EXPERIMENT

Here's a thing...

This is an experiment  because I  haven't tried writing on this before. Anyway, I've

been meaning to try this for a while - ting the blog  an rexternal device - just

to see how asy t is... and it's not and to see how I ight do f  i was out and

about

precise key strokes seem to be the  key to it and switching off the nternal he

lp

anyway back to a real keyboard I think

What I was trying to say was this:

This is an experiment, because I  haven't tried writing anything of any substance or quantity on this particular device before. Anyway, I've been meaning to try this for a while - writing the blog on an "external device" - just to see how easy it is - and it's not!!! - and to see how I might cope with writing updates to these blog postings if I was out and about and away from a "proper" keyboard for any considerable length of time.

Using precise key strokes seems to be the  key to it and switching off any and all of the internal "help" that the device itself offers when it comes to writing... All of that predictive text nonsense, and the "auto-correction" facilities hat somehow seem to either leap to electronic conclusions, or delete the letters you've already typed, like an impatient teacher with a child they've already decided is utterly useless...

Anyway, until I learn how to do it all a bit better, I think that I'll go back to the real keyboard (the "normal" one with all the symbols on it, and which doesn't require "alt" keys, and holding down "shift" keys and the kind of manual dexterity and slenderness of digits that might give the average ant pause for thought and make it think that it might need to lose a few grammes), at least for a little while.

However, I'm sure that, with a little practice and a bit of patience, as well as experimenting with some  keyboard technique, maybe things will improve. After all, practice, as they say does make perfect, or at least as close as I'm ever likely to get...

Still, it might be useful for making notes and getting the gist of an idea down before it flitters away into the vault of forgotten notions. After all, it doesn't take a genius to work out what it was I was driving at in those opening paragraphs, but sometimes an ingenious idea can slip away from you and lie tantalisingly just beyond your grasp for the rest of time.

Or maybe I should just carry a notebook and pen around with me instead...

44 DAYS

At lunchtime on Monday, with the permission of my understanding and very tolerant employers, I packed up my stuff, got into my car and headed over to the not-quite-as-local-as-usual hospital once again and found myself a parking spot, rather ironically I felt, in the car park for the maternity unit.

I had been called because, after a seemingly endless forty-four day ordeal, thirty-nine of which were spent in two distinct and separate hospitals with an entire five days spent at her home somewhere in the middle of it all which culminated in another emergency admission, the powers that be had finally decided that they needed the bed enough to send my mother home, despite the fact that what we euphemistically refer to as “stomach issues” show little sign of having been improved by the experience.

So, after navigating the usual maze of corridors, agreeing to get a rather wonderfully patient nurse to wrangle a wheelchair to an entrance where they could wait for me to retrieve my car from the maternity unit car park and place it in a more convenient, if obstructive, spot, and being given a “grab bag” full of the latest cocktail of medicines that will add to the growing lottery of problem-solving guesses that various doctors seem to be convinced will sort it all out this time, I got her into the car and we headed back to her flat.

After the usual complicated rigmarole of depositing her back into her home and heading off to the supermarket for some basic perishables, I then discovered that the hot water supply didn’t seem to be working properly, which meant that I ended up staying far longer than would otherwise have seemed strictly necessary as we made a few telephone calls and a wise old retired plumber popped around to see if he could do anything about it, which was just as well as the mysteries of plumbing is another legacy of my Grandfather’s that he failed to pass on to me.

Still, it got slightly improved enough for me to finally bid my farewells after making her a swift meal, and I headed home to collapse onto the sofa and wonder whether this really is the end of this latest chapter in the ongoing ordeal.

The problem is, I always know that it’s just a pause. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that this is the end of it yet. This could merely be another short lull before the three nines are dialled once again in the wee small hours, and the entire sausage machine of hospital visiting will crank up and continue this seemingly endless saga.

Because, when you are stuck in the middle of it all, an end to it seems almost impossible to imagine. Well, at least one with any kind of “happy” outcome. Your darker thoughts do become preoccupied with possible endings, but you try very hard not to have to think about those, not least because of the amount of stress those possibilities are likely to bring along with them.

Instead you know that you simply can’t even say to yourself that things will be different tomorrow, or “this time next week” or even next month. All you can see are endless days stretching ahead of you where there is nothing else you can do, nothing else you can plan for except the endless cycle of visits, hastily grabbed meals, work and sleep, and the occasional grudgingly accepted day off from it, and, whilst you know that this is what “family” is supposed to be all about, sometimes it feels like the hardest job in the world.

Meanwhile, I’m still feeling exhausted and yet, despite the fact that I’m yawning like crazy and my eyelids are stinging like hell, I still find myself lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning and about as clumsy and forgetful as anything when I do finally give up the ghost and decide to get up and make a cup of tea to jump-start another day.

I’m told it’s the stress that makes me forgetful, but it’s really very difficult to tell what it is that you might be forgetting, when you’re not entirely aware that you’re forgetting anything at all. There’s the occasional nagging down that pricks at the back of the mind which reminds you that there was something that you meant to do, but you’re never convinced that it’s not just your imagination playing tricks on you and prodding at your paranoia centres.

