LEONARD

Things have been rather quiet at Blogfordshire Towers lately. Well, they have been if you can ignore the constant sound of building work that has filled every weekday for the past fortnight, and proceeds apace whilst swallowing up huge chunks of my very limited savings. That said, there is a certain logic in getting all those "Big Repair and Renovation" jobs done at once, even if my Bank Manager might not quite see eye-to-eye with me about that.

Life passes by so swiftly, and sometimes it's too short to live in a squalid hole for longer than you ought to. To many years passed with little being done to my ramshackle little home and now the time has come to pay the price for that, but hopefully, it will all be worth it and soon I will be living in a more positive environment.

I've not felt much desire to word-wrangle recently, even though the "excitement" of such "great things" being "afoot" might have proved a mildly entertaining topic about which to write about, I suspect that, much like "other people's holidays" or "other people's children", writing about your building work might not be the most gripping of subjects either, if it's not your walls that are the ones that are crumbling.

From time-to-time, I have given an idle thought or two towards returning to the sad, mad world of pointless and uninfluential bloggery, but I have still struggled to rejoin the game, and the longer you go without practicing, the more difficult it starts to become.

Some days, I did actually wonder just who would have to die to make me feel like blogging about it, in that way I used to do when my boyhood heroes slipped silently away into that long, dark night, and, rather sadly, yesterday it turned out to be Mister Spock himself, the one and only Mr Leonard Nimoy.

I still love the original "Star Trek" series in more ways than seem strictly rational, and would still prefer to sit down for fifty minutes of "The Doomsday Machine" than either of the flashier, more recent, J.J. Abrams efforts. "Star Trek" was there for me on what I remember as always having been Monday evenings just after "It's A Knockout" and stayed with me during those Christmas break mornings as "Holiday Star Trek" and led to another collection of books, and later videos and, later still, DVDs to stock up the shelves of whatever brimful and tatty little home I happened to be living in.

To me, "Star Trek" should always be William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley and James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Walter Koenig, and we really ought not to accept any imitations, no matter how impressive they might initially seem as you exit into the car park.

With the passing of Leonard Nimoy, three of the "Big Four" cast members are now gone, with only the seemingly indestructible Mr Shatner still standing (maybe even running!) despite his age being almost exactly the same as that of his recently fallen colleague and friend.

Of course, there was far more to Mr Nimoy than Mister Spock, as his once notorious Autobiography "I Am Not Spock" (later recanted in the follow up volume "I Am Spock" and which inspired some classic "Spitting Image" gags - "To be, or not to be, that is illogical, Captain...") attempted to show. Philosopher, photographer, film director, musician, he became a polymath even when such a term might only have implied pointy-eared aliens from the planet polystyrene to some of us who might not have had a better vocabulary.

Alongside various other performances, not least in "The Big Bang Theory" and "Fringe" around the time that he officially retired a few years ago, he also had an entertaining couple of years as "Paris" on "Mission: Impossible" during those awkward, ill-fitting years of my youth, but it was his portrayal of Mister Spock who continued to inspire and entertain throughout the movie series (where he doubled a couple of times as Director, moving on to direct "Three Men and A Baby" later on) and beyond, and, in many ways, he became the glue that has held the various "Generations" of "Star Trek" together across the five decades and more since he appeared in the very first Pilot episode and became one of very few characters to be retained for the main show.

The "Star Trek" world has lost a friend and ambassador, but, even to those of us who never became full-blown addicts of that show, a world without Leonard Nimoy in it suddenly seems "wrong" somehow, and he will be missed.

Leonard Simon Nimoy, March 26, 1931 - February 27, 2015

TWO ROOMS

I haven't much felt like blogging lately, because I've really not been in that sort of a place.

As you may - or may not - have read in the exchanges underneath my last posting towards the end of last year, the words have simply not been coming and have, perhaps sadly, continued to not come ever since.

This has been something of a double-edged sword, however, because writing something new on an almost daily basis had become something of a stick to beat myself with, and my absence from such endeavours seems to have little troubled anyone very much, which does, at least, indicate the inflated opinion that I might have had about how significant my continuing to do so might have been.

In the meantime, however, the world, as you are no doubt aware (you are, after all, terrifically well-read and erudite people, dear readers and likely to be more than a little bit aware of what's happening in the world around you) has been a very mad and quite scary place whilst I've been off being sad and pathetic, and whilst I might once have had much to say about such things, so much has already been said by others that anything I might have had to add would have been, at best superfluous, and at worst, irrelevant, and perhaps, dare I say it, completely inappropriate.

Meanwhile, my free time has been somewhat swallowed up by certain necessities and a fixed timescale.

After our rodent infestation experiences towards the end of last year, we decided that the next phase of the refurbishment of our tiny little abode was long overdue and, having consulted with our local, friendly builder, Phase II (or is it technically Phase III or even Phase IV…?) was scheduled to begin in the middle of February, a time which, as the more astute of you will already have worked out, is now upon us.

As such, much of my free time lately - that which hasn't been squandered by early morning viewings of the "Complete Box Sets" of old telly that I acquired both before and after Christmas - or swallowed by being trapped in the house by snow and ice, has involved packing up boxes full of the mountains of junk that used to clutter just about every surface of the two rooms - a full forty percent of our living space that we plan to have refurbished, and then lugging the contents either upstairs (where we are now packed to the rafters), or to the storage unit several miles away which is, perhaps not surprisingly, now also packed to the rafters.

Some books - and other gubbins - have been donated to charity shops, and a seemingly endless supply of what can only be described as being utter rubbish has been transported to the tip, or carted away in black bin bags by our surprisingly cooperative council waste disposal operatives.

Anyway, as of ten o'clock in the evening on Sunday night, the two rooms were finally (finally!) clear for the first time in nearly two decades and, for once, seemed to be quite pleasant - if echoey and slightly battered-looking - spaces, and I have to start giving some consideration to addressing the clutter that remains to be sorted in the other sixty percent of the house, even though this year already feels like it's evaporating and like I've never really had a chance to stop, sit down, relax, and maybe compose a wordette or three for the entertainment of a few (mostly) strangers.

On Monday morning, the builders arrived and began knocking seven bells out of our tiny little homestead, so take a good long look, because it already doesn't look anything like this, and I'm not likely to have a functioning kitchen space for quite some time which might, along with all of the calorie-burning lugging of stuff that I've been doing, might not be the worst thing for my waistline, even if I do think that it's far, far too much for an enfeebled old man like I am to be doing.

So, after all that, here we find ourselves indulging in the gentle art of bloggery again, however fleetingly.

There may even be more to come… although I don't know when.