REASONED DEBATE AND CATERPILLAR PLANTS

In my point of view, there was really nothing bad about the age of science and reason taking over from the age of magic and superstition, and human beings are always better off when they have knowledge and understanding of the way the universe works around them rather than letting ignorance and superstition guide their actions.

The battle between these to extremes points of view has been a long and bloody one and in some cases certainly doesn’t look like anyone is likely to want to give up any time soon. After all, as I’ve always believed, a great deal of argument is pretty pointless when it comes down to it. Very view people are going to change an ingrained point of view to the complete opposite just on the say so of someone else, and it takes a very big person to look at an overwhelming weight of evidence and accept that they could have been wrong about something.

Recently I was lurking around in a bookshop, which despite all you may have heard, do still exist. At least I believe they do, and the young shop assistant I paid for the rather tangible books I bought there seemed to believe it too. This is probably not the moment for us to fall into a discussion on the quantum state of hypothetical bookshops, however.

Meanwhile, I was mooching around the shelves and stacks looking for some bargains whilst the steady drone of the noises of a busy shopping centre drifted through the open doors on a hot summer’s afternoon. One voice seemed to be coming across more distinctly than most as a soapbox evangelist was lecturing anyone who would listen about his own beliefs. Suddenly however, things took a more sinister turn as his audience started to disagree with him and began throwing back different opinions at a similar volume and pretty soon a full blown row was brewing up on a public high street on a hot afternoon, loud enough to stop many shoppers in their tracks and cause bored shop assistants to stick their noses out of thie shop doorways and have a look what was going on.

The air was tense with anticipation. Would the mob turn on the hapless orator? Would the hot sticky afternoon bubble over into scenes of chaos and tragedy and riot? Would the heretic be carried off by the mob and lynched?

Well of course not. We live in an age of science and reason, and the days of mob vengeance are far behind us and the best we can hope for is that we will agree to disagree. The fierce debate was still raging as I headed off towards the bank with my carrier bag of purchases in my hand. No fist fights had yet broken out, and none probably would, although I did find myself suppressing a slight “Tsssk!”  to myself as I passed the perimeter of the now quite sizeable crowd when someone started on about famine and flood being “God’s fault…” but I decided to let that particular one go rather than add my own two-penneth of fuel to an already burning fire.

It did make me think though. I like the fact that I live in an age of reason, but sometimes I do miss the old days of magic and wonder. Oh, I’m not saying that I would ever want us to return to the dark ages where people got burnt alive for looking at you funny on a day when your cow died, or where victims would be thrown into volcanoes to appease the gods, but the more spiritual beliefs of the kind that Tolkien built a world from, wizards and elves and ancient magic and forest spirits, and some of the more mystical, earth-centric folklore just sometimes seems rather more appealing than the trappings of modern day life. Of course I’d rather deal with a doctor who understands that blood flows around the body and that pain can be controlled by little white pills rather than one that decided to punch holes in my skull to let the demons out, but in many ways those simpler times do have their temptations, even when you know that life back in those times was nasty, brutish and short.

Meanwhile, I went into the garden yesterday and found one particular weed that had punched its way through the grass and around its flower heads were clustered so many different sizes of the same kind of caterpillar that it looked like it was a caterpillar plant. There were no others to be seen on any of the other plants all around it, just this one plant where they were all clustered. A medieval version of me might very well have believed that caterpillars came from plants if he’d seen that, and the evidence would have been very convincing if you didn’t know any better, which is why, in the end, even though the people of the future may very well look back on these times we are living in as being full of ignorance and stupidity, I’m rather glad I live in an era of knowledge and enlightenment.

NIGHT SHIFTING

I’m sorry if this turns out to be a little bit weird, but I’m too depressed to think of anything else to write about today. I’m suddenly starting to get the slightly paranoid (and possibly completely unfounded) notion that certain aspects of my so-called lifestyle are feeling as if they are turning into a bit of a personal nightmare which is probably mostly made up of the bleakest worries squatting in the darker corners of my own imagination but, nevertheless, this is leading to a significant amount of inner turmoil and the kinds of introspective mullings and musings, which are tending to keep me up at nights and aren’t all that conducive towards considering and creating the calm rendering of rational thought into the kind of reasoned argument and discussion that I would normally expect to achieve whenever I head to my keyboard with a plan to write something at least vaguely interesting.

Well, interesting to me, at least…

I do try and write something every day, not for any real and proper good reason, but just because I want to, even if sometimes that is both very hard and really doesn’t achieve very much of any consequence. Today, however, I should really have had loads more time than I normally would because I had lain awake half the night worrying about work and eventually got up at 4.00 am because I was sick of having all these terrible scenarios spinning around my head and I decided that I would be better off if I just got up and wrote them down. I still don’t really know what is the source of all this angst. Maybe, deep down, it’s just that nagging sense of how quickly things can just fall apart. Somehow, the older I get, the more aware of this I get. I don’t generally think that youth is wasted on the young, although mine obviously was on me, but I do have the growing realisation that no matter what they might think, one day they’ll grow older and find they have just the same doubts and fears that they currently find so worthy of contempt in me.

Sometimes, however, you do have to try and address your inner anger so that you don’t say something stupid to just the wrong person at just the wrong time, and equally, when you analyse these things more rationally instead of just letting them spin wildly out of control in your mind as you desperately try to sleep, you can at least regain a sense of proportion. The irritation might not completely go away, but the knee-jerk reaction of some kind of “armageddon solution” has, at least, been averted for the time being.

“Armageddon? I think armageddon past it…” (Shut up, Groucho…).

By the time I’d done that, of course, it was time to get up anyway and so I was committed to a day of walking around in a daze, drinking far too much coffee, and trying to keep focussed on the things I should be focussing on rather than all the orbiting nonsense that was troubling me so.

