NOTHING TO PLAY THE CASSETTES ON

An Audiobook company whose products I occasionally buy recently put out an appeal for old off-air recordings which were just the sorts of things that I used to record by pointing the microphone of the tape recorder that my Grandfather got me for my thirteenth birthday, back in the 1970s when particular people used to appear unexpectedly on the radio or television, and I wanted to record their mutterings for all eternity…

Or about ten years, as eternity seems to have turned out to be…

With this in mind I recalled a cassette tape with the word “Interviews” scribbled on its spine which dated back to the days when cassette tapes seemed extraordinarily expensive when you had to buy them out of your own pocket money, and I was less “precise” about my labeling.

I suppose back then I had less memories to remember and so expected that I would be able to just remember things, never realising that what was once the “now” might one day be “long ago”…

Anyway, I shifted heaven and earth, or rather the exercise bike and the coats hanging over it, and found my old stack of cassette tapes and, rather surprisingly, was able to put my hands on the very cassette that I was thinking of within five minutes of the thought occurring, which, as long-term readers might recognise, is rather unheard of in these here parts…

Chortle! I said “parts”…!

Sorry, thirteen year old me just made a brief comeback there…

Now, I’m not the kind of idiot who might then pop the cassette into a jiffy bag and post it off to “person or persons unknown” (or “complete strangers” if you will) without at first checking that what I thought was on the cassette was actually what was on the cassette.

Oh no!

Reaching this great age has taught me nothing if not to be far more shrewd than that…!

And this was the moment that I realised that there probably wasn’t one device left in the house that might actually be able to play a cassette tape any more. Both of the remaining dusty old “ghetto blasters” had long ago given up the fight against the march of progress and refused point blank to play or even rewind cassettes any more. This had happened quite a few years ago, but the radio and the CD player still worked, so they hadn’t yet been sent to the landfill, despite over 30% of their usefulness having gone.

The various “music centres” and their turntables went to the tip years ago, as did that old cassette player that my Grandfather gave me, as well as the one he used to inflict upon entertain us with tapes of his Hammond Organ playing upon, back on those endless Sunday afternoons of my youth.

The car no longer has a cassette tape option these days, and the Radio Cassette Alarm clock that saw me through my student years and beyond is nothing but a distant memory too…

Then I remembered the coming of the personal cassette player, the so-called “Walkman” in the 1980s. Now I never had the proper “Sony” version because they were always far too expensive, but I did remember buying a “Saisho” knock off a few years after they had become the trendiest of objets du jour.

I vaguely remembered that it was lying on top of a row of books on a dusty bookshelf somewhere, and I was not wrong about that and very quickly found it.

When it comes to tracking down long-lost “tat”, it would appear that I’m on something of a roll here…

I never have really got into the habit or taken to the idea of carrying a personal selection of music around with me, so that dusty old object might still be operational as it only ever played the odd audiobook cassette and test match commentary in its brief phase of usefulness. I blew the dust off it, tracked down a ratty old set of headphones that looked as if they might just be still able to talk to it, and rummaged around in the kitchen drawer for some suitable batteries.

Finally I had something that I might be able to actually hear those ancient recordings upon, and to check whether they were far more precious and rare than I first thought.

I turned the cassette to side “B” and, risking wearing out all of that twin AA battery power in an instant, hit “Fast Forward” as my old “personal cassette player” had no rewind facility. Perhaps both of these concept will be unfamiliar to younger readers, but never mind. The past is another country, we did things differently there…

When I heard that satisfying soft click that indicated that the tape had reached the end of side “B”, I took it out and flipped it over again, with it now magically set at the beginning of side “A” and hit “play” and waited for the blank strip at the start of the tape to pass over the tape heads…

It worked…!

…and I heard my thirteen-year-old self muttering the theme to “Little Blue”, a children’s programme of the time about a small blue elephant…

“Little Blue, Little Blue (Pom-pom-pom) Why do they call you ‘Little Blue’…? He bit his mother’s fountain pen and broke it in two…”

So there’s no way that I’m sending that cassette anywhere at all.

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 17th 2012)

LOOK INTO MY EYES

With the same regularity of the seasons, i.e. precious little regularity at all, the time had come around again for yet another appointment with the optician to see just what wear and tear these battered old organic optical devices have suffered as they laboured through yet another year of spending far too long looking at screens of all shapes and sizes.

