hung up and offered me a caution. TS took me aside to whisper his advice that it was the best deal I was going to get if I wanted a quiet life (That is to say: to go home and put it all behind behind me.) A police caution is a case-clearing shortcut for all parties ... except the victim. I signed a confession and the police got a crime cleared up (good for station morale and statistics). I also got to walk home with no further criminal charges to face regarding the same matter. Only a fool would risk a trial after making a taped confession, so I accepted the caution with immense relief.

The downside of a police caution is the acquisition of a criminal record. I was fingerprinted, photographed and sampled for DNA so my life of crime is over before it ever really got off the ground. Which is one failure I shall not be unhappy to have on my life's record.

It wasn't the best day of my life ... but, hell! I've had worse. And I did get to witness EP's reaction and that almost pays all. I'll settle for almost. For once nearly is good enough!

Mirelly

2005-08-05T13:23:00.000+01:00

mirelly
Originally uploaded by wfatc_Trillian.
Captured by the crappy camera built into my mobile, Mirelly stares into the distance contemplating either her 96 hour odyssey or a nap or dinner ... it isn't an easy life being a cat.

No Never! No More!

2005-08-05T04:22:00.000+01:00

Ah songs lyrics! And even worse my Folk Club days are showing. But even though it is just past 4 am life has taken an optimistic turn with the return of the "Wild Rover". I woke at 4 convinced (again) that I had heard her distinctive cry. I had retired early and wasn't especially surprised. I dismissed the idea that Little Mad was outside the bedroom the window because it seemed ludicrous think that she would be able to recognise the house out of many similar ones and considering that she had made good her escape via the rear. Besides my dreams have always had a strong aural element....

When I heard the cry again I was galvanised. Could it really be her? I had come close to giving up yesterday. My seventy two hour deadline had been and gone and my dear former neighbour, D has no news either other than to report with sour amusement some of the fanciful gossip that has bloomed in the wake of my departure. We laughed over a coffee at the follies of human frailties as W's dinner cremated itself — forgotten — in the kitchen. Oops....

On my way back home I loitered outside two different pet stores. A little one in The Land Time Forgot and a mall based giant; just looking, is all. Should have stocked up on cat food though but my superstitious roots suspect that would have soured the fermenting good fortune.

I dressed hastily in a pair of jeans and a sloppy sweatshirt and headed for the front door. As it opened I caught sight of four white socks scuttling down the flight of steps that lead down to the road between the roses and I heard a familiar wheezy croak of feline surprise. I mde my trademark sqeak and waited. There came and answering meep and I squeaked again and Little Mad appeared out of the pre-dawn gloom, ignored me entirely and rushed past into the living room presumably to double check that she had the right premises.

After rubbing her cheeks against a few familiar corners she seemed content and, turning her attentions to me, she accepted some happy scoldings and ear-scratchings and agreed that she was, indeed, a jolly clever cat to have found her way home. (Although a part of me wants to think she had passed the preceeding nights mewling outside the bedroom windows of every house in the 'hood until she found the right one. That scenario would be more in keeping with her, undeserved, reputation for crackpot behaviour, but I don't suppose she'll be apt to tell me and I doubt I'm likley to get evidence from any other sources.)

One thing I am certain of is that she doesn't appear to care a fig either for my own concerns nor for the wider concerns of the blogoshpere. The tidings that her welfare had become a matter of concern in several different time zones had no discernible effect as she calmly despatched a bowlful of food. Enough for now, she has decided my lap looks like a comfy place and this lap ain't big enough for Mirelly Lyra and a laptop computer.

Perhaps later I shall be able to concentrate on finishing the tale of the interview in the police station.

Dirty Habits

2005-08-03T08:11:00.000+01:00

It was my intention to title this piece "I Don't Do Habits" but it occurred to me that I have far too many habits. Postponing jobs being one, eating when not hungry is another. My latest habit is not smoking. The recent stresses I have endured have caused my old addiction to waken from its uneasy slumber and it rages and craves at inopportune moments. I then go off down a reflective dead end daydreaming about the idea of casually walking into a little newsagent shop and picking up a paper and then, kind of carelessly, I say: "and a pack of B&H please." I won't ... well I hope I won't, but the distraction is annoying and that's putting it mildly.

Yesterday I promised myself that I would do something useful and productive. Of all the jobs outstanding, bringing the washing machine into operation was the most pressing because the events of last week had gotten in the way of laundry which was already overdue ... because of procrastination. My new bungalow is very compact but it still boasts a separate laundry; well it's a 5 by 3 foot cupboard by the back door but I got a handyman to fit some taps, a waste pipe and power point. Well the movers put the machine in there and then I had it buried as I stood around peering at the the seemingly endless boxes of stuff being brought in and directing where it should go. Too much was unidentifiable and was sent to the laundry cubby ....

By mid afternoon I had cleared the space and sorted out the machine. I also added a couple of extra shelves which are not exactly level but only I will be looking at so who cares ... I can't help it if the drill always seemed to skate off a little before it bit into the brick. Besides half the men I know are as useless, if not more so, at the simple domestic construction jobs. That was one fault not possessed by EP which isn't to say much because gilding doesn't disguise the underlying shape.

It was also a hot day yesterday and by the time I was ready to start sorting out the stuff that had accumulated on the paved area outside the sun had come around and was quietly baking every square inch. So I reviewed the situation and trawled my mind's basement for reasons to procrastinate. I found what I needed. Mads dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Well although I am undoubtedly mad I neither dog nor man ... I'll settle for mad bitch. Either way I could get out of the heat. I got.

How is possible for 37 channels of TV to be so deficient of choice? One station was showing back to back episodes of Diagnosis Murder ... and I sat watching that for 20 minutes hoping to see Dick Van Dyke break into some mockney Meary Powppens or do a quick bit of tap ... he didn't. Realising that I could care a lot less concerning the identity of the murderer I went back outside where the sun had moved around behind the large tree that might be sycamore but isn't. (Identifying it is a task to do when I unpack the box of books that contains my battered flora.) Meanwhile I decided that it was just too hot for serious work. It didn't actually take long to tidy up and put the syuff away and when I had finished I spent a happy ten minutes under the shower getting the caked on brick dust and sweat washed away. Brick dust turns out to be a effective exfoliant scrub although I don't recomment it.

Now it is August the early evening shadows are longer and after a hot day, if there is anything resembling a breeze a walk is great way to cool off and wind down. I also felt that it was time to explore the south-western fringes of my hinterland. There's a large undulating park one street away to the west. The south-west bound road which borders the park has a small church, a community centre, a school and — half a mile away — there is a useful convenience store selling most of life's essentials. I found my suspicions it had been a hot day confirmed because the chiller cabinets were looking a little thin on stock at 7pm. I took this to be a good sign because the sheleves were otherwise well-stocked and I hate it when I buy a drink from a chiller only to find that it hasn't been in the chiller long enough to get properly cold. This guy probably refills the shelves when he closes up for the night.

I picked up a few cans of Guinness because there is nothing so nice as a long tall glass of the dark stout at the end of a hot day. I haven't actually got down to unpacking the long tall glasses but it tasted just as good from a shorter, fatter one.

There is still no sign of Little Mad. She has now been missing for 48 hours so if she were to turn up, either back here or at the old address then the next 24 hours is the most likely time. My old neighbours have been alerted and I shall be passing there tomorrow and I will check-up to see if there is any news.

Right. Time I emptied the washing machine and put it outside to dry ....

Busy Busy

2005-08-02T10:20:00.000+01:00

I have spent too much time writing recently that should more productively have been spent unpacking and other tasks connected with a new home. But ah! That's me. The great procrastinator. I am not, therefore, in hibernation just otherwise engaged. I have still to tell the yarn of my police interview and the aftermath and that may have to wait for a day or two more.

In the meantime there continues to be no sign of Little Mad although her spirit hangs close to me like a cloak. I seem to sense her presence and maybe she isn't actually far away. If cats possess some sort of navigational sense that would guide her in the direction of her former home then she has a canal to cross within 50 yards. She could just be hanging out in the undergrowth a few yards from the back door and if she is I guess she'll come when she's hungry. Well, I can hope.

Last night I managed to catch most of a TV programme that featured fellow blogger Chameleon. The full story of the recording was told here. I think the lady is too modest. Her team's performance was respectable and for quite a while the contest could have gone either way and the final result seemed to me to belie the facts as I remembered them. Anyway it was good to be able to put an animated face to the words. Chameleon writes in an evocatively lyrical style that rarely fails to capture my imagination, although I have to confess that some of her pieces are long and — considering her very broad remit of subject areas — I do therefore to ignore a proportion of her posts ... if only to retain some time for me to do other things.

I am so often in awe of other bloggers. Even setting aside my pathetically poor typing skills that produce an average of 0.25 typos per word and 2.5 skipovers per paragraph, the act of composition for me is too often closer to childbirth than copulation. The coitus occurs in my mind but the parturition is an exhausting process and, worse, the unfortunate metaphor is too often made worse by the uncomfortable fact that the afterbirth is occasionally the better part. In this instance the afterbirth is the stuff starts to get tacked on around the edges of the story I am telling. Like this paragraph, only better. I really must push the Publish Post button and get out of here!

Hard Cell

2005-08-01T17:01:00.000+01:00

"Oh my god," I thought as stepped out into the busy street with a uniformed cop taking up station at either elbow. At least they weren't actually holding on to me. I might be accused of theft but they seemed to content to accept my parole, at least as far as their personal professional responsibilities went. It has occurred to me this morning to wonder why I was arrested as opposed to being requested to go to the police station to help with equiries. I am a bit of hellcat in some respects. There are some things that just get my dander up and some other things that inexplicably do not. I suppose that it's the simple things that rile me, while the complex issues take some thinking about and there's nothing like a good think to defuse an anger-making situation. Of course stewing over a wrong is a good way to cook up a nice pot of cold revenge, but — although I have used the word before — selling that benighted bike wasn't an act of revenge. I was pleased there was a vengeful element in the outcome, but the whole business was matter of worry and wrongness to me. Not serious enough to have stopped me, and I would still do it again ... and hang around to face the consequences. All the same I am perplexed as to why I am not actually breathing fire and spitting lava over the indignity of being arrested. Partly I know that it is because there are almost no grounds whatsoever for objection and also because it is kind of a hoot when push comes to shove.

To be escorted from the house by the police is probably the worst sort of domestic nightmare of every normal citizen. Although having the house burn down would seem to me to be a lot worse ... or getting flooded out with stinking storm run-off. Hell! Most things are worse than getting arrested. I've even been burglarised and that was lot less forgettable. My own worst fear is to be physically attacked, I'm pretty sure I would wet myself if I found msyelf staring at a deadly weapon that was aimed in my direction. In short getting busted is a bad thing but I guess I'll get over it. All the same the road is quite busy and it was matter of excrutiating embarrassment to me that the traffic crawling past slowed down even more to rubberneck the cops making an obvious bust and, bless their Doc Martened size 12's, the cops did what cops do best, they held up their arms to halt the flow and speed my crossing to the other side where the jam sandwich was parked in a no parking zone (the zig-zag approach to pedestrian crossing) and blocking the driveway access to two houses. I couldn't make it up!

The police station is a mile away. It was a short trip then and that is also a cause for bitter amusement. How typical of me even to get short changed on my once-in-a-lifetime trip by police-car. British police cars aren't. If they were there might still be British car manufacturing industry, which there isn't. The police car I was taken away in was a Peugeot or maybe a Vauxhall although as all modern European cars look alike I have trouble telling the difference. Either way it wasn't made in Britain and that's kinda irksome in non-specific but slightly xenophobic way.

I have been to that police station before. It was to produce a vehicle's registration documents and insurance after I got into a pile-up on the M25 London Orbital (it wasn't my fault but that doesn't mean you get to avoid the fun of establishing your legal right to be on the road in the first place. On that occasion I entered via the front doors. Now we pulled up at the side and I was directed to an imposing unmarked set of dark oak double doors. The doors looked quite civilised and I felt a slight easing of my distress levels as I imagined being led into a large cluttered office full of clattering typewriters and sweating overworked cops yelling into phones. Yeah I think I watched too much TV as kid, too. Anyway my delusional dream did not persist beyond the doors. Inside a few steps led downwards ... not good, not good ... and into a spare wide space in a corridor that stretched away into depressing gloom.

The wide space was a sort of office on one side with a high counter topped off with robust looking computer monitor cowls. There were a couple of uniformed men behind the desk, a small TV was mouned high up near the ceiling. It was showing the funeral of the former Prime Minister Ted Heath. Part of one wall was covered with little black and white CCTV screens, the other wall had a stack of lockers one of which had been crudely marked to indicate that it belonged to "Son of Sick Note" (so that's all right then. Cops do do have a sense of humour — although not a very original one — and they are also not above defacing public property for their own amusement.

My escort asked whose funeral it was? On being told it was Edward Heath he retorted that he didn't know he was dead. The custody officer's remark:

"Someone's made a hell of a mistake if he isn't.!" Brought a smile even to my otherwise quite miserable face.

The area opposite the counter was a cell that I took to be the local equivalent of a "drunk tank". It was an alcove separated from the rest of the corridor with steel bars. Anyone locked in would be unable to make contact with anyone outside though because there was also a substantial layer of something thick and transparent. The only item missing was Anthony Hopkins, but it was unoccupied and I hoped I wasn't to be the next occupant.

In vain I studied the floor for a painted line parallel to the counter positioned at an inconvenient distance from the counter and behind which I would be ordered to stand and not to cross ... I really have seen too much TV. Maybe a spell in stir will save my brain from total dissoluion. I was guided to the desk and introduced to the officer behind. No idea what his name was, although I was told, I don't rememember the names of people I want to keep as friends so there seems little point making an effort to remember this one. It's not as though we're likely to meet again next week at the mayor's cocktail party. I do note his function. He is the Custody Officer whose job it is to record my visit in excrutiatingly minute detail as well as to assure himself and his service that all of my rights, legal and human, are respected ... because it would awful if they screwed up somewhere and had later to let me go on a technicality. How ironic it is that the more rights a society so graciously hands to its citizens the longer a citizen has to be deprived of most of them in order to assure that all are being respected.

The booking into custody procedure is stultifyingly tedious. It consists first of the arresting officer making a statement which, in this case, began with an account of the IP's (Injured Party) allegations and ended at my house where I was preparing to take flight. I discovered that I was the PIC — Person In Custody. From there we moved on to establishing my identity which is another time consuming process that seems aimed at checking every damned corner of the national crime records. Not having a criminal record in these instances is a handicap. Everyone should go out and get a criminal record while they are young and carefree and such things don't hurt so much. Believe me it will save a lot of time and worry later on if you ever get in trouble with the law.

Eventually I was told of my basic rights: namely to keep schtoom, to have free legal advice, and a load of other stuff that was printed in a forgettable leaflet. To be honest the separate drugs and alcohol leaflets, provided by charities, were much more interesting and I contemplated declaring a drink problem ... a free shot or three might make the time pass quicker. Of course I am not that stupid! I declared my wish for the lawyer and a phone call to speak to a friend. Then comes the property bit. Ah. That hurts. Whatever possessed me to pack so much stuff into my bag before I left home. My change purse was bulging and every coin has to be counted and logged.

"Don't worry about the coppers," I quipped, oblivious of the pun. "Just leave me with the taxi fare home."

"Sorry," came the reply. "It all has to be counted." There was £19.24 Good lord! If I'd known I was that wealthy I'd have chartered a boat and escaped to Ireland to buy a farm. I was handed my mobile and asked to turn it off. How pathetic can you get? I didn't know how to turn it off, so I got the custody officer to do it for me ... I also got him to show me how to turn it back on for when I got out. That was a rare streak of optimism from me. When, not if. Finally there's a body search. Not an intimate one, but any kind of (uninvited) feeling up is not a pleasant experience, and I've been around long enough to have been frisked a lot during the various IRA campaigns that hurt most of the major British cities over the last 35 years, including Birmingham in 1974 when I was a student there. One of my friends was actually involved, professionally, in those tragedies. He helped to squeeze a gallon of plasma into a girl whose legs had stayed in the pub she'd been in. The girl died before sunrise and no-one I knew got or was offered any kind of counselling.

Eventually I am escorted to a cell. I cannot use description to describe the feelings; the heavy door slams behind you and you can either go mad with any combination of emotions or bite down hard on everything and hunker down into yourself and wait patiently for the situation to improve. I chose the latter. The cell was 10 feet by 6 with a stout wooden shelf that bore a 2" thick vinyl covered mattress. The mattress had a deep indentation in the middle and lesser one that I later found matched my shoulders. I wondered how many crims had reposed here waiting for the outcome of an investigation that might send them to jail or else back into the real world. There was a toilet in an alcove at the narrow end. The ceiling was high, maybe 10 or 11 feet, as were the windows, which were the kind made of thick glass cobbles. Everything was very echoey and there was no handle on the inside of the door. I stepped inside in a sullen mood of resignation. The body search still rankled, I could still feel the latex-covered hands of the female officer tracing the outlines of my flabby and neglected carcass. It hadn't helped that I wasn't wearing any underwear ....

