IN THE AIR TONIGHT

All being well (because I'm writing this a few weeks in advance), as you read this I ought to be well on my way home, soaring through the air far above the Atlantic, and gobbling up the eight hours of time difference as if they had never really existed.

Unless of course the Ebola, or the driving, or the mechanical failures, or the earthquakes have got me.

The fates, you see, can always sniff out an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Of course, I think that we all generally believe that such things will always happen to "someone else", we do occasionally have to accept that they can happen to people like me, too, given that, to most of the people on this sad planet, I'm "other people" too.

So, spare us a thought... (If you have one).

And sometimes I do have to admit that, having seen people struggle with decay and old age, a quick escape sometimes does look like the easier option, even though you might not think so, cometh the hour...

For me, you see, travel does bring along with it a certain amount of fear, and the pleasure of anticipating a holiday is always tempered by my nervousness about the list of things that could possibly go wrong.

It always has.

And that is a very, very long list.

Not the least of which is the tempting of fate and wondering, if things have actually gone catastrophically wrong, then this is likely to be a very ironic footnote to whatever events have befallen me.

Perhaps I should give some thoughts to epitaphs, or "famous last words"...? After all, it is entirely possible, but by no means certain, that these may very well turn out to be them.

I mean, I hope not, obviously, but, well, you just never know.

It's probably good to finish on a song ("Always leave 'em wanting more, kid..." - although in my case, singing would probably leave 'em screaming "Less!!!" but there you go). The problem with being a nervous traveller is that the lyric that is constantly popping into my head is "The Gods may throw a dice, their minds as cold as ice, and someone way down here, loses someone dear..." which really doesn't suit the mood at all.

I mean, if I had to choose a song or a tune to be seen off too, I don't think that that'd be top of my list. It used to be "In My Life" by The Beatles, or "Days" by The Kinks (because I'm nothing if not unoriginal), but nowadays I just think Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" is (perhaps ironically) the most "me" thing that I can think of...

Although, at the risk of venturing into the realms of the worryingly camp, perhaps the most poignant song and appropriate that I can think of to finish on is "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"(weigh a pie), just so long as it's one of the decent cover versions that you're hearing in your head (or, at a pinch, Jimmy Stewart's version from "The Philadelphia Story"). Somedayi'llwishuponastarandwakeupwherethecloudsarefar--- be--- hind--- meeeeeeeeee... wheretroublemeltslikelemondropsuphighabovethechimneypotsthat's---wh-e-r-e---you'll---f-i-i-i-ind---meeee....

"Birds fly over the rainbow, when then, oh why can't I...?"

Catch you later... (???)

BROKEN

I don't know how to properly explain this, but I am feeling more than a little broken at the moment... It's as if whatever made up "me" has been smashed into smithereens by a great big hammer and there are pieces of me lying around on the floor everywhere and not one of them can summon the energy to pull themselves together again.

Instead, each of the little bits wants to just lie there for as long as possible before whatever light there was simply fades out into darkness and peace and quiet.

This year so far has been a genuine slog to try and get through and I'm starting to believe that the very last strands of my tether were reached months ago, so that the end of it is now little more than a vaguely pleasant memory, dating from a time when things were merely bloody awful and there looked like there might actually be light at the end of the tunnel one day, rather than a series of oncoming steam trains each trying to squash me.

Rationally, of course, I know how lucky I am. I know that, in comparison to many, I've got it very easy, and somehow, that just makes it worse as I put myself through the meat grinder for even daring to think that I've got it bad when so many have it so much worse.

And yet it still goes on and on, and my ability to think properly is so scrambled that I have to force myself to remember even the most mundane of things that need to be done as flashbulbs of anxiety burst incessantly inside my head and prevent me from actually managing to do anything.

Whilst I hesitate to make the comparison, because to do so feels as if it is somehow belittling the far greater ordeal these people suffered, the only comparison that I've so far been able to make is to shell-shock, in that I've spent what seems like years now just waiting for the next mind-bomb to go off, and the next, and the next, so that my hopes and dreams and, dare I say it, compassion have been bludgeoned out of me, leaving this hollow shell who's just trying his best to survive the day, and sometimes feels as if he's not even going to quite manage that.

Somehow this broken husk seems to drag itself along, however, and the battles with decay and destiny and ingratitude and endless criticism keep on chipping away at the soul. I try to start my days trying (and mostly failing) to be "witty" on the internet (not here, obviously), because it's now the only moment or two that I can find where I can dig down deeply enough and try to mine what remains of what I think of as "me..."

I want to just run away and hide, cover my ears and shout "Lah! Lah! Lah!" as loudly as I can to block out the noise, the expectations, the responsibility, but it's always there, clawing away at me, demanding my attention and time that I'm no longer prepared to give away as my own life slides away down life's sewer.

I obsess upon my own mortality, on the brief span that is already flushing away. This weekend, assuming I reach it, I will reach an age older than another one of my writing idols ever managed to become, and whilst I ought to find some comfort in that, not only will I remain wretched at the loss, but I will beat myself up about how much  they achieved in their all-too-brief span, and how little I have despite having a pulse and, perhaps, another dozen years left to reach the same age my father did.