For once I had responded with surprising speed to the “reminder” letter when it popped through the letterbox, instead of just waiting for the third or even fourth one to arrive. This is presumably because, in the past, I used to think of them as merely a marketing device from the optician intended purely to sell more spectacles than was strictly necessary, and so I used to “put off” my visit until I felt properly shamed enough into not ignoring the need to go any longer and, happily, for many years, the prescription remained much the same and so buying new glasses wasn’t strictly necessary and a fiscal bullet was dodged for another couple of years…

Not that it’s really something you should scrimp on. After all, these things get parked on top of your nose and play a large part in how you are looked at by the world as it passes you by. If you are prepared to look at the world through a rancid, filthy old bit of twisted wire that is the optical equivalent of a lop-sided dustbin, then you shouldn’t be surprised to find that people are looking at you a bit “funny” although you will probably find out later that it’s because it is actually you that is looking a bit funny…

But the deterioration of my own fetid specs wasn’t the reason I responded with what seemed to be unseemly haste (or as close as I ever get to it anyway) to the letter. No, it was more because I was actually rather concerned for once about my one and only set of eyeballs and how much I’d been struggling with them recently, especially when it comes to reading a page, or looking at a screen.

There have been days lately which I have spent in utter agony as I’ve been working on that - now stolen – computer screen in that office of ours. Somehow its bright new high-resolution screen managed to be positioned at the exact distance to make my eyes feel like I imagine Malcolm McDowell’s did when he was filming that scene in “A Clockwork Orange” (only without the moisture).

There is, of course, an inherent fear involved with eyesight which is basically that you might lose it. I think that it’s probably a universal fear for anyone whose life is essentially “visual” like me of course, but also for anyone who drives or has relatives or… Well, basically, it’s everyone who possesses eyesight really, isn’t it?

I first started “needing” to wear glasses at secondary school, sometime around the time between “O” and “A” levels when, ironically, despite the fact that the classrooms got smaller, the blackboard got fuzzier to look at, and so it was decreed that I would become one of the “four-eyed” ones, and, on reflection, my chrome “pilot” style spectacles of choice were not the wisest option, even though I pursued that style through a number of incarnations (once that I discovered that you could get them in black) for a few years after that.

So anyway, I toddled along on that Saturday morning and spent half an hour in a dark room with a professional woman whom I barely knew in very close proximity to me, and then paid her for the privilege as she tested the latest downgrade of my eyesight and put it on the record.

I went through the usual routine of reading things clearly off the illuminated letters board, blinking, and then finding that they were less distinct, whilst I had that ridiculous device parked on my nose (thankfully the mirrors were out of my line of sight) and various lenses were placed inside the contraption that made my vision better or worse, and various glass lollipops were held in front of me as I declared them to be “better” or “worse” or “much the same”…

I always think that, like with marketing polls on the telephone, there are “trick questions” being slipped in there, just to see if I am lying, and the occasional “tut” when I seemed to get the answer “wrong” or, at least didn’t give the one which was expected, seemed to confirm this suspicion.

Then I looked up and down and left and right (where I had to try very hard not to look straight into the optician’s mouth) as she shone her examination light into my eyes and I had that rare experience of being able to see the veins on my own retinas, which is something you don’t get to see all that often. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s only during eye examinations that I ever get to see that, which is probably just as well…

And I looked at the red and green lights and read the test page in tiny 5-point type and after that there was the dubious delight of the “pressure test”, a relatively recent torture that opticians seem to have developed to put the anticipation of visits to go and see them up on level par with a trip to see a dentist, when a blast of air is shot at your eyeballs one at a time just to prove that they’ve not yet turned to mush, or something.

Anyway, after all that, it was suggested that I had reached that great age where I might want to consider crossing the rubicon into the strange new world of “varifocals” which will, apparently lead to some very peculiar sensations for a while after I get them, might make me fall downstairs, and delayed my simultaneous order of prescription sunglasses (like I need those any more anyway with the summer we’re having…) just long enough that I believe that the “free” part will get forgotten about when I actually get around to requesting them.

So, with all that in mind, I ordered up some new specs and had to go through the whole torturous process of choosing new frames for the mask I will be wearing to face the world through for the next couple of years of my life. This is never a great moment in my life as it involves looking at my big fat head in a mirror for far longer than I think is reasonably tolerable, and involves making a decision that is usually a “wrong” one whilst looking through plain glass lenses that don’t let me see my big fat head with all that much clarity anyway. This was also when I discovered that the beloved had never much liked the glasses that I had been wearing for the past few years either…

In the end, wisdom prevailed, and I allowed her to decide, and so, in a couple of weeks, a bright shiny new me will be stepping out into the world, twitching my head as I try to work out my focal centres and no doubt plummeting headfirst down a flight of stone steps shortly afterwards.