Well dear diary, I will admit that I am lazy cow. But I am also resourceful. I realised that I had a good chance of getting out fairly quickly but that, of course, I had to take legal advice before deciding what to say (or how to say it) in presenting my case when I made myself available for interview. I am the world's worst waiter-in-line, I walk rather than wait for a bus for example. Now I was locked in with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no way to measure the passing of time. I decided then that my only option was to practise some relation tecnhiques. After maybe fifteen minutes I was so relaxed I could almost ooze out under the door. As if! It was so noisy I couldn't concentrate on anything, let alone relaxing. Loud voices, heavy footsteps on hard floors, heavy doors slamming. It's purest bedlam. I concluded that I had experienced all the jail time I was ever going to need. Anything more would amount to cruel and unusual punishment ....

After an hour I was led out to speak to my friend who promised to come and bail me out if I didn't ring her back before midnight. Then back to my cell, where more time elapsed before a friendly face peered through the little hatch that — for the want of the proper term — I shall call the "Joe Sent Me" and asked if I was there because of drugs, presumably because he was able to offer counselling and rehab. Later I was brought a coffee and quite a lot later I was collected to meet my free lawyer.

At last this was going to be sorted out! I asked what was the time. I'd been in custody for four hours.

Oral Descent

2005-08-01T11:28:00.000+01:00

I don't believe in fate or bad luck but it's not easy to shrug off those cultural bonds that tie most of us to our superstitious caveman souls. I am sat here feeling lower than a millipede's ankles trying to think of a reason to get activated. I guess blogging will have to do. I woke up to a dull ache from the general area of a tooth that probably needs root canal work but, frankly, too much knowledge is as dangerous as a little. Root treatment is an art that few dentists are actually capable of, and that sweeping generalisation demands explanation. This isn't a dentistry lecture however and suffice it to say that root canal treatement is soundly based in theory but the practise is so thoroughly hit and miss that if it were heart transpantlation there would be laws against it. If this were not true there would not be such legendary fear among the laity when the words root and canl are uttered in close conjunction. In short the pain would have to become a lot more frequent and a lot more severe and a lot less amenable to aspirin for me seriously to consider having the wretched thing's nerves extirpated. Meanwhile I am perfectly content, if not exactly happy, to wallow in self pity.

In spite of the dull ache in my jaw I woke with pleasant feelings of optimism after enjoying a seriously good night's sleep that had run from midnight to almost 8am without a break. That is so unusual for me that it's worth a note. I almost leaped out of bed and pulled the curtains aside to reveal a lovely pale-lit suburban vista. I don't keep much of a close track on the calender — I knew it was Monday and that seemed sufficient &mdash but I was aware that we are already in the neighbourhood of August. Opening the curtains and casement window showed me that the year is already getting late, that fat old sun in the sky is falling, past his zenith, and the morning light is noticeably thinner. In case that sounds like a reason to be sad it isn't. I love the passage of the seasons. The waxing and waning of the moon, the strenghtening and weakening of the sun's light, the changing patterns of life. I love it all.

The bright sky was also welcome because the weather here has been mostly cyclonic since I moved in &mdash my old student neighbourhood a few miles east of here was actually struck by an unusually powerful (T3-T4) tornado a few days ago leaving hundreds to face devastation and rebuilding. Today Britain sits under a ridge between two weak highs and the skies are bright and optimistic and so I flung open my bedroom door, feeling all froody, to see how Little Mad felt about the day.

After my first night here I took to shutting her into the kitchen overnight. It is where her food is and it's far enough from the bedroom that her plaintiff cries wouldn't disturb me — there's little one can do other than ignore such mewlings, if only to get my own rest. The kitchen was unoccupied. It was catless. It is a very small kitchen, but that did not stop me from performing an almost comic double-take. I guess we will never really move far enough from our monkey ancestry to be able to fool the putative visitor from Mars observing us from afar. We rely on our senses to tell us about the world around us but when we fail to see what we expected we go against reason and look again, in the same places, with utterly stupid optimism. I confess that I actually looked under the wool throw that I had folded into a pad for her to sit on.

It was obvious that she had managed to escape and I quickly checked the other rooms but I had already noticed that the little casement window in the kitchen was ajar. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of animal ingenuity. How much of so-called intelligence is merely persistence anyway? She started out as an untamable free spirit and it looks like she may finish up that way. She very much belonged to the old house anyway, it was the only place she had ever known after leaving her birthplace. And she had lived there as long as I had, bar a month or so.

At the time I moved into the old house with EP I was doing a little courier work, the sort that mostly involved collecting and delivering parcels. I spent a lot of time in the rural counties to the west of here and Mirelly found me while I waiting at a farmhouse door for someone to answer my knock. She was about three months old, black with white socks, white whiskers and white markings on her ventral surfaces ... there was one smeary looking mark on her chin that looked like she had just been caught at the cream jug. Her chest was well marked with a fairly standard tuxedo style bib, but her belly was the cutest. It was a ragged mixture of narrow, white, meandering bands that I soon took to referring to as her frilly underwear.

I have lived with a good number of cats and never found two that were alike. The little black and white fuzzball that came home with me a few weeks after we'd moved in was so full of attitude I quickly decided that she needed a big and dignified name. Big to go with her personality and dignified because she behaved so madly that it was even harder than usual not to laugh at her kittenish antics. Even the way she walked seemed contrived to arouse a chuckle. I chose Mirelly — a name I took from the scary female creation of Larry Niven: Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthra, a character in the novel A World Out Of Time whose overweening arrogance and vaulting ambition and irresistible charms probably say more about the author's unconscious misogyny than anything else ... but it's a great name and I always loved it! Mirelly the cat was well suited to the name. Vociferous and always around for mealtimes she kept the house well stocked with dead rodents and at least one pigeon that had been ringed. (She had neatly eaten one whole breast down to the keel bone before staggering off to leave the rest for the flies. I am ashamed to admit that I disposed of the evidence ... what if it had been a champion racing pigeon? Though I don't suppose that champion anythings are the sort who stop off for a rest halfway through a race.)

Mostly she was a free spirit. I had another cat at the time and they never made friends; a truce, yes, but fraternity isn't really in the feline psyche. Within days she had figured out the cat door and left the building. It took her more than three months to work the same magic in reverse so she was more often out than in and that never seemed to bother her. I guess she was born to open skies on the farm and being shut in never appealed to her. All the same I have moved several cats from one home to another and, in spite of the protests and fuss, keeping the cat in for a couple of weeks is the only sure way I know to get them fully imprinted on the new territory. I haven't lost one yet. On the other hand I never had one go AWOL within days of moving ....

So my day has started on a high only to fall so quickly off its perch that it took my incautious slurp of tea to reawaken the slumbering but not entirely quiet beast that is my right upper second bicuspid. Yow! It hasn't stopped hurting yet and since I used up all the aspirin yesterday it looks like I shall have sortie forth in search of fresh supplies. (Wonders if I could swap ibuprofen for aspirin somewhere ... I have tons of Adil and Neurofen but ibuprofen is contra-indicated by Atenolol. I don't use paracetamol because I consider it a relatively useless analgesic with serious toxicity. Besides, aspirin is more effective than heroine for dental pain.

Anyway losing Mirelly is strike two and my neanderthal roots are showing because I am sat here waiting for the third kick in the arse.

I really have plenty to be getting on with and maybe the cat will show up later. I will call my old neighbors later and ask them keep an eye open for her. I am thankful that I removed her collar that doubled as a key to let her come and go through the cat door. I had locked the door to allow her to get in but not out the day before the move and as far as I know it remains that way. The old house is only a couple of miles away and the possibility that she might find her way back there is strong. It would be awful if she succeeded and got inside only to starve because she couldn't get out again. Whatever her future I feel confident that she can feed herself, I also feel that she will show up again.

If I hadn't left that flipping kitchen window unlatched I would not have this anxiety and shame and misery. But that's my cross and I'll bear it with all my other woes. Maybe it is just true that I am never really happy unless I am miserable ... except that I know that isn't true, exactly. It's also true that my sunny outer shell isn't the real me either. Inside I am a turmoil of worries and doubts and fears and I don't suppose that makes me a lot different from anyone else either! I's just that I have spent so much of my life not absorbing the obvious that I have an awful lot of catching up to do. I still hope that I can do some of that catching up with Little Mad whom I am already missing more than I want to dwell upon right now.

La la la la la

2005-07-31T11:46:00.000+01:00

I broke my tale at what was admittedly a corny metaphor for a cliffhanger; me at the top of the stairs and more than one officer of the law inside the premises but so far unseen. It was urgent for me to stop there because I had slipped into one of my numerous bad habits - (the clue in the title's link). I was turning everything into a song. I get this trait from my mum who I used to adore to hear singing as she sashayed around the house polishing and cleaning like a demented Cinderella. I feel sure that at such times she was not holding a duster or damp cloth; in her mind she was floating among the clouds. Because that's how it is for me. I break into song when I am happy and when I am sad. It is not something apt to occur when I am more nearly balanced. I guess that's as good a definition of equanimity as I'm likely to be able to conjure.

Mum sang tunefully meaning that she had a good voice. She could hit the right notes, although she was untrained, and in consequence her register was natural ... which is a euphemism for saying it was somewhere between soprano and alto. I am not a musician either, but I am pretty sure that few people are naturally born with a classic vocal range. Her greatest virue as a singer was that she didn't attempt to bolster whatever weaknesses were present in her range with a warble. God how I hate to hear a warbling singer. Warbling is for birds, who do it prettily and not for effect. Vibrato is a skill and should be used when the composer requires it and not because the singer hasn't the confidence or the talent to hold a note for the required duration. I have only once heard a voice so clear and true that it made tears flow freely from my eyes and that was from an amateur who had no desire to turn professional; more's the pity.

My mum sang songs from the war, from shows and films of the 50's. I tend to a broader more catholic repertoire from musicals like Oliver and Grease to pop songs by the likes of the Carpenters, Abba and Cher to the rock and roll greats like Buddy Holly, Del Shannon, and not forgetting lounge singers and jazz. Hell, if I know the words and tune I'll have a go, and if I don't know the words I make them up — not an actual lyric ... just gobbledygook. I don't care. I don't do it for anyone else, it's pure selfish fun.

Of course singing for any reason isn't a bad habit. But like my mum when she was in full song mode, once I get there it is hard to turn off. It used to drive me nuts when I needed to talk to her and she was singing. Because then her singing became first an amusing trick and then just a trick and finally oh puhleeze! enough already Every word you uttered would drive her seamlessly into a new song. It's the psychiatrists' word association test set to music. I share the same fault in a similar but notably different way. With me it is more apt to occur in writing. I really was singing, sotto voce, I Will Survive as I started moving boxes. I did also think of the Sister Ray line "oh man I haven't got the time time", when I realised that the cops were real. But, in writing down my experience, I knew I wasn't going to be able to stop my own inventive inanity. I had wakened the playful beast and it wasn't quietly going to lay down and be a good wee-beastie. Besides the tale is too long to tell all at one sitting on this cranky memory deficient laptop.

The unseen male policeman called out my name again and the reason for the dark shadow in the hallway made itself apparent — that part of the house is poorly lit even without two extra large British bobbies in wearing 'stab vests' standing in the way of the only natural light. At the foot of the stairs a constable stepped into view. "Hello," I said, attracting his attention and thereby enjoying the temporary luxury of having a tall dark man look up at me. "How did you get in?"

"We have a key that was given to us by the owner, Mr. _____."

"Ah," I said. "He thinks he owns it, does he? That's interesting."

The officer squared himself and took charge of the situation. I expect that the EP had forewarned them that the suspect was armed with a very sharp tongue and even sharper wit and, therefore should be handled with extremely dense ear-plugs. I was asked to confirm my identity. I agreed that I was indeed the person he had named. I was then informed that the EP had alleged that I had stolen some property that belonged to EP and not to me and that they wanted any information I could give them that might shed light on the matter. This seemed sort of hopeful because they had not bothered to caution me concerning my "rights" ... oh yes, I didn't waste my youth; I watched Dixon of Dock Green and The Sweeney. I knew my rights. I told them the simple truth: that there had been a bike in the garage and it wasn't there now and I did not know where it was. Economical but not inaccurate. Correct but useless. Much like a Microsoft Help response, really. Oh, boy! I was on a roll!

"Mr. ____ said that you told him you had sold it," the officer said elliptically.

"Well, I can't comment on what he said because I wasn't there," I said flippantly. It was all going too easily and I guess that deep down I knew that. However, never say die ....

"Mr. ____ said that you are moving from here tomorrow and that he does not have a forwarding address —

uh oh!

"— for you. Can you tell us where you will moving to? Have you got a forwarding address?"

"Not for him, I haven't," I said. I think I even managed to snarl a little ... but maybe that is wishful thinking.

"In that case I have no alternative but to place you under arrest ...." He looked sort of sad and I guess that a policeman's lot is really not a happy one but that would be to repeat the crime I outlined at the top of this piece so I will not mention it again. "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence." It wasn't surreal it was beyond that it was swimmy-crazy. Everything went out of focus, not in a fainting way, but in a twisting sensation as though reality is little more than a Rubik's cube and God has just jerked things around to make a new pattern. The world, well my part in and of it, had just changed irrevocably. I would never again be the same person I was before. Of course that's all just self-pitying bollocks as well. I was just very, very scared. I wanted to sit down, hell! I wanted to lie down and curl up in the foetal position and go to sleep. Sleep seemed like a really sound solution to the whole problem.

I'll sleep on ....

Not really a bit of advice I can honestly say I have used much, if at all. Acting precipitously is pretty much a good description of me. Of course going to sleep for excessively long periods — usually in places other than bed, a sofa for instance — is pretty much symptomatic of many varieties of mental disorder. I become aware that I am under scrutiny. The two cops are watching me closely for signs of madness. I realise now that they cannot rule out any hazard. They are reviewing their ta da! "Risk Assessment". After all, I might whip out a concealed knife. Come to think of it having been given a key the polcie would undoubtedly have asked the key donor for information concerning any possible weapons in the house. Oh I bet he just loved telling them about all my cooks knives! What I really wanted was a nice cup of tea. A cigarette would have been a fair substitute but — I may be mad but not that mad — giving up once was tough enough. I doubt I have the strength to give up again. Besides if I am going to be "banged up" I may as save the fun of sourcing some "snout" for later ... I might very well be getting an opportunity to learn a good deal more of the lingua franca of the criminal underclasses so no sense in trying to do it all once.

Lamely and rather pathetically I asked if I might put some shoes on. It was agreed that I could and I took full advantage, grabbing a few handy items and stuffing them into my handbag. Oh how innocent I was! As though they allow persons in custody (PIC's) to have "property" in the cells with them! At least it gave me something to do and I dithered around, closing windows, locking doors, turning off electrical appliances. I came to the cat's bowl. So far the cops had been tight-lipped and had given away little in the way of comfort.

"Officer?" I said. "Look! I have a cat to look after. Do I need to worry about this or will I be coming home to avoid being up on RSPCA charges of animal neglect as well as my present troubles?" His answer was somewhat reassuring. He promised me that it was mostly a formality. A couple of hours at the most was what he suggested. That didn't seem so bad until he asked if I was ready in the sort of resigned way that suggested a cynical attitude towards the time it takes females to get ready for anything ... even to be arrested! I was as ready as I ever going to be.

"OK then, Trillian," he said. "As a courtesy to you I am not going to place you in handcuffs but I must warn you that if you try to run away when we get outside my super-fit young colleague here will most certainly catch you and tackle you roughly to the ground." I took a moment to study the younger cop. He looked lean and mean and ... well ... "fit". To use one of my grandmother's coarser sayings, I would not be unhappy to be darning his socks.

Oh! Come on! This is serious, man!

"Don't worry, I won't be running anywhere," I assured them. Privately I suspect that my race fitness would take a lot more working-out time than I am likely to find motivation for anytime soon enough to matter. Even the idea that being able to outrun capture could have some uses doesn't do much for me. "I will go where you direct and I will not do anything until directed, that OK?" I tried to smile. I wanted to look co-operative. I suspect that I was going through a well recognised sequence of emotional responses to a stressful situation and, now as I am writing this down, I am reminded of that very funny sequence when Homer Simpson is reading a helpful hospital leaflet titled "So You're Going To Die" after he'd eaten some Blow Fish in a Japansese restaurant. As he read aloud each symptom that a person experiences when facing certain death (denial, depression etc.) he reacted as each symptom manifested in his tone of voice, facial expression and posture. I wish I could have thought of that at the time. It might have made me smile, but then again, perhaps not. The lawmen might have thought I was smirking and as things turned out a smirk wouldn't have been smart move.

Habeas Corpus

2005-07-30T19:02:00.000+01:00

I passed the two weeks that elapsed between the out of the blue phone call and last Monday in an aimless fugue. It would not be a lazy metaphor to say that I was like a pilot in a thick fog. Landing was out of the question but so was knowing where I was going ... or knowing when I was about to arrive. I was, however, in little doubt that when the moment of arrival came, I would have no problem noticing. Which is sort of ironic in a squaring the circle kind of way because I began this blog with the idea that armageddon was somehow lurking beyond our species' perceptual horizon; that we could sense it and that we were waiting with patient resignation for its arrival.