So I remain broken, shattered even by circumstances, and can see little hope of respite as the ongoing, never-ending saga meanders on, tearing at the remnants of my soul and leaving me despairing of ever escaping from this dark, charmless, hopeless maze into which I've somehow managed to put myself.

SUDDENLY OLD

I know that I’ve always had a slightly “old-fashioned” way of looking at the world. I realise that my points of view and opinions really don’t seem to fit all that well in this world in which we live, but I am prepared to admit that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that they ever have. The world to me has always been a strange and mysterious place, but I rather suspect that it always will. People, and by that I mean “people”, and their strange and, quite frankly bewildering ways of going about their lives, have always been a bit of a mystery to me and, quite frankly, in most cases, I could quite happily exist without a great many of them. I was always pretty convinced that I was “born forty” and somehow I imagine that I’ve just spent my entire life waiting for everyone else to “just grow up” although that seems to be something of an anathema to many people who share my generation, and many more in the one coming after it.

“Growing old gracefully” just seems to have become, like myself, a thing of the past.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve suddenly started to feel as if I’ve actually got old, as if the sands of time have started to run out, and the old man in the mirror who’s always been there is now actually an old man in the mirror. Still, as they say, getting older is far more preferable than the alternative, although some days I’m not exactly too sure about the validity of that argument..

“You’re getting to that age…”

The doctor’s said it, the practice nurse has said it, the optician’s said it, heck, even the beloved has said it. I’ve been known to mutter it at myself into the mirror from time to time.

I mean, the grey hairs and their “pepper and salt” effect which is now looking more like the slush after a snowfall (although I’m still preferring the grey over the pink option when it comes to my own dome), and the indelible lines carved into the face have been there for a while now, and I’ve been on that daily regime of pills for quite a few years now (which I always promised myself would never happen), but other things, other more worrying concerns have been creeping in lately, things that speak of the sharpening of scythes and a general slow descent into deterioration, degradation and woe.

You might think to look at that I’ve already been like this for a very long time and you might very well be right, but its just taken me personally much longer than everyone else to actually notice...

I’m not completely without any self-awareness, however. I have, in the past, already started to notice a few things about which I am less certain than I once was. My driving, for example, seems to be getting worse. Now I’m not quite in the “soft brimmed hat 10 m.p.h.” brigade yet, although some of the people stuck behind me might be forced to disagree with me on that, but I am rather less self assured than once I was about such things, and I have noticed a strange tendency to feel less confident than I once was behind the wheel and my concentration sometimes seems less focused than it used to be.

Recently the memory had started to play little tricks and, as well as that, the memory has started to play little tricks.

(Hah! Bleeding hah!)

I’ve also started noticing that increasing sense of vagueness and doubt about things that I was once so very sure about, and I seem to be getting more convinced that the world has somehow passed me by and that I’ve managed to rather “waste” my one shot at this “living” mullarkey on things that really, in the end, weren’t all that important.

Then I’ve noticed a creeping sense of nostalgia affecting many of the things I do. I’m not quite yet at the “in my day” stage, but I really can’t imagine that it’s that far away.

Oddly enough, there’s also been a growing sense of what I can only really refer to as “the fear”, and that’s the most surprising thing of all. You’d think that once you had less to lose, you’d worry about things less, but I’ve discovered that, instead you seem to get more scared of losing the things you’ve got, and by that I don’t mean material things, all the stupid “stuff” you accumulate on your way through a life, but the more important things, the things that an arbitrary act of unkindness, or a rather too virulent bug, can take away from you without a moment’s thought.

That and your hopes and dreams, of course…

I’ve kind of got used to the endless feelings of tiredness that overwhelm me every single day, even though things like a good night’s sleep seem increasingly difficult to find.

And talking of things being difficult to find, where did I put my car keys down…?

Extreme tiredness combined with insomnia… What the hell is that all about…? I’ll be thinking about taking afternoon naps next…

Alongside all that, there has, of late, started to be an increase in those little aches and pains that I used to shrug off but which are now becoming persistent enough for words like “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” or “Rheumatism” or “Arthritis” to tiptoe softly and terrifyingly across the back of my mind. Last weekend I went to pick up a plate out of the cupboard to put my pending toast onto and got a shooting pain through my wrist that stayed with me, suddenly and painfully, on-and-off for three days.

This, as they say, was not good.

I’ve started to worry far too much about my spine since my mother’s has started to curl up and twist like a broken corkscrew. Do I share enough of that DNA for mine to be destined to go in much the same way? Does my lifestyle of mostly being hunched up over keyboards and steering wheels, or slouching on a couch watching TV mean that mine is going to fuse into much the same shape? Is there anything at all that I can do to avoid this fate…?