I’m so looking forward to it… but at least I am still capable of looking…

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 15th 2012)

BROWN BIN REFUSAL

I suppose it’s lucky I was home, really, although, as I’ve droned on at length about, the circumstances that led to me being at home have, of course, nothing remotely “lucky” about them at all.

Still, as I was beavering away at my temporary makeshift work station, I heard the unfamiliar bleep of a largish wagon attempting to reverse down the treacherous slope that leads down from the road to our huddle of tiny houses.

What happened next largely depends upon whether you want to accuse me of suffering from “nosey neighbour” syndrome, or whether you believe that it’s only natural to wonder what the hell’s going on. Whichever side of that fence you may choose to fall towards, the truth is that I went to see what all the noise was about, but I did, in all honesty, already have my suspicions.

After all, a mere two days earlier, on bin collection day, a packet had been stuffed through the door telling of the latest developments in our council’s “scattergun” policy on waste disposal and recycling. Another year, another refuse disposal contract, it seemed and, of course, yet another bin to politely decline.

Every couple of years or so, we get a new directive about how we are going to clutter up our kitchen with yet more sorted waste that we are no longer allowed to deal with in the way we once did. Once more our limited amount of storage space and clear work surfaces are going to be cluttered with yet more of the clobber that has to be placed in receptacle “A” for collection on day “B” (if they turn up) and which is never, ever to be placed in receptacle “C” or “D” which can only be allowed to contain refuse “E” and “F” and we are to assume that receptacles “G” and “H” are no longer to be used for that purpose.

Or something…

Our council, like so many I suppose has, out of necessity to have a “one size fits all” policy when it comes to such matters, even if your dwelling doesn’t fit the particular size they think that it ought to. Every couple of years we find ourselves having to deal with a new set of operatives who have to learn that the huge wagons that they turn up in won’t fit down the track they need to drive down and every time this takes about three months to sort out, usually after they’ve not collected anything for about two months.

This week’s letter gave us the opportunity to refuse the latest huge brown wheelie-bin and have two other options instead, either a smaller brown wheelie-bin or a hessian sack by circling our choice on the form and returning it to them. The morning after we got the letter we posted it back, going for the “hessian sack” option as it is the path of least resistance and still means that there’s a path that my neighbours can negotiate in order to leave their own houses via the pathway past my house towards freedom and the big wide world beyond.

However, the very next day, before the postal service had even had a fighting chance of getting my letter to the relevant desk and long before, I imagine, the “in-tray” itself had a chance to be looked at, the wagon was reversing and indeed a dozen or more huge brown plastic receptacles were being deposited in the places where most of my neighbours park their cars.

As I said, it’s lucky I was home so that I was able to politely decline and now I am the only house on the row without the beastly bins although, ironically, they are all expected to be deposited at the back of my house come collection day.

Christ alone knows what it’s going to do to the parking around here, and who knows when the mysterious “hessian sack” will appear, although I’m currently guessing at “never…”

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 14th 2012)

NB Note to the world in general, (if any of you are there). Whilst this might in some way resemble one of those “anti-recycling” rants which you may have seen or heard, that is simply not the case. I am, in fact, very much in favour of such things but I’ve always felt that the “best” way to get the public on your side is to make it all as simple as possible and whilst officials do seem to try their best to keep costs down, that’s usually because they pass the burden of the sorting onto the customer and seem to add increasingly complex bin collection systems into the mix which end up confusing everyone and building up the resentment. My own kitchen now resembles a rubbish heap and not only because of the usual reasons, but because of the various piles of rubbish waiting for the appropriate day and the right receptacle needing to be readied for collection. If you add fines into an already tense situation, no wonder you get the kinds of affronted headlines that the tabloids are so fond of screaming out. It’s an old cliché, but offering the carrot instead of using the stick, I believe, works far better every time.

THE THIRD DIMENSION

Meanwhile, in an effort to while away the boredom for a couple of hours over the weekend, there was a plan to go to the cinema to see the next “big summer blockbuster” and it was left to me to have the dubious duty of sorting out the times that it would be best to go.