That was me alright on Monday. I had crawled out of bed and found very little in the way of motivation for anything. My living conditions, having for a time emerged from a heavy dose of bekippling that had required some serious trips to the municipal dump and recycling centre, not to mention industrial quantities of bleach, had returned to the squalid mess that I find so hateful and depressing. I had a mother-in-law who was a depressive. She was probably bi-polar and she rode waves and troughs in line with her weight. Depressed she would stop eating and get skinny. Skinny, her mood would elevate and this would encourage further mood-boosting activity like buying a new wardrobe. Then the bills arrived and bang! Back to the pits! I'm somewhat the same with mess and housework. Clean me up and I get happy; let me get too happy and I go out to buy stuff. Stuff gets dirty, clutters up the cupboards, and that makes me feel bad. As soon as I start feeling bad I figure the best solution is leave it alone for a day ... I'll definitely feel more like cleaning up tomorrow. (I know I won't, but I'm the only one who doesn't believe my outrageous lies and anyway by the time I get to stage of lying to myself I am beyond caring.

Perversely, as these things go, I had finally succeeded in turning down my jumping at shadows threshold, having passed the last ten days leaping out of my skin every time I heard a bump or thump. I failed to hear the EP breaking into my back garden. The first indication that I was not the only human being on the property was a loud and vigorous rapping at the window followed quickly by some violent crashing at the back door. Cautiously I looked around the edge of the curtain and saw the EP (with his wife in tow) in the back yard. He was engaged in some strenuous activity that seemed intended to kick his way through the back door. That then was my chuckle number one. Kicking down the door would have expensive and time consuming consequences. The door however had a cat door installed in a knock-out panel. Easier and cheaper to get past. Never one to be slow on the uptake, I quickly apprehended that the EP was one extremely pissed-off chappie and that he was therefore beyond reason and unpredictable.

Wanton damage is not an activity I live with happily. I hate to see it and I so rarely have been a party to it I am genuinely stuck for an example ... I must have done something once or twice, but then it was probably more accidental than deliberate. I headed for the back door. The EP spotted me on the other side of the glass and ordered me to open the door. Yeah! Like I felt there was a choice; open it or wait for it crash in still bolted and hinged to it's frame. (And given the ant activity in the neighboring brickwork It wouldn't have surprised me if half the wall wouldn't have come down with the door ... but that's a conjectural luxury I can only dream about.

As soon as the door was open he was inside and shouting demands for information concerning the bike. Where was it? Etc. If the sudden presence in my house of two angry shouting people hadn't been so intimidating the situation would have been quite funny. Whatever the man's suspicions wasn't there even a trace of a possibility that the bike had in fact just been stolen by passing opportunist criminals? His mindless anger and his unreasonably accurate landing on the truth was ... well, irksome. Plan A had called for denial of everything. There wasn't a plan B. I created one on the spot.

"I sold it," I said. I flounced away, mainly in the hope of avoiding another spit-shower. Why do angry folks need to shout into people's faces? I do not know what reply he had expected and I guess I'll never know. It hurts to think that he maybe anticipated hearing that I'd had it crushed, or even that I had acted out of spite. It wasn't spite that motivated me. It was actually a a feeling for the machinery. I don't have much in the way of empathy for machines but there is great historical and cultural value in old bits of engineering and even if I don't share it directly I can sense and acknowledge that cherishing and preserving such material is a worthwhile activity.

The fact is that more than 15 months had elapsed since I had last heard from him, and that only by telephone. During that time I had been to some pretty dark and dingy pits of despair. During that time I had lost a raft of computer and cell phone records and in consequence had no way of contacting the silly arse anyway. During that time he had known that I was depressed because I had told him I was under treatment at the time of last contact. For all he knew I was dead ... by my own hands or by neglect. In all that time neither he, nor the new Mrs EP, had once made an effort to check upon the security and status of his property — not the real estate, not the metal stored inside it. And now, suddenly I am to be made the scapegoat for his careless complacency? Well, yes it seems I was. Oh well, my shoulders are broad.

Over the following ten minutes I was accused of a lot of things. Most were untrue and most of the rest were founded in false assumptions. Me? I figured I'd said enough already. I was given the rest of the day to get my "stuff" and get out of there! I didn't take that too seriously, but only a fool shows a hand before needs be. I said I'd be gone by the end of the week — I'd had what I wanted, thank you very much, I didn't need to stick around now. No sir!

They left, taking a key with them. Fair enough. They said they were going to see a lawyer to see about sorting out the financial mess I had "created" ... er, excuse me, isn't all of this in your name, sunshine? It wasn't me who fucked off to the Wildnerness leaving behind debts that you have never acknowledged but luckily for you are not the arrestable kind. While they were gone I made some urgent phone calls. I was a bit tearful at times. It was shock, I guess. Within an hour I had a removal company booked to arrive at 10am on Wednesday and, even better, someone from the company would drop off some packing cases within an hour. There are things I hate about city living, but being able fix up just about anything at an hours notice isn't one of them!

At 5 past 2 there was a knock at the front door. A cheerful man delivered 20 large flat cartons that had (according to the printing on the outside) been made for Panasonic microwave ovens. Unfortunately no-one had thought to consider that flat cartons need strong sticky tape to hold them together. The delivery guy had none in his van and I said that it was OK cos I could lay my hand on all I wanted at the hardware shop at the end of the street. We bid farewell and adieu until the day after tomorrow and I closed the door and started dragging the cartons to rooms. So many here, this many there, a couple for that room. I even started to hum-sing a cheery little song ... corny but true I improvised my way through a few bars of Gloria Gaynor's I will Survive. Of course what was happening was the corniest of Hollywood hiatuses between the final acts. The guillotine blade was jittering on its restraining peg and was about to fall with a dreadful crunch.

There was another knock at the door. There were few possibilities as to who was at the door. Packing case delivery man has found some sticky tape ... or EP has lost another key. (I forgot to mention that losing keys is as close as I found him to get as regards finding a vocation.) I approached the front door with my usual caution and was thankful for that. Because I could hear voices outside, human voices and metallic disemebodied ones, the kind of voices that come out of walkie-talkies; I could even hear the squelches between the short sharp speeches. I also heard my name in connection with a "we're at the address of ...". I panicked and went upstairs to look out from behind a bedroom window curtain. I decided that I really had lost all of my marbles because some words flashed into my mind:
Who's that knocking Could it be the police? They come and take me for a ride-ride

Oh no man! I haven't got the time!

So I decided that I had lost it. Lost the plot. Lost my mind. I was out to lunch. No-one was home. Tilt. Game Over. DO NOT PASS GO ... erm, but I had collected £400 enough for hotel on Mayfair and Park Lane! I looked out the bedroom window. Yep, there's a cop car outside. While I am still contemplating a rooftop escape &mdash damn my fear of heights &mdash I hear my name being called by voices I do not know. Interestingly they are in the house.

Oh ... My ... God! They're coming to take me away. All the same, hope springs eternal and my mouth has never let me down, I can talk my way out of it, sure I can ....

Of course it turned out that I couldn't ... well, not there and then, I couldn't.

Dead Parrot Sketch

2005-07-30T09:28:00.000+01:00

I am suffering from chronic depression; I am not stupid!

There have been moments recently when I have felt that it might be a good idea to have that printed on a tee-shirt to save time when dealing with people. Yesterday I had the fun of attempting to intitiate a complaint and suddenly I felt like John Cleese embattled with a dopey shopkeeper who is incapable of responding appropriately to the appallingly dismal level of service that, for his sins, he is currently "front and centre" of and thereby directly responsible for.

My house move was precipitated, not to say catapulted foward, by the events that exploded my cosily idle head-in-the-sand idyll. Needless to say sudden and precipitous house-moving carries any number of hazards. Thankfully one of the worst potential hazards, that of an unpleasant escalation of the stress ordinarily involved, was rendered largely ineffectual because getting arrested was kind of analgous to being hit over the head with an axe as a cure for migraine. All of this boils down to the fact that come yesterday I could no longer postpone a trip to the pharmacy to collect the balance of my prescribed medicine.

I have mentioned before that my former domicile had a neat geographic location being equidistant from three completely different urban centres. The nicest of those, in ambience terms, is also one of the least pleasant in that it is a trifle middle-class snooty, a little expensive and rather limited in the choice of shops if your shopping list contains anything remotely exotic. It is also the location of my general practitioner and so it also the place where I have my prescriptions made up; the pharmacy — one of Jesse Boot's emporia &mdash is only a 2 minute walk from the doctor's surgery.

The doctor is a darling and his place of business is the least like a modern twenty-first century icon of production-line medicine I could imagine. I wouldn't change him for the world. The pharmacy is another matter. When I first hit the area there was a choice of three: Boots, a branch of another nationwide chain and an independent. One has ceased its pharmacy operations leaving just Boots and the independent. I took my last prescription to Boots as I always do ... mostly because I have a Boots loyalty card and over the years I've had it the pleasure of discovering that suddenly I have enough points for a serious treat is never less than the same childish pleasure one gets from ripping the paper from a long awaited birthday gift. I am easily pleased, I guess. Anywya, for reasons I failed to understand at the time, and still do, come to that, the Boots pharmacy was unable to fill my order. They did not half sufficient capsules to make up the required 28 day supply. After some negotiation I settled for leaving the store with 18 caps and the staff promised the remainder would be in store the following day and I could collect any time .... Big mistake!

Give me an inch and I will take it all the way down to last angstrom with the emphasis very much on the angst. The caps were venlafaxine 150mg but I also take a 75mg cap of the same every morning. I had plenty of the latter ... yeah! You're with me already. I ran out of the 75mg jobbies (if that isn't a Freudian scatalogical slip I don't know anything!) on Thursday night and so a journey to the land that time forgot became an overnight necessity. I finally set out in middle of Friday afternoon having finally run out of suddenly more urgent (and interesting) things that simply had to be done. I also needed to stock up on some fresh food so it would have been an excellent plan to take with me some of those stout carrier bags that the large supermarket chains have taken to selling in the hopes of weaning us off those free self-ripping things that are normally available to pack up the purchases. Naturally I did not plan nearly so far ahead. Getting to the pharmacy was my goal and nothing else was important until I had gotten my fix.

The first clue that something was awry came when the 12 year old pharmacist finally abandonned his search of the shelf behind the counter and went to the back of his little domain and began to riffle through a small box of scripts. In seconds he pulled one particular paper slip free and brought it to the counter working his face like bad actor hamming his way into something he was hoping might pass for concern by the time he cleared the stage wings and emerged into the limelight. He didn't fool me.

"I am sorry, but there has been an error," he said. He did look sorry. Sorry that he was the one who was stuck with the discovery of the incompetence and sorrier still that he was stuck with giving out the good news. I allowed a pregnant pause to smoulder in the inter-galactic chasm that lay between his concern for — and comprehension of — the real situation and mine. At length he realised that my muteness wasn't going miraculously to resolve itself without further input. "I can have them for you in the morning," he added, clearly struggling to remind himself not to smile hopefully as if he were suddenly telepathically aware that such a facial expression could easily be misunderstood. It wouldn't have been; I am an excellent reader of minds and of body language. I would however have maliciously mistaken a smile for a smirk, had one shown up, and beaten him with it about the head with delighted abandon, joyful to exploit a careless obsequious gesture. Unfortunately this was a well-trained 12 year old pharmacist. Clearly I needed to change up a gear. What we need here is good old-fashioned english charm ....

"I beg your pardon?" I said, my face a rigid shell.

"I'm afraid," he said, oozing professional calm. "There has been a mix up. I am sorry but we don't have these in stock."

"But how can that be possible?" I said. I waved my collection slip without vigour, just enough to draw his eyes to it. "They have been on order for three weeks." He looked as though he suddenly wished he had chosen to vivisect Canadian seal pups on the doorstep of an animal-rights campaign group's headquarters for a profession. His eyes fell to his computer screen. His fingers tapped at the keyboard. His eyes brightened with youthful enthusiasm.

"I just ordered them. They'll be here tomorrow."

"Excuse me?"
He repeated himself. Confident, foolish youth. Hah!
"And tonight?" I paused to allow the concept to sink in. I suspect he was thinking of wine bars, maybe a chicken balti, perhaps a movie ... probably all three. There wasn't a glimmer of comprehension in his eyes. "What do I take tonight?" I prompted.
Few questions have no answer. I don't know is pretty good one, if it is honest. However, it is with regret that I must bring the 12 year old pharmacist to the realisation to the knowledge that I am sorry isn't even close to being a good answer to my question. "I'm very sorry," he said.

Nice try, mate, but no cigar!

"I am not disputing that but it doesn't answer my question," I said tartly. "What do I take tonight? You're supposed to be the pharmacist, I imagine you might have some idea as to the reason I have been prescribed the medication. Are you completely happy with the idea that I will be fit and well tomorrow to arrive and collect?" Ooh I am mean. What a loaded question. I would massacre him if he dared answer. He was a clever bugger though. The Jesse Boot customer relations training must be first rate ... however although you can teach a parrot to say pretty polly it does not mean the damned avian knows what it's talking about. With almost admirable doggedness he stuck to the script.

"I am very sorry," he said. "But I am afraid that mistakes do happen ...". The ellipsis was almost to much to bear! I am expected to empathise with him? He thinks he can use verbal italics on me!

"Mistakes?" I said allowing the slightest of increases of volume that my laryngeal rheostat permits. "This isn't a mistake it is negligent incompetence!" There were customers behind me and they were shuffling about in that beautifully uncomfortable way that Brits affect when a looney materialises in the queue. That's OK with me. My psychiatrist agrees that I am safe to be out in the community but if having a psychiatrist makes me a looney then that's not a problem for me.

"I am very sorry. There is nothing I can do." It was clear that he needed to be moved from his script if this argument was to progress.

"So am I," I said. "I want to make a complaint. Have you an address I can write to?" And so we moved from the risible to the surreal.

He sidestepped to the cash register, rang up no sale and hauled out a tongue of blank Boots' company till roll paper and ripped off a few inches. He folded it carefully and trying — but failing — notto seem as though he was talking to a feeb he showed me the telephone number of the company's head office. "If you call this number someone will help you to deal with your complaint."

By now I am acutely conscious of the Python-esque atmosphere that had formed. I looked around beseechingly at my fellow customers. A lady behind me was waiting for her pills and turning back to the counter I noticed that the 12 year old pharmacist's hands were occupied with stuffing a box of pills into a paper bag. Outrage swelled in breast and if my beta receptors weren't also therapeutically blocked by Atenolol my blood pressure would have risen while my pulse rate would climbed to the sort of levels achieved by NASA astronauts around the time they realise that they're sitting on a very large bomb and the only way off is straight up.

"A phone number?" I said feigning shock and distress. "I want an address. I want a named individual to complain to. That is a National Health Service prescription, you are paid by the NHS for dispensing it and I have a legal right to competence and care."

"Yes, madam, but mistakes do happen," he was getting the Python bug too ....

"Mistakes, yes," I agreed. "This isn't a mistake. It is incompetence or negligence or both. It took you half a dozen mouse clicks to order the drugs didn't it? I have a receipt that tells me that the drugs were ordered 3 weeks ago when obviously they were not. That is negligence, not a mistake. A mistake is dispensing the wrong drug. I can accept mistakes. Mistakes are doing the wrong thing. Someone here — and I accuse no individual — did not make a mistake they did nothing. That is negligence, not an error. You pharmacists are so scared of making errors it takes you half an hour to take a box off a shelf and to apply a computer printed sticky label on it. A twelve year old could be safely trained to do your job." I decided it was time I shut up. Before I pointed out that I thought he was in fact only twelve anyway.

Of course he dissembled. I disagreed and remained adamant. He showed no sign of acceptance of corporate responsibility. There was a total absence of any hint that mind had wandered down through the bullet point list of skills to employ in dealing with problem customers. The one that looks like —

Problem Solving Skills

— as for personal initiative and dedication ... pfah! I had already worked out for myself what the solution was, but he must have attended the class on how to deal with "difficult" customers because Boots is a very large manufacturing and retailing drug and personal products outfit. They recruit their graduates direct from the universities and induct them through the undoubtedly thorough and scientifically rigorous corporate policies on everything from equal opportunities through personal development plans to customer relations and control of hazardous substances and dangerous drugs. My problem wasn't that tough to figure out! I continued to chip away at his resistance with helpful prompts.

"And if I was a diabetic? You would advise returning tomorrow for my insulin?"

"Good job I don't have asthma and you're all out of Ventolin ....

A lady reached over my shoulder to hand in a prescription to be made up. "I shouldn't bother, chick," I said with a warm, but wry smile. "You'd be better off going to _____'s, cos these'll get you started with half a batch then expect you go cold turkey halfway through if you have the audacity to come back for the rest."

There was a very loud clank sound ... well I thought I ought to have heard such a sound! It was the sound of a penny dropping in the 12 year old pharmacist's hardly used noggin. "Maybe," he said. "I could run over the road to _____'s and see if they could loan me some Efexor to tide you over ...". His expression was one of sheer joy. I almost expected him to hold his hands above his head, clapping them together as he did a little hornpipe dance of celebration over his sudden flash of inspired problem-solving.

Hoo-bloody-ray!

"You do that sunshine and I'll be very happy customer," I said with a dead-pan expression. However I couldn't resist my parting shot. "You got half an hour ...."

I used the half hour to patronise the local branch of a supermarket chain that is the ultimate chameleon of the UK retail scene. This chain has traded under more names than can be counted. It caters to so many demographic mixes that if it were a sentient entity it would be in permanent therapy for serious multiple personality disorder. This particular store sells french-made store-baked baguettes as opposed to the execrable crumbly Canadian flour "french stick" found in more down-market locations. They also sell a passable brie and a not undrinkable Australian shiraz, however their plastic carrier bags are rubbish and they hurt my hands to carry home so it's back to the bum-slappers for me ... besides that store is within walking distance and even better is downhill all the way back. They also sell buttermilk which is almost unique in the UK.

