DEAD BLOG

Or is it, as suggested in the case of that most notorious Norwegian Blue parrot, merely "resting"…?

Or not, obviously.

It's so hard for me to tell at the moment with the small things of life being in such a state of flux. After all, August will mean a massive leap into the unknown for a chum of mine who is emigrating to a place nearly half a world away along with his entire family and that is, of course, far more entertaining than anything else I could find to talk to you about.

Or not, obviously.

All that I have planned, amidst the usual drudgery, is that I suddenly have an unexpected "event" to attend one day in a couple of weeks which might prove interesting enough to share, but equally, at the time of writing, might turn out not to be.

And so we drift lazily towards the end of July, a month in which this blog, to all intents and purposes, "ceased to be…"

Towards the end of June, things got very difficult inside my head, and I found myself in a very dark place, and sitting here, writing endlessly dreary prose about nothing in particular, suddenly seemed like the most pointless thing in the world, especially as we lurked upon the very brink of July, a month during which a paradigm shift in my own position in life was due to occur whether I liked it or not, and I had a couple of short breaks already booked which would inevitably drag me away from the keyboard anyway.

The relaxation that those breaks themselves managed to create in me finally showed me quite how unwell I had become in recent months, what with all of the angst and the woe, and the simply not taking the time to have a proper rest and recuperate from all of the traumas of last year. Sometimes it's only when you sit up and realise just how peculiar you'd become that you get to see the causes of that peculiarity for what they are and realise that you can actually do something about them.

Or not, obviously.

Meanwhile, my endless daily wittering on and on about nothing in particular had become little more than a stick to beat myself with, coupled with a strangely obsessive need to just keep on doing it because I already was, if that doesn't sound too peculiar…? Sometimes the realisation that I had nothing to say still wouldn't prevent me from really needing to say it anyway, and that can lead to a whole load of old nonsense and a certain amount of bitterness and disappointment all around.

Or not, obviously.

Meanwhile, the clock has continued to turn and I have slipped almost unnoticed into my sixth decade which, in and of itself, doesn't feel all that different to the last one, if truth be told. It's not the numbers that bother me (or, as a wise old adventurer once said "It's not the years, it's the mileage…") but the realisation of all that time wasted, and all of those things not done, regrets not addressed, and, perhaps, how little time may remain in which to deal with any of them.

The clock is ticking… and I've rarely heard those clicks so clearly.

So, this remains a period in which to reflect and consider and wonder about the mysteries of life, and, as to whether this will remain a "dead blog" or whether I choose to keep on churning out those strange observations and reflections from time-to-time remains to be seen.

Or not, obviously.

Time will tell, as they say.

It usually does.

But just in which manner I choose to waste what's left of mine - whether hereabouts or otherwhere - might yet prove interesting.

Or not, obviously…

THE WRONG SIDE...

Woke up on the wrong side this morning...

MOONRISE

Last Sunday evening, whilst t'Beloved (and, it seemed, the rest of the universe) were watching the World Cup Final, we happened to glance out of the window of the place we were staying in for our holidays and saw the extraordinary sight of a moonrise over the headland across the bay.

Now, because this was a rather full moon, and given that the so-called "super moon" had happened 24 hours earlier, this all seemed rather more impressive than the deathly dull nil-nil draw which seemed to be playing out on television, and so we gaped and gawped at this rather beautiful view for several moments before deciding that we'd like to capture it in a photograph, even if it was going to have to be taken through the window because I didn't feel quite like dashing outside with a load of old clobber at that time of night.

Now, for some bizarre reason, it turned out that I had four photographic devices with me on that particular holiday. In fact, if you count the Kindle, I actually had five, but let's not, eh, because I didn't even try with that one.

First of all I snapped a quick shot with the teffalone before it was suggested that I ought too try using a "proper" camera, and so I rummaged about in the backpack, produced the tripod, and set up the SLR.

Sadly, my knowledge of night settings for such pictures is sadly lacking, and so I spent a few minutes producing shiny blobs on dark backgrounds before remembering that the pocket camera had some special "night sky" settings and grabbed that out of the bag.

Rather miserably, I couldn't work out where those settings were on the menus, and more blobs were produced as the clouds began to gather and the moment was escaping us.

In the meanwhile, of course, the Beloved snapped off a couple of rather smashing shots on her own camera that I'm now very jealous of.

All of this frantic scrabbling about was not helping me to appreciate this rather serene moment, but I grabbed the much underused "bridge" camera, the batteries of which - rather happily - I'd charged only that afternoon after finding them to be completely and utterly flat.

Once again, the moon proved to be far too bright for the "night sky" setting, but by spinning the dial I managed to find a setting that worked reasonably well, and got a snapshot that I'm relatively happy with, even if it's never going to impress any "proper" photographers.