This was when I discovered that the only showings that suited our vaguely planned schedule at the cinema we’d vaguely planned to go to, were ones that were in 3-D and, to be brutally honest, I’ve been resisting that whole rigmarole for quite some considerable time now on the not unlikely assumption that it would probably cause me to have a massive headache…

Oh, I know that I should learn to embrace the future, and that it’s the way of things and so on and so on, but I really just don’t fancy having to make a spectacle of myself and wear spectacles over my spectacles and then, quite possibly, have an “experience” which is less wonderful than I find a standard issue 2-D Cinema Screen Experience to be.

Just like in the 1950s, cinema sees itself as being under threat from all the shiny new “home viewing” opportunities in an age when people constantly go on about the advantages of the “high-definition” viewing opportunities available to them in their own homes. Potential customers have come to the conclusion that they don’t “need” to pay to see movies on the “big screen” any more, and then, rather perversely, decide, in a lot of cases, to actually watch the film on a screen the size of their own hand.

Now I’m fully aware that my age group isn’t the one that film-makers want to target, and that they need to keep that youthful demographic pouring through their doors because that is the group who watch the most films and bring in the most money. There is an argument to be made about actually making movies which appeal to a wider demographic, of course, but that, I think I decided long ago, is unlikely to happen.

So, the big new gimmick designed to grab them back seems to be the return of the same old gimmick that was supposed to make things “different”, “exciting” and “new” in the 1950s, so-called “3-D” cinema, which seemed to presume that by making the audience wear stupid glasses and by throwing a few spears in their general direction in order to try and convince them that they were really flying towards them, that the audiences of the time might not notice how fundamentally awful some of the acting and writing was.

Now, until they are literally showing me 3-D landscapes that can totally surround me and that I can actually touch, or transporting me onto the film set (and what a green screen disappointment that’s likely to be), I don’t think cinema is ever going to be truly 3-D in the real-world sense that I mean by it. Equally, from the point of view of a narrative, I don’t really think true 3-D movies would ever really work as everyone’s experience of it would differ, which isn’t really what telling a story is all about.

“Did you see the bit where…?”

“No, I was back around the corner at that moment…”

Ah well… It’s another phase to be endured, I suppose. Going to the cinema is bad enough nowadays with all of the chatter, and the phone calls being taken, and the popcorn-munching and all of the rest. Adding stupid glasses to the mix is more likely to be the final nail in the coffin for it to me. In most cases there’s nothing “unmissable” enough for me any more these days anyway. I’ll just try and avoid all the spoilers and wait to rent whatever it is at home in glorious 2-D.

After all, for me it’s always been about a good script anyway, and no amount of gimmicks and impressive CGI was ever likely to change that. Meanwhile, by shutting you inside your own little world and adding another “barrier” between the observer and the screen, I kind of anticipate that the 3-D glasses would remove a certain special “something” from the experience of being in the cinema itself. That moment of exchanging a glance with your friends and partners, perhaps, or maybe something more fundamental, like the fact that you can move your head around and focus entirely on the bottom left hand corner of the screen if you choose to. I’m not quite sure I can successfully fully explain what I mean by that, but perhaps it’s just that I’m not over keen on my “point of view” being so rigorously enforced, and I also genuinely believe that no amount of chucking spears at me (or whatever) is going to make a badly written movie a better one just because it’s been made in a facsimile of the third dimension.

However, if I do ever go to a 3-D movie, I’ll report back to you on what I thought of it. You never know, I might yet be amazed by it all, although I wouldn’t hold your breath...

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 10th 2012)

ARCHITECT OF MY OWN FEAR

It’s been another one of “those” weekends where, despite my very best efforts, every time I approach the keyboard to attempt to string a few words together, somehow they’ve just failed to come. We’re two years into the great blog experiment now but I seem to have plunged headlong into another brick wall of hopelessness and, even despite the fact that I unexpectedly had many hours of opportunity to go upstairs and play with my toys, whenever I actually parked myself at the desk, the fatigue and the confusion overwhelmed me and those things that I wanted to do, and also those that I really needed to do, just didn’t (or couldn’t) happen.

I must apologise to my good friend Rick to whom my reply is long overdue, and to my good friend Andy for not conjuring up the next paragraph in our epic word game adventure. For both of you, I really wanted the words to come, but so far they’re remaining hidden far beyond some distant horizon whilst babbling nonsense like this is all I can muster.