You see, despite all the appearances to the contrary, I have been, generally, quite happy with the way I have had my life organised for the past few years. Oh, I know it’s not perfect, and I know that I share my little grumbles with you in these little postings from the dark side, but it could be so much worse. It used to actually be so much worse, to be perfectly honest with you, so, despite its faults, I rather like the way my life is currently set up. Suddenly, though, the sands they are a shifting and it looks as if I’m going to once more quote from the gospel according to Joni and reflect that you really don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

Meanwhile, in far away meeting rooms, dark forces are stirring, and decisions are being made that will directly change my quiet little existence, and I expect them to eventually cost me dearly in terms both financial and temporal, as well as in matters of my general well-being (if I can ever remember where I left it). Sadly, as I am just a tiny cog in the great scheme of things, I don’t really matter all that much and am not really all that important, so I will probably be getting very little input into how these various scenarios will actually play out, and, of course, why should I? I am aware of my tiny place in the great scheme of things after all, although sometimes it is really quite hard to accept that you’re just going to have to do what you are told, and that everyone else’s priorities will have to be put before your own. Ultimately, for any of us, that feels like it is a rather intolerable situation, even though we know we’re going to have to accept it eventually. After all, isn’t that what being an underling is, when it all comes down to it? These days, in the current climate, what other options are there? The alternatives are very grim, especially for an aging exponent of the visual arts working in a sector that mostly depends on the youthful vitality of those exponents.

One of the things is, of course that I am resistant to change. Actually, when it comes down to it, I do rather think that everyone is, but maybe other people are better at hiding it than I am, and I suppose you can adjust to anything given enough time and a certain amount of understanding as you grumpily negotiate the period of transition.

I can learn to lump it, I don’t have to like it, but I will get used to it eventually.

STONE BALANCING

I spent an hour or so of one of my days last week just lying on a rocky beach and balancing stones. I’m sure that there’s nothing unusual in that and that it’s quite a common thing to be doing but, as far as I can recall, this was the very first time I had ever actually done it.

I suppose that it’s just never occurred to me before, perhaps because I’ve never been all that interested in “beach” holidays, and I can only suspect that it’s got something to do with some of my more recent reading which has attempted to open my eyes to the small beautiful things of life and persuade me to embrace them. This, as anyone who’s read much of these witterings will realise, is no mean feat.

Anyway, we arrived on a cloudy beach in the middle of the morning on an unpromising day and there were already families set up with windbreaks and deckchairs and buckets and spades ready for their own day of glorious inactivity. Our own preparations seemed somewhat lacking in comparison as they basically involved having a few supermarket sandwiches sitting in a cool bag in the car, alongside showerproof coats in case it rained. But then we hadn’t really come for their kind of day at the beach. What we had come for, I suppose, was a chance to relax a little, maybe watch some birds and explore the nature reserve that the beach was part of, and in that we succeeded magnificently.

So we sat ourselves down on the shingle and, possibly remembering a few photographs I’d seen decorating the walls of cafes or hotels, or maybe some pictures I took myself of a similar stack when I came across such a structure whilst walking on another beach on another year, I found myself starting to balance one stone on top of another. Then I added another and another, and pretty soon I found myself getting totally absorbed in becoming one with the rock as I struggled with the knotty little problem of keeping the whole lot in equilibrium as I attempted to add yet another.

It was kind of like playing solitaire “beach jenga” if you will, but it did have the added benefit of focusing the mind and making all the other cares just drift away for a while. Occasionally just a slight breeze would send the whole thing toppling back to chaos, and equally sometimes a tower on the very brink of collapse would suddenly become stable by the simple addition of one small extra pebble.

All very satisfying and calming.

After an hour or so of this, we were surrounded by various little precariously balanced towers of pebbles and rock and we decided that it was time to move on, which we carefully did, managing to creep away without causing a mass collapse. I briefly wondered how long these things might actually survive the comings and goings of an ordinary day on the beach, but I didn’t have to wonder too long as a large family arrived to park themselves like an exploded landmine and scattered themselves across an area much larger than would have seemed possible and the first thing one of their little darlings did was to kick down the piles of stones as he passed them by.

It wasn’t unexpected. In fact, when I was a small child I suspect I would have done much the same, but it did remind me of an observation I once heard about so many people spending so much time making pretty things only for someone else to come along and smash them. Perhaps human beings are fundamentally just like that. I had, of course, hoped that, like I had myself on that other year, coming across an enigmatic pile of stones would cause someone to pause and wonder about them for a moment, but that was probably too much to expect or hope for. After all, sometimes a pile of stones is just a pile of stones, and when you’ve seen one, you’ve probably seen them all, and perhaps we are all just preprogrammed to break the things that aren’t precious to us personally.

Anyway, I stomped on his sandcastle later on, so the balance of the universe was maintained.

No, I didn’t really, but I imagine that there would have been a hullaballo if I had done, after all, even if one person’s carefully constructed sandcastle is just a pile of sand to someone else, and even if it’s true that the sea will always win eventually anyway, for that particular moment, a child’s personal Camelot is the most important thing in the world to them, especially if they’ve spent some time together as a family building it and building themselves a precious memory.

47

The other side of the purple door circa 1984

It was never the most prestigious of addresses, but for three surprisingly consistent years in the early-to-mid-1980s, Room 47 in Hostel 3 on the Caerleon campus of Gwent College of Higher Education was the place I called home.

Despite what anyone who might have known me during those three years might now think (if they think about it at all…) in many ways I realise now that they were the golden years, the three years of the most consistent actual sense of happiness that I ever spent. Don’t get me wrong, I spent much of the time feeling thoroughly miserable on a day-to-day basis, and during the final year my father died, but that basic sense of doing something you actually quite enjoy and not having the responsibilities of much other than paying your rent and not feeling beholden to anyone else, somehow now remind me of a spirit of freedom that I don’t really recall having ever since.