But the fact that it was born out of chaos and much frantic leaping about will always make the story behind that beautiful moment very memorable to me.

Oh, and apparently Germany won the football in "extra time" (whatever that is) which I'm told means that whoever's best at football has finally been resolved forever and there'll never be any more football.

So that's nice.

UNITED USELESSITIES

The next time that there's a drought or a hosepipe ban, and a representative of the water companies appears on your TV or radio bleating on about how they're doing "everything that they can" to deal with any leaks in the system, I'd like you to remember this small tale of woe about which I am going to tell you.

Just over a fortnight ago, I went up into the back garden (because the geography here is complicated and far too tedious to explain at any length) to hang out the washing on a sunny Saturday morning for the first time in a while after a period of summer rains.

It rapidly became apparent from the swamp I found myself stepping into, that what I had presumed to be groundwater drainage at the bottom of the wall during the previous week was actually an underground water leak from the pipe that the water company run across my particular patch of land to feed the entire row of terraced houses that my own simple hovel lurks amidst.

Trickle, Saturday 12th

Immediately I squelched down the steps and back into the house and reported the situation to the "Leakline" and, after a lengthy chat in which I tried to explain the situation, and the tedious descriptions of the geography to a very doubtful-sounding young woman, I got a promise that an inspector would be sent out to assess the situation the following Friday.

In the intervening six days, the slight trickle did increase a tad, so that we had two tiny little streams trickling softly across the cobbles on the back road, but it still seemed harmless enough, although, given that the streams were likely to vanish if Friday morning, when it came, turned out to be a rainy one, I thought I'd better arrange with work to be around to chat to their inspector, given that, out here beyond the rim, some workmen struggle to find us at all and depart muttering dark oaths about their time being wasted.

Permission granted,
Friday 11th

In fact, on that Friday morning, I was actually on the phone trying to explain how our obscure little terrace could be found to his supervisor, when the inspector arrived and began his inspection without me, which kind of belied the "we need you to be there" instruction that I had received on the phone the previous Saturday, despite me explaining that the area was fully accessible without me, but I let it pass. Still, it was all very pleasant, and he chatted about the problem, and any other issues which might arise, and I signed the various permission forms, explained that I was about to be away on holiday for a week - the first (and much needed) break that I'd had since the death of my mother last year.

"Not to worry" I was told "They'll be here within seven days and, because you've signed all these forms, we'll just get on with it…" and so, after a last look at the garden on Saturday morning, I set off on my holidays knowing that the problem would be solved by the time I returned.

Deluge, Saturday 19th

The following Saturday, around lunchtime, and now two weeks since I reported the slight leak, I arrived home from my relaxing holiday to find a torrent of water now pouring non-stop off the garden and one of neighbours scowling at me in that "why haven't you done anything about this" way that people have when the problem is somebody else's.

"Have you not seen anyone from the water board?" I asked, "because they said it would be dealt with within seven days…"

"And when was the seven days up?" she asked frostily.

"Yesterday!" I replied and we share a sombre "Ah!" moment, presumably about the futility of existence.

In the house I found an official-looking card from a mysterious "Brian", allegedly a second inspector, which made slightly scary threats and asked me to text contact details to a mobile number which turned out to be unavailable. Having pondered upon the wisdom of sending out another inspector after I'd already dealt with the first, I thought I'd better query this with United Utilities and rang the "official" number on the card.

Ring "Brian" (?)

Curiously, they'd never heard of this "Brian" and claimed that the only employee they had of that name worked out of Manchester, so that's a bit of a mystery.

They told me to ignore it.

Meanwhile, they were able to confirm what we'd already discovered from our answer phone messages, that the team were due to come and fix the leak on Monday (sixteen days after I first reported it) and that it would be helpful if I could be there, not least to get some clarification as to who "Brian" was.

I disappeared off to compose more emails explaining to my manager why I might not be in on the first morning back after my holiday...

Later on, I tracked down my next-door neighbour who seemed to have had a very frustrating week watching this water pour out from her garden and splash noisily onto the steps which align with her back door.

Apparently the transformation of the minor leak into a full-blown torrent began the previous Monday, and a team had turned up to fix it last Wednesday, looked at it, but then claimed (perhaps because it was raining) that they didn't have permission go onto my property, and went away again, having done nothing about it, and despite my neighbour's (rather irate I gather) telephone call to UU discovering that the necessary permissions were actually on file on the computer.

I'll gloss over the bizarre logic of the Utility company sending out a team without the necessary permissions to a house they knew would be empty, and I'd like to point out that, because I had received no notification that they were coming that day, I would have been at work anyway so still wouldn't have been able to give it.