After all, when you get to the point of being this tired, you can’t quite trust that your brain is reacting quite as it should, and so you muddle through, doing the best you can, and hope that you don’t drop any mighty clangers as you go about the “normal” parts of your life, such as it is.

This forty-four day marathon came hot on the heels of the colds that neither of us quite managed to shift over and after Christmas and mean that, so far at least, 2013 has been something of a washout.

Not only that but it’s almost impossible to plan anything, because you simply don’t know how things are going to unfold over the coming days, weeks and possibly even months. You find yourself having to defer things that you ought to be getting on with, failing to sit down and reply to that letter or email that you really ought to, and can’t even think about accepting such invitations as you might receive because you can’t promise to be anywhere specific under the present circumstances.

So if you have been ignored, or forgotten, or left in limbo, then I can only apologise and hope that you’ll understand that there are good reasons for what I fail to do, even if it might just seem as if I’m just being ignorant…

Which, of course, is what I am being really.

CRAFTY SUNDAY

These little projects occasionally come my way because of my beloved, who is a rare and generous human being who tries to make the lives of those around her just a little bit happier as best she can.

This is why a few months ago we spent much of a weekend working on a wall chart in the run up to the wedding of one of her colleagues. There had been a growing sense of pressure of not having got everything done which is kind of normal for those events, I’m told, and this was her way of  helping her colleague to realise how much she had already actually got done and to help her to calm herself down a little before the big day by being able to show the things that were already sorted out and dealt with.

It was a simple thing, I thought, created with the barest minimum of what used to be my practical artistic skills, but it seemed to have been well received at the time, and did its job.

A few months later and another of her colleagues was about to jet off for her first “proper” holiday in a dozen years or more, and so, in order to build up some of the excitement and anticipation at work, another little project was suggested and a spare Sunday was set aside for the task, and much in the way of preparatory work was done before I needed to be involved in the project.

Of course I misunderstood and expected another wall chart, but when I was told that this wasn’t the plan, I managed to solve the tricky problem of representing a cruise ship with a bit of paper mechanics, and we were so pleased with the result of that that the other idea – dressing one of those cardboard dolls that you used to see in the kind of comics that were around when I was younger in various holiday outfits – was abandoned, as well as the “sea and sky” around the ship, as the ship on its own seemed impressive enough to do the job.

Oh, I know that it’s not the finest of pieces of artwork in the great scheme of things, and that those “expert crafters” out there would pour mockery and scorn upon our humble little offering, but it was nice to get the “problem-solving” part of my brain unpacked again and quite nice to have a Sunday where I wasn’t constantly thinking about the other madnesses going on in my life…

So, it’s now been bundled up in anticipation of transportation to my beloved’s office, and I hope that her colleague likes our humble efforts and has a fabulous holiday.

SNAPSHOTS

One of the more fascinating aspects of making regular, if reluctant, trips to the hospital on visiting duties, is the number of tiny snapshots you get into other people’s lives which you wouldn’t ordinarily see.

Those off duty moments where a tired-looking nurse is heading home after a long shift, or the jolly banter between members of the cleaning staff when they meet in a corridor. Then there’s the bored-looking nurse who’s just sloped off to the coffee shop for a pick-me-up, and the porter with his crackling walkie-talkie.

Then there are those who don’t have to work there; The lost-looking family who are trying to work out where the ward they’re supposed to be visiting actually is, the bereft looking ones who are just leaving after a long or rather tough visit, or the ones pushing a wheelchair transporting a relative in a dressing gown towards the shop in search of supplies.

Sometimes you pass by an open doorway where someone is just sitting and keeping an unconscious figure in a bed company, and when you go again the next day, and the next, the same scene is repeated and looks as if it has been for quite some considerable time and may very well continue to do so.

When I first arrived at that particular hospital a few weeks ago when round two of this latest version of my own family’s sad old tale began, I was most struck by the number of patients there who seemed to be missing limbs. “Uh-oh!” I thought, “This is a place where they’re very quick to amputate…” because there seemed to be an above average amount of such people hanging around in and around the lobby.

Interestingly enough, it only dawned on me later that many of them might have been heading outside for a crafty drag on a cigarette or three, despite the fact that an addiction to them might have been what led to them being there and in that unfortunate situation in the first place. I even saw an entire family pushing a chap in a wheelchair, plus his drip and oxygen cylinder, outside the door so that he could have a fag…

Oh well, I suppose when you’re that far gone, you’ve got to get whatever pleasures you can out of what time you have left to you, and I don’t suppose that when you have got to that stage, another one is going to do you any more harm…

Now, it must be pretty obvious to everyone that, because the people you are seeing are actually in a hospital, whether it is an a patient or as a visitor, they are probably going through some kind of personal crisis and are unlikely to be at their best. After all, I imagine that few people find themselves wandering around the corridors wondering about how they are looking or what other people might be thinking about them, they’ve probably, as they say, got other things on their minds…

What always strikes me, though – perhaps because I’m usually feeling the same way myself – is the general air of fatigue and weariness that abounds throughout the place, whether it’s from the bewildered chap trying to make sense of the baffling instructions on the food dispensing machines, or the sharp glances which stifle an unexpected raucous laugh, the whole place just has an air of feeling utterly knackered about it.