Worries, worries… It’s all a constant worry…

And I haven’t even got around to the fact that my stomach no longer seems capable of consuming anything without there being some sort of unfortunate side-effect, or the strange new mole which appeared upon my face only two months ago but now seems to be insisting on becoming a brand new feature of my face. I’ve said nothing about the constant trips to the bathroom when I drink even slightly too much coffee when I arrive at work in the morning, or about my general clumsiness and a lack of co-ordination which, I’ll admit, I’ve probably always had but I’m now becoming increasingly aware of as I break crockery (you should see our chipped crockery collection, courtesy of my washing up...) and fall over the furniture with alarming regularity. Then there are the more subtle things like style choices and not caring about certain things like what I am wearing, my appearance in general, or designer labels, or rinky-dinky new gadgets.

I’ll also admit I think I spend far too much time contemplating my mother’s DNA and finding parallels, even though, deep down, I know that nothing is carved in tablets of stone, none of it is inevitable, and the outcome of a lot of these things is, as yet, undecided, and that in all probability, how any or all of those things turn out is rather down to me and how I act from now on. However, it still bothers me that the easiest route, the path of least resistance, is the one that leads directly to me turning out much like she has and it is, quite frankly, terrifying.

The most worrying development of all is the sense that my eyesight has been getting worse recently. The inability to stare at words on a screen or a page for any length of time, and the fact that I now need to remove my glasses to be able to read anything at all. My father used to say that he considered that, in many ways, his deafness was far worse than blindness because it was a less visible disability and so people just presumed that you were an idiot, but I don’t really think that I could ever agree with him about that. In the end, apart from obvious audible loss of the cricket commentaries, I’m not really interested enough in music to miss it all that much, but reading, artwork, films and TV pretty much sum up all of the things I love to do with my life, and to lose the visual element would be, to me, a loss that I really think that I couldn’t bear.

Sometimes I get these things which I can only really describe as “genetic flashbacks” I find myself curling my lip in a particular way and I am reminded of my grandmother, or I find that I’m trying to read favouring just one eye and I am reminded of my grandfather. I rub my forehead and in my mind’s eye, I can see my father doing exactly the same thing, and I look at my mother as she crumbles these days and so many of the tics she exhibits and those annoying little mannerisms she has, as well as some of the more troubling aspects of her personality and biology are manifesting themselves in me...

The strangest thing of all is how quickly it seems to have come on over the past couple of months, as if someone just flipped a switch and I woke up “old”. But at least I’m still planning on going down with dignity. Not for me this rather sad-looking modern tendency to try and dress ten, twenty or even thirty years younger than really seems appropriate. Oh no! I will continue to mock and pour scorn upon those people who want to dress up just like their children and fall for the farcical flattery of idiots pandering to them and saying patently untrue “you look just like sisters”, God help ’em…

That’s not for me. I’m going down the route of being a “grumpy old git” and nothing’s going to stop me now…!

A SHOUTY MAN

Yesterday I got home from work only to find that I had to become a shouty man for a while. This was because I went to open the mail and found this letter addressed to me from a company whose name really doesn’t seem to pull any punches: “UNIVERSAL DEBT COLLECTION”. It was not a particularly nice letter to get and, more importantly, I really had no idea why I had received it. I was particularly offended by the phrase “You have chosen to ignore repeated reminders from our client in respect of the above debt” mostly because, firstly, I have no debts with anyone who might reasonably considered to be the aforementioned client and, secondly, I had not received any reminders about that non-existent debt from anybody at all, ever.

Obviously, this was rather a troubling development for a time so late in my working day, and, with BOLD CAPS informing me that my future credit or mortgage applications might be in peril, not to mention the thought of big, burly bailiffs turning up on my doorstep and insisting upon entry to my innocent little homestead, I thought that I’d better try and clear up what was obviously some misunderstanding. After all, if they had my address to send me this freaking letter, surely it wouldn’t have been beyond their wit to send me any previous reminders to the same address in the past, would it?

So, instead of idly mellowing into my hard-earned weekend, instead I found myself stomping around the house and having to make a telephone call to the number that I’ve so helpfully deleted from the image, just in case you feel like ringing them up and getting all ranty on my behalf.

I decided to save them from that. Do you see what a nice, reasonable man I’m becoming these days?

Anyway, I rang the number and spoke to a nice enough sounding young lady who asked for my reference number. I felt that I’d rather not recognise the fact that I needed to have a reference number and told her so, and that I seemed to have received a letter by mistake.

She still needed the reference number, so I conceded that point, and then grumpily told her what it was.

Once we had established that I was indeed who the letter thought I was, I explained that I had not got either of the telephone accounts with whatever company she told me it was that she seemed convinced that I had agreed to, and I didn’t even know where the retail park I had allegedly signed the agreement at even was (Later on, I checked my diaries, and it turns out that I didn’t even leave the house that day. I know... sad in so many different ways). She told me that she would pass me on to another department and the line went quiet.

This was the moment in which I decided two things. The first thing was that this was probably going to go on for quite some time, and, after all, I did have a train to meet. The second was more troubling. Was this, perhaps, some kind of a scam designed to keep me on the telephone for quite some considerable time and bleed me dry at vastly inflated rates? I had heard about those sorts of things, and they didn’t sound pleasant, and I had gone in with all guns blazing, and not much in the way of forethought, after all.