Typically, of course, I never really capitalised upon those freedoms, something which I’m sometimes think that I might start to regret slightly as I stagger through middle age. Occasionally, I think it would be nice to have a more exotic past to look back upon, or maybe to have been a little bit more of a scoundrel and possibly had a bit more fun to remember, but I suppose that I must accept that that was never the kind of person I was, and anyway, the scruffy moron I was back then would have been no more appealing to the world in general than the tedious moron I am nowadays would be if I were still alone. I think that those frankly terrifying government sponsored adverts from those disease-ridden few years of the mid-1980s certainly managed to put the lid on any thought I might have had in such directions, but probably meant that I managed to remain friends with people whose lives I might have complicated in some other reality.

It could have been so different. I headed off down to that part of the world full of fear that I would spend three years not talking to a living soul. I was, quite frankly, terrified. Talking to complete strangers was never my strongest suit, but most of the people I actually talked to on my foundation course seemed to have all gone off the Stoke-on-Trent, although my own application to that particular establishment had been hobbled by an unfortunate series of misunderstandings and incompetence by those who were supposed to nurture you through these obstacles.

Anyway, I try not to dwell, and, because the wheel of destiny chose to turn the way it did, a few months later I turned up in South Wales on a Sunday lunchtime, having arrived far too early as usual, and staggered blinkingly around a deserted campus trying to find out where exactly I was supposed to be. Eventually, a few more early birds started to appear and I was pointed in the right direction and soon found myself in one of the many queues I would join that week, still feeling rather alone and frightened and not knowing how to start any conversations with any or all of these confident seeming people who all seemed to know precisely what they were supposed to be doing.

By one of those strange coincidences that sometimes smooth the wheels of life a little, I overheard the chap ahead of me in the queue saying he was supposed to be in room 48, hostel 3, which sounded to me like he was very probably a neighbour of some sort, so I suppressed all the mounting fears and said hello, and, somehow a slight connection had been made and I was no longer quite as alone as I had been. That connection led me to others and, within a surprisingly short space of time, I had a circle of friends that was as close as any I have ever had and who I still miss even to this day.

Pretty soon, back on that long-ago Sunday, I had my key and someone else to talk to, and I was strolling across the campus and eventually found my room on the top floor of a building with internal paintwork that was all an institutional deep purple, and, with that slight rock music connection, it seemed that I had managed to find my new home. It turned out that each of the buildings was colour coded, perhaps to help you find your way home when the worst for wear, with Hostel 1 having blue doors, 2 red, 3 purple and 4 yellow.

I staggered back to my trusty old Cortina which I’d had for what seemed like an astonishingly long time back then, although it must have been less than a year, and lugged my various bits of tat up those many stairs and made myself at home. How many times over the next three years would I lug my entire life up and down those stairs at the beginning and end of every term.

Couldn’t do it now.

Unusually, that purplish room would remain my home for three years as I chose not to venture into the dark world of student housing in the seamier parts of town (I was terrified enough as it was without such additional adventures to consider) and the administrative gods took pity upon me and allocated me the same space each year. Perhaps no-one else wanted it, or perhaps my obsessive inclinations were always more evident than I realised.

Anyway. It was generally a happy, if uneventful, place to be. The door might close and conceal the darkest moments of my miserable existence from the prying eyes of the world, but people knew where I was and would come knocking for a cup of tea and a bit of a chat, or to watch some telly, or (most often) drag me “kicking and screaming” down to the pub. There are many tales I could tell of those three short years so long ago, and pretty much all of them are pretty unspectacular, although that’s never stopped me before. Tales of forgetful Maurice and his various attempts to inadvertently burn the place down, my first experience of tea that tasted like pond water, or the day I nearly took off Leigh’s nose as I got so angry that I flung my keys so hard at the door that they embedded themselves in it just a second before he emerged from his room to see them sailing by. That was a lesson learned.

Generally, though, I enjoyed my time in good old room 47 and it was a wrench to have to leave. Strangely, despite my aversion to numbers of the odd persuasion, I’m only just beginning to realise that pretty much everywhere I’ve ever lived has been an odd number, 29, 47, 3, 37 and 15, and even the years spent living at an even number were at a 2A (which is probably really a 3, if you think about it).

No wonder I’ve spent so many years feeling slightly uncomfortable with my lot in life. Like many things, when you look into it further, it’s all down to the numbers.

A TALE OF TWO PHONE CALLS

You might find it hard to believe in these days of multimedia communications that I spend very little time on the telephone. My mobile phone is just a work tool and my callers are usually from a circle of about four regular people and so it remains fairly shiny and pristine despite not being the most up-to-date of pieces of equipment. Otherwise, communications with Lesser Blogfordshire are performed using the medium of electronic mail (although personal messages are very rare), or the landline. Sometimes it is such a rare occurrence for our telephone to actually ring that it can come as a total shock and cause great astonishment when it does so and it can sometimes take a few moments for me to realise what is going on, because, apart from a few troubling calls about family matters, or yet another call centre making me an offer I find easy to refuse, it can sometimes go entire weeks and months between rings…

Actually, being as I am such an antisocial so-and-so, you might not actually find any of that very hard to believe at all, but I do occasionally allow myself the slightest of hopeful glimmers that I haven’t quite yet been completely consigned to the dustbin of history by everyone who’s ever met me, although it’s getting to be a bit touch-and-go nowadays.

I’ve always been particularly bad at telephone conversations anyway. Unless I’m in a “prepared” state of mind, I can very quickly find them getting out of my control, with me either coming across as so ridiculously pleased to hear from someone that I verbally gush with excitement and babble on nonsensically, or I get so intimidated by the silences coming from the other end that I become desperate to fill the gaps and it all rather rapidly turns into a bit of an embarrassing mess. Many is the time that I’ve hung up after a telephone conversation and truly, truly wished none of it had ever happened and that I hadn’t said a word, and I will spend the rest of the evening convinced that everyone I’ve ever met must think that I’m some kind of idiot and that whatever it was that I had been saying, I’ve just made a complete fool of myself.

“Why can’t I just shut up?” I find myself thinking. Frequently. But then I do that with these musings, too, so what do I know about anything?