In both instances, of course, the foundations have been built and there are even a few ribs and struts of the superstructure in position but, having done that, it’s almost as if the builders have gone on strike and left the site only to jeer at me and taunt me as they stand at the gate, chucking their brick-bats as if trying to persuade me of my wordsworthlessness…

So, I continued to try and do that, or, when I hit a dead end, I would instead find myself spending precious moments building sentences made up of nonsense so that I ended up talking to myself about nothing in particular in TwitWorld and thereafter sensing the dark clouds of gloom gathering as I became increasingly aware that there was nobody out there who cared whether I Twitterated or not… and I came once more to my regular conclusion that, whilst such things are not pointless in themselves, my presence therein does seem to be.

Instead the empty hours dragged by. My occasional attempts at “banter” all turned to the silent ash of a settling cloud of dust and my sense of self-worth collapsed once more and my confidence, seldom built on the strongest of foundations, crumbled away again to nothing.

Strangely, I notice that it’s there again - the architecture analogy – as if the superstructure that holds things together has started to come crashing down and, as ever, I find that I can only blame the architect, and this time the architect seems to be myself.

It became one of “those” weekends, as I said. One where it was all I could do to drag myself out from under the blankets and face the awful light of day. One of those where the sheer pointlessness of everything I have ever failed to achieve was brought into sharp relief by the sense of skydiving towards eternity. One of those where all of the flavours seemed to turn into one of rotten fish and still the words wouldn’t come.

Fatigue is creeping up upon me and shutting down my thought processes, so I think that whilst I try and think of something new and possibly even mildly exciting to tell you about (you lucky people), I might just treat myself to a week off and let you enjoy a few days of “The Best of the Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative.” Basically, some of those bizarre and bonkers pieces I wrote during my month of exile back in July and which I haven’t shared with the big, wide and scary world before.

Still, they’ll be new to you, if not to me, so they’re probably worth a look even if they’re talking of things from long ago eras and periods of time like, er, last July when the summer was still full of promise and hope of brighter days to come and not just the soggy memory it seems to have become.

Don’t you just love how the syntax and tenses will have got scrambled once you’ll be having started tomorrow’s time travelling to the past…?

So I hope that you will have been finding something that was to have been enjoyed when you read what’s coming of the past next few days…

I’m sure that I’ll be here when you get back, and, in the meantime, I’ll be busily juggling with my words and tenses and trying to make some sense of it all with whatever building blocks come to hand… or maybe I won’t.

Sometimes it’s just so very hard to tell what you’re actually going to do until you’ve actually already done it. These paragraphs, after all, were going to be just a few words about explaining why I didn’t feel able to write anything today, but now they’ve turned into something a lot more substantial, albeit a something without much in the way of meaning…

I’m confused.

Maybe I’m a little bit scared, too… You know, frightened…

Perhaps I should have stayed under the duvet instead…?

A CAR WITH NO NAME

We’ve had “new car” for almost a year now. In fact we should stop calling it “new car” and perhaps just start calling it “car” I suppose, in the absence of anything better to call it. Anyway, in the post “Blinky” era, we never really came up with anything else to call it. The “Silver Bullet” would never have been appropriate and it is far, far too chunky to be called “Thunderbird One” even though the colour change would have been appropriate as a direct contrast to Blinky’s occasional alter-ego “Thunderbird Two” which it was given because of its dark green colouring and the regular trips made to the tip in a big “cargo container” like way.

“New” car has yet to be sullied with a filthy old trip to the tip. It’s leather seats seemed far too shiny and clean for that sort of thing, but given my general neglect of my vehicles in terms of their cleanliness, perhaps that day is looming. Perhaps such a fate has only been escaped because of the general laziness (or busy-ness… or rainy-ness) which has overtaken us over these past twelve months meaning that the house and garden have been chronically neglected and that kind of rubbish has not been accumulating in quite the same quantities as it once did.

So, having surprisingly survived a full twelve months in a relatively clean state in our company, “new”  car it remains, even though it was not exactly “new” when we bought it, having a good eight years on the clock when it fell into our nefarious and neglectful clutches. It was, of course, merely “new” to us, and that seems to have been the massively inappropriate monicker that it has come to be known by.

However, perhaps, after the past few weeks, I should just start calling it “cash cow” (at least as far an everyone else involved with it is concerned) as it seems to have caused a substantial amount of cash to have been drained from my dwindling resources, but I kind of think that to call it that would ultimately be rather mean, especially to any cattle which might overhear.