I am the very model of a calm equanimity this morning. My cat is dozing agreeably on the window sill getting acquainted with the Saturday morning habits of the neighbours and a little while ago I found my coffee grinder, cafetiere, and a large jar of dark-roasted beans so maybe this afternoon or tonight I shall feel likr sitting down to commence work on my time as a PIC.

Honesty is the key —

2005-07-29T13:55:00.000+01:00

— but it's the dishonesty that leads to the need for one.

On such a note then I approach the subject of my crime and punishment. But first I feel a need to wander off on a diversion. This morning I was taking my usual perambulation around the interweb thingy, starting as I often do at that pleasantly domestic coffee-shop that is Sharon's Blog, where I was tickled half to death with her hysterically funny account of a colonoscopy — and of a gastroenterologist who expressed an admiration for her teeth. I added (or rather I believed that I had added) a suitably dry comment of my own concerning the lack of depth of a dental pratcitioner's probings versus the surprising heights to which colonoscopists might ascend in their quests for interesting scenery. But ... well, hey! I get distracted a lot. I have a cat who is presently suffering from third degree cabin fever of a severity that even concentrated ear scratching does not ameliorate. Mirelly Lyra Zeelashishthra (who would have been Hotblack Desiato had she been a male) is very much a cat with attitude, most of it utterly insane; a lucky happenstance because it means that her nickname used only by me — Little Mad — is rather more apt than was intended when it was coined; it was originally a fond contraction of Little Madam ... mostly because she has, as has been said, a lot of hoity-toity feline attitude. It was, then, Little Mad's fault that I somehow reloaded the browser tab with my witty rejoinder to Sharon's colonoscopy escapade before it was fully and irrevocably posted.

My morning constitutional on the virtual surfboard is also a bit of an on off experience. I wander in and out as I punctuate my activities with cat-fondling, tea drinking, drug-taking and even calorie-refuelling; this morning I treated myself to a delicious bacon sandwich for example. So it was later that I got sidetracked again as, first I returned to Perspectacles to see what other comments had been added and then puzzlement as I found that my own limp contribution was conspicuously absent. Paranoia is a wonderful affliction. I don't actually suffer from paranoia in the official sense that I have a psychiatric opinion attesting to it, but I no longer suspect that I am alone in leaping rapidly and foolishly into the deepest pit of paranoid self-pity the moment the opportunity arises to place the blame for some oversight upon the general and indifferent, but peversely organised, resistance of the whole world to one's plans, ambitions and designs.

So all of this long-winded detour is by way explaining how I ended up taking a fascinated look at the blog of fellow Sharon fan. Heather's blog — Blog Blah Blah was where I ended up after studying her comments regarding Sharon's post. There, I read her self-critical musings as she discussed her own reluctance to share some secrets and her sudden realisation that it is not an issue; that no topic is, or should be, too shameful and too secret to share with the world that is mostly filled with one's friends and those that mostly love and respect us.

Heather's summation neatly catechised my own feelings and my recent arrest has made me realise that freedom is a thing to savour and not to take for granted as well as to draw my attention to the fact that there are few crimes that are beyond the pale. As a child, I was brought up under the Anglican aethos — though ours wase not a strictly church-based family faith — and my upbringing was soundly rooted in the basic principles of simple Christian goodness. I feel that is not a bad foundation for anyone's life. It does however begin, pretty much, with a code of ten cardinal rules that either seem pretty inflexible or else harshly foolish or both. A man who refuses point-blank to bear any kind of false witness is apt to find himself on the painful end of flying crockery if he expresses his honest opinion of his female companion's new hair cut ... and lest there be confusion on the matter there is no commandment against hitting hubby over the head with a frying pan; the matter only becomes a case for Mosesian law if the blow is violent enough to terminate the victim.

Handicapped, as so many of my contemporaries are then, by that odd Old Testamental codex that so shapes our moral outlook, both as to our own behaviour as well as in respect of our expectations of the behaviour of every-damned-one-else we find it hard to admit both the possibility of breaking laws; let alone the shame and ignominy of being caught.

The motorcycle I sold was a 1963 BSA with a sidecar. The sidecar was the fully enclosed kind that looks a little like a surgical boot or else, perhaps, a crudely homebuilt and hopelessly unaerodynamic aircraft fuselage. After I sold the damned thing, I realised that I had gained a sudden and imperative incentive to pile pressure upon my plans for relocation. Not being around when the crime was discovered seemed, at the very least, the wisest and only sane option. I figured that I had a fortnight. Luckily that was also the amount of time that I also claculated was needed. Unfortunately I tend to estimate projects that involve my own voluntary and self-motivated input with a vague and groundless optimism based — mostly — upon my limited, but not unsuccessful, experience at project management involving other people. It is impossible, I have to note with reluctance, to dismiss oneself from a task or project for sloth, procrastination or even incompetence. Never employ yourself would seem a promising axiom; well it would to an idle optimist like myself who tends to loiter around pessimism because it seems to involve rather less effort.

Ten days elapsed and I was at that juncture of a hot and sticky weekend that Douglas Adams memorably described as The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul. Nneedless to say, due to the heat and humidity, little work had been gotten from the recalcitrant workforce! I was facing a crisis and engaged in frantically replanning the outstanding work to be completed when the telephone rang and, like a lamb to slaughter &mdash more accurately like an Ealing comedy idiot behaving in the exact contrary manner to both common sense and standing orders — I answered it instead of leaving to it to ring and then using 1471 to ID the caller and decide for myself if I wished to return the call. It was the former partner calling to say that he wanted to arrange a trip down from the wilderness to collect his bike.

I went tharn. If you haven't read Watership Down that won't make a lot of sense. Technically only floppy-eared rodents can go tharn. Big, over-cerebrated apes tend to go into change of underwear scenarios. I cannot quite recall what I told him it but it was not related to any version of the truth. I also concluded the conversation with the distinct impression that he hadn't swallowed a word I had said and that if he was starting his car engine at that moment I had exactly six hours to run for the hills.

It was at that moment that it occurred to me that I would be depriving myself of the opportunity to experience, in the flesh, his reactions to the discovery of that aforementioned oily stain on the garage floor and its associated disturbed drift of eight years worth of autumn leaves that had blown in thru gaps and accumulated around the decaying metal and thereby creating a bizarrely Mad-Maxian harvest festival display in an otherwise unremarkable concrete and asbestos pre-fab garage.

To state the fact baldly: I simply had to stay around a week or two longer to see what would happen. I owed it to myself to witness the outcome because not to stay would have been the more unforgivable dishonesty ... the denial of a continuing and not entirely worthy (nor admirable) interest. My salacious tort needed to have its concluding full stop and I could not for any risk ignore the demands of my own catlike curiosity. I had to see it happen.

I saw.

Goodbye Old Chaos. Hello New Chaos!

2005-07-28T17:26:00.000+01:00

It is a little over twelve month since I began this erratic record of a dysfunctional life that was quietly gurgling down a will-sapping maelstrom of anxiety and depressive negativity. My intitial coping strategy had been the mind-numbingly vacuous activity of doing nothing. In strict and pedantic terms of course I am aware of a certain ironic, not to say oxymoronic, non sequitur; of course I also realise that I have now fallen foul of the tautology as well. Such are the trials of the motor-mouth who spews vocabulary as a substitute for sharing confidences.

None of which explains my de-chrysalisization [Sic] which has occurred this week but that is a longer yarn and one that deserves a longer and fuller examination in words, partly for my own savour and partly for honesty. Honesty because the catalyst for the sudden track-switching was a certain rather dishonest transaction of mine and the consequential unexpectedly beneficial outcome. I shall maybe never fully succeed in convincing myself of my own worth as a writer -- I too often describe myself as a writer manqué anyway -- but any writer, good or bad, will agree that no experience is without value when it comes to that odd mental filing system we use as a repository for ideas and germs for ideas for bits of writing. So those who write blogs will quickly recognise the immense value, for a writer, of being arrested by the police. I have racked up more than half a century of living in a rule-raddled society without breaking any of the more serious arrestable ones and then just when I thought it was safe to assume I was past my best in terms of my opportunities for a life of crime, that larger Life (the one with the capital L) ups and drops a surprise in my lap and I found myself in a police cell wondering how the hell anyone manages to smuggle an item past the custody officers' body search with which to carve grafitti in the chipped paintwork that passes for decor suitable for those held in that innocent limbo between absolute freedom and "prisoner" while police enquiries ensue and a legal advocate located. I suspect that it does not need to be mentioned that the grafitti almost exclusively dwelt upon the artist's undoubted innocence.

My crime was rather serious. The absence of the flippancy of quotation marks indicates an uncommon (for me) nod in the general direction of serious. It was theft. I sold something that did not belong to me. For the last few weeks I have been in an irritating and stressful hiatus between one home and another. I acquired a tenancy on a run-down but otherwise sound and sturdy bungalow with plenty of garden and a neat, peacable neighbouring community. In contrasr, my place of residence for the last 9 years has become an increasingly depressing burden to me. A place of mounting debts and structural deteriorations (from ant infestations to earthquake subsidence). My recent depression further compounded the matter by adding to the dismal atmosphere, inside and outside the property, by my own neglect of the place in regard to simple housekeeping. Windows got grimier, floors got dustier and the kitchen ... I suspect that new forms of intelligent life may yet be evolving in some nooks and crannies therein. Meanwhile I was just a tenant. A tenant with no legal rights because the landlord was in absentia leaving me without a rental agreement and (being only absent for 2 years or so) without even the dubious luxury of a squatter's rights. The landlord was my former partner.

So I must talk about that "property" that was not mine. There was a garage, in which was kept a motorcycle. I considered it junk, in the way and frankly, a nuisance. I made no secret of my attitude toward it in my conversations with neighbours and one day a few weeks ago I was approached by some "gentlemen" at my door who informed me they had heard of my dilemna and expressed a willing desire to purchase this item from me. A sum was mentioned. Cash money was held out in front of my eyes. It was almost as much money as I had lent to my former partner almost 6 years ago, while we were still on relatively friendly terms; a loan that had never been repaid, or even formally acknowledged. Well I may be secretive and (like most of us, I suspect) prone to small dishonesties, but I do not admit ever to have indulged in fraudulent deception. I declined to sell and to accept the cash. The property was not mine to sell. I could offer no legal title, no bill of sale, no receipt. Such a sale was out of the question because the buyer would be in possession of a useless, illegal motorised vehicle that could not be legally registered for use. I was told that the junkified, decrepit and rusted-to-buggery machinery was not wanted as a possible runner but for spare parts and breaking. At a stroke my fraud or deception veto was trumped the emptor was utterly self-caveated ... with my part in the construction of the caution a relative sideshow. Beside the smell of a wad of slightly used 20's, which were doubtless fresh out of an ATM, was still wafting pleasantly into the nostrils of my purse, in which unpaid bills cowered in terror of (re)discovery.

The transaction, then, was simple. I accepted a modest but useful sum of cash and with little further reflection of a remorseful nature, I turned my back on the deed. Shameful. I deserved to be locked up for such a crime. Little did I think that incarceration was a real possibility. The only real puzzle, for me, is would I have conducted my affairs between then and the date of my arrest any differently had I obtained the gift of foresight? I have had a day or two to calm down and to reclaim a sufficiently firm grip on the handles of sanity to believe that I would not. The experience was actually deliciously funny and -- counter to my prior expectations -- I find that I am neither ashamed of nor contrite for my experience at the hands of good old British Justice.

But I wish to make this a record of fact as well as one of amused detachment and for that I am planning to save my powder and to publish my best account of the events that led to my arrest, my subsequent treatment and my later flight to a safe and, mercifully, anonymous new location. Justice has been done and it was seen to be done by all who were involved. Nothing is quite so satisfying as taking a large portion of cold revenge upon a person who is to all intents and purposes beyond all reach. I once described him as the least blackmailable person I have ever known. A man who thought himself without a single vulnerability ... but there was one and I found it. It was worth hanging around, like rabbit caught in the headlights of a truck, waiting for my crime to be discovered and to take "the consequences of my actions" (so sanctimonious are the declamations of the deservedly, but technically innocent, aggrieved). It was worth it because elsewise I would not have seen the expression on his face when he discovered that his precious bit of antique british engineering was no more than an oily patch on the dusty concrete floor. And writer or not I am unwilling to attempt a description of it. A major aspect of literature is that it depends in some measure for its success upon the imagination of the reader. I hate so to read tripe that hackneys out the same old metaphors for rage ... or any other condition of emotional extreme, don't you.

Little Green Papers

2005-06-22T17:19:00.000+01:00

I have the kind of life in which very little happens. It has settled down into a pleasantly dull routine that involves doing as little as possible for spells of time that vary from hours to weeks punctuated with intense bursts of manic enthusiasm. Of course this is obvious from my blogging. I do a bit and then rest upon my laurels for a month or six. Hell's teeth I even found an old school report that lauded my unexpectedly large improvement in grades during the preceding term but warningly also spoke of concern regarding my tendency to dwell upon my past glories. I hate to be so transparent. It is bad enough knowing that others have a low opinion of one's determination but it's utterly despicable of them to voice that opinion at every opportunity. Even if they were teachers.

The trouble with an uneventful life is that when events occur they sail by the window of consciousness and are too easily mistaken for humdrum passing scenery and they get — not so much forgotten — as overlooked. Either that or noteworthy events come tumbling along like a flash flood or an avalanche and one is swept away unable to keep a foothold on a semblance of a foundation upon which to set up base camp and begin the retelling: 'This is how it happened ...'. (That is my all time favorite opening for a short story and I am damned if I can remember who the author was!) The last few days have seen me flounderingly struggle to keep my head above water. I don't need this much excitement. It's not good for my blood pressure or my chronic anxiety condition. Especially not at time when I am moving house, which is the most stressful of life's little travails after bereavement and divorce — I know this because I read it in a Reader's Digest in a doctor's waiting room ... ooh two dress sizes ago.

In the last few days I have gotten involved in my country's legislative process. It's too much. Apparently I am not just expected to vote once every four years or so but now 'they' want my opinions about the laws before they make them. The whole process struck me as highly amusing in a Douglas Adams kind of way as I wondered if anyone would appreciate the joke if I enquired into whether anyone had conducted any studies to find out if people wanted 'well being' that could be anally inserted. There was an excellent lunch though and the conference facilities were very much in premier echelon of such places of corporate hospitality — which is an oblique way of referring to the football club that was our host. I forwent the opportunity to gaze upon the hallowed turf ... I've got way too much turf of my own and all of it is in direst need of a good scything. Maybe I could put it on ebay. Hay for sale: buyer to collect ... I'll just wait to mention the need for cutting it until the buyer arrives.

I have a very low threshold of tolerance for the humbug and bunco of politicking. Those traits may be great as entertainment but self-aggrandisment and axe-grinders and single-issue merchants mire down the decision making process in a welter of confusion. A period set aside for questions relating to a presentation (Powerpoint raises its ugly head again!) turned into a series of little set speeches promoting a single issue; but, O! Look how beautifully they were wrapped in glowing velvet praise of the presenter's sincerity, credentials and choice of cologne on such a hot day. It was good therefore that I had a elected to be chauffeured for the day by a co-conspirator who shares much of the same antipathy regarding fæcal matter of a bovine nature. We came, we ate, we buggered off. Leaving early we had no compunction in lambasting the others we saw who also scurried out like naughty children bunking off school on a day too balmy for double algebra followed by eng. lit.. We of course had good reason to bunk off: we were certified Looney Toons. They were wearing suits.

There's only one thing to do in England on a weekday afternoon in blazing June when the great white anglo-saxon protestant majority is mercifully trapped, sweating, in the hell that is the workplace. (Those Brits fortunate enough to work in offices with large number of computers are often lucky enough to get air conditioning; the rest just melt and stink.) For the lucky few with money to burn and time to burn it the blue skies demand that we seek a nice little pub with a garden. This can be a tricky task in a metropolitan area that is home to some three million multi-cultural souls, but not impossible. There are five or six within a 3 minute drive of my front door. I so rarely go into pubs these days that it is always a delicious pleasure to rediscover the odd grown-up-ness of a slightly dingy, low-ceilinged, Victorian or even Georgian English public house. The interior of the bar is dark on even the brightest of the longest days of the year; it is also refreshingly cool even without refrigeration technology.

My companion ordered a pint of the ice-cold lager while I chose a pint of the cold Guinness ... there's a drink to get your teeth into! We must have been thirsty. The liquid hardly touched the sides. We decided to have another. It was my turn to pay. My companion would not permit that and headed resolutely for the bar to have our glasses refilled. I'm reviewing the situation ....

Hmm. When one drinks but does not contribute financially to the transaction the situation is veering off-course into dating territory. Aw shucks. I am far too old for all that nonsense. Besides I like my own company far too much to begin sharing it ... again. On the other hand it takes more than a swallow or two to make a spring and I am no coy virgin either. All the same I have reviewed, with frantic mental haste, the foregoing hours. Replaying snatches of conversation looking for indavertent flirts. The beer arrives and I am like Homer Simpson sitting, blankly staring, thinking: "Message to brain: don't flirt, don't flirt". Doh! There's some devil in me that cannot help it. Wherever I am I take on a personna to fit the situation, like the time I flirted outrageously with a well inebriated pensioner in an East End London pub by slipping effortlessly into a pastiche of every barmaid there has ever been. Come to think of it that was an occasion when I had been to a meeting that became so dreary that I fomented revolution and led a sizeable contingent out and across the street into as perfect an example of London culture as possible. Londoners love to 'send up' up anything and everything including themselves. And I honestly didn't know that that pub held a male stripper night on that day of every month. Sheesh.