So it was rather unusual that a few evenings ago the telephone rang three times in as many hours, and all the calls were for me, and two of them were people I know actually ringing up for a bit of a chat. The other one, by the way, and just in case you were wondering, was a location report on where the beloved needed picking up from later. Both of the other callers were the people who, if I do ever end up having “non-family” telephone conversations with someone, it’s one or the other of them that it is most likely to be. I hadn’t spoken to either of them in months so it’s quite a coincidence that they would both ring me on the very same evening, a few short hours apart, and find me in such different moods.

The first one took me completely by surprise and, on reflection, did not go too well. It didn’t help, I suppose, that my meal was busy bubbling away in the oven and so I was already feeling rather distracted when there was this unexpected development from out-of-the-blue. There’s a kind of “adrenaline rush” that surges through my mind when these conversations happen and the thoughts and ideas and possibilities and interconnectedness of all things tend to flood my brain in a way that I can suddenly feel like I’m drowning. This is dangerous territory because I can very quickly find myself spouting nonsense of the kind that will precisely cause the kind of mental self-recrimination that I mentioned earlier, and, sadly, this is how it turned out to be. All my fault, of course, but I am, even now, days later, still filled with the “this man’s an idiot” vibe I thought I was getting when the conversation ended. After all the years we’ve known each other there really are some topics that we should know better than to venture well clear of and steer a wide course around, but I waded right on in there regardless and now I feel like such a fool it’s ridiculous.

No wonder nobody wants to ring me up any more.

I’m pretty sure that it will all just be dismissed as another of my “rants” and that I was just being my usual stupid self, and I know that my much valued and very good friend is unlikely to finally give up on me just because I said a few strange things during one telephone conversation, but these things really do seem to trouble me. Perhaps, in the end, it might very well be the realisation that such things do trouble me so that will make people think twice before calling me up at all, so I should really play the matter down a bit and say that it doesn’t really matter all that much to me.

All of this just persuades me a tiny bit more of a much bigger picture in relationship to my dealings with people in the great big world. I sometimes really wish that people would listen to the words I’m saying rather than just hearing some noises I’m making, or, in the case of these blogs,  actually read them rather than making their mind up about what I’m saying before they’ve given me the chance to actually say it. I get this a lot, which is why I always feel somewhat misunderstood. In fact, in many ways, the blog is what I do instead of conversation, because I’m so very bad at doing conversation. I find that using this medium to put some of my more radical thoughts into some kind of order means that I can make my point without (hopefully) being too offensive and whilst having the opportunity to explain myself more thoroughly (if not, sadly, concisely). Of course, the fact that very few people actually read them with that kind of thoroughness does rather defeat the object, but at least I’m trying.

Anyway, an evening of brooding silence seemed to be in prospect, with me staring at the phone in self-disgust, having decided that I would probably be better off if I never spoke to anybody on a telephone ever again…

So, when the telephone rang again and it was my other old friend, I was so surprised that I didn’t really get the opportunity to worry myself about it, and we had a nice old chat and suddenly the art of telephony didn’t seem quite so bad any more.

I’m not a big believer in fate or coincidence or any of those sorts of things, tending, I suppose, to be something of a pragmatist, but I’m really so very happy that the second call happened because, with the amount of angst and self-loathing I was feeling after the first conversation, none of which was my friend’s fault I really must stress again, I was rapidly convincing myself to never, ever attempt to use the telephone as a means of social interactivity again, and so it was just nice to be able to have a little chat and come off the phone feeling happy.

Sometimes I do think that I have a tendency to over-analyse these things, but if you are  ever thinking of giving me a call, just beware. It’s a complete minefield.

THE NEWS AGENDA

We now live in such a media savvy world that it’s really difficult not to know what’s going on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week no matter how far out of the loop you’ve managed to get yourself, so when someone that most rational people might consider to be something of a maniac starts killing people on such a vast and unbelievable scale, you pretty much get to hear of it even if you’re in your own self-imposed bubble.

These days, it’s almost impossible not to, so even if your idyllic retreat happens not to have a TV set in it, you will probably get to hear about the more horrific details, perhaps only in the loosest and sketchiest of ways which can sometimes make things sound (if at all possible) far worse than they actually are, and in a manner designed to have you running off to find out more just so you feel that you know what the hell is going on. Even if you only find things out by chatting to a fellow guest over breakfast who happens to have internet access or just a radio in their car, you will be put in the picture fairly quickly and there is seldom anyone nowadays who can genuinely reappear and say, in all innocence “Why, what’s happened?”

It’s hard nowadays to have the excuse that you don’t know what’s happening because, even if you are sitting in a hospital waiting room waiting for an X-ray there is likely to be a TV set pouring out the only images that they had on an infinite loop of grief designed, I suppose, to raise the spirits of even the most troubled of souls and make those of us waiting for those endless hours to tick away realise that are own troubles are not so bad in comparison.

I suspect we’ve all had that strange kind of moment when we walk into a room quite cheerfully and notice someone looking a little upset. Sometimes our own mood is so good that it can take a few moments to process that anyone else could possibly be feeling sad on such a wonderful day, and the kind of exchange that goes “Who’s died?” “Her grandfather!” can tend to alter the feeling of high spirits fairly rapidly. I suppose it’s always wise to try and remember that every time that you are feeling “up” the need for the world to keep things in balance means that someone else is probably feeling “down” and it’s always wiser to bear that in mind as you go about your day feeling sickeningly cheerful, especially if you are the kind of person who feels that it is necessary to say “Cheer up!” to someone you think looks a bit sad.

But, when it comes to the bigger news stories that touch all of us in some way, even if we are not personally involved it’s difficult not to make it be about ourselves. I recently read an exchange where some people were discussing their memories of a major news event from fifteen years ago when a bomb went off in a major city. “I was only there a week before!” was one of the comments I saw which struck me as being a little strange. It was not a memory of the event itself, nor was the comment made by someone directly affected at the time, they had merely been in that spot, in no real danger to their own life and limb, a mere seven days away from harm. I worked with someone once who quite genuinely decided to get upset because of a plane crash. Now, I’ll grant you that plane crashes are terrible things, but their reasoning seemed to be that they had flown to the same place a year earlier and so the story was really all about them having a dreadfully narrow escape.