It’s a bit like being at a dreadful dinner party that nobody really wanted to go to and where everyone in it wants to leave but nobody wants to be the first to leave, and there’s that constant sense that somewhere behind the scenes someone is battling furiously (and ultimately to no avail) to keep the thing going long after the rest of society had given it up as a totally lost cause.

I think it was the late, great Claire Rayner who once said that if you ever go into hospital, you should leave your dignity at the door and, whilst I’m sure she was referring to being a patient, I’m pretty sure that her statement might be applied just as well to many of the visitors and, perhaps, even one or two of the staff.

TELL ME WHY...

I have decided this morning that, because the idea of a Monday is nothing more than a human construct, then I ought to be allowed to refuse to recognise it today...

There, that was easy, wasn’t it...?

And for my next trick…

SPY NIGHT

Perhaps it was a mistake to watch “Skyfall” for the second time on the very same evening I watched “The Bourne Legacy” for the first, but that’s the nature of shiny disc-dom; You get a random rental which arrives on the previous day to the one you pre-ordered off the internet (only to find that the supermarkets are then flogging it at half the price you paid – so much for “pre-order discounts…”) and, because of various factors, you’re then stuck with the dilemma of which to watch first…

The shiny new thing that you’ve actually spent your own money on, but which you saw so very recently in the cinema that nothing’s likely to come as much of a surprise, or the one you’ve never seen, started watching the day it came but was far too tired to appreciate, and which is a rental and so it really ought to go back as soon as possible so that they can despatch another one and you get something approaching your “money’s worth” this month…

Somehow though, you then actually manage keep yourself awake long enough on a Saturday evening to see both, whilst the other rental disc, the one that arrived two weeks earlier but which you really haven’t been in the mood for, sits there lonely and unloved in the envelope, and you constantly hear a soft shrill voice shouting in the manner of a fly-headed scientist caught in a web…

“Watch me! Watch me!”

Which is merely the sound of my own guilt constantly nibbling away at the back of my subconscious mind.

Watching the two films back-to-back really did give me pause for thought. Both of these films start off rather slowly, in fact, the first time that I tried to watch the Bourne film, I gave up after half an hour because I was feeling so very sleepy. Still, second time around it escalated into a rattlingly fast-paced yarn which was all rather enjoyable.

This observation of “slowness” might seem an unusual observation, especially with regards to “Skyfall” which opens with an escalating chase sequence which has had the critics and the general public raving, but the high-octane ending of “The Bourne Legacy” really made the pace of “Skyfall” seem pedestrian at first, once we’d switched the discs over, although the pace does pick up after the attack on the board of enquiry room…

Mind you, I thought that the first half seemed rather slow in the cinema too. The Bond films, I’ve always felt, have always seemed rather too pleased with their stunt sequences and do rather tend to dwell upon them, whereas other films of that ilk seem to treat those sequences in a rather cavalier and throwaway fashion which does tend to keep the pace rattling along more quickly…

I had a similar problem with the l-o-o-o-n-g boat chase sequence at the start of “The World Is Not Enough” over a decade ago, although I put that down to finding London to be a rather drab and shabby place on film, although I suppose that’s perhaps got something to do with over-familiarity, and London might seem exotic and mysterious if you’re watching a film in Islamabad.

It’s not that I think “Skyfall” is a “bad” film or, for that matter, that the Bourne one is a “good” one, but it was interesting to watch them both “back-to-back” as it were when I wasn’t really expecting to and make the comparison between two different film franchises which cover broadly the same ground.

Of course the plots of both of these films make no sense at all, but, then again, the plots of this kind of movie seldom do anyway when you actually start to think about them... “Skyfall” in particular suffers from the “over-convoluted plot” syndrome in that a heck of a lot of pre-planning has to fall into place for the plot to even be possible whilst another character gains easy access to the home of the main target very simply quite early on and you wonder why the villain didn’t just try doing that...

In fact there are a few moments where you find yourself almost screaming at the screen (well, I was at home this time…) things like “If he can substitute himself for a chauffeur, why didn’t you…?”

And, of course, the person who ends up being the main victim in the film only does so because of an act of random chance and this leads to a rare failure for the lead character which is dressed up in all the trappings of success, because after all, we need our “heroes” to be “successful”, don’t we…?

Daniel Craig is an oddly shaped chap though, isn’t he…?

You only have to look at the silhouette on the cover of the DVD to realise that, and that slow walk towards the camera at the start of the film does rather emphasise it, too. But, I reaise that a lot of people actually seem to like his peculiar shape (Personally, Clive James’ description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “condom stuff full of walnuts” springs to mind) so I suppose that, once again, I’m getting that wrong in comparison to everyone else’s opinion.

Back to my own DVD purchase, and I suspect that, on another day, I might have been posting giddily something tiresome like “It’s arrived…! It’s arrived!” about my “Skyfall” disc, but, you’ll have happily discovered, I chose not to do that.

Well, until now, anyway…

After all, I’ve always been inclined towards completing my Bond film collection as quickly as possible whenever a new one comes out, but they still only sit on a shelf and gather dust once I’ve done so, so perhaps it’s time that I grew up and stopped being so easily led…

DEATH (OF) RAY

My friend Andy wrote this today and, well to be honest, I couldn't have put it better myself, so I won't even try.