“Matthew” came on the line for a while and we discussed the situation. No I hadn’t taken out the whatever it was, etc., etc. He went off to “check” and the line went quiet again.

“£10, £20, £30…” went my mind…

“Matthew” then returned to tell me that there had been some kind of inadequate search and that a standard letter had been sent out and that it was all a mistake and, yes, I could ignore the letter. I asked him to confirm this and he said yes indeed, they would have to resume whatever searches they were doing and I could definitely ignore the letter, and so I thanked him… (I know!!!) and hung up the phone and went to meet the train.

But it still troubles me, which is why I am, through no fault of my own,  awake so late and writing these words instead of sleeping the night blissfully away like I ought to be.

After all, some random computer may very well have now blacklisted me (which is, incidentally why I’m choosing to name names here…), and I really have no guarantee that this incident is over, or that the big, burly bailiffs still won’t turn up on my doorstep at some point and make demands upon my financial goodwill, and, to be absolutely honest, I’m not really sure quite what the situation might be if they did.

A long time ago, when I lived in the urban jungle of the teeming metropolis, someone broke into my mailbox whilst I was away on holiday and went on a right old spree with my utility bills being used to verify “his” identity and allow him to leave retail outlets all over the countryside with all manner of electrical goods tucked under his thieving arms, and that took me absolutely months to sort out back then. I never really understood why the late lamented Cellnet never seemed to question the fact that someone buying three separate mobile telephones in three different shops during the same lunchbreak might just seem to be exhibiting slightly suspicious behaviour. Instead I just kept on getting a few of those “congratulations of opening your new account” letters every day for about a month. I do kind of understand now why Cellnet no longer seems to exist as a cellphone company if they couldn’t even make that particular connection.

On the plus side, I did get to be on very good first name terms with some of the people in their fraud department, but, even so, I really, really don’t want to have to go through all that again, and so, just to make it perfectly clear, and to have it on the record… You’ve got the wrong guy!!!

Do you reckon that’ll help?

Mind you, of course, it still might have been a big fat con (after all the internet - that fount of all accurate information - seems to claim that it is), which is why I’m telling you this tale of woe this morning…

“Keep ’em peeled!”

FACING THE TRUTH

I’ve never been the cheeriest of souls.

Looking back I find it very hard to even picture a time when I could have been considered the “life and soul” of anything very much. I’m told that there were times, of course, when I was likeable, fun to be around and generally not the black hole in the corner of the room sucking up all the escaping light but the truth is, whilst I’m sure that they’re not lying to me, it doesn’t sound like the me I know.

I simply don’t remember.

What I do remember are patterns. Of behaviour. Of history. Parallels with dark events in my past that seem to be resurfacing. Reoccurring. I see the same things happening all over again and I feel powerless to stop them. Impotent. I try to form the words to deal with them, to find the ways to cope and instead I rush headlong into the flippant or the banal. I dismiss them. Internalise them. Wish and hope that they will simply go away and refuse to face up to their essential terrifying truth. Or I avoid them. Hide myself away from the reality by hiding myself away from them altogether. Fear is the mind-killer (Thanks, Frank!), but keeping myself safe means keeping myself behind the barriers, under the rock and far, far away from any kind of engagement with the enemy, where the enemy is defined as the whole damned universe.

Scribbling these thoughts on a semi-regular basis has helped me to find some sort of a focus, get the interminable thinking out of my head and into some solid form that I can see, that is tangible, malleable and there to be seen, read back and understood. It helps me to know that there is something in what I said, that those fleeting passing fancies weren’t just forgotten memories that don’t even become memories, perhaps more forgotten forgets, if that isn’t putting too much “oxy” in my “moronic” outpourings.

Ah! Who knows?

I’ll admit to myself that the “media disease” I’ve developed in order to make sense of it all, that constant need to check for numbers, data and just plain old pageviews is about affirmation and recognition that, despite what I might prefer to believe, I do exist, I do matter, that something, however insignificant it might be was important enough for somebody to feel the need to go there, have a look and not be unduly disappointed.

I’m starting to realise that the situation in my head might be chemical, emotional or just plain old medical, but the symptoms are all there for all the world to see. I sit here doing this because it’s the only thing I feel that I can do with any modicum of success. Everything else remains in total limbo. I can’t make any decisions because they’re bound to be the wrong decisions. I can’t even do the basics to improve my environment because ringing, for example, that builder might cause an avalanche of other problems to surface that will escalate and escalate beyond my control and I simply will no longer be able to cope with it, afford it or deal with it.

Meanwhile everything I do has had the joy sucked out of it. All the things I thought I used to like are no longer stimulating me. I walk through this life like a zombie. The sleep won’t come, the life has gone. Nowadays I simply accumulate stuff and find no pleasure in the ownership, it’s just there to be consumed, or not, and then set aside. Looking forward to things, planning things remains almost impossible, because of the fear of getting it wrong.