Over that same breakfast on Saturday morning I also found out how interconnected we all are. I mentioned our sudden discovery of the hospitalization of a relative and got the jolly reply that my breakfast companions hoped that she wasn’t in the hospital featuring so heavily on the news recently. As a matter of fact she was, but interestingly enough those fellow holidaymakers had a daughter who was in school with the girl who had been arrested and had been visiting the hospital themselves only the previous day and reported how “strangely quiet” it was.

Was this some kind of “I have a personal connection with the news” Top Trumps game we were playing? Or is there some fundamental need to make the story relevant to ourselves and put ourselves in the picture? I’ve always had little time for getting my picture in the paper, and it really is very seldom that anything major happens upon this planet that involves myself, but I’m beginning to realise that I may be unusual in this. Perhaps we all do feel the need to share. Perhaps bad events happening to others are the catalyst we all need to release our own inner torments that we would normally keep buttoned up. After all, the number of people who openly cried at Diana’s funeral and said that they hadn’t even done so at their own parent’s deaths, must mean that the shared “common experience” of grief has value to us, although I do rather baulk at the “Cult of ME!!!” so prevalent on the social networking sites when such things happen.

It does seem rather fascinating that our madman across the water seems to have been so immersed in this modern-day media-savviness that he took the time to prepare his media profile enough in advance to have professional portrait images photographed and have his pre-prepared sound bites carefully placed in Twitterworld. Now, even for a stone hard multiple murderer, that seems cold.

I wonder how many of us have ever taken just a moment to wonder which picture of us would get used if we were to suffer a high-profile unfortunate fate. Very few of the normal everyday folk you meet are likely to have a decent and recent picture of themselves, so you should really keep an eye on all those photos people take of you as you’re out enjoying yourself. That gurning snapshot taken after the twelfth tequila of the night, you know the one I mean, that’s right, the one with the redeye, could very possibly be the very image everyone remembers you by if the papers ever come knocking on your friends’ doors.

Meanwhile, when it comes to our own individual relationship with the news, I think that was probably quite a tough weekend for everyone because, as the horrors of Norway unfolded, a well known celebrity face also happened to die on the very same weekend, which led to the usual stomach-churning sense of disbelief that we all get when something so unexpected and yet (possibly) also so predictable happens. that same gut-wrenching moment also happened to the Jimi Hendrix generation, the Marilyn Monroe generation, the James Dean generation, and the Rudolph Valentino generation before us, and it remains a tragedy and a shock every single time. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, two stories occurred that on any other weekend would have been devouring the airtime and column inches themselves, but actually got barely a look in. The train collision in China that killed dozens would normally have drawn much of our attention if it hadn’t been for a Norwegian lunatic, and as for the other madman with a gun shooting five, including himself, on a Texan ice rink, well, we have been spared the usual ill-informed analysis and hand-wringing about that at least, although it troubles me to think that I can even think of that as being something “usual” these days.

These matters are really where we have to start to question the so-called “news agenda” when they have to start to qualify which of the tragic tales that they choose to tell is the most newsworthy. All unexpected deaths (and most of the “expected” ones too) are tragic and there shouldn’t be a “scale” of importance when it comes to selecting which of these stories should draw our attention, but when a weekend just spins away from us like that last one did, it’s rather difficult to know what to think any more.

THREES

I just spent a few days on Anglesey, gadding about hither and yon, seeing the sights, spotting the birds and generally taking rather too many photographs to “inspire” more prattlings and mullings as the summer starts to fade into autumn over the next few weeks, although, as is normal when I spend a few days away from the keyboard and interacting with the real world again, suddenly those very prattlings and mullings acquire such an air of pointlessness, that I find it very difficult to resume them once more when I try to. So, the ironic dualism remains; I get away to recharge the batteries and having done so, there remains little reason for the batteries to have any charge in them.

Anyhow, despite the obvious risks involved, the idea of going there was to have a few days rest and relaxation pottering about the island in a bit of a carefree manner and, generally, that’s what we did. The weather cleared and, all-in-all, a relaxing few days were spent in some of the lovelier parts of the island with the weather even choosing not to drench us for the duration as we suspected it might.

It was, however, an “eventful” week, one not without incident, and designed to keep the stress levels ticking along nicely, just so I wouldn’t get ahead of myself and start to take things for granted. There is a theory that such things happen in threes, and it would seem that the essential truth of this was proven by those little incidents that didn’t manage to ruin our little break, but did keep us on our toes (or would have done if events hadn’t unfolded as they did…).

The first incident was pretty minor in the great scheme of things, but still one of those small, annoying developments designed to keep you guessing. As we passed across the border into the “Land of my Fathers” there was a rather alarming crash against the windscreen of the venerable vehicle we like to call “Blinky, the Wonder Car”. At first we thought that something had fallen off a passing wagon in the blatting rain, especially as a rusty bedspring seemed to be now nestling in the air intake channel right in front of me.

As the rain continued to pour, however, it became immediately clear that, whilst we were happy that the windscreen had not shattered, something untoward had happened to the wiper as it was now not so much removing the water from my field of view as smearing it around a bit in a rather ineffectual way.

We pulled up into a lay-by, and I decided to at least retrieve the spring so that it didn’t fly off and collide with yet another vehicle as it sped happily along. I became suddenly envious of all those people barreling along in their sleeker, newer transports without a care in the world for those of us rattling around in our aging jalopies, no doubt with their fingers forming that oh-so-caring “L” sign that I know so well. A quick examination of the wiper blade followed and it quickly turned out that the loud thud had been the tension pin on the wiper arm sheering and causing the spring to release and smack into the glass. Blinky’s getting old and metal fatigue is starting to creep in.