Instead, why don't you just click on the link below and read what he had to say instead...

http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/exterminate.html

Raymond P Cusick, Designer (1928 - 2013)

THE HISTORICAL APOLOGY

I see that our beloved leaders have been apologising for our imperial past again, despite the fact that nobody living today had a great deal to do with the things that they’re apologising for on our behalf, or that anyone living here has actually asked them to do so. Still, a wrong done is a wrong done, and, whilst we can never turn back time and change any of what happened, I suppose it’s nice for the descendants of those who had the wrong done to them to feel that it’s been acknowledged.

Not that it changes much. Those who benefited from those outcomes can’t be forced to roll back time and change their history, any more than the victims can be resurrected, allowed to live their normal lives, and perhaps produce a dynasty of unborn people who might also have changed the world. So we can only be sorry for what other people did, and hope that enough of us have learned from history for similar errors of judgement not to be made ever again.

Some hope…

Time, of course, or at least “future time” as well as being a great healer is also a mass of variables. If you could go back to the dawn of life on this sad planet and drop the marble of life into the maze of history, the ball might bounce through different “flip-flop” doors in the maze and there’s nothing at all which guarantees that you’d get human beings out at the end of it.

The problem is, however, that if you think about what’s going on in just one second of this human construct we call “time” and changed just one tiny aspect of what is happening – BAM!! – right now, the ripples would be felt throughout future history and perhaps humanity’s marble would go in a completely different direction as it fell through the “flip-flop thingy” of eternity.

And then, I suppose we ought to ask how far back must our apologies go…? English history is stained by the blood of many wrongs committed, although many “rights” were also achieved because of its dominant position in the world. Many of our closer neighbours would attest to our brutal history and some still resent it even in these enlightened times. Much of our Tudor wealth came from raiding Spanish galleons, although they themselves were up to no good and it was really the fortunes amassed from their pirate’s raiding and pillaging that our pirates were stealing.

Of course, the national psyche was shaped by our occupation by the Romans two thousand years ago, and centuries of living in fear of Viking raiders, so you could argue that we are who we are because of them and ask you to re-focus all your requests for apologies in the direction of Italy or Denmark.

Then again, since 1066, England has essentially been an occupied nation anyway since the Normans crossed the Channel and nabbed our country from right under the eye of King Harold, so anything that has happened since then is pretty much  the fault of the invaders and occupying powers.

In other words, it’s all the fault of the French.

Hmmm… I may be onto something, there… This notion somehow sits rather well with the English way of life, when you think about it. Historically, and perhaps sometimes with pretty good reasons, we’ve quite enjoyed blaming our various European neighbours for many of our ills. Perhaps, if I were a politician, I might seize this idea and take it up as a rallying cry, because it would be a popular sentiment even if it does quietly forget Agincourt and the rather helpful alliances we had with France during the vast conflicts of the last century.

“Just blame the French!” - getting politicians votes almost since voting was first thought of…

And there was me hoping that we could learn from history…

YOU, THE JURY

Listed below, you will find the ten questions posed by the jury in the first Vicky Pryce trial which leaves you with little faith in the future of the British legal system, or in the abilities of the “Twelve good men (and women) and true to have much in the way of common sense.

I might blame the fact that a lot of the people who I see walking around the streets of this once great nation of ours now seem to know more about “soap opera” justice than how the real thing works; or maybe it’s just that we’re all getting our opinions from the knee-jerk response triggered by the tabloids; or maybe it’s just the “I reckon” culture that social networking seems to have instilled in all of us…?

Either way, I do like to think that there was someone in the jury room who did actually know most of the answers, but I also worry that they might have been the sort of person who is easily shut down by a gobby “Alpha” type who might not have listened to them, but “reckoned” instead that they didn’t really know anything and they’d be better off asking the judge, even though a heck of a lot of these questions – nicked wholesale from Clive Coleman’s article on the BBC website which you can read in full here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21521460 - do seem to fall under the heading of “the blindingly obvious”, especially to any of us brought up watching Granada’s “Crown Court” back in the 1970s like I was.

And God help any of us if we ever end up in the dock, unless you’re a “much loved” celebrity of course, then I’m sure you’ll be fine, because, as we all know, they could never do anything wrong…

1. You have defined the defence of marital coercion and also explained what does not fall within the definition by way of examples. Please expand upon the definition, specifically “was will overborne”. Provide examples of what may fall within the defence, and does this defence require violence or physical threats?
2. In the scenario where the defendant may be guilty but there is not enough evidence provided by the prosecution at the material time of when she signed [the penalty notice letter] to feel sure beyond reasonable doubt, what should the verdict be: not guilty or unable/unsafe to provide a verdict?
3. If there is debatable evidence supporting the prosecution’s case, can inferences be drawn to arrive at a verdict? If so, inferences/speculation on the full evidence or only where you have directed us to do so, e.g. circumstantial evidence, lies, failure by Vicky Pryce to mention facts to the police.
4. Can you define what is reasonable doubt?
5. Can a juror come to a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and has no facts or evidence to support it either from the prosecution or defence?
6. Can we infer anything from the fact that the defence did not bring witnesses from the time of the offence such as au pair, neighbours?
7. Does the defendant have an obligation to present a defence?
8. Can we speculate about the events at the time that Vicky Pryce signed the form, or what was in her mind at that time?
9. Your honour, the jury are considering the facts provided but have continued to ask the questions raised by the police. Given the case has come to court without answers to the police's questions, please advise on which facts in the bundle the jury shall consider to determine a not guilty or guilty verdict.
10. Would religious conviction be a good enough reason for a wife feeling that she had no choice, i.e. she promised to obey her husband in her wedding vows and he had ordered her to do something and she felt she had to obey?