It's a good job that no one but me reads this because I have saved the most shameful thing until last. My drinking companion is one of that vanishing breed of men: a smoker. I smoked a couple of his cigarettes and frankly it wasn't that great ... but I need to be more cautious about restarting that habit than I do about becoming accidentally involved in any sort of relationship.

Island Mine

2005-06-21T23:09:00.000+01:00

One hundred damn dollars US and I have lost it. How annoying that is! (Actually slightly less annoying than it would have been if the rebel scrip hadn't suffered such drastic devaluation of recent years but ... still.)

My father was a printer and although he was mostly involved in the 'business printing' side of things he nevertheless still came into possession of a considerable number of books. I am still in reminiscence mode and found myself wondering whatever had become of some of those books. Including some I am pretty sure are now hard to find. These were no classics, these books. Some of them were unreadable poop, others no doubt, were far too adult to be allowed into my possession. But there were always the odd ones that slipped through the net and those were always the most memorable for no other reason than because they had that je ne sais pas associated with forbidden fruit. Hey I was only 11 or 12. At that age I was supposed to be reading Moby Dick I did not finish it; I think I didn't feel much like calling anyone Ishmael and I thought that Moby Dick seemed like a silly name to give a whale. Kids!

I was more taken with dramatised biographies of people like Churchill; hell, we're talking about pulp fiction masquerading as fact. Nothing too demanding. I think I am a coward, I choose to avoid challenges because I might succeed.

Anyway I suddenly got into my head the idea that I should Google for the most outlandish of the titles that rattle around on the musty flagstones of memory's cellar floor. And so I came up with And To My Nephew Albert I Leave The Island What I Won Off Fatty Hagan In A Poker Game. Such a delicious title for a novel. Almost a novel in itself. It was, I remember, richly farcical in a highly singular British idiom as Albert's newly acquired island gains a pivotal international significance in the cold war while he haplessly clings a sliver of no-man's land in the middle trying his damnedest to lose his virginity. It was crude and vulgar and funny and although some of the jokes undoubtedly went over my head, there were many more that did not.

I don't have it any longer. I haven't seen it for decades. Even if I did still possess it I am quite sure that I would have hidden it away somewhere being too ashamed to admit ever having read it. I am over that now. I have no shame. Not even in posting the link above that shows that copies of the damned thing change hands for over $100. I let mine go to a secondhand book dealer for pennies.

And I still seek reassurance that I am in fact slighty nuts. Man I am loopy like a bouclé sweater!

Viennese Whirl

2005-06-21T19:07:00.000+01:00

I got the bug for making puns out of titles from the writer John Brunner who was apt to head his chapters with far-too-clever titles like Roomie Nation in which we find the novel's protagonist in retrospective mood as he considers his domestic arrangements in the light of a trend — in the world of the novel — for people to share their living space with non-relatives. I like to take things a tad further and deeper and the meanings are, I suspect, apparent only to me, but that is how I like it because i write for myself and not for anyone else.

Still preoccupied with the unseasonal dampness associated with the ridiculous heat and humidity and which has now caused my front door to swell and to stick I have gone to the deepest extremes to make my title extraordinarily dense. I came home today to find the kitchen window was host to an angry population of fat, black flies all buzzing mindlessly as they took to the fœtid air in short, aimless figure of eight sorties in search of a way through the impervious transparent barrier that separated them from the light. In an instant I knew that my resident serial killer, a cat by the name of Mirelly Lyra Zeelashisthra, had allowed another of her victims to escape behind the boiler and there to become maggot food. I long ago gave up hope of curing her of this sin; it seems ingrained in her genes and it would be a cruel crime against nature to seek a means of ending it.

I am hardened to the problem by now. The darned cat has been with me since she first wound her way, mewling piteously about imagined privations and hardships of a feline nature, when I called at a farm to ask directions. I left with a better idea of where I was as well as with a cardboard box — that had once held a Toshiba television set — filled to bursting with eight ounces of vigorous black and white fury. Before I had reversed my car away from the farm entrance and pointed it up the road the flap uppermost on the box jittered upwards and a tiny, bewhiskered face emerged. She stared around her new environment with disdain, clambered out with as much grace as she could muster (not much) and spent the next several miles attempting to sit in a demure manner on top of the box so that she could observe the passing scenery. It was clear to me that she had never before seen trees move with such reckless abandon.

All that was nine years ago. She is still the maddest cat I have ever known ... and I have known enough to be a fair judge. Mirelly — mostly known to me as Little Mad (which is short for Little Madam and not an insult) — is as nutty as a truck load of walnuts with a side order of pistachios. I even allowed her to play the field with local tomcat population in the hopes that motherhood would lend her some wisdom. Some hope. With the first kitten mostly out and clenched neatly around the neck she decided enough was enough and tried to run away from her own back end. Fortunately I was able to help the two get acquainted. Three more kittens followed the first and she became a model mother ... unless an inability to count is a fault because she moved the litter several times, each time moving three and leaving the fourth behind. I grew far too attached to the kittens in spite of myself but I bravely managed anyway to surrender them up to the various offers of homes that came once it became known that kittens were up for grabs.

As soon as the kittens were all gone Mirelly instantly reverted to her former condition of madness though now with an increased penchant for murder. Clearly, now that she no longer had a pack of dimwitted babies to learn-up in the tooth and claw jungle of hunting etiquette she could always make sure to keep her paw and eye in in case some more kittens should happen along. As if! She had been to the vet in the interim and had come home with that tell-tale postage stamp sized patch of fur missing from her right flank. Luckily she was too busy practising the art of bringing down a pigeon in mid flap to study up much in her biology texts. Over the intervening years she and I have enjoyed a peculiar sort of relationship. She hangs around because I do not set unreasonable conditions upon her; she lets me keep most of my skin because I make a neat place for her to sleep on. I also turn out to be a pretty cool object for getting annoyingly large quantities of rain out of fur when she gets caught in a hailstorm as happened a day or so ago.

So there it is. Imagine if you can yours truly doing a cross between the sailors' hornpipe and the tarantella as I try to avoid the twin hazards of getting my cuffs of my jeans soaked with wet cat and my ankle skin flayed by playful cat who thinks that the return to fashion of flared trousers is just so cool that playing with them is irresistable and you have half a scenario to fit the title: the whirl.

The sadly missed Leonard Rossiter was a fabulously talented actor, equally at home on stage in comedy and Shakespeare, as well as on the both the big screen and the silver. He is most memorable to me for his fabulous protrayal of the odiously comic slum landlord Rupert Rigsby in the TV series Rising Damp ... aha! A clue. Or as Inspector Clouseau might say: 'ay clure. Rigsby, of course, owned a cat. Naturally he did because scrofulous he might have been, but for a character to be endearing and ultimately lovable he needs to have at least one redeeming feature. Rigsby's was his cat.

In case you forgot, or else didn't know. Rigsby's cat was named Vienna.

Damp Squib

2005-06-19T20:35:00.000+01:00

I don't like it when the weather turns all heavy and oppressive. Temperatures above 80°F combined with high humidity cause me to become a giant vegetable. Not to beat about the bush here, I become a bloated and sweaty inanimate object. Bloated because I comfort eat, all the while consuming copious quantities of fluids from which my skin filters out all the toxins before spreading liberally over my wrinkly hide. It's not a pretty sight.

What I most dislike about humidity is the dampness. I hate being damp. This probably harks back to when I was a child and my mother had what was practically a fetish for seeing that no clothing was issued unless it had met her exacting standards for moisture content. Clothing shall have no moisture present within its fibres before it is donned. This shall include atmospheric humidity. A complete non-sequiteur in the great but soggy British climate where if it you can't see the horizon it means that it is raining and if you can can (see the said horizon) it is, in fact, about to rain.

The month of flaming June conceals my birthday. Until I skidded, more or less out of control, into my teen years I had considered that June was the best possible month for a birthday. There being no possible way for relatives to combine Christmas and Birthday gifts and regarding parties ... what better time of year for a party than high summer, when the outdoors is open from dawn to, well, dawn, I guess. Unless, of course it rains. Luckily June is the one month when rain is unusual and so birthdays washed-out by rain just don't figure in my rose-tinted memories.

Anyway, my birthday has been and gone and while there was no precipitation there wasn't much in the way of solar radiation either. Which is a pity because I read the other day, in Sharon's fabulous blog that summer had come to her neck of the woods and that it was both damned hot and damned humid. How I smiled. We don't get heavy weather like that in England until much later in the summer. June is the perfect month for everything in the UK. The schools are still 'in' and the biggest kids are mostly involved in school exams so the shops and the tourist places are pleasant places to be. It is heaven on stick.

Then things took a turn for the worse.

For days the weather forecasters were promising a heatwave. Yeah! Like that is believable. Our island climate is not best suited to predictions ... totally unsuited to be accurate. Anyway, yesterday — as if to prove that anything that is forecast for long enough will happen eventually — the heatwave arrived. Which would have been OK were it not for the fact that I am in the middle of moving house.

My home for the last eight years — the longest I have stayed under one roof — is half packed up and my new place is mine already but in need of some urgent remedial cosmetic treatment. Of course, speaking as a time-served specialist in the art of procrastination, I am well behind schedule in the redecoration stakes. Paint that should be on walls is still in the plastic tubs that pass for paint cans these days. Paint brushes that should be clagged to the roots with clots of congealed vinyl silk emulsion are still in their risqué see-thru acetate sleeves, baring their hairy extremities to an uncaring environment with coquettish brazenness.

Never mind, I thought, with blasé equanimity. I can just go over and chill out, maybe watch some TV, drink a cool beer, or even that oddity that we Brits turn to in times of heat prostration ... a nice hot cup of tea. Yes. I have installed a fridge, a TV and a camp stove in my new premises. The first two are new and had to be delivered somewhere. The latter is more or less essential survival equipment. A fridge I can live without but give me a kettle and a fry-pan and somewhere to make those two get hot and I can live anywhere. I also had a good reason to be "in" at my new address yesterday afternoon. I was expecting a visit from an engineer to hook me up to cable ... erm, everything.

I have been resisting the march of technology for some years now. I am still wedded to the silver jump suits and robots I was promised by Raymond Baxter back when I was still just 'thinking' about owning a bra. I am not technophobic, I love technology and I love all things scientific. But science and technology is pointless unless it does something. Cable TV didn't do it by my reckoning. I can get five channels for nothing with a cheap TV and a bent coathanger; why on earth would I want more than that? I love the internet because it does what says on the tin. It works ... well most of the time, it does.

But times change and so do people and (luckily) the free-enterprise capitalists are very much aware of that and they change their stance too, the better to unscrew the cash from our pockets. I am moving home and I am lazy. Two pretty much inconsistent conditions. Laziness means that I stick with the status quo long after it ceased to be a value for money situation. I may be lazy, but laziness (by my stipulation) requires a certain degree of miserliness. That is why I love the internet; bargain hunting takes so little effort. I've been with my current ISP for quite a while now and they pretty much take me for granted. So much so that they recently cold-called me to offer me a free mobile phone. It was at that moment that it dawned on me that I was maybe paying a little too much for my telephone and internet access to the world.

A little searching revealed that for half what I currently pay, the local cable firm will give me the same deal and throw in 39 channels of shit for nothing. Well hey! I may be an infrequent watcher of TV and 90% of that 39 are so banal they actually require a stronger word (or do I mean 'weaker'?) to define their feebleness in the entertainment scale. Its all to do with way I do maths. The 90% I speak of is a floating proportion; it isn't always the same channels that are beyond the pale. Howver when you have a choice of five, 90% is inevitably going to involve half a TV program. Yes it is true. I actually do sometimes watch half a TV program but only because half is entertaining and I turn off when when I stop being entertained. Oh dear! I feel I am beginning to spout utter rot!

Time to get to the point. The telephone man arrived yesterday afternoon. Looking slightly harrassed and sweaty. He fumbled with his ID with what may have been embarrassment as he introduced himself. Maybe he was psychic. After we had gone through the "where do I want it" routine he departed to get his tools ... (this a strictly male thing, I have noticed. Men set out to do a job without a single item of equipment, they then proceed to examine the said task, suck their teeth, make faces and extravagant gestures and then return to safe base to collect — almost — all the tools and material they will need). He returned with a screwdriver and a little grey doo-hickey and unscrewed the cover of the main junction box and clipped the doo-hickey to the wires within. It made a noise like a budgerigar with an inflamed cloaca. I left him to his devices and attended to the haus frauly business of making the workman his tea ... 5 sugars naturally.

Some minutes elapsed during which time the telephone man was like some kind of djinn. It was a case of now you see him, now you don't. Mostly it was a case of his little grey doo-hickey making its oddly strangled parakeet warble; a sound that I found resistant to direction location. I was beginning to wonder what earthly use was a noise that could not be localised when I caught sight of 'my' man. He was talking into his sleeve. I sidled closer to hear what was being said. The news wasn't good. I quickly gleaned from his conversation with "base" that 'my' cable isn't in one piece. A new one needs to be pulled through. So saying, he packed up his little grey doo-hickey, screwed the cover into the place on my junction box and with a cheery wave he departed after assuring me that the cable-pulling crew would make contact first thing on Monday. A whole crew! Goodness. Is my cable to run uninterrupted all the way from Chateau Trillian to Cable Central? That sounds like like just too much of a bargain.

After he had gone I fell into a miserable introspection centred mostly around the fact that the east-facing (and thus the coolest rooms) in my new mansion had acquired a fine sheen of condensation on the undecorated cold surfaces. It was at that point that I heard my mother's voice warning me against dallying for too long in a damp atmosphere and so I beat a hasty retreat, breaking my journey halfway back to what still passes for "home" to pick up some Argentinian sirloin, a baguette, a bag of Italian salad, a small wedge of ripe brie and the inevitable bottle of Oz shiraz because cooking for one is a total bore but even a peasant knows how to introduce a slab of cow to a very hot griddle for a few minutes while uncorking the wine and drizzling some extra-virgin olive oil over the greenery. (I ate half the bread while I waited for the bus having forgotten it was Saturday and the buses run a totally screwed up schedule.)

Whilst I chewed the delicious crusty French treat (resisting the urge to break out the brie as well, because then I might have to get out the beef and just jerk the bastard stuff under the mid-afternoon solstice sun) I gained an admiring audience of pigeons but they didn't look as hungry as I felt. I am so mean!

Tagging Along

2005-06-18T18:47:00.000+01:00

I was honored to find that wonderful Sharon tagged me into this amusing little bit of vox-poppery.

But first the rules to this meme game:

Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross pollination effect.

Ivy Tied Up
Presentstorms Corner
Blog, Blah, Blah
Adventures of a Domestic Engineer
Crazy Like A Zircon

Next: select new friends to add to the pollen count. (No one is obligated to participate).

Kristal
Chameleon
Dave Rupert
Mingling & NotSo
Kitty

So ... the challenge is to list the five things I miss most from childhood. First I took sneaky trackback through previous offerings and discovered a broad vein of slighlty shmaltzy misty-eyed nostalgia for what sounded like a halcyon American distillate of idyllic childhood consisting, in the main, of beloved cousins and camping weekends and fishing trips. In an instant I was overcome with a nauseating mixture of jealousy and ... well, nausea.

Jealousy because there is still a part of me that harbours a little envy for anyone who was lucky enough to be raised in a part of the world where the plumbing worked and also where it was possible to find somewhere to live that was within easy travelling distance of wild territory. The nausea? I am no fan of shmaltziness and sugar-coatings are for wimps.

All of which, by way of preamble, is probably going to look rather sad in the context of my five items; a list that needed some thought to compile. I am not especially case-hardened; much of my laconic rhetoric is more a disguise for a too easily bruised ego than evidence of urbanity. However I mostly keep my sentimentality to myself, choosing to share it with only the closest of friends ... so if you don't know me from Adam kindly leave the room now, because I am going to expose myself.

Number one on my list has to be my teddy bear, Charles. (What an odd name for stuffed toy ... wasn't I ever precious when I coined that name!) My mum burned him because he stunk. He was a cheap old thing and washing was out of the question ... I know because I tried to wash my last boyfriend's childhood friend and the sawdust stuffing dissolved and dyed the threadbare plush of a mostly grey panda an alarming shade of burnt orange. The erstwhile owner was last seen crying as he stuffed his bags into the back of his car .... Of course Charles had become a stinky thing because he'd been used by me, mostly, as a pillow. There's a limit to how much infantile drool one bear can adsorb before ... well never mind. I still haven't forgiven my mother for her heinous crime, though. Forty plus years later it still rankles.

Numero deux would have to be my mum's cooking. Mum was never a 'fancy' cook, although it would be a mistake to think that label means she was untalented. She likes to tell the tale of the occasion she made a cheese soufflé; the soufflé was perfect, unfortunately we kids (and my father) were far too unsophisticated to appreciate it. I miss mum's cooking because it symbolises all that is precious about my childhood. A full belly, comforting company at table, the sheer miracle of food appearing as if by magic with no effort required on my part. One's mother's cooking is pretty much a metaphor for 'mother love'. I still have the latter, but i don't consider it selfish to continue to miss the former.