Anyway, with the showers being intermittent we were able to get on our way relatively safely, and made it to the island without incident. I stopped at a couple of car places that we happened to pass who were not really able to help much. In my head I had the idea that these tension pins might be the kind of thing that are lying around in repair shops but it seems that it is not so. There was much talk of far distant dealerships and possible scrapyards, but I really didn’t want to get involved in that sort of thing during my all-too-brief summer break and decided to MacGyver my way through the week with the help of some garden centre plastic wire and some duct tape, both acquired from places we happened to call in on as the week rattled on, and so we were able to bodge an adequate repair over the course of the next few days whilst the weather remained relatively kind.

Incident two occurred on the final day whilst we went for a walk around the headland in the glorious sunshine that it transpired was not much evident back home. It involved a badly sprained ankle, much hobbling to a rendezvous with the car, and various rearrangements of our planned “last night of the holiday” meal which we still managed to enjoy by means of some very helpful assistance from the local restaurant and the place we were staying.

I muttered something over our meal about things always happening in threes and the darker corners of my mind started to brew up all sorts of possibilities to nag at the edges of my thoughts and trouble me, but I really should have known better than to tempt fate that night, because, no sooner had we managed to manipulate our way back to our room than the phone rang with tales of incident number three which basically told of a relative now languishing in hospital, in fact the very same hospital that was currently splurged all over the news because of very bad things happening therein, and which would ultimately only leave the headlines because of even greater tragedies unfolding in other parts of the world.

So it seems that things do always happen in threes, and, thankfully, our particular three incidents were really just tiny irritants affecting only us really and certainly weren’t anything like as tragic as those being suffered so terribly in Norway, or China or by the family of a talented young musician in Camden. In fact, in comparison I think we got off very, very lightly and should be very grateful that our little holiday had so much to enjoy in it, and our tiny little moments of angst are probably barely worth mentioning…

Except of course that I just did.

WASSSSSSPZZZZZZZZZZ

Oh! It was a gloriously hot day! The sun was beating down on the roof and the dark slate tiles were absorbing so much heat that they were turning the house into something resembling a sauna. I was trying very hard not to notice what a beautiful day it was out there, because there was much work to be done, although, luckily I don’t generally have much of a view of the glorious vistas outside which tempt me, because of where I am perched for most of my day.

But crikey! It was getting hot. Too hot! I was really going to have to flick back the blinds and open up a window just to let some air in, a bit of a breeze instead of the usual draughts which, whilst perfectly capable of reducing temperatures at home to polar levels in the wintertime seem singularly incapable of making the house even vaguely temperate during those rare baking hot summer days.

A quick click of the latch and the air was at least moving around again and I could actually consider breathing properly again instead of merely gasping and hoping. The trick is, as they say, to keep breathing.

But then, uh-oh! Wouldn’t you just know it? The window had hardly been open five minutes before there was that familiar buzzing and tapping sound as a wasp had flown in through the most miniscule of available gaps and was then, as they always seem to, finding it utterly impossible to do the same thing in the opposite direction. Because it is one of the stranger aspects of those rare hot days of an English summertime; the amount of times a wasp will come drifting in through a perfectly ordinary open window and then have a devil of a time getting out again. It’s not that they’re stupid, it’s just that their instincts take over and they head for the light which has an invisible and solid transparent sheet which goes on forever in front of it which they can’t get through.

I often wonder what they think is happening. I assume that they are thinking in whatever waspish way they do, but it must seem like a completely bizarre phenomenon to them despite being a very ordinary thing to we humans who put such things there. It makes me think of the many things we ourselves as humans really don’t understand and I wonder if that too is because we’re simply too close to the problem and aren’t able to step back far enough to understand the bigger picture.

Wasps and higher philosophy… I didn’t see that coming.

Anyway, back in my own workspace, suddenly I was all on edge. Having an angry wasp in my immediate vicinity was really no laughing matter. I instantly felt seriously distracted, and not just by those noises, but by simply knowing it was there and that it might just take a bit of a dislike to the tasty salty old human that was rather too nearby and come over to me and investigate, allowing for one of those unfortunate confluences of circumstance to occur when I either, don’t quite know where it is and inadvertently accidentally get too close and it stings me, or it just stings me because it can.

I’m not usually one to fly into a panic when there are wasps about. I see plenty of people doing that strange frenzied air dance during the summer when they’re around, but I’m generally much calmer than that around them. I’ve only ever been stung once (so far) by one of the wee beasties and that was at school during a lunchbreak when one happened to crawl right up my trouser leg (yes, long trousers) and I scratched at what I thought was an itch. The school nurse had to pull the back end of that suddenly unexpectedly halved wasp from my leg with tweezers a few minutes later, but I guess I got a better outcome of that whole incident than the wasp did.

Anyway, after waiting for this latest wasp visitor to return to the skylight and continue with its confused headbutting, I did what I usually do and, with the aid of a longish ruler, managed to persuade it through the gap and on its way. I was pretty sure another one would be along before long, but it has now become a bit of a routine, and I’d really rather not squish the little devil. After all, they are rather beautiful when you stop for a moment and really look at them, with that rather amazing black and yellow body and their amazing aerodynamic abilities, and, when all is said and done, they do have their part to play in the great scheme of things.

A few years ago we had to clear out our old shed because it was falling down and we needed to replace it. A lot of the junk got thrown away, and a fair amount of it inhabited the kitchen for longer than was deemed reasonable and some of it got put in the little greenhouse at the end of the garden. A few weeks later, when the brand spanking new shed was in position, a lot of this stuff got moved into it, including a pair of wellies that had spent those weeks in the greenhouse.

Paper engineering the natural way

Some time after that, as late summer turned into a soggy autumn, the wellies were needed and it was then that we discovered the rather beautiful paper sculpture that was a half-constructed wasps’ nest that had been under construction in that boot when we inadvertently relocated it and sealed it inside the new shed. It was truly a marvel of natural engineering, an incredibly complex, beautifully intricate, and yet amazingly delicate structure, all built from wood pulp and the hard work and spit of a swarm of creatures all working together.