Good, as the saying goes, grief…!

FALCON

I think I saw a Falcon the other day…

I was driving along the motorway when, as I followed the last long slow curve to the right as I approached my usual exit, I noticed that perched at the very top of one of the lamp posts, all huddled up against the bitter cold of a February evening that had snow in the air, what was obviously a bird.

But it did not have the shape of the more familiar birds that I might usually see there, the jackdaws, the magpies (salutes), the gulls or the pigeons. It was an altogether more unusual and rather light grey shape, and this is what my brain did:

“Ooh! That’s an interesting looking bird…”

“It might be a bird of prey…”

“If it is, I wonder which bird of prey it might be…?”

“Hmmm… It looks a bit like the bird in “The Maltese Falcon…”

“I wonder what kind of bird it is…?”

(beat...)

(The sound of mental gears grinding ever so slowly...)

(Somewhere deep inside what passes for my brain, a light-bulb begins to glow faintly...)

“Oh…”

“Right…”

THE PRAT IN THE HAT

Around about twenty five years ago, a timid young chap with precious little in the way of practical experience walked for the very first time into yet another office for yet another interview and, despite being third choice for one of two available positions, managed to convince the people inside that he might be worthy of a punt…

Personally, I think that it might have been the hat which actually got the job, and I just happened to come with at as part of the deal, as it were, being, as I was, rather attached to it. After all, my interview technique has always been more than a little useless, what with all the fear and the blind panic and all, and I know for a fact that it didn’t go at all well until it was over and both parties were so much at a loose end that we could think of little to do with the rest of our afternoons so we “might as well have a bit of a chat…”

On such moments destinies turn…

I’ve always hated interviews as a way of choosing employees anyway. Sometimes the better candidates are just lousy at interviews, whereas the confident ones tend to get the job, bugger off for a “better one” a month later, sometimes taking the petty cash along with them as they go.

Perhaps I think that simply because I was always so lousy at them…? After all, everything in life is about “self-interest” and seeing things from your own point of view, isn’t it…?

Later on, and for years afterwards, I was occasionally referred to by at least one of my colleagues as “the prat in the hat” which might have got a little tiresome but did at least prove to me that I did leave an impression that day, and which is why, I think, I got remembered when one of the first choices opted not to take up the opportunity which I so desperately needed at that stage in my life.

In an era when ideas like “loyalty” might have seemed old-fashioned and notions like using jobs as mere stepping stones to a brilliant career seemed to make people rather disinterested in sticking around for long or making any actual effort, even I thought that it might just be a useful starting point for gaining a foothold in the industry, and thought that I might give it six months until something else came along.

Came for six months, stayed for more than a decade… and I’m still not entirely convinced that anything “better” actually came along when the time came for me to leave, in the great scheme of things. Different, yes, but “better…?” Well, it’s hard to say, given how certain things went, but things seem to have turned out okay in the end.

So, at the start of this year, on January the fourth 2013 to be precise, it was exactly twenty five years since I joined the ranks of the “full time employed” for the very first time and left the world of twice daily viewings of “Neighbours” (in the days of Deffnee and Dizz…), too many snack-size Toblerones from the shop positioned far too conveniently across the road, and the surprisingly energetic pastime of a weekly game of Squash behind me forever.

I still have the hat…

A MAN OF FEW WORDS TODAY

I’m sorry but I don’t have any words for you today, well, apart from these ones, of course. The ideas cupboard is completely bare. Well, that’s not strictly true, either. The ideas are there but the execution is sadly lacking…

When I sat down this morning to not write this piece, it was actually going to be called “No words today” but that would, of course, have been a complete lie and, whilst my relationship with the internet is an odd one to say the very least, outright lying to it was never my plan, and I’m not going to start doing it now.

I never was much good at lying anyway, even when I was ordered to…

But anyway, the point is that some words is not the same thing as no words, and whilst I doubted that any significant words would come today (fatigue, distraction, lack of inspiration, blah, blah, blah…), I am at least self-aware enough to know that the words that make up the explanation amount to more than none…

Still, let’s just sit here and think for a moment…

Nope…

Nothing’s coming today, so perhaps I ought to just stagger back to bed and hide underneath the duvet and give some thought to what I might like to tell you about if there was anything in my mind which I felt was worthy of sharing…

There were some numeric coincidences which pleased me last weekend as I posted Tweet number 4444 on the very same weekend as my bill at the supermarket came to exactly £33.33 which I found interesting (what are the chances of that…?) but they are hardly likely to open up any earth-shattering insights into the human condition.