It starts to get difficult. More than two? Come on! I can list hundreds. How is there a way to place one above another? I decided to leave people out completely because the brief that I read seemed to specify 'things' rather than people. So number three is my bedroom. Meaning my first bedroom. The first one I had all to myself. It was the smallest bedroom in the house, even though I was the eldest. For some reason I never queried that decision. The room that I had shared with my sister became hers and I got my own (more grown up) room. I shall never quite forget the slow, almost glacial, build up of my excitement as my dad sealed himself inside the little junk room and began the mysterious task of converting it to a bedroom. OK so the process mostly involved paint and wallpaper, it was hardly alchemy! But my dad had a way of making the most mundane seem like something else and of course in missing the thing I miss the man as well. (I realise I am slipping people into my list by Machiavellian stealth ... but, hey! If make a rule, I shall determine the protocol for breaking the bugger.)

Four would be Radio Caroline. I decided that childhood had to be encompass the whole of my minority. I first heard pirate radio when I was eleven. We were travelling through Kent en route to visit my paternal grandmother (who was then on her third and final husband ... she was bride and widow three times and all in the right order) and I copped my first listen to Radio London playing something decidedly un-BBCish and all done with commercials too! How terribly Bohemian! Mostly I miss the feeling that came from number five ...

I miss Tomorrow's World the Beeb's weekly magazine programme that presented the latest in the cutting-edge of technology. Specifically, it isn't the television programme I miss so much as the lovely comfy feeling I got from watching it. I was comforted (strictly as a gullible child) that come the twenty-first century we would have solved all of humanity's problems. We could take holidays on the Moon, robots would do the housework and any sort of disease would be a bad memory like the Black Death.

That's it.

I regret that our planet has completed ninety degrees of its solar orbit during my ill-mannered silence. I have an excuse.

I am a lazy bitch!

Mugging muggins for a mug II

2005-03-20T15:19:00.000Z

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.

2005-03-18T10:33:00.000Z

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?

2005-03-11T01:27:00.000Z

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

2005-03-08T20:59:00.000Z

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

2005-03-07T14:14:00.000Z

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

2005-03-06T11:05:00.000Z

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

2005-03-05T13:44:00.000Z

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

2005-03-04T17:00:00.000Z

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

2005-03-04T15:49:00.000Z

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!")

Word Warrior?

2005-02-25T11:27:00.000Z

So I was wondering why people get pierced after reading on the BBC's news site that, apparently, piercees are suffering silence when their body adornments go awry (Read it here.)

Being curious I went a-Googling and and after getting an eyeful of more than enough seriously desecrated erogenous bits I lost interest and clicked an advertisement. Yeah! Really. The irony is too funny ... and uh-oh I just realised that Constant Reader has already conjured up an image of yours truly done up like a dog's dinner with various dangly parts bejewelled with hypo-allergenic rings and dumbells. No! Not that. I stopped with my ears. One each side; and I only had those done because hypo-allergenic clip-on earrings are hard to find and uncomfortable to wear .... Where was I?

The ad I clicked, in a attempt to revive my flagging amusement levels, was for The Classic IQ Test. "Ooh," I thought. "Test. I like tests!" I also like IQ tests because they make me feel good cos I am a complete smart-arse and I had a distinct and (sadly) characteristically cynical hunch that the test would be a cinch. My instincts rarely fail me and I have a shrewd grasp of the advertising industry so combining cynicism with experience led me to conclude that the product, being both free and in need of a self-selecting subject, would be bound to inflate the result.

I was not disappointed. I am, it seems, a "Word Warrior". I was told that:

You are equipped with a verbal arsenal that enables you to understand complex issues and communicate on a particularly high level. These talents make you a Word Warrior.

Whether or not you recognise it, your vocabulary is your strongest suit -- use it whenever you can. Since your command of words is so great, you are also a terrific communicator -- able to articulate big ideas to just about anyone. Your wordsmithing prowess will also help in artistic and creative pursuits. The power of words translates to fresh ideas off paper too. Since you have so many words at your disposal, you are in a unique position to describe things in an original way, as well as see the future in your mind's eye. In short, your strengths allow you to be a visionary -- able to extrapolate and come up with a multitude of fresh ideas.

You think? Aw shucks. I don't know whether to blush or start a tirade on the foolishness of those who believe that advertising is trite or cynical or both. All the same ... the test also identified me as having an IQ of 133 which is moderately above average, I admit, but it is a long way from genius level whatever anyone says. I am a long way below that. My number skills are slow and clunky and anything involving algebraic analysis (eg logic puzzles) leave me floundering in a verbal limbo of my own manufacture .... While the genii are solving the symbolic logic problems I am still lost in an internal committee wrangle over the naming convention for the elements that are to be algorithmically tabulated.

Christ! I am doing it again!

You can check out my result by clicking this link or take the test yourself and share your results via the comments.

Tempus Frustro

2005-02-23T13:29:00.000Z

I have gone all slack in the publishing department again. (Memo to self: Remember to slap own wrists when you have finished typing this!) My mind has, however, been unusually active over the last weeks, in spite of domestic appearances to the contrary. Of course what goes on within the confines of my lame excuse for a domicile for my ego is not necessarily the same kind of thing that others members of the species commonly associate with rational thought.

I am one of those nerdy types that have actually read Professor Stephen Hawking's opus: A Brief History of Time and, if I did not actually fully understood all of it, I at least grasped the bulk of the essential gist. In thinking about it again recently I came to realise that if one accepts Einsteinian relativity and the Big Bang as fundamentally established truths then two conclusions are inescapable. The first being that science and theology are not mutually incompatible and the second that the nature of reality is truly as tenuous as suggested in the camp-fire song: Row, row, row your boat.

Now the first is not merely a matter of conjecture. A big bang is as clear an example of a spontaneous 'act' of creation as any described by any theological doctrine or tradition. But the second is significantly more disconcerting, much harder to accept, still more difficult to comprehend at the instinctual level ... and it is a lot less likeable once the logical analysis has left you entrapped in its essential truth.

Briefly it goes like this. Time stands still for a 'thing' moving at the speed of light. Of course only light travels at the speed of light but look up at the sky ... any time, day or night; the universe is pretty well bathed in the stuff. Now it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that if time has stopped then it has ceased to exist; at least for the light, it has. Next we come to the creation. The universe all starts with a big bang from a point with no dimensions and has been expanding ever since ....

Are you with me? If time doesn't really exist then universe only actually looks big to us inside it. It actually doesn't exist at all. Which is what a thought or a dream is (or maybe that should be isn't).

It might well be a slippery slope leading to the pits of total insanity or, worse, a slideway straight into the arms of that strange late twentieth century phenomenon: the conspiracy theorists. It is not a route I feel comfortable in following. Not because I wish reality to possess some substance of tactile realness which is immune to being reduced to oblivion by logic. Nor because I want a theology that possesses an immutable and incontestable "truth" (such theologies to include atheism, because believing there are no gods is as much an act of faith as believing there are). However I am comfortable in pandering to the curiosity that my monkey ancestry has bestowed upon me and this has led me into some strange places.

Nick Bostrom is a research fellow at Oxford university and is about as unlikely a candidate for conspiracy theorist as I can imagine. So I was intrigued to come across his paper: Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? a few months ago during one of my aimless meanderings around the net. "Come back Neo, all is forgiven!" But the simulation argument has been a favourite philosophical bone for centuries from Plato thru Descartes to today. Personally I subscribe to the demands of the philosophers in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Universe by the late Douglas Adams, who fatuously demanded 'rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty' when faced with a super computer that was designed to answer the 'Ultimate Question'. (Said question being risibly and rhetorically succinct, it was: Life, The Universe, and Everything..)

But that is exactly what it is about, isn't it? We demand to know exactly when the plane is due to land and we get annoyed if it is late. We need to know exactly how much we are to be paid before we agree to go to work. Some absolutes are not just desirable they are absolutely essential. But we blithely accept a reality that utterly defies any absolutism. I just dropped a cup in my kitchen. It broke. I knew it was going to break as well as I knew that would fall toward the floor by the shortest possible route. I was not then surprised to see it broken. Was I disappointed? No. My expectations were fully realised and in consequence I should have felt only pleasure. But I was annoyed, damn it! I was annoyed because it was one of a set of six. I was annoyed because it was broken and although breakage as a probability was so close to unity as to be certain for all intents and purposes there remained an incalculable and very small, but nevertheless real, chance that it might not break. On such a minutely honed area of doubt and uncertainty I shall now retire to consider my future options for dispensation of hot infusional beverages to such guests as I from time to time entertain in my shabbily humble domain ....

Besides, I just discovered that this blogger has been over the same sort of ground and, worryingly, made more sense. Maybe I should just sit down in front of the TV and pick at the thick dead skin on my heels until they bleed ... again. Oh! Why do I keep doing that! (Unless I am unconsiously fulfilling a desire to be "interesting" in order to procure for myself an extension to my existence ... but that would only serve to define my level of craziness and -- frankly -- I am not entirely convinced that would be a negative goal regardless of its practicalness!)

To Ellen Back

2005-02-03T14:20:00.000Z

As a life-long giver-up, a procrastinationista extraordinaire, the kind of person for whom tomorrow is an infinite resource ... and which is always between 1 second and 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds away, I freely confess that I shamed myself into writing. Doing this seemed to be the easiest option as all the alternatives are far too mundanely domestic. But even I am forced to question the logic of the decision. Writing. Well, typing, to be pedantic, requires firstly to be written and secondly to have at least the semblance of a hint that there is actually some purpose to it ... or failing that some originality.

Logic would dictate that I really ought to get around to making contact with some of my elderly relatives before paper and words cease to be a viable method of communication with them (as opposed to a ouija board or planchette!) My godfather, for example, lost his wife in January. Their Golden wedding anniversary would have been next week. Life's a bitch and no mistake. I really must write to him. He was nothing but kindness and generosity to me in my youth and I liked my aunt a lot too. She was a real motherly sort of person and it is a matter of sadness (mine, I suppose, in the form of unrequired and unlooked for empathy) that they never had children of their own. Aunt A___ was pretty much an enigma within the family; a family, it should be said, that has too often been torn apart by feuds and disputes over the stupidest things. Many such rancours remain smouldering in that sullen way that childish sulks always do.

I have not been immune to the disease. I was made a personna non grata by a cousin after a wedding nearly 20 years ago. I am still in the dark as to why, exactly. The old aphorism concerning relatives and friends and choice is pretty much on target as far as I am concerned. The concept of a wide and happy family circle is more or less dead on my branch of the human family tree. Sour? No contest, your honour!

All the same, I want to write to Uncle B___. To tell him of my sorrow that I have been too wrapped up in my own life to find time to visit him since he and A___ moved into their bungalow after they both reluctantly conceded that they could no longer manage their large house and garden. But it is hard to do. And here the reason is even harder to express ....

It's the damnedest and daftest reason I ever heard for one not writing a letter of condolence to a fondly loved elderly relative. I am ashamed to write. We have been out of touch for ages. Years. I dread to think when was the last time we exchanged letters. He never was much of a man for conversation on ther phone; he was -- still is -- a letter writer. Worse, he's one of those endearingly exasperating ones who reply by return of post answering every query you raised except, invariably, the one you really wanted the answer for. He's also very partial to what I call "literary condiments"; those quirky little clichéd phrases and hackneyed expressions that some writers use, either as a written version of umming or else as a gauche way of attempting to seem urbane. I alwasy found it charming and endearing ... although that is probabkly as patronising as it possible to get .... And I still haven't been honest enough to blurt out my reason for putting off writing.

Well ... it did not help that my mother, uncle's sister, reported to me that the cousin with whom I am an unwilling feudster had been reported as the first family member to get a condolence card on uncle's door mat. He is a crawling little creep, really! As a child he was the snivelling sneak who would rat on anyone who baulked him ... and years have done little to nurture his charisma rating. That isn't the reason ... but, like I said it doesn't help. The fact is I am just ashamed that I haven't written for a dogs age and now I feel that to write would merely give the impression that I am belatedly hoping to bolster my claim on a share of dear Uncle B___'s estate.

Yeah I know. It's gotta be the dumbest reason for not writing to someone ever thought up. But that's me. Dumb and dumber.

The title to this piece came to me from reading through this morning's news. Ellen MacArthur is on the last leg of her latest epic solo adventure. I am looking forward to the inevitable TV series made up from her video diary recorded en route. Nothing is quite as entertainingly inspiring as seeing the miniature heroine make her pitifully lonely and tearful pleas to the gods for respite from nature's vigour (or lack thereof) and the mortal and material frailty of flesh and boat. Why, one is forced to wonder, would anyone in their right mind do such a thing? Because! That's why. And I am so jealous.

Dumb Over

2005-01-27T17:01:00.000Z

A couple of things have occupied my mind in the last day or so. Dumbness has sort of featured in both and now I feel righteously filled with the urge to campaign ... well, enough so, at least, to sound the clarion.

Yesterday afternoon I was wracking my brain for something to write about. I have been far too slack in keeping this blog up to date and part of the reason is my unbounded capacity for laziness and procrastination. It would help if I could only lighten up a bit and wax lyrical about the mundane things of life. But, for the time being, that is a step too daring for me to contemplate.

However if the determination to find a thing is strong enough then finding is pretty much a matter of course. I reached the last day of a course of antibiotics yesterday. I had been prescribed them for an infection around a wisdom tooth that should've been a distant memory but wasn't, mainly for reasons that have more to do with a healthy suspicion of dentistry skills than with cowardice. The drug came as massive dispersible tablets in foil blister-packs of three. At three times per day I had seven days supply. I kept them in the fridge; I cannot think of a good reason why. I just did.

When I removed the final day's supply from the carton I noticed the manufacturer's blurb leaflet laying around sulkily at the base of the box. It seemed as though it was reproaching me for my cavalier disregard of its edifying contents. Useful stuff, no doubt. Golden nuggest of wisdom like: not to be inserted anally and may cause drowsiness, do not fly commercial jet-liners if affected.

Knowing that such printed matter offers rich grounds for one with a sardonic sense of humour, I carefully peeled it open while I waited for my horse pill to disperse into the water. (I had previously marvelled at this dispersing. It definitely did not dissolve. Without a hint of effervescence the things just sort of boiled away into the liquid until the had formed and impenetrable fog around themselves at which point some agitation is required to encourage further dispersing to occur. Being an inveterate worrier of the trivially inane I wondered whether the active ingredients were the finely divided material that formed the main suspension or if -- as I suspected -- the drugs were mostly to be found in the heavier particles that remained stuck to the sides of the glass after all the liquid had been consumed. One fact seems indisputable. There is no anti-paranoia medication in those pills.

With such an involuted degree of concern for materials science -- rather than with the more wordly concerns of a patient who might wish to find out what to do in the event of breaking out all over in hives and itchy rashes -- I was nevertheless ill-prepared for advice at the level of those to be found, allegedly, on the toothpicks supplied by some restaurants.

As most of us know, antibiotics can upset the normal composure of one's bowels. Not to put to fine a point on it, antibiotics can give one the shits. But as the leaflet spelled out the potential disorders of bowel behaviour I noticed, with a savage kind of glee, that the anonymous writer had lapsed into dumbed-down langauage. (It is more likely that the leaflet was co-written by a committee that met dozens of times and had numerous interim consultations with governmental and non-government organisations before arriving at its final draft.)

In the UK the correct medical term for shit has for decades been that old stalwart: stool. But now, it seems, in a farcical attempt to sieze the intellectual high ground while tossing a casual nod towards the ill-educated plebs, that shit is now to be known as: faeces (otherwise known as poo)

I couldn't make it up!

It also doesn't really make much of a blog entry.

And then I got to thinking about dumbing down again later on when I was reading a blog I like a lot. Sharon's Blog has been a must read for me for the last several months. Over those months I have grown to know her and her family; some of her posts have made me weep, sometimes in sadness, others with joy.

Yesterday evening, after my frivolous musings over the naming of poo, I read Sharon's latest entry about her youngest son who has a number of challenging differences ranging from a form of autism to hearing loss. Sharon is having trouble getting her local education system to meet her son's needs. And this isn't right. She lives in the USA, and it seems cruel and senseless that the richest nation on earth can't manage to run an education system with equality and fairness as its byword.

More to the point I find I am now wondering about the whole MMR vaccine debate that has been boiling up a storm here in the UK for several years. The furore has been flaring up here from time to time since it first hit the tabloid's front pages in 1997. Though proof that MMR causes autism remains elusive the taint has led a high percentage of parents to shun the triple vaccine, there being no compulsion to have it.

Thus far, as a parent who submitted all of mine to MMR in the early 1980's, I have tended to come down squarely on the side of the medical and government arguments for MMR. The anti-brigade, to my way of thinking, were simply foolish Luddites who risk the health of their children from the unnecessary dangers of measles as well as the health of the unborn children of their relatives, friends and neighbors through rubella and mumps.

It's a no-brainer. At least ... I thought it was. I am no longer nearly so confident that MMR is safe. I mean it is adminstered to little kids whose moms still sterilise bottles and teats. Huh? I mean seriously ... huh?

At least one search result I found indicates medical researchh in to hearing loss and MMR has been conducted. Below is brief list of the kind of advice to be found on the internet.