I do still wonder what became of them when they flew back to that spot  where the nest and all their eggs once were to find it had suddenly just disappeared. Did they spend some considerable time trying to work out what exactly had happened or did they just, like the resilient creatures they are, just calmly start again and build another one somewhere else? I imagine that’s precisely what they did, without any fuss and bother or enquiry. I know if I’d gone to all that trouble to build a house only to get home and find it had vanished, there would be one hell of a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth going on. Maybe that’s why wasps do sometimes seem to go off and just sting someone for no apparently good reason. They’re just really annoyed about something.

Still, whatever happened that summer, I did rather find myself feeling slightly sorry for the humble creature. You might not like the much-maligned wasp, but you’ve got to admire its skill and resilience.

JUST ANOTHER PEBBLE ON THE BEACH

To be perfectly honest, I’m just a tiny bit bored with all this wordsmithery at the moment. Churning out these endless pages that ultimately end up actually not saying very much in the great big worldwide scheme of things is starting to feel just a tiny bit of a meaningless pastime for a supposed grown up to be doing with his time. Sometimes it feels just like I’m throwing the odd tiny pebble onto a stony beach during an earthquake. There are so many other pebbles all bouncing and jumping about that one more really doesn’t make any difference. I think, therefore, that I’m going to take things just a tad easier for a while and try and get whatever something it is that resembles my nearest equivalent to enthusiasm back, and attempt to recharge the batteries and any other cliches of that ilk. In the meanwhile, thanks for your interest, keep ’em peeled and stay tuned. M.

ON ANON ANON

Very few people take the time to actually read this nonsense. Most actually end up here due to some kind of mistake having been pointed in this direction by a search engine trying (bless) to be helpful but misunderstanding completely what it is they are looking for, and so the hapless bewildered tourist will swiftly depart just as soon as the stunned disbelief has had time to register upon their synapses, hoping never to darken our doorstep again (although “darken” might yet prove to be an impossibility when things are already as pitch black as they usually are). I tend to think of those visitors as being very similar to those people who turned up on the doorstep of 1313 Mockingbird Lane back in the 1960s and came face-to-face with lovable old Herman Munster and, misunderstanding his basic harmlessness, ran for the hills.

Some of you are more daring and read the whole content of my unravelling madnesses before possibly thinking “thank you very much” and departing. A more determined few actually come back occasionally, and there are one or two of you who are actually regular visitors to this forgotten and rather fetid corner of the universe, and some of you have even been known to write regular comments to me, just to say “hi”. You know who you are, and with a little persistence, anyone who doesn’t can find out pretty quickly by checking back a few days and reading what you thought. It’s always rather pleasing to have the opportunity to engage with further thoughts that sprang from someone reading this stuff, not least because sometimes I wonder whether I’m so very out of tune with the times that all I am doing is scratching away at the surface of my onion skin to reveal even more layers of ignorance beneath.

Occasionally though, like a mysterious figure in a cowboy film, a passing stranger will leave their mark (or remark) upon our peaceful, humble, quiet little town. Generally this won’t mean four more six-foot holes being dug up at Boot Hill, but sometimes, even as their silhouette disappears off towards the horizon and the heat haze devours them, I am left quite bewildered at the sometimes devastating effect their fleeting presence has had upon our little community. More often than not, these visits will be memorialised by a simple distinguishing mark that reminds us all that this visitor passed by, not the flashing “Z” of a rapier blade, or some other familiar calling card like the white glove of “The Phantom” or Simon Templar’s stick man, but another, altogether more sinister signature:

“Anonymous said…”

I often wonder to myself who “Anonymous” might be. After all, the entire point is that they could be anyone at all. Perhaps they are an old friend who doesn’t wish to reveal themselves, or a former colleague who really didn’t like me all that much, or doesn’t want anyone else to know that they are reading this drivvle. I might be well known to them, or have never met them in my entire life. We may have fallen out years ago, or just lost touch. Basically, “Anonymous” could be any of the above, or all of the above. They could, basically, be anybody at all, but I tend to connect the thought to a face, and my reactions are tempered accordingly. I am, of course, assuming that there are several anonymouses, but putting a mental face to the comment helps me to approach my replies with a slightly calmer air, so that when I picture just who it is that I might be about to offend, I tend to draw back and think better of it, and, as it is unusual for me to take a moment and pause for thought under such circumstances, I suppose that it’s not really the worst thing in the world.

Obviously, however, this has its downside. I may very well be convinced that I’m addressing A from B when actually I’m really writing to C from D, and, even though it helps me to get my thoughts into a straight line, it may very well lead to some confusion, especially if I happen to run into A from B later on and start discussing matters of which he or she turns out to be oblivious.

For example if “Anonymous” turned out to be my doctor when I thought it was my mum, well, you tend to talk to these people in a decidedly different manner and it shapes the way my mind processes the comments that have been left. What if my doctor was saying that? What if my mother was?

Shudder…

You see, sometimes “Anonymous” turns out to be someone I know, sometimes it’s someone I think I know and sometimes it’s someone I am actually related to (probably… unless they are hacking into my history very, very well…). There are ways and means, but usually it’s pretty obvious from what they are saying, and their anonymity is based purely on technical reasons than anything more sinister. Sometimes I think, from the style of the actual message and the clues contained within it, that I know who precisely who it is only for it to turn out not to be, and, as I said earlier, if I do decide I think I know who it is I will reply very differently in style to how I might have done when I thought it was a complete stranger whom I was addressing. Mind you that can even happen when person A from B is also claiming to be person C from D, and that is where things can start to get really complicated, but interpersonal relationships, and the real world convergence of all of what I thought were my regular readers into just one actual person with many facets is not really what I’m thinking about today.