Not, of course, that anything else that I’ve ever written ever does that either…

Hmm…

This does still appear to be some words, then…

Just not all that many…

333 to be exact, according to my word count software.

Now what are the chances of that…?

VIDEOLANCHE

A few years ago I heard a rather alarming and tragic story about the man who ended up going to prison for manslaughter because he threw the TV remote control at his partner and it hit her on the head and killed her.

Now, unfortunate though this story was, I’m not going to bother looking up the fine details and an accurate account of it because that’s not really why I have dredged it up out of my memory this morning.

There is another reason.

Yesterday, as I skipped into the bathroom to deal with one of those very few reasons why one might wish to use a bathroom, there came from outside a resounding crash which caused a certain amount of alarm for the beloved who had just seen me depart from one room heading in the very direction from where that crash had subsequently erupted.

Such is her faith in my geriatric old body that she immediately thought that I’d fallen down the stairs, and so was much relieved when I emerged unscathed from the bathroom to try and find out what was going on.

Well one of the long shelves full of videotapes had finally given in to the force of gravity and allowed a whole row of cassettes to cascade to the ground after having been held in position merely by the friction and presence of their neighbours for quite some time now.

If I ever went up to get a tape from the shelf (something that has been happening far more rarely recently I’ll admit) there was a little game which had to be played to extract one tape whilst keeping the bond of the surface tension strong enough to prevent such an avalanche, because the wood used to construct the shelves has been slowly angling itself ever more steeply over recent years.

Obviously, when I moved the vacuum cleaner minutes before I had knocked something which caused the slow slide towards catastrophe which resulted in the devastation that we found in the corridor after the crash.

And this was when I remembered the unfortunate story of the TV remote control and realised that I was rather lucky not to have been underneath this videolanche when it toppled as it really could have killed me if I’d been extraordinarily unlucky.

Death – and a “Stupid Death” at that - by analogue…

I don’t know…

Perhaps it might just have been a rather appropriate way for me to go…?


Note to self: Having carefully stacked the tapes at ground level, it is then a huge mistake to keep on falling over them in the darkness. Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice...

COIN SHIELD

I love this…

I just love the fact that you can do this with our coinage and am amazed it took me over four years to even notice that you can, seeing as they were first introduced in 2008.

However, my own lack of observational skills aside, I also rather like the fact that, with a little bit of careful planning and a willingness to set aside £1.88 of your small change, anyone can collect together the parts of this little jigsaw and build one for themselves.

The design itself was the winning entry in a competition run by the Royal Mint back in 2005 and was won by a Welshman called Matthew Dent whose use of the Royal Shield across the reverse of the entire set gives the coins a contemporary feel whilst linking them right back through the entire history of English coins, and got him much criticism, ironically, because the shield itself doesn’t actually contain a uniquely “Welsh” element in its design.

So, if you’re just a tiny bit bored the next time you’re in a coffee shop or on the train, why don’t you rummage through your pockets and see if you’ve got the makings of the national jigsaw game.

Go on… You know you want to…

THE THROBBING BRAIN

Migraines do tend to do funny things to the brain. Mine felt as if it had been bleached for a couple of days afterwards, and yet I found myself writing the oddest things in response to the oddest thoughts, little of which made much actual sense at all…

Even when I was supposedly feeling “better” (or as close as I ever get to such a happy state…) the letters would dance in front of my eyes and it took an almost monumental effort to focus on anything, perhaps to the detriment of other things which I ought to have been focusing upon.

The difficulty, of course, is that you forget that these “events” are really quite invasive and whilst the vision can clear and the banging in your head can ease, the strange sense of detachment and feeling that you might have snapped some synapses does tend to hang around for a couple of days alongside the fatigue and lethargy that such an attack leaves behind in its wake.

Of course we all have busy lives and are far too eager to get back into the fray to allow ourselves the luxury of lurking under a duvet and recuperating. This is not the “modern” way when struck down by le grand mal, and we knuckle down and muddle though instead of taking to our beds like a consumptive poet and sipping upon cups of sweet tea served in bone china cups.

Pauses to savour that particular thought for a sweet moment…

As to whether a migraine is the price I have to pay for the small matter of daring to enjoy a couple of glasses of a rather fine red wine on Friday evening, remains a matter for some conjecture. After all, there was a certain amount of “cause and effect” of that nature once upon a long ago before they stabilised my blood pressure but those days were, I believed, far behind me now.

There is also the “relaxation theory” of migraine production, in that you will only get one when you finally relax, which might be a fair point given the circumstances of Saturday morning, even though the immediate discovery was that the time to relax was still a far way off in the distant future.

I really should’ve known that one was coming, of course, given the fact that my taste buds were all askew on Friday and the usual “barely bloody drinkable” was causing me to gag and retch and have the most unfortunate reaction to the workplace cups of joe…

I had, of course, just put it down to the brand switch, although our budgets have demanded that we’ve had Tesco’s “own brand” coffee several times before and it’s always proved perfectly adequate to the task…

Perhaps they’re adding horseflesh to that these days too…?

Once upon a time, you see, I got these things so regularly that the symptoms and the pre-symptoms were blindingly obvious and I could leap upon the preventative medicine before the world went mad, but recently, because I’ve not been getting them quite so often, I forget the tiny signals my mind is giving out, and the whole tsunami of nastiness will overwhelm me before I’ve had a chance to even notice it coming.