MMR - the fact. UK NHS Website
CDC NIP. Official US Website
Spiked Health - Independent Website
Immunization Studies: Adverse Vaccine Reactions. (Hearing Loss)

So, while I continue to moulder, (and I have no illusions as to how many come here actually to read this erratic conceit that passes for witty journalism) please take a moment to visit with Sharon and maybe leave her a message of support.

Youthful Ambitions

2005-01-26T13:09:00.000Z

I was in training yesterday afternoon. Not the sweaty and puffing kind of training, it was the cerebral kind. I volunteered recently for a course in recuitment selection procedures. This is not the kind of thing I would normally associate myself with. Especially as it seems mostly to be concerned with the wishy-washy, trendy-lefty political correctness issues of race and gender and disability.

If such a thing as a political minefield could be said to exist then it is alive and well in the tangle of laws that we have to protect minorities of all shapes and sizes and hues from ... [ta-da!] Social Exclusion

Ye Gods! We spent almost an hour trying to define 'social exclusion'! What the hell is the point of coining an expression if no-one can define it? I ventured my opinion that social exclusion was a fancy word for lack of financial resources, that being a fancy way of saying poverty. There were a lot of arguments put forward as to reasons why poverty was just a single factor in "social exclusion", none held water, in my opinion.

A man with no legs and no money is bound to feel exlcuded from society if he is unable to travel wherever he wishes. Give him enough cash, I argued, and he can do anything he wants. Of course that is an empirically glib analysis. If we all had a million Bill Gates would still be rich. Towns and cities would still have nice neighbourhoods and scuzzy ones. Shops would still divide us into classes by taste. Some hanker for oysters and foie gras others are much happier with a bastardised pizza made with chunks of boiled pig and slices and canned pineapple.

The other day I was dragged kicking and screaming to my local mall. It's one of Britain's biggest and it's only a mile from home which are the prime reasons I cite for not having been there in more than 5 years ... not counting occasional visits to the mall's Oort cloud of warehouses such as PC World. I must be the only woman on the planet who can be led through and endless series of clothing shops -- ranging from chique through chic to the execrable "chick" and emerge with wallet unopened. My companion, bless her, seemed mildly to be worried by my thrift ... or else by my fussy hard-to-please-ness; I wasn't sure then and I am not now. Anyway we ended up at the back of a place that specialises in remaindered designer gear and seconds and (frankly) thirds ... or do I mean turds?

I felt that I had surely disconcerted Angela more than enough with my clothing reticence as she fell upon the displays of gewgaws and other kitsch domestic ephemera with the glee of a child in a toy shop so I joined with her in admiring the African carvings and Chinese pottery and rustic (recycled packing-case) furniture.

So there I was, yesterday musing this over, both internally and vocally. We are not equal. We can never be. But still I see there is a great need for anyone who is involved in selecting a person from amongst a number of candidates to be both fair and dispassionate. This is the goal of the equal opportunity programmes. To try to lead us to a point at which we can feel comfortable that we have tried our hardest to leave our own prejudices out of our decision making process.

Afterwards I was waiting at the bus station hoping, without much optimism, for a bus that would actually go past my house. There are two regular services, one goes past my home, the other turns off half a mile before it. Guess which one always comes first? I was joined there by one of my fellow trainees. I toyed with trying to construct a convincing sounding apology for not having waited for him; that I hadn't realised that he used also used the buses and that we could have walked there together (I had in fact walked there with two others who closer to my own age.) Andrew (not his real name) is a much younger man; I can give him 30 years and still have years that amount to more than small change! Slowly it dawned on me that apology wasn't needed. Andrew was young and such things did not matter to him. He joked that rushing to the bus station had only earned me a longer wait. I agreed but countered that at I was at least warmed up. This was only partly true. I had rushed out of the house earlier without scarf or gloves or hat and it was now sub-zero by windchill and my coat is more style than substance.

"Now who's the syle victim?" I thought savagely, mocking my own shopping prejudices of a few days earlier, as I thought about the rack of lovely thick parkas with the remarkably low prices I had so casually shunned.

As we waited, Andrew chatted with the unselfconscious enthusiasm of the young for whom the future is as dark and mysterious and inviting as the Congo and Amazon basins were to early European explorers. Not for him the doubts and worries of mundane things like practicality. No! He had his next ten years all mapped out, from college to VSO to post-graduate doctorate to seat on the board ....

It all sounded so simple. If only life were like that. By then we were on our bus. I had listened quietly and respectfully to his plans. I applauded his enthusiasm without passing opinion. Then he delivered his own coup de grace.

"Or maybe", he said mischeviously. "I'll fall at the first post, drop out and die before I'm 25 of a drugs overdose."

I snorted softly with wry amusement and said something that seemed apt and wise and urbane but was none of those things. What I really wanted to say was something about the wonderful all or nothing approach of the young. But we had reached his stop and I had the seat to myself for the next few minutes before I too had leave the bus's steamy interior go where the PTE's buses only go when I don't want one.

Listening to Cynthia Jordan ... because I like piano and free music is never to be sniffed at.

2005-01-26T10:39:00.000Z
Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Love to Love

2004-10-09T01:15:00.000+01:00
I've had a couple of conversations lately that have seeded a slight alteration in my perspective on life. In one I learned that someone, a person I thought I knew pretty well, had been responsible for breaking a young man's heart in her youth. When it came to the crunch she had just hadn't been in love with him and so she ended the relationship before it progressed into marriage. My first response to that revelation was surprising to me -- the more so because I do not usually consider myself particularly quick off the mark when it comes to especially apt ripostes. But later I was talking with someone else and the subject of my own love life, or lack thereof, came up .... "But you'll probably want another relationship, eventually," said Linda. "I am pretty sure I won't," I said. Linda regarded me doubtfully. "I think I am too selfish," I added by way of explanation. "After all, when push comes to shove, a 'relationship' is only really a licence for having sex." "Isn't that a bit cynical?" Linda said. "Maybe it is. But it doesn't really stop it being a true analysis of most people's actual situations ... as opposed to the fancied ones that they cling too in their daydreams." (Now I was being cynical!) That piece of conversation was ironic, not just in its cynical tone but also in its subject matter in the light of my previous conversation. The first individual, whom I will not name, had expressed herself in terms of love. Specifically that she did not love the man she rejected. I challenged her. I said surely love wasn't the real issue, wasn't it more to do with lust. The truth was that you didn't fancy the pants off of him! She thought this over for a few moments and then smiled and agreed. After kicking the idea around for a little longer we reached agreement that love comes out friendship and that neither actually requires lust as a precursor but in most cases (of lifetime sexual partners) a little fruity lust can go a long way. The crucial element in a marriage is the trust and sharing that arises out of friendship and (or) devotion. (Many a 'tradtional' marriage survived more on the devotion of the two parties to their vows than it ever did on friendship.) Anyway back to my conversation with Linda. I was very mindful of my prior foray into similar territory so recently and I therefore felt myself unfairly prepared to resist Linda's casual-seeming determination to marry me off, decently, at the earliest possible opportunity. "I'm too selfish for cohabitation," I said. "I have tried it twice and both times it failed, mostly because I hated to share. I have trouble being honest with myself so I can't possibly see how I can do it with another individual entirely. Cohabiting just brings out the control freak in me." "But you could have a relationship without actually living with someone," Linda said. Her eyes seemed to say that she had scored a winning point. "But that isn't a relationship, Linda. It is an acquaintanceship, or a friendship, or even a love affaire. Marriage it isn't. It needs no respect, it needs no sharing, it needs no committment." "So it's committment that you are afraid of, then?" Aaarrgghhh! "No," I said. "I can commit to friendships with people of either gender without fear that sex will become an issue. I can (and have) committed to love for people -- love that cannot be assuaged and that does not require the sticky elements of coition for its sustenance. And sex ... well anybody can have sex ... can't they?" Game set and match to me, I think.

Count der Feet

2004-10-07T09:00:00.000+01:00
Last night I got to thinking about easy money. As an erstwhile writer one of my holy grails is the perfect crime. Perfect being defined as undetectable, victimless, and surviving long enough to savor the fruits. Sadly the victimless caveat is the real bear trap. What kinda master criminal bozo would consider such a stupidly counter-intuitive ethical stumbling block? Yeah, I know. One like yours truly. Anyway it doesn't stop me thinking. It takes most people a whole day to make between 50 and 150 pounds. Over that range? You are in the top echelon, mate. Above the 90th percentile. You have to work hard for the money ... I never believed all the crap and Mark Knopfler was definitely in danger of chewing off his own tongue when wrote Money For Nothing. So I was musing on the level of effort involved in making my own money. I overlooked the problem of the hypothetical victim because I wasn't gonna take the idea beyond the intellectual process. The first step, in the chaotic mish-mash that is what passes for mentation in my milieu, was to speculate on mass production. There being no good reason, that I could think of, for having to do a thing over and over if it could be safely be done in larger batches with more opportunity for R&R within the schedule. It was at this point that Her Royal Highness emerged, blinking in the unaccustomed harsh halogen glare of my desk lamp. Quickly and guiltily her slid her out of sight beneath the lid of a nearby handy device. The device had the letters HP emblazoned upon it. Boldly, I depressed a button. The button was marked with the word Color. The button had a neighbor mark Black and between them were the words Start Copy. You know, I was startled and amazed by the realistic quality of the "twenty pound note" that emerged a few moments later. Nervously I turned the real McCoy over and replaced the printed sheet in the paper feed tray. Press. Five minutes later, after some squint-eyed action with the kitchen scissors I held a newly minted twenty pound note in my greasy fingers ... (I had been forced to extract the scissors from the half-loaded dishwasher. The scissors has last seen action at breakfast cutting the rind from bacon.) The grease helped to distress the note. Distress is a technical word employed by we professionals of the forgery world. A new made reproduction must be distressed, whether it be a Louis XIV escritoire or a bearer bond for mineral rights in the Patagonian Steppes ... the patina must be consonant with the article's supposed age, history and purpose. I began to crease and crumple my new money. Soon it resembled something I would expect to find in a trouser pocket after laundering. I wondered what a cycle of crumpling followed by pressing with a hot steam iron would achieve. I am still wondering this morning. I looked at the fruit of my first foray into forgery and I realised that I could do a lot better. The color copy cycle on my HP printer scanner is, well ... slack. The scanner can make an image up to 1,728 dots per inch. That would be pretty darn near photo quality. I suspect that the cheap old 11" by 8" paper I get from Staples by the ream could easily be made to resemble the high rag content paper used in money by repeated crumpling and hot steam pressing. But there remains that victim caveat of mine. Oh if only I weren't so damned principled! Meanwhile, yesterday I had my first group therapy session in anxiety management. There were many things that occurred to me as worthy of a specific mention, but in the cold light of day only one remains fresh. The others are not forgotten, they just don't seem so vibrant and important. Naturally, throwing 10 chronically anxious people into the same room isn't going to be any kind of picnic. However, as mature adults, we all strove to at least try to appear interested, awake, and willing to consider the possibility of maybe entertaining the notion of soon (but perhaps later ... no sense rushing things) contemplating actually saying something. One or two of us did. Me? What do you think! It was a 90 minute session. Halfway through we were told that we would take a break for a coffee and (or) a smoke. If I still smoked I wouldn't have been there. Anyway I joined a small huddle at the coffee machine. Inevitably we talked, inescapably -- perhaps -- we fell to comparing neuroses. Why is it that we too often feel compelled to indulge in the "I've had that, only worse", syndrome? Soon the hot brown liquid had been consumed and we filed back to the meeting room with its Swedish warehouse furniture. Someone had opened a window (British public buildings are rarely air conditioned and yesterday afternoon was warm, too warm for the heating to be on ... but British public buildings have the heat on from September 21 through to April 30 and the good ole long-shuffering Joe's Public must either shiver or perspire and like both discomforts with the equal-minded fairness of a true Brit.) In spite of the shared confidences around the god of office refreshments we reassembled in silence and waited in patient contemplation of the floor for the group "facilitator" to return from her cigarette break ... I guess even psychotherapists have incurable hang-ups then. I wonder why I am bothering. Even I managed to quit tobacco! For two minutes, I counted feet. There were 20; two of those were mine. I also wondered what thhose two minutes might have been like if some eldritch wizard were to appear and with a wave of a spangled stick revert us all to the age of 4. We would not have been counting the feet, that's for sure.

The Art Of Swearing

2004-10-05T22:28:00.000+01:00
A few months ago, while I was searching the net for some help with a web page style sheet problem I came across one of those glorious little factoids; those snippets of golden know how that can turn a mundane accessory into a niftily indispensable aid. I have been using the all purpose text editor, Notepad, ever since I got my first Windows PC. It is a rare day when I do not have a stack of notepad files open. I have a large folder of jottings named Notepad Bits. I suspect that as much as 90% of the files are utterly useless and redundant. Lately I have been using MS Outlook not only to manage my completely stupid number of email addresses, but also to manage my diary and to keep track of my private journal. However I continue to hold simple old Notepad in esteem for those eureka! thoughts and in particular there is a single file, tecnicolor dream (yes my typos are that appalling!), stored directly on my desktop. Its first line is:
.LOG
This first line in a text file, I learned, instructs the program to append a date and time to the end of every entry. So I not only have a record of those thoughts I considered significant, I also know the date and time I committed them to electronic memory. I took a look through it today after adding a new reminder and was pleasantly surprised to rediscover an old idea that has been patiently waiting for resurrection. It was only two words: swearing tolly. I have a son who is now all grown up and making a career but when he was tiny he was cute in both main senses. One day when he was still between first word and first recognizable sentence he overheard a conversation and added a new word to his rapidly growing vocabulary. It was a word that was to delight him and me for several years to come and he quickly made it his own by making subtle changes, both to the vowels sounds and to the consonants. The word was polyester but within weeks it had transmogrified into tollylister. It was a supremely ubiquitous word. It was used in high spirits uttered with a joy and the sort of unselfconscious chuckling giggle that toddlers too quickly forget how to do. It was also used petulantly and on at least one occasion I am certain that it stood at least one tour of duty as a profanity ... there can be no mistaking the tone even if the words used are risible or non-sensical. For me, though, Tolly Lister was always a real person. As the years rolled by I got to know him, even as his inventor outgrew the childish gibberish that spawned his name. Tolly was an exotic person. A true wild man of rock and roll. Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Axl Rose ... these were mere pretenders to the title. Tolly was also a musical prodigy; a Mozart for the twenty first century. He could make grown men cry by plucking an original melody from any handy guitar or keyboard; he could soothe restless babies to sleep with soft contralto improvisations of nursery rhyme standards; he could draw and capture for ever the hearts and minds of a one hundred thousand strong audience with the wildest and most original music since Buddy Holly reinvented rock and roll. Stephen King says that a writer doesn't just need ideas. Writers also need to be able to deliver. He sums it up as "Can you?" Ten years ago I asked myself that question. Tolly Lister had a presence in my mind and he just begged for a story to go around him. I had some ideas but most of all I needed a scenario to put a past into Tolly's life. To make the man rather than to leave him as just a shadow, a thin transparency set only in one moment, a cartoon gel. On a cool spring Saturday afternoon during 1993 I retired to the bathtub with a bottle of indifferent French merlot. I had the house to myself and I meant to find out if I could work up a yarn that made Tolly come to life. What emerged was both scary and heartbreakingly moving. I found that was looking into the not-too-distant future and although I felt inclined to shrink away from science fiction I felt drawn to the story that was growing in my head. I had it off pat within an hour; it was then that my second mate, Mark, chose to return from work and came to see if I wanted anything such as tea or a help soaping my back. I told him I'd like to borrow his ears, so he perched on the toilet and I told him the story of Tolly Lister. It took about 45 minutes and I didn't lose his attention for a moment. It was quite an ego boost. I began work on a full length novel a few days later. Time was always a problem and the project continued in fits and starts over the rest of the decade. Mark and I split up and it got shelved indefinitely. One day I refound it and I read a substantial portion of it to my mother; she wondered why I wasn't trying to finish it and I wasn't easily able to explain, not then. The truth was simple. I was stuck. It wasn't writers block. I was writing pretty good stuff but the plot was going around in circles ... by the time I stopped for breath and took a serious and honest look at what I had I saw that the plot had eaten its own tail. I was still trying to figure out how I could rescue the thing from slow death by inspiration starvation when 4 planes crashed on a September day in 2001 and huge chunks of my plot came too horribly true and at the same time other major plot devices were exposed as false and silly shams as events overtook them. I lost heart then in many more senses than one. My own loss was insignificant in the great scheme of things but loss is relative and mine hurt me as much as anyone else's hurt them. Time is of course a great healer and my muse is now slowly coming back to life. So I say tollylisters to everything and maybe one day I really will sit down and tell the story of how a nice middle class girl ran away with a fairground gypsy and gave birth to a baby boy whom she named Nutroast .... I tell, ya, it brought a tear to Mark's eye and he thought he was a tough guy; he also thought that Tolly Lister was modeled upon him and maybe that was a true, a little, but Tolly lived first in my own heart and he is, was, and always will be, my very own alter ego. My own little pitchfork equipped devil hovering o'er my left shoulder, belittling my successes and heralding my failures. But I am goona get that little ~~expletive deleted~~ Get thee behind me, imp. But, er ... not before I have you pinned down to this table flayed open and fully dissected and analysed.