You see, the problem with approaching the anniversary of buying a car is that you also approach the time when its first MOT test becomes due, or at least the first one after you became the “registered keeper” or whatever the latest terminology might happen to be. This can be a costly affair and, coming as it did a mere three weeks after that other annual raid on the pocket of the motorist, the annual car insurance renewal, I am currently staring at the “Silver Streak” (No…) with a great deal of what can only be described as bitter, seething resentment.

A tractor by any other name
(Number plate concealed to protect the guilty)

Ironically, when I dropped “new” car off in the morning, I was actually offered a loan vehicle for the day, which was nice, even though it turned out to be a bit of an ex-farm-boy’s “battle tank” which had a gearbox which was akin to stirring porridge and an unpleasant habit of being just a little bit rubbish. Perhaps I would have been better off if they had offered me a tractor...? But I digress. I thought that, when he offered it to me, that he was trying to persuade me that the “Freelander” might be my option of choice whenever I was next considering a trade-in, but that was swiftly kyboshed when I asked him that. He told me that he hated them himself and another customer had rung him to say that hers would be arriving for its MOT test later on “on the back of an AA truck…”

So, I stirred this venerable vehicle through the wettest morning on record, carefully negotiating that hour most associated with the “school run” with frequent stops by the “lollipop guild” and the madness of all the mumsies and dadsies delivering their “little darlings” to their various educational establishments with little thought, it appeared, for their actual safety, given the number of doors swinging open into moving traffic, conversations being had over shoulders as the car was still moving, and the amount of simply running out into oncoming traffic that I witnessed going on.

How do so many of them survive it every day...?

By the time I got to work, what with that and all the porridge-stirring, I was knackered, and I was even more knackered by the return journey during the evening rush hour. I staggered back into the garage’s reception area almost pleading with them to take this monster off me and tell me that the “Silver Lady” (No…) was ready for collection.

Whilst I was relatively happy to be given a courtesy car for the day when it went in for its annual MOT test which I, perhaps unwisely, combined with a full service, in the end being given a loan vehicle for the day didn’t quite make up for the £541+ bill for my own car which I was presented with at the end of the day.

Strangely enough, the two main things that needed paying out for were both things that were not covered by the 1 year warranty that the “Silver Fox” (No…) was supposedly covered by. Tyres, you see are not “mechanical” (and, at the price they cost me, it felt as if they were selling me actual silver tyres to put on my silver car...), and brake discs (apparently) also aren’t covered, as they’re subject to normal “wear and tear”.

Funny that.

Oddly enough, I thought that, by replacing my own wiper blades a couple of weeks ago, I would have pretty much got it covered. It was, after all, “perfectly sound” a year ago, when I bought it. Unfortunately, it seems that I was travelling far, far too hopefully (which is unusual for me, as you’ll know…) by convincing myself of this, because there’s always, always something that you haven’t even thought of that just sitting there waiting to bite you in the wallet.

Sadly, I do seem to have a history of such things. I genuinely don’t believe that I’ve ever dropped a car off for its MOT test and come away with a bill of less than three hundred quid. It seems that, in my case at least, it’s almost become compulsory, although the extra two hundred on top of that seems to be setting a new precedent that I’d rather didn’t turn into a tradition if I can help it. Mind you, I do get the feeling that mechanics just have to see me walk in and they immediately dash off to book their holidays with the word “Jackpot” ker-ching-ing across their eyeballs…

Thankfully, (or at least relatively thankfully) I did manage to switch the annual tax to the other half of the year by forking out for twelve months after the initial six the garage which sold the “Silver Beast” (No…) to me and so at least I’m not having to face the “triple whammy” of MOT, Tax and Insurance all at the same time.

Small mercies, eh…?

KLAATU BARADA NIKTO (AGAIN!!)

The content of this particular blog is, of course, complete nonsense when you actually take a moment to think about it (not that I have much expectation of that) and was obviously written so very long ago as to make all of the “current events” referred to within it utterly old hat but, well it had to turn up one day having lurked in the files for a while (and messages sent out into deep space do take a notoriously long time to get to where they are going...) and all those other references to not being able to string any new words together at the moment remain true enough for these words to remain slightly relevant today…

Here I am, waiting, with the Earth pretty much standing as still as I am, with a couple of free hours on my hands and, finally, an opportunity to spend some quality time bundling some words together for your edification and delight and, once again, I find myself staring at the wall as the tweety-birds fly around inside my head and no ideas will come.