Still, whatever was going on, my brain remained scrambled for several days afterwards, and I would find myself doing odd things like reaching for a cereal bowl but actually picking up a cup, and forgetting things which I otherwise would never have done…

It’s a strange life, that of the migraine sufferer, and one which is difficult to get across to those fortunate souls who’ve never been stricken, so I hope these few paragraphs, ripped out of the burning heart of adversity, might go some way towards helping you to understand these things a little more…

A METEORIC WEEK

I can’t have been the only person who thought that the news just kept on trying to outdo itself this week. It was almost as if having come up with the biggest story it could possibly imagine, like a Hollywood movie producer it just had to keep on trying to go one better as we got to the inevitable sequels, expanding the snowball effect of incredulity to try to get the whole world to the point where we simply couldn’t believe any of it any more.

Early on in the week, I was idly sipping at my mid-morning cup of coffee and scanning the headlines as I do during that “little break” (a little break which, I sadly note, no longer serves as a “screen break”) when the first announcements of the Pope’s resignation started to seep through.

Considering that he represents quite an important symbol to a hefty chunk of the world’s population, and that this is the first time such a thing has happened in nearly six hundred years, even I, as a not particularly religious person, could see that this was going to turn into a pretty big story and, when I happened to mention that it had happened, it came as something of a shock, and we all wanted to know a little bit more about it, and, as the news spread around the world, so, it seems did everyone else, with the inevitable result that, before you knew it, the gags about it started going around as well.

Well, it was always going to take a pretty big story to shift the horsemeat scandal off the front page, but, for once, it seemed that the church had come up trumps. Of course, the food story refused to go away and would resurface again later in the week as we all became far more aware that a lot of us eat an awful lot of rubbish an awful lot of the time, and, until now, few of us gave a rat’s kidney about what it was.

Unless of course, it actually was rat’s kidneys, then we’d be really bothered.

Actually, the “I reckon” brigade rather came up trumps over that. Despite the fact that “news gathering” nowadays simply seems to involve trawling TwitWorld for (mostly ill-judged) “opinions” or reporters taking their cameras along on the school run, they did at one point manage to find that most rare of creatures, the “sensible parent” who said that their child probably wouldn’t even have noticed if they’d accidentally eaten a little bit of horsey in their school dinner, so it probably wasn’t worth worrying about.

Give the woman a medal.

So, what on earth was going to knock the Pope from his top spot as “biggest story of the week”…? Well, it turns out that it was a “famous” chap who I’d never heard of (don’t worry, I have now…) called Oscar Pistorius who shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp in the kind of tragic incident that seemed rather out of place on Valentine’s Day morning, but is just the kind of celebrity scandal that will fill miles and miles of newsprint, have the “I reckon” brigade out in full and tiresome force and is almost certain to find us asking “Pope Who…?” a couple of days later.

Meanwhile, a bloody great rock was hurtling towards us from outer space, but because we knew that it was coming, nobody was particularly concerned about it apart from a few jocularists who were in the know, making cracks about sending aging movie stars up to deal with a problem that wasn’t actually happening…

So, it came as something of a surprise then when a ten ton rock exploded in the atmosphere twenty-six miles above Chelyabinsk in Russia with the shock wave injuring nearly a thousand people on the ground.

“Where,” as the saying goes, “the hell did that come from…?

Well, meteors do tend to travel in clusters and we can only track the really big ones, so it ought to have been less of a surprise than it seems to have been, but we are only human and we do suffer from the ridiculous belief that we have some kind of control over our destinies.

I’m sure that Reeva Steenkamp once did, and I imagine that the Pope probably thought so, too, just as I’m sure that even in these more “enlightened” times, some people will see a random meteor striking the atmosphere as some kind of a “sign” about something or other, and other people will continue to believe that celebrities can’t possibly do any wrong…

So instead we’ve learned to watch the skies with a little more fear for a while at least until we forget about it again and life returns to whatever passes for normal nowadays, and we start thinking about the mundane and banal “every day” stories again, as we stat to develop the strange suspicion that it might just turn out that everyone who’s ever been on telly ever might just turn out to be a sex offender now, thanking their lucky stars that the news was bigger than them and their dirty little secrets this week.

A strange week, on a strange planet, and you can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen next to top all of those stories…?

SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE

This is starting to feel brutal…

There’s only so far you can bend before you eventually break, and it feels as if, like a piece of raw spaghetti, it won’t only be two pieces that I’ll be breaking into.

But the miserable sequel to this year’s most irritating storyline “Hospital Stay 1” has already stretched to a week and, with an added hospital acquired infection, looks like turning into another epic, with the added complication of being so much further away that the travelling time is doubled, and when you add in the commuting time to and from our tiny little office next to the sewage works, and the occasional battles with blizzards, as well as the insomnia, the worry, and the increasing sense of unwanted responsibility being thrust upon me, I am, quite frankly, knackered.

And it’s not as if the visits seem to be doing much good, even though the place itself is so relatively remote that I’m likely to be the only one who makes the trek out there. We sit there with little to talk about apart from tales of work that nobody outside the place could reasonably be expected to be interested in, meals which we haven’t had the time to either cook or eat, and the exciting news stories that don’t see to have penetrated through the walls of the ward.