Medicine Balls

2004-10-04T22:39:00.000+01:00
It occurred to me, today, pretty much in the form of a bright light suddenly flicking into brilliance that the loss of a single notebook at the age of eleven has probably had a rather disproportionate series of consequences for the way my life has since developed. Bearing in mind that this was forty years ago it seems not just churlish even to mention it now, but actually a serious sign of delusional wishful-thinking ... and yes that is a deliberate tautologous expression. Not everyone is familiar with the 1960's British educational system. In the school year that one attained age eleven we joined a secondary school. When I joined mine in september 1964 the minimum leaving age was 15. This was raised to 16, where it remains a year or so after I passed my 15th birthday. In those days pupils were selected on the basis of an exam taken during the final year at junior school. I had done pretty good and so I got a place at the local state-run grammar school. This was a stuffy academic institution with a bevy of Ph.D doctors in the staff room and a published playwright of a headmaster. It had a long a distinguished record of sending students on to Oxford or Cambridge universities many with so-called open scholarships (those being the closest thing to a blank cheque, university expenses defrayment, for the use of, to which anyone of humble background might aspire). Within this hallowed institution of learning pupils were further segregated into an "a" stream and a "b" stream each of which was further subdivided thus A/alpha; B/beta. I started in 1A ... I have often been stupid, I have frequently been ignorant, I freely confess to being too gullible; dumb, I am not. Toward the end of year one a crucial series of end of year tests loomed. By this stage I had already formed a passion for blood and gore and most earnestly desired to widen my knowledge and ultimately I hoped to become a surgeon. I also liked to read a lot and also to write. Sometimes I dreamed of becoming a writer instead. Anyway we draw close to the fateful moment when one of the trucks in the van of my ambitions took an unexpected derailment. The one subject that I had struggled with during the year was Physics. The principle of Archimedes' was so much spilled bath water as far I was concerned. However I had a secret weapon. I had one of the best short term memories this side of Alpha Centauri. I would swot through the whole year's worth of semi-legible scrawlings that I had made in the county issued hard-backed notebook and upon whose green and faux-leather crinkly cover I had illumined, with ballpoint pen, the imaginative title: Fizzix. Tests for 11 year olds aren't especially challenging. Spew out a few facts and the marker is happy to award a few marks and the happiness is spread fairly and squarely all around. Imagine my childish horror when I discovered that book wasn't anywhere to be found! I remember quite clearly coming to the conclusion that it had been stolen by someone with a less than honest approach to keeping good scholarly records. Whatever ... the thing never did reappear in my life. The physics test was an excruciating embarrassment. I believe that I did well in remembering my name ... though I wasn't at all sure at the time. I actually got 15%. It is a rather ghastly blot on my academic record ... and I have all of my end of term reports for the whole of my school career. It was the nadir of my learning curve ... Hell, nadir? Curve? This was the Mariana Trench! I started year 2 in 2B. It could've been worse. If it had been 2-beta I would have been forced to find a way to type greek letters. Actually it was worse. The A/alpha stream got to do character forming subjects like Latin and English literature while we dumbos were gifted extra classes in the basics of life ... like breathing. Without even making an effort (and I cannot say this without it sounding conceited) I came out at the top of 2B 2 terms running ... not by a mark or two by a light year. I finished the year in 2alpha. But by then the damage was done. I was already taking the dumb-ass courses and Eng. Lit was off limits. I still won the Third Year Literature prize anyway. So there it is. For the want of a notebook a night's cramming was lost, and with it went the opportunity to be guided through some of the most significant landmarks of literature. Instead I have stumbled around, pretty much in the dark reading trash and high art, often simultaneously, both for contrast and for also for light relief, each from the other ... Oh, I know what I mean. In some way it is an advantage, I can rate Stephen King as highly as Steinbeck. I can look through an Ayn Rand and wonder: "why" and gives a shit who John Galt was. Dickens made me laugh and Homer impressed me as the kind of man who would have trouble finding his way home after a party ... but I wouldn't mind cos he told a good yarn. All the same ... an earlier grounding in the principles and mechanics of the science of literature might have cured me of my obsession with chopping pieces of formerly live tissue into minute chunks (the better to determine why it was once "alive") ... it might also have kept me from becoming the natural corollary of a dissectionist: a dentist. Which would have saved me from wasting the best part of two decades doing something I loathed, mostly to people that I detested. Still ... it is never too late. I am learning to wake, on demand, my recalcitrant muse, to tame it and to steer it. Now all I need to decide is which way to go ....

Blogged Up

2004-10-04T13:28:00.000+01:00
Being a weird one I am prone to many silly and childlike faults. Alliteration is one. Of course being weird I am apt to conjure up complicated alliterative conjunctions that rely upon the reader having a similarly off-kilter view of life in order to appreciate them. One way to do this might be to use rhyming slang to mask the alliteration and -- in doing so -- changing the whole apparent meaning of the relevant sentence. I agree. It is not big and it most decidedly not clever. It is just childish nonsense. The nonsense of a precociously clever child possibly ... but still the work of a child's, mostly, febrile mind. And here I go .... Febrile mind? Whatever am I thinking! Are the minds of children febrile? Well it is true, I suspect, that for most of the time between birth and the age of 16 or 17 the average child is either about to become feverish, actually febrile, or else in recovery form a particularly nasty virus that was accompanied by a truly dreadful fever that was just barely within the powers of Calpol's® abilities to control. Some even go to the extreme of actually fitting; an event that is a truly frightening experience for any parent. A while ago I came across one of those witty pages that breed like lemmings in the dark corners of the virtual-reality of cyber space. I have wasted a good 30 seconds of my life today in trying to find it again via the auspices of Google but all I keep finding are websites for childhoods ailments. The page I found was a long and detailed examination of the pandemic affliction known as childhood which seemed to afflict a large portion of the human race. The disease's principal signs were dwarfism and ignorance. The paper noted, speculatively, that many cases of the disease seemed spontaneously to go into a remission that is characterized by sudden height gain and a growth in common sense.... Well, I guess you get the idea. Trouble is I cannot find it again and, frankly, I can't be bothered to look too hard. The only reason I mentioned it at all was because of my casual use of the epithet febrile mind in relation to a child. It is, one has to grant I feel sure, an apt usage. And so, by association we also readily accept the silly concept of childhood qua childhood being ipso facto a disease of humanity. It is rather comic. It is also sad. When we cease to like the behavior of a grown person we insult them by labeling them as childish when, maybe, what we really mean is mad. Why is being slightly crazy an affliction (to be ashamed of)? Where was I? Oh yes ... Being a weird one I am prone to many silly and childlike faults. Another one is a fondness for overuse of new-found tools, toys and gizmos ... like for example alliteration (and no ... don't bother I haven't hidden any here today, too tired, too lazy!) I was messing around with Windows movie maker for the first time the other day. Imagine my delight when I found that I had a simple, but complete set of video effects available to me ... and, more to the point, I had never suspected that were even there all the time! So I edited together a quick 3 minute movie and managed to use every single transition effect that was on offer. I also used almost all of the video effects on the various clips (scenes) mostly doubled and trebled-up, for example, blurring plus colorization plus slo-mo. When I had finished I was thrilled. It was a masterpiece. I was clearly bound for Hollywood and Oscar ceremonies. I would dine with Bushes or the Kerry's -- I'm not fussy, nor too proud (to hobnob with mere politicians). But, whatever else may be true of second childhoods and/or premature senile dementia, one is at the peak of one's powers of self-criticalness in those dreadful first hours after the daily miracle of raising oneself miraculously out of bed. It was during such a period, that for nonce I shall call "this morning", when I viewed my masterpiece with a more savagely critical eye than had hitherto been employed. How ironic that I had chosen to name the wretched opus: "Shattered Dream". There are many writers of great skill with the literary tool, irony who have chosen many and varied paths that all, essentially, seek either to prove or else to disprove the existence of God or of Fate by the expedient of finding a real life example of the deux ex machina at work in their own, or someone else's life. Well, I just found mine. The taste is bitter. Thank you Jaweh or whatever Your name is!

Getting Into A Two And Eight

2004-10-01T18:54:00.000+01:00
OK, OK! I get the message already. I blog four entries in June and now I'm expected to make a habit of it? Someone posted a comment positing the theory that I was making some sort of exotic (non-? ) existential demonstration of the futility of work. That was so good, such a sharp and well-honed observation, witty and brief as well as having all the hallmarks of a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, that I felt goaded; I have to feel spurred or impelled before I decide to do anything. My problem , I now appreciate, has less to do with laziness per se than it has to do with emotional constipation. When I began this mess I was deep in the throes of a mild, but chronic, clinical depression. It wasn't a place I had ever been to before but it's a place that I am not ready to visit again. At the time I thought, hey! Why the hell not? I'll just begin a blog and open my soul and write down all my thoughts and maybe someone'll be able see where I went wrong ... Bad idea! I am emotionally constipated. Ask me how I am. Go on, then ... "I'm fine, thanks!" (And here's one of my big, cheesy patented sunny smiles) See what I mean? I've been going through these motions (oh help, please lord, if I need a three-legged thing for me to sit on please don't let it be a stool!) all of my life. I don't really say what I feel until, when I finally do I end up falling out with someone. Oops there goes another relationship. Yes my house is still the sort of place that attracts flies rather than good housekeeping awards. Most days I think I would choose to have teeth filled without anaesthetic rather than clean something. Cleaning is so pointless ... it only gets dirty again. Last week, for example I went all week without getting into the bath. Why? I was too lazy to evict the arachnid who had abseiled into the tub overnight. OK Too scared as well. Arachnophobia is another foible I have. The beast in question was a monster in UK terms (meaning that it was approximately the size of Wales) ... it also had a particularly malevolent glint in most of its eight eyes and whenever I looked, cautiously, over the edge in hopes of finding that it had turned turtle and died, decently, of -- presumably -- hunger or dehydration I was partly relieved (I'm not by nature a sadist) and partly disconcerted to see it still standing there, in enamel valley, trying to look like it was rolling up its shirt-sleeves prior to physical combat. For four days that fearsome sight was enough to send me scuttling away to do something as unstrenuous as possible. Sadly on the fifth morning I had an appointment with a therapy group (more of that another day) and although I tried my level best to convince myself otherwise I had to admit that I had acquired an aroma. I did not yet stink, but I was moving in that direction. Call it pride. Call it anything but I was darned sure I wasn't going to sit in a room with other people I hardly know if I wasn't utterly content with the olfactory signals I would be transmitting. What I found much more worrying was the realization that this piece of pridefulness was far too sane and sensible. Maybe I should just go out all stinky. I'd given her a name by now. Charlotte . (I know! Cheesey isn't it?) What I had figured was this. Spiders can't get a grip on the enamel which is why they get stuck; they cannot climb out because the sides of the tub are too slippery ... even in my filthy house where bathtubs hold archeological records in their fossilized scum rings (only joking ... even I like a clean bath tub!) Anyway, I figured that being large, Charlotte would also be smart and that, given enough time, she would work out that if she built herself a stairway with silk she would be out of the tub in a jiffy. (Ever noticed how much silk there is stuck to the sides of a tub that's had a spider in residence for a day or two?) Well. She hadn't. I needed the tub and she was still there and if looks could kill she would still be there. And if I had less pride she might still be there, too. OK. I admit it. I hate myself enough as it is. One more admission isn't gonna kill me. She went up the Dyson. I could see her all supine and toes-together amongst the assorted cat hairs and skin flakes that make up what passes for household dust in my residence. I felt a deep well of remorse yawn open before me like nightmare gateway into a hell-for-spider-killing-lazy-people and then I shrugged and turned on the hot water .... It was later, as I laid my head back against the steamed up tiles, that I remembered about the silk that spiders leave attached to the sides ....

Idle Vice

2004-06-06T07:55:00.000+01:00
I have usually got a sizeable number of reasons to feel shame. Oh not the grand shame of a serial poisoner or some other wickedness, just the normal common or garden variety. I’m thinking of the sort that stems from leaving the dishes in the sink. But there is ‘leaving the dishes’ and Leaving The Dishes!’ There’s a lot of difference … This morning I have more than my usual “fair share” of shame … though what’s fair about my terms of judgement I cannot say. We are, when all is said and done, our own most pitiless judges. My sister paid me a visit yesterday as family concern mounts over my financial solvency … if not my sanity. Reason to feel shame number one then. The general condition of the inside of my house has declined at a rate that resembled free-fall and which seemed generally oblivious of the concept of such a thing as “terminal velocity”. This is so important! I hate untidiness. I loathe dirt grime. But I do not seem to have a shred of a work ethic. Yes. When I force myself to clean up I sit down and admire my handiwork and I feel pleased with it … but a few days later when the clutter and dust begins to reassert itself I’m right back at square one. I can try to bombard myself with logic … go through all the reasons why the aphorisms concerning prognostication make perfect sense and then I step over the mess and go and do something pointlessly satisfying. I’m hopeless and beyond help.

The Work Ethic - Defining the Definition

2004-06-04T21:08:00.000+01:00
Ok I'm not even going to attempt it ... well not all in one go. A quick Google search reveals only two significant foci of the internet community's obsession with the concept:
Employee focussed desire to shrug off wage-slavery
Employer focussed obsession with exacting the full pound of flesh
Eh? do the search yourself, if you want to. The headline link is just an example of a sparsely served genre ... not an affirmation of a specific endorsement. I'm looking for answers, too! OK? So first principles is always the best place to start. Work, as a human activity, has to be defined so here goes. Work is any activity that has a specific goal that -- if not achieved -- causes the effort involved in the attempt to be regarded as wasted. Put another way, all animal activity can be divided into 2 simple flavours: work and leisure. At the most basic level this means eating and sleeping. Oh ... bloody hell ... I need to lay down ...

Ring Ring

2004-06-04T07:14:00.000+01:00
Am I the only person on the planet who gets pissed off every time I hear a Nokia phone's distinctive ring tone from the TV? Even when it isn't the one my phone is set to I still jump up and start looking for the damned thing. TV producers need to find the audio equivalent of "555" ... Meanwhile there's something else about TV that's been bugging me recently. As an unemployable unemployed person I have a greater degree of access to daytime TV than is probably good for me. Mostly I don't actually watch it ... it's just on in the background ... mostly because my TV set is behind me as I sit here at my PC. I have to say that when heard and not seen, current British TV programme making values have gone down the toilet ... and I blame it all on Blue Peter. OK now you expect me to justify that .... Prgramme Scenario Fresh faced non-entity with chirpy manner arrives at a non-descript suburban home. Inside we meet Mr and Mrs Average who are either
eager to get on TV but not eager enough for Jerry Springer style experience
to dumb for Countdown and too lairy for The Weakest Link
so mean that they really will sell grandad's war medals to raise a piffling couple of grand for their daughter's wedding/big family holiday/new kitchen/wife's boob job
... or else they actually are that stupid they need help finding out they own 'some stuff'.
Two more non-entities - "experts" - appear and ransack Mr and Mrs's A's home. Quite where their field of expertise lays is anyone's guess ... but one thing is certain; dear old Mr and Mrs A will be found in possession of an astonishingly large number of Clarice Cliffe crocks or else a whole attic-full of 1950's toys still in original packaging ... or both. The tedium escalates. The show adjourns to the sale rooms where Mr and Mrs A's 'treasures' go under the auctioneer's hammer. (How on earth did someone actually think this would be entertaining?) Undeterred non-entity numbero uno, narrates the whole fucking auction in the the most pretentiously paternalistic style you could imagine but imagine Blue peter presenters narrating their annual safari to Kenya with Princess Anne and you're getting the picture ... it was OK when you were 10 ... not so good when 40 is but a fond memory. Meanwhile ... lots one to four all go for excellent prices well above the "experts" valuation then lot #5 valued at £80 goes for £75 and non-entity is trying far too hard to make it interesting and I'm just thinking I couldn't care less. It used to be the case that TV could accurately be described as "radio with pictures", which if you stop to think about it isn't really a negative comment. All has now changed. TV is now pictures with radio and that is a very bad thing. It is true that a picture can be worth a thousand words and that is what TV should be a significant augmentation to that which sound-only media can achieve. It ain't doing it though. A far worse example is parlous state of the modern documentary ... they can 'look' pretty good on the trails but in reality they are merely radio programs with an unlovely slideshow. Such stuff makes a mockery of both the medium and the audience. To substitute "filmed-action" scenes which might actually enhance and improve the narrative with stupid, out of focus 'generic' stock images is lazy and insulting. In most cases a story can be better illustrated by a good entertainer, a few toy soldiers and a tray of sand. Anyone else remember Michael Bentine's talent for recreating epics in a sandbox? There's a moral here somehwere ...

Waiting For Armageddon To Come

2004-06-03T08:44:00.000+01:00
Intrigued by the title, huh? Hope you stick with me for a while. I thought that I'd better start this thing while there's still time. It has been my opinion for some time that the world is kinda holding its breath. It's as though we're all waiting for something if not actually earth-shattering then at least apocalyptic enough that there won't be anyone left alive who isn't instantly aware that the agenda has changed. Changed in such a way that all avenues of retreat into previous lifestyles are irrevocably cut off, all established patterns of thought and belief are rendered instantly obsolete. I'm pretty sure that this pregnant pause in humanity's consciousness is a numerolgical thing ... a millenial effect. As in everyone feels a bit sort of cheated and let down. We woke to the 21st century and realised, for the first time--more or less--that the groovy future full of robots and other funky techno-bling that we were 'promised' in our '60's and '70's childhoods had sort of snuck in under the door while weren't paying attention.