I got home and did the list of things I promised to do this morning, the B, the other B and the C (which made it so much easier to remember), and I knocked together a sandwich to fill the food gap between lunch and a potentially very late evening meal, thus adding to my waistline instead of taking the opportunity to let hunger have its way for a while and prepare my body for the notion of expecting less when I return to my travel tube.

A strange package had awaited me upon the doormat but it wasn’t addressed to me, although the vastness of it rather surprised me when I first saw it, wondering quite how it had got there, until I noticed its general squishiness and understood that this was not dimensional atomic reformatting in action, but merely the actions of a persistent postie.

The day had been an odd one. Princes had been unwittingly broadcasting their nudity to an enquiring world who seemed to find him having human form unusual (maybe their leaders are aliens too…?) and a little old lady had gained notoriety for “restoring” a church fresco to within an inch of its life causing much hilarity amongst the artistic community who constantly have to deal with this notion that it was something the daft kids did at school and that anyone can pick up a paintbrush and produce “art…” although the Turner prize judges would no doubt have rewarded her “unique view” of the world.

Humans, eh…?

But none of these things inspire me in my word wrangling this evening.

Today, after a week or two of composition, I finally zapped off a lengthy email which I had been composing in reply to a lengthy email which I received the week before last. I have had a lengthy correspondence with a friend of mine who also walks amongst the humans with a growing sense of bewilderment, and when such effort is being put in, it’s hardly right to just reply with a swift “Cheers for that, mate!” is it…? (Although, that does seem to be an acceptable form of retort…)

Thought has to be put in, effort has to be made.

Unfortunately, with my “one-finger” typing style (caused by the compression field not being able to “do” fingers properly) and my ongoing urge to carry on rattling out daily reports nonsenses, plus the occasional paragraph in the breathtaking tale that is thundering towards a climax in the “Blog Tag Experiment” (another shameless and pointless plug for our coded messages to home planet there), the amount of “Free Time” I have (for it is never “free” considering the Mighty Zarg’s latest tax hike… Probably best to delete that…) for thoughtful composition seems to be diminishing and so my friend’s email kind of fell into a “void” for a couple of weeks, which is regrettable. I do, of course, like to attempt to get ahead of myself and, like in Lesser Blogfordshire (which has a huge backlog of unpublished part-written nonsenses all of which I take the odd peek at and decide that I’d better come up with something else instead), I would like to stay ahead of the game, have a few paragraphs in the bank before the next slice of life arrives but, sadly, I never seem to be that organised or find enough to write about from my “real” life leading to yet another round of old nonsense and wittering which I’m sure entertains no-one in the home I optimistically send it to.

Trying to blend in with the humans all of the time really saps your inspiration, you know…

If letters weren’t such “private” things, of course, I could combine the two and nick a few paragraphs, mix them up a bit and call it another blog posting but that would seem like “cheating” somehow, even though instead I find myself staring at the wall, listening to those tweety-birds and hoping that the sledgehammer of inspiration will slam home once again.

But then there are distractions.

Wit and guile (or witless bile…?) needs to be spouted in TwitWorld as I dance around the room in celebration of my one “celebrity follower” who must have accidentally clicked the wrong button and stayed around for at least an hour. Still, despite me, the old faithfuls stick around and some of them even engage in a “wee bit o’ banter” with this aging war horse, and so I am tempted to return, and try again and again to make people smile, or think, or get irritated with me (and prove, finally, that I blend in) depending upon what mood I’m in…

Yet I’m still pondering upon the meaning of it all and whether a request to remove my moderation protocols should be considered. More exchange of philosophical banter is surely to be encouraged, but I fear releasing the “ming-mongs” to do as they please with their abuse and bile and decide that protecting myself and my lovely most intimate circle of lovely chatterers is far more important than embracing an unscreened open policy.

Sometimes I think that it would be best to bring down the shutters, shut up the shop and just have a bit of a “lock-in” with the three, four or five of us huddling around our camp fire, chewing the fat and putting this world to rights, but that’s not the way to engage with the world, I’m told, even though I believe that my best “engaging” days are far behind me.

Night must fall... Chaos will reign...

Still, it’s an improvement on that “Doomsday Scenario” which happened recently and, despite the human army taking their pot-shots at me, I have sent the usual (and now overly-familiar) message to Gort and the end of the world has been averted once again…

But for how long, humanity…? How long…?