Other than that, all we do is try to sleep, and there’s only so many times that you can tell that old story…

Oh, I know I should try and prompt some kind of reaction, ask probing questions, but she seems to have lost any interest in the world beyond that mattress as well. One day, I’m sure I’ll regret not having taken the time to ask so many questions about what things were like in her youth, what it was really like growing up with my grandparents as parents and whether, behind all the madness they were actually people whom I might have enjoyed the company of and getting to know.

In another reality, another world…

One day, all those opportunities will have slipped away and be gone forever, but we have never really had that kind of relationship and, to be perfectly honest, I imagine that if I started asking about such things now, she might just suspect that I’ve finally gone completely around the bend or that I “know something” that I’m not telling her…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’m also beginning to wonder whether I have indeed rounded that tricky hairpin…

I’m so exhausted and I know that I’m starting to miss things, forget things. I go downstairs to take my morning pills and the little bubble bearing the name of yesterday’s day is sitting there unopened and I wonder whether I missed a day or just forgot that this sachet hadn’t actually started on a Sunday but now it mysteriously does…

I can sense the concentration slipping away at work, and I can sense that the mind is struggling to come up with new and exciting thoughts to put down in my roughly hewn sentences. Not only that, but things are quite simply not getting done as the squares in the picture puzzle of life get shifted around again and again to accommodate the various changes necessary, but the picture always manages to not get completed…

Sometimes it gets tantalisingly close, only to get jumbled up again by the simplest of moves, because, in the end, something’s always got to give, and I’m beginning to suspect that the something might be me…

LOSING THE HOUR

It’s always feels a little bit sad when one of your favourites bites the dust, even if it is just a bit of old telly that nobody ought to get all that worked up about.

So it was with “The Hour”, the BBC drama set in and around the lives of a team of investigative journalists working upon a TV show not entirely unlike “Parorama” back in the 1950s. It has run for two series of six episodes, and the second year had seemed much “stronger” that the first, and it had all ended on a little bit of a cliffhanger, with one of the main character’s life hanging in the balance, and it had been good enough, I felt, to come back for at least one more year.

Because it was the kind of good, solid, slow-burning character-based drama that is all-too-rare on television nowadays, and whilst the episodes did sometimes be taking an awfully long time to get to the point, it was rather wonderful to be able to wallow in that rather beautifully constructed world for an hour each week, and when they did allow the plot to unfold, it usually packed one hell of a punch when it did.

I’ll admit, from a pernickety point of view, it was the anachronistic telephones that I had always struggled the most with when I had been watching it, because I could swear that the model mostly being used in the BBC offices at Lime Grove hadn’t actually been introduced until 1960, but having been able to smugly point that out to anyone who cared, I was prepared to let it go and get involved in the drama.

The problem was, I was only rabbiting on about that very point again at work the other day, and the very next day the BBC announced that there would not be a third run, so I am beginning to think (in that way I can have of making everything be about me), that it might have been all my fault.

I’m also now running a particular risk of being made to appear rather foolish when somebody points out that I’ve got it quire wrong about the telephones, and those particular versions were available far earlier than I thought they were, especially in the London Metropolitan area and in publicly owned buildings.

The cast was pretty astonishing, too headed up by Dominic West, Ben Whishaw and Ramola Garai and with a supporting cast involving the likes of Anna Chancellor, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Peter Capaldi, so I imagine that it might have been difficult to corral that lot back together any time soon.

And period drama is far more expensive to produce than contemporary drama is, I suppose, even if you are able to film hefty chunks of it on location in your own premises. Well, either that, of those sets were very good indeed. But, with all of the set dressing and the authentic props (give or take the odd telephone receiver), and all of those fabulous old cars to hire and those beautiful fifties fashions, it was never going to be a cheap do, even if most of the investment was already made by the first couple of years.

I added my “Bah!” to the general sense of frustration the loyal few had displayed in TwitWorld when the story broke, and I was surprised to be almost immediately encouraged to add my name to a petition attempting to “save” the show, set up by an irate and protesting former viewer, but I was disinclined to do so, much, I am sure, to the disappointment of the “true” fans…

But I’m old enough and realistic enough to know that when the axe has fallen it’s already too late, and the pleas of a few disappointed viewers is unlikely to change a decision that’s already been made, although it would be nice if the powers that be could be persuaded to make one more episode, maybe a one-off TV movie to round off the story and give it a more satisfying and rounded conclusion, or at least to let us know quite what became of Hector and Bel and Freddie…

Especially Freddie…

I read someone online wailing that they’d “left Freddie with broken hair! You can’t leave Freddie with broken hair!”

But it seems that they can and will, and whether that damages a real someone for a lifetime or not remains to be seen…

AWAKE

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Lying here…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Unable to get back to sleep…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Mouth full of blood…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

From the grinding worry…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

The sound of my heart pounding…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Inside my head…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

The only thing to do…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Is to trick the brain…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Into thinking…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

That it’s relaxed…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Even though I know…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

It isn’t…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…

In… Two… Three… Four… Five…

Out… Two… Three… Four… Five…