Bloody great hole,
Arrived unannounced 2013.

I will also gloss over the fact that last year I arrived home to find that they'd dug a bloody great big hole outside my back door without any prior notification and without any permission whatsoever, but that's just likely to exasperate me if I choose to think about it again, so we ought to move on.

Finally, I should also like to confirm that I had already given permission for them to deal with the leak anyway… I have forms and everything.

Anyway, as I listen throughout Sunday t

o all of that water draining away as it splashes down our own impromptu waterfall at the back of the houses, I'm now fully aware that it will all be sorted out tomorrow, and another sorry episode in my relationship with United Utilities will come to an end.

Somehow, I don't quite believe that it will, though.

JULY 11th 2014

Going much against my usual instincts, and perhaps to even your surprise, I actually sat down and watched some ballfoot on television the other evening.

To be honest, I still didn't really want to, but the Beloved has more than a passing interest in such things - not least because she still had an outside stake in her office sweep - and it only seemed polite to keep her company despite the potential lateness of the hour.

And so I huffed, and I puffed, and I chunnered away to myself, and I tapped away at the Kindle, not really paying much attention as the shouty nonsense in the park was going on via the telly in the corner.

It was, apparently, a "semi-final" which, much like the term "quarter-final", is a term which I find a tad bewildering, given that I always thought that "semi" meant "half" and this was by no means half of a final.

It was more like all of one of the last games before the final… but I digress.

Anyway, whilst I sat there, not really watching, something very strange happened. A ball seemed to have appeared in the back of what, to all intents and purposes, if you were listening to what the "experts" from teams that hadn't made it to this particular stage of the competition were saying, was deemed to be the "wrong" net.

Then, a few moments later, this happened again, and again, and again, and, by the time this had happened five times in what seemed like as many minutes, and even my disinterest was piqued enough to realise that something unusual might be occurring, to persuade me to lift my eyes from my hand-held screen and wonder what was, as the saying goes, afoot.

From that point on, things did, rather surprisingly, become at least mildly interesting from a psychological point of view.

For example, I began to wonder at what point the average sportist comes to the conclusion in their own mind that the game is utterly hopeless and unwinnable.

After all, knowing that you suddenly need to get six of the round things into the net thing to have any hope of winning, must be a little bit daunting, given how difficult the other side are supposed to make it for you, even if they've just proven to you how easy it could be to do so.

After the intermission, where more "experts" chunnered away meaninglessly about how surprised they were that a game in which one team or the other was supposed to emerge victorious was being won by one of those two teams, that target eventually became eight, and, to be honest, even to a layman like myself, it looked as if it could have been even more than that. Pretty soon it seemed as if there simply wouldn't be enough actual minutes remaining for that sort of mathematical requirement to be a credible option.

But there was no shaking hands and saying "Well played, mate… You've obviously got us beaten!" Instead the whole sorry spectacle just carried on towards its inevitable bitter end.

Meanwhile, the various reactions of the audience also became very psychologically fascinating to me. In general, it appeared, they had obviously been misinformed that the result would be a foregone conclusion for what they presumed to be the "right" team, and then seemed to get more than a little bit upset when this turned out not to be as likely as they had been led to believe.

They didn't even win the second half, although, to be fair, that result was a lot closer.

And, even though there hadn't been a fatal tragedy involving their relatives or close friends enacted in front of their eyes, it began to look as if the audience thought that there really had been, rather than recognising that what they were watching was just a game - something involving play which is something that we learn to do as children - in which one of the two sides had to lose.

It just happened to be the team that they happened to like that achieved the losing part, that's all, which seemed not to have been a possibility that had crossed any of their minds beforehand.

Such is the way of hubris, I suppose.

The next evening, and because the other game involved the Beloved's sweepstake team, we settled down to watch the actual last game before the final, if you don't count the other game before the final which is not the final.

This was a far more dull affair, and my head scarcely lifted from my Kindle device. Even the Beloved, who had a whole £2.50 of her hard-earned resting upon the result, went off to bed at the half-way point, which turned out not to be the half-way point anyway.

Strangely, out of a sense of loyalty to her rather than anything else, I hung on to the bitter end of that game too, reminding myself in the process why I don't really have much interest in the game of ballfoot as a rule, before retiring at around midnight and subsequently having a lousy - and very brief - night's sleep.

She won't be winning the sweepstake, by the way, just in case you were wondering.

NO MORE WORDS

To be honest, and in case you hadn't noticed, Lesser Blogfordshire is having an indefinite break because my brain is feeling pretty mashed and miserable at the moment….

Back soon, I imagine…