PLANE SPEAKING

For various reasons – some of them even work-related – the topic of aircraft seems to have been flying around (Ho, ho!) the office recently. It may be because one of m’colls went off to an airshow and got all “enthusiastic” about the subject, or it may be because they’ve become very interested in the gentle art of model-kit building, or it may even be because some research had to be done into vintage aircraft in relation to a possible theme for a project, but, for whatever reason it might have been, we’ve been talking a lot about aircraft, and most specifically vintage aircraft seems to be the bit that we’re currently finding most exciting to discuss.

Interestingly, as these things always seem to you’ll no doubt have realised if you’ve been here before, this has stirred up many memories from my own childhood as I was once, in a very understated way, a bit of a plane spotter myself. I don’t mean that I stood outside with my binoculars and my notebooks and took down numbers or anything like that (although if I’d had any like-minded chums, I’m sure that would have only been a heartbeat away from happening), but I was an “enthusiast” of the type that liked to read about the things and draw them and look up at the sky and identify them, as well as contributing (briefly) to “SQUAWK”, the magazine produced by the school aircraft spotters club, (and I’m not generally as a rule someone who joins anything…).

Since our little chats have been filling the gaps between the work at the office, I’ve been trawling the dusty shelves and digging out my old aircraft identification books as well as the exercise book containing the school project I did when I was about nine and which, almost unbelievably, I still had sitting upon one of the bookshelves.

You can tell how old I am, by the way, when I can recall regular Vickers Viscount and Vanguard turboprop services approaching Ringway, and I’m happy to tell people about the colourful delights of the various “Court Line” jets flying in with their two-tone groovy coloured fleet and its shiny silver letters.

Despite all the talk of Spitfires, Seafires, Hurricanes, Lancasters and Wellingtons which we are currently bandying about in reference to the kit-building world (where the attention to detail really is truly astonishing and which takes far, far more effort than I would ever have been prepared to put in), my own first aeronautical loves were the passenger planes which I used to build quite poorly from kits when I was a ham-fisted bungler of a model-maker as a boy. I am reminded of friends’ bedrooms with fleets of aircraft hanging on strings from the ceilings, which also reminds me of the Aerospace museum in Seattle where full-sized aircraft were hanging from their ceiling in a very similar way...

I mean I used to build the warplanes too, of course. Interestingly enough, although I can’t quite track it down at the moment, I have a photo of a Hawker Hurricane somewhere (although I don’t have a clue exactly where) that was amongst my grandfather’s papers when he died. Despite not being available for active duty due to his appalling eyesight, his plumbing skills were apparently requisitioned to help build Hurricanes I was once told, which might explain the petrol-driven “control line” one I got for my birthday when I was about eight. It flew for one glorious afternoon, I seem to remember, before nose-diving into a field and snapping off its machine guns, before being parked in its box on a shelf in my bedroom and making the place faintly whiff of fuel for a number of years before doing one of those mysterious “vanishing tricks” that many of our childhood toys seem to.

Perhaps those are both subjects that we’ll be returning to on another day…?

Anyway, when it came to model-making, you went with whatever kits took your fancy at the newsagents in those days, but it was the 737s and the Tridents that I most liked building, but my real favourites, the aircraft I consider to be true works of art and things of beauty were those passenger planes from between the two World Wars, those silver bi-planes seemingly held together with string and canvas which used to take a leisurely week or so to travel to South Africa, India and even Australia as the British Empire  began to fade, in which, for about a year or more’s salary for the ordinary worker, you could be served Silver Service dinners as your plane flew over the pyramids.

Aircraft like the Handley Page 42 and, to a lesser extent, the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy truly are things of beauty to me, perhaps because they just look like train carriages with wings and perhaps prove that if you just put the right kind of wings on something, pretty much anything can fly. Even so, I’d still have been far, far too terrified to ever get inside one of the things, but they speak so clearly to me of that long-lost era of the dawn of passenger air travel… I had to look the names of the actual aircraft up, of course, because such specific details had long been buried in my brain by the mundanity of grown-upedness. I remembered the type of aircraft from my own “Brooke Bond” tea card collection, something silver with a load of propellors attached to a huge wing above the passenger cabin, but the name of the thing had escaped me. However, finally dredging the name “Imperial Airways” from the slurry at the back of my mind soon put me back on track, and I was able to find these fabulous pictures to back up my childhood memories.

Of course the technological miracle of the fact that human beings went from not being able to achieve powered flight at alt to supersonic jet travel and being able to put a man on the moon within the span of one human lifetime is a topic I’ve touched upon before, but it doesn’t do any harm to remind ourselves of it again every once in a while.