At the same time, everything I thought I knew is rapidly and inexorably plummeting towards the scrapheap. Suddenly everything I thought I knew is old-fashioned, out of date and worthless, and a whole new pile of new things that need to be mastered are ahead of me and I’m simply terrified that I won’t be able to cope, that I’ll be found out as being the second rate useless article I already think I am anyway. Younger, brighter minds will come along and be able to do all those things I used to do and do them better, quicker and with more inherent skill than an inveterate plodder like me could ever do. I struggle to think of anything that I can do well enough, that somebody else couldn’t do far better and with greater efficiency and success. I struggle to clear the fog in my mind and find one unique selling point, one positive thing in my life where people could turn around and say “Only Martin could have done that!”

Everyone else appears dismissive, quick with the putdowns, eager to show me how much better they are at everything than I could ever hope to be. I can’t even open a book, or switch on a TV drama without it simply being there to remind me of the things I’m not good enough to do, the things that are being done far better than I could ever hope to by other people.

I need to get these thoughts out of my head, and I need to face up to the pathetic truth that I’m not half as good at things as I like to think I am, that the world simply doesn’t care enough, and that somewhere, buried deep inside this façade I show to the world is a terrified version of the person that some people used to know, and tell me was a decent sort of a chap, with something to offer to fulfill his tiny part in the grand scheme of things, even though I currently don’t have the faintest of clues what it might be, or whether I would recognise it if someone waved it under my nose and pointed at it, bellowing “Here it is!” at the top of their lungs into my bewildered little face.

I finally have a word for what ails me.

They call it “depression” and I’m about to embark on a journey of self-discovery.

More soon.

THUNDERBOLTS AND LIGHTNING

(VERY, VERY FRIGHTENING)

I was sitting in the room at the top of the house the other day, toiling away as I am paid to, and being very much focussed upon the project I’m currently working on whilst trying very hard not to be too distracted by the patch of bright blue sky that was so temptingly taunting me through the small square of the skylight above my head. That window was open just enough to let me hear the birdsong and soothe me, whilst also letting in enough of a breeze for the temperature to remain tolerable and to allow the occasional passing wasp to fly in, have a nose around and escape again after bashing its brains against the window pane for a few moments.

I was so tuned in to whatever it was that I was doing that I barely noticed the sudden drop in temperature and the darkness as it descended. Perhaps on some level I thought that night had fallen and I’d been so engrossed in some tricky little problem that I’d failed to appreciate how much time had passed, but, as the glow of the screen seemed to be becoming pretty much the only light source on that previously beautifully sunny afternoon, I shivered and got up to block out the birdsong by closing the window.

Incidentally, earlier on I’d heard the distant electronic voice of a tannoy making some kind of announcement. I couldn’t make out a word and had dashed downstairs just after it had stopped to see if I could hear the message more clearly. This had led to an anxious couple of hours expecting the electricity or the water supply to be suddenly switched off, which meant almost obsessive pounding of those “save” buttons, but I have once more digressed from the point in order to ponder yet another imponderable. I still don’t know what was being announced, but I suspect that it was not a storm warning, and it does prove to me that if ever some disaster should ever occur in the heart of Lesser Blogfordshire, I’m likely to be found stone cold, unprotected and oblivious to the last. I wonder if there’s more truth in that theory about some of the victims of Pompeii than some of the more uplifting ones you hear…?

Meanwhile, back at the gathering storm…

Suddenly, in the middle of a clear, bright day of endless blue skies, the black storm clouds gathered. It’s that sudden darkness that gets to you. Well, that and the unexpected raging winds causing the trees to thrash about wildly and it’s not so very long after that happens before the rain starts to thump against the roof tiles and the windows sounding for all the world as if all the devil’s machine guns have been turned in your direction and fired. Still, at least I was indoors and not having to dash through the hammering rain whilst dressed for a bright summer’s day like some of the people I saw tearing along the road when I glanced out of the window and gratefully sipped at my coffee.

Then it begins. Before you know it there’s the distant rumbling and those sudden alarming flashes of light. Then the rumbling starts to get closer and louder and the time from the flash to the bang gets shorter and shorter telling you in no uncertain terms that the dark heart of the storm is getting nearer and nearer. When the flashes and the bangs are almost simultaneous and the whole house shakes despite its solid looking walls, then you know that you’re right in the middle of things and its time to just hold on and wait for the worst of it to pass you by.

I’m not generally one who is frightened of thunderstorms, but I understand that there are many who are, and if they aren’t suffering themselves, then the effect it has upon their nearest and dearest, be they human or animal, can still make them very wary. I have been told over the years of people having very bad experiences, with all their electronic gizmos being destroyed by an unfortunate lightning strike or of ball lightning chasing them across the room, which must be a very alarming thing to have happen to you. Still, I guess none of these things are anything like as terrifying as the kinds of storms that brew up tornadoes and hurricanes in other parts of the world, so I suppose we should at least be thankful about that as we sit shivering and quaking in the darkness. I was reminded, however, of the true hold that extreme weather conditions have over our imaginations when noticed that the pictures of an aeroplane landing in a thunderstorm that same day managed to become another of those dubious delights, the so-called “internet sensation” which generally seems to involve a lot of people getting terribly excited about a bad thing happening to someone else.