Meanwhile, sometimes one of my anonymous guests will write something that irritates me so much that will I start to compose an indignant reply (or consider just jacking it all in at last… which may very well have been their purpose in saying it…) only for me to think again when I consider just who it might actually be, and then I think yet again. You see, despite what you might think, I am capable of much thought. Not about anything of any consequence, I’ll grant you, but much thought nevertheless. After all, I know that there are many and varied reasons for wishing to remain anonymous, and most of them are fairly benign, but sometimes the mask of unknowability is used to do things that are far more hurtful, say things that you never would if you had to look the person you are saying them too right in the eyes as you did, because, alongside the obvious advantages, anonymity also brings with it a certain amount of freedom. Freedom to be mean or spiteful, sarcastic and rude…

On occasion, “Anonymous” has offered a supposedly factual correction to something I’ve written that they then turned out to be quite wrong about, which makes me suspect that they lacked the courage of their convictions in the first place. What’s the matter with these people? Do they not know me and my meticulous ways, especially when it comes to matters of telly? Oh, yeah… They don’t (unless, of course, they do…). They’ve just read something which they think I’ve got wrong and decided to butt in and tell me so. I do wonder whether they ever mosey their way on back to these here parts to check up on what I thought of their offering, but I suspect that seldom happens. They just drift away, so certain in their mistaken views and with a certain smug satisfaction that it’s them that is right and everyone else who is wrong.

Or is that just me…?

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE BLOGFACE

06:00 An extra half-hour to lie-in today as our routine has switched to mode “B” for the day. After the usual offices are attended with and my teeth are gleaming for the first and possibly last time of the day I head down and brew a refreshing cup of tea to help me to swallow the usual morning pills. I switch on the TV set to check the news headlines on BBC1 and to make sure the blog I’m planning on posting this morning isn’t suddenly massively inappropriate and to check that no-one in my immediate and limited field of interest has died overnight. It’s a simple routine, but a familiar one.

06:20 Upstairs to boot up the computer and decide which of two potential half-completed musings is the best one to share with the world today, but it turns out they both need more contemplation, being as they are, even more rough than the finely honed rubbish that you get to read, and the one that is a “kind of” half-poem/half-chant I decide is actually all pretty poor and something that the world really isn’t ready to tolerate yet. Maybe tomorrow if nothing else turns up. Instead I fall back on an “emergency” piece of waffle that I wrote to use on days like these and hit “publish”, immediately wishing I hadn’t and feeling a disclaimer brewing, before tinkering speculatively with the other pieces and failing to improve them much either. “Writers write” was one piece of advice I read once, although it has been superceded recently by “Writers rewrite” which is of course an opinion, but sometimes you’ve got to finally bite that particular bullet and let someone else see what you’re thinking (and then mercilessly laugh and point, obviously…).

06:30 I drag myself away from tinkering to have a look at my usual morning cycle of websites. Nothing of any real significance appears on any of them, nor anything telling me that anything I’ve contributed was of any interest to anyone else. A pity this as I’m desperate for inspiration today…

06:35 Back to the blog, but really nothing’s coming to mind at all this morning. I seriously start to wonder whether I’ve actually already said all that there is to say about my humdrum little life, and consider the possibility of calling it a day and wondering whether I’d actually miss it…

06:40 Tinker, bodge, procrastinate with pointless distractions…

06:55 The morning routine beckons and keeps me busy for the usual hour or so…

08:05 On my way back from the station now with the usual morning idiocy on the roads to deal with. Do so many people really not pay any attention to what’s going on around them as they drive a lot, sometimes with the most precious of human cargo? A rant for another day, I suspect, or have I already done that one…? Meanwhile, as I’m heading back I notice that the passenger door mirror is all askew following my passenger’s swift departure. I try to decide whether it’s safe enough to park up and unfold it again, but come to the conclusion that I can deal with it when I get home and carry on through the kind of traffic that would seem unreasonable in a video game.

08:07 Parked the car, tweaked the mirrors back into place, and dashed up the old stone steps to the house (“still got it…”) and am lucky I’m not ten seconds later as I realise that I said it out loud, as I then unexpectedly get to greet one of the neighbours as she heads out in the opposite direction for her day. I sometimes wonder what the various neighbours actually make of me and my lifestyle, but I suspect that they don’t wonder about it at all…

08:10 Back home from the station run and I hit the on switch on the kettle and brew up the first (instant) coffee of the day before running up those stairs (“still got it…”) and relaunching the workstation with a view towards punching out a few more words before it’s time to start working…

08:20 The computer is booted up and I head into “Blogger” but there are no stats as yet to speak of, so my embarrassment is not yet exposed, but then, as I trawl around the other familiar sites once more, it seems that the internet is either broken, everyone else is still asleep or the rest of the world has got more to do than I have at this time of the day.

08:25 Desperate for ideas I scrawl down the many pages of my half-written and ill-thought-out ideas, but nothing reaches out and grabs me, not even the skeleton of an idea which I was so very enthusiastic about and eager to pursue only last night.

08:30 I’m getting rather stupid now in my quest for ideas. I grab an old photograph album off the shelf, but still nothing springs to mind. Why don’t I remember anything about so many of those days I was obviously alive and conscious enough for to get myself into the picture? I mull over the idea, just for a moment, of pondering about all those people I seem to have pictures of and I really haven’t the slightest clue who they are (or were…), but the thoughts won’t string together and I throw that one, once again, on the increasingly vague (and in reality non-existent) “things for another day” pile. I pause to wonder, just for a moment, whether anyone has actually kept a record of things I’ve said that I’ll talk about on another day and then never got around to, and, if they have, whether they’re going to end up hugely disappointed, but I sincerely doubt anybody’s paying that much attention…

08:40 and the words still won’t string together so instead I decide to write this very piece instead just to keep my fingers busy, knowing that it’ll never see the light of day on the web unless I really struggle to come up with anything else… (Author’s update: “Bugger!”).

09:00 Got to stop now… Work to do…