Despite not wishing to ally myself with all that kind of bandwagon leaping, thunderstorms do sometimes still manage to fascinate me. In fact, one or two of my fondest memories involve thunderstorms. I remember being about ten years old and being on holiday with my parents and staying up late one night and just sitting on a balcony in a Yugoslavian hotel with my father, both of us watching a huge storm out at sea and being mesmerised by the seemingly endless jagged fork lightning sparking along the horizon on a scale that I’d never witnessed before. I also remember standing on my own front doorstep many years later watching a storm front literally move across from the hills on my left towards the town on my right as if it was a curtain of rain being drawn. There was some spectacular lightning that afternoon, too.

Of course it doesn’t matter how much you’re told how unlikely it is that you’ll ever be actually struck by lightning, the fact still remains that people are and with around 16 million lightning storms happening across our planet every year, I guess we should be a little bit cautious and not go out in the rain flying our kites or walking around with long metal poles, and avoid standing under trees, especially ones that look to be a little bit past their prime and in danger of losing large chunks of themselves at the slightest provocation. Apparently the Empire State Building in New York City is struck by lightning anything up to 500 times a year and has been known to be struck a dozen times in twenty minutes, so maybe just a bit of caution isn’t the worst thing to have. After all, you are dealing with a phenomenon which an travel at up to 140,000 miles per hour and reach temperatures of 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is not something to be messing around with or taking too lightly.

Still, as you sit snugly in your home, listening to the thunder crashing all around you and the water drops beating their insane rhythms as they thump against the glass, and being occasionally suddenly illuminated by the flashing sky outside, you can sometimes start to wonder quite how close it’s going to get to you, and about how worried you ought to be getting. I also find myself starting to wonder about everything electrical in the house that’s still plugged in and whether it’s advisable for it to be so. I have some mad theory that if the lightning strikes the TV aerial (yes, I do still have one…), it will be fine because that is attached to the house which is mostly attached to the ground and so the whole thing will be earthed and protected. Also, if the plug is in, surely that’s earthed too, isn’t it? People used to have strange ideas about TV sets and lightning which I’m pretty sure the science doesn’t back up when you start to really think about it.

But afterwards, once the storm has moved away and the rain stops, and the clouds part and another shaft of sunlight tentatively probes its way through them, the air seems so clear, and so fresh, and all that sticky humidity has magically gone and the world seems to be a beautiful place to be in again.

I guess that’s what comes of having a silver lining, which, even though I am a great big pessimist, I can sometimes admit to the existence of.

TECHNOFEAR AND TRANSFERENCE

Here’s a thought designed to make all but the most stout-hearted of fellows remain cowering under the duvet in blind technofear as we start this merry day. Every day, someone somewhere switches on their computer and it doesn’t behave quite in the way it should. Something, and you rarely know what it is until it makes itself known to you, usually at the most annoying moment possible, will not do what it is supposed to in quite the way that you expect it to, when you need it to.

“Well, there’s nothing unusual in that,” you’re quite possibly thinking, “it happens to me all the time…” but, just because we’ve kind of learned to accept it doesn’t mean that it’s the sort of thing we can become complacent about. I mean, we all now how simple (and yet massively complicated) our lives have become since the computers moved out of their vast chambers in the bowels of NASA and into the specially cleared corners of almost every home, or perched atop our own thighs, or tucked snugly into our pockets. Only a generation ago, the paraphernalia of the office worker included maybe a pen, a blotter, an ashtray and a telephone sitting on a vast acreage of polished oak (I watch a lot of seventies drama...) and the thought of each little workstation transforming into a cubicle with its own computer within would have been laughed away, if you’d ever thought of and mentioned such a thing.

Nowadays the little so-and-sos have their tiny little electronic claws deeply embedded inside practically every single aspect of our daily lives and yet we still allow them their little foibles as if they were cute and endearing precocious children whose little whims we indulge and tolerate. If ever there was a time for some stern parenting it is probably now.

Every time you switch the blighter on, there’s basically a ‘start up’ routine that your electronic chum goes through to get itself to a point of functionality and on the odd or (if you prefer) occasional morning your particular electronic device, no matter how fancy or state-of-the-art it might be, will arbitrarily decide to skip a bit of it for no good reason at all.

Anyway, as I so often do, I have digressed. What was that thought that I mentioned? Oh yes. The problem for me is, if it’s so common that it happens all the time, doesn’t that mean that it happens occasionally when the pilot boots up the aircraft’s onboard computer systems or the doctor kicks up the medical scanning software? That’s a hell of a thing to only find out at 30,000 feet or after the tumour has become the size of a tennis ball.

It’s mildly interesting that almost as soon as I started putting these thoughts together a few days ago, our beloved host “Blogger” started to have some kind of a meltdown which lasted for at least two days and made the position of Lesser Blogfordshire and its stablemates very precarious indeed for a while. I even started to consider a move across to some other place although the amount of faff that this would have entailed eventually dissuaded me, although, because, it’s always good to have a backup plan, I decided that it was time to take advantage of another account I’d set up “just in case” this kind of thing happened and just dump everything there. A backup back-up plan, so to speak.

It turned out to be a bad idea. A really bad idea. Huge chunks of the weekend got eaten away by trying to achieve nothing very much in particular except a duplication, an alternative viewpoint if not actually an alternative point of view, and an ultimately massively time-consuming discovery about how ‘labels’ work.

Sadly what this ultimately meant was that instead of focussing on my content, I spent much of that weekend rather pointlessly tinkering with the layouts and tabs and categories of all my transferred files and not being able to get the imported text to behave quite as it should. Just putting in returns to add space between paragraphs seems to be beyond me on the ‘transferred’ files’ paragraph breaks and default fonts and, as I really don’t have the spare time to go through and individually edit all of my postings so that the paragraph spacing works properly and as beautifully as it once did, there now remains a little demon whispering in my ear about the inelegance of how much of my old prose appears therein. Never mind, it’s been set as ‘author only’ so nobody should see such horrors except me (although I have my doubts with the wicked old internet’s ability to probe and ferret out all manner of hidden things).

I also had to navigate my other ‘backup’ plan. Using the alternative browser because ‘Safari’ (which always brings to mind Christopher Biggins and his catchphrase “Safari-So-goody” on the old children’s TV quiz show “On Safari” which also introduced Gillian Taylforth to a wider world…) is dealing with things in a way that can only be described as ‘so-baddy’ and, on occasion, and for certain websites, I now have to launch “Firefox” which is a whole new chicken coop of issues of transference, preference and forgotten login details.

I like things to just work, I seldom enjoy change (especially for changes sake), which is why I’m terribly impatient with the various power supply companies and banks whenever they call me up and try to offer me a ‘great new deal’. The pennies I might save or the pitifully miniscule amount of extra interest I might earn are so massively offset by the sheer degree of irritation and concern that I would have to go through to successfully navigate such a minefield. I know what happens. You get a phone call telling you everything’s going to be simple and just peachy and then your financial life goes down the plughole for six weeks as payments, wages and bills just disappear into the ether.

Of course there comes a time when even the back-up plans come to naught, and such is the cascading nature of these problems that when the broadband connection itself died on the following Monday morning, I really wasn’t at all surprised.

Obviously, when computer minds do finally inherit the earth, it’s useful to know that we could claim our planet back by switching them off at the wall and that even they are going to wake up on the odd morning and not be firing on quite all of their cylinders. The ‘brave new world’ will be just as subject to moods and irritations and accidents and gremlins as our old one was.

In passing, it is (slightly) interesting to note that when it comes to the ‘white heat’ (or should that now be ‘light speed’?) of new technology, the 25 year old BBC “Domesday” project is having to have its data recovered having been stored upon the then cutting-edge videodisc format which is, of course, now obselete. Interestingly enough the data found in the thousand year old technology of the original Domesday Book is still recoverable.

Just a thought…

DEEPEST DARKEST DREADS

I don’t think it’s going to be a cheery one today, I’m afraid. Be warned. The glumps are persisting and I’m not much fun to be around (if I ever was…). As ever, I probably think about things too much, which is odd really, because one long ago morning when I accidentally drained someone’s heating system when I got up and found only one working tap to fill the kettle with I was told that I needed a more enquiring mind. Against all conventional wisdom, I persisted with my protestations that I don’t generally look into how the heating works in anyone’s house, or hotel or guest house that I just happen to be staying in, and certainly not at 6.30 in the morning when all I want is a brew up to kick start my day, but my words were all in vain and another day got off to a dreadful start that it struggled to recover from. I blame it all on the lack of a decent cuppa myself, but it was long, long ago and probably doesn’t matter any more.

So, where was I…? Ah yes, persisting glumps. I’m beginning to suspect that all the things that I have dreaded over the years are finally manifesting themselves into some kind of awful reality. I remember once being told about the power of words, that you should be very careful what you say, even in jest, because the words will weave and thread and knit, and those words will come back and haunt you for daring to tempt the fates. Perhaps this is also true of our inner fears and doubts. Somehow the subconscious transmits these thoughts into the ether and those things that you so dread, which are floating about looking for suitable victims find you and lock on to you like a dog with its jaws clamped a particularly juicy leg-bone.

It doesn’t matter who you are, your life is full of the things you personally most utterly dread. I’m not talking about the usual everyday fears that trouble us in our relatively affluent society, things like getting seriously ill or having an accident or ending up in abject poverty or homeless, or the kids being taken, or the loved ones being hurt or worse, or even the maniac on the loose or breaking into your home in the night and slaughtering you and yours. (Good grief! With all this angst, how do I even get out of bed in the morning? Well… it’s the insomnia, mostly, from all the worry…)

Those are just the fears that we’ve all got. Well, that is, I assume we all do. Maybe I am the only one who lies awake at night worrying about this stuff. Do you see the risks I’m taking here? All this externalizing might only achieve the result of the world going “Nope! I don’t do that. You’re very strange!” and the laughing and pointing starts all over again in a bright shiny new medium.

It doesn’t matter if you deny it, anyway, because I simply don’t believe anyone who tells me that they have no fear. Everyone has their deepest, darkest anxieties, otherwise the concept of Room 101 (The book version, not the comedy celebrity chat show…) simply wouldn’t work, and we all know it does. I’ve known seriously able ex-military types who’ve faced down the enemy around the world be reduced to jelly by the sight of a spider and otherwise cocksure young bucks to be seen quaking in their trousers at the thought of the slightest form of public speaking. The problem is that the things we fear aren’t necessarily recognised phobias as such, just those things that we’ve heard about and hope will never happen to us. Thankfully, history tells us, most of these things never actually do happen to us and we are statistically generally pretty safe from the dice that the fates roll for us, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief and stop worrying.

And yet…

Recent developments have altered my views on such matters. It now appears to me that in life we must always get lumbered with the things that we most fear. It has a certain inevitability about it. For example, although I’m not going to go into too much detail, one of my own personal dreads involves long-term responsibility with an unpleasant biological slant, and that seems to have become a huge and unpleasant factor in my life nowadays.

For years now, I’ve also had a terrible image that was once put into my head that grew out of a casual comment made decades ago about a someone’s elderly relative having had a face that resembled a field of mushrooms which had to be scraped away. Not a nice image, is it? It still gives me the creeps when I think of it, and I realise, I’ve been and gone and put it into your head too. Sorry about that. As I get older and another one of those strange little growths that seem to come with age pops up, I wonder when and where they’re going to start clustering and whether that this image that so horrified me was actually a vision of my future self. If my theory is correct now it would seem that this too must inevitably come to pass…

Maybe if you always get what you fear most, I should start to fear an optimistic outlook, the big house and a sense of financial security… but it doesn’t work like that, does it? You can’t put the ‘fix’ in, because then you get trumped by the ‘be careful what you wish for’ scenario…

Because in life, the house always wins, and nobody gets out of here alive.

A LITTLE FLASH OF YELLOW

It’s never like it is in the movies, is it?

I was watching the news yesterday morning in the aftermath of the appalling events at Domodedovo airport and the news channel I was viewing had the CCTV images of the moment that the bomb went off, and, unlike the big, dramatic, slo-mo excesses enhanced by the CGI effects departments of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, this devastating moment managed to look somehow utterly insignificant and understated, as all the camera shows is just the littlest of yellow flashes.

To the generations who have experienced those kinds of movies it looks like not very much at all, just a tiny flash of yellow lasting barely a second on a busy afternoon.

And yet…

After that little flash of yellow, 35 real human beings lie dead or dying.

After that little flash of yellow, another hundred and more living, breathing people like you and me sustain horrific injuries that will change their lives forever if they survive them at all.

After that little flash of yellow, ball bearings and shrapnel flew out on all directions and tore into the flesh and bone of any person that got in its way.

That’s real life for you.

Barely a moment, but 35 lie dead.

Such a tiny moment in time but hundreds of lives will never be the same again.

Just one tiny flash of yellow.

I know that some of you visit Lesser Blogfordshire to get away from the unpleasantness of the daily news, but over the last 24 hours this has been much on my mind. Philosophically, I know that the purpose of terrorism is to terrorise, and that if I let them terrorise me then the battle is lost, but, every day I still feel the slight wobble of uncertainty as I see the beloved depart to head about her day that someone, somewhere might just take it upon themselves to reshape our lives forever, and I’m sure she finds that similar dark thoughts nag at the corners of her mind every time I head out of the door.

By an unhappy coincidence, yesterday was one of the few days of the year upon which I have to poke my little nose out of the boundaries of Lesser Blogfordshire and spend the day in the bright lights of the big city, and so it just happened to be one of those very rare days on which I spend time in public places like railway terminals and tube trains, and so I was probably more aware than usual of how crowded these places are and how random these kinds of attacks can be.

Look around you in any public place and all you will see are ordinary people like you and me just getting on with their lives. Just doing the shopping, or travelling to a meeting or having a day out, with no expectations that anything today is going to make those activities any different to the hundreds of times they’ve done them before. But these are the same types of ordinary people who always suffer the horrific consequences during and after these kinds of terrible, terrible events.

Ordinary people like you and me, with plans and hopes and dreams and commitments and stuff to do, all just trying to get on with their lives and do them. This is why there was more than a little nervousness in my soul as I lurked in those various places yesterday, not because of any “terror” as such – I’m sure we all bulldoze our way through life pretty much assuming that these things won’t actually happen around us – but because of the purely random and arbitrary way that these things happen when they do.

I can’t help but empathise with those ordinary travellers because I’m quite often an ordinary traveller too. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to walk in another person’s shoes than others, and although I can’t possibly really understand what each and every one of those people and their families went through and are still going through as I sit here safely typing my thoughts today, I can at least send some of my sympathies in their direction during these terrible, terrible days.

Meanwhile, to the rest of us who are still able to get on with our lives, have a safe day, people.

Please.