Art is not about soothing noises

We went to our favourite café and sat in the middle of chaos as a splatter of artists 'installed' their works on the walls. They had not arrived together, and the later one pointed out that the paintings already installed had been hung on the wrong walls. They consulted the plan and agreed, after a brief but futile attempt by the first to claim fait-accompli, that the paintings should be transferred to their allocated space.

One artist had a husband with her. He was there to do all the banging. The café owner squeezed out from behind the counter after the first fusillade of tapping. "I would rather you didn't make any more holes", she said, "and there are live cables behind there". A great artistic moment was lost forever, we were denied a preview to the work entitled ‘Creative Fire-dance’.

Woodpecker man finished tapping into his pre-drilled holes and installed his partner's works. The second artist lady, she who had reclaimed her wall by recourse to the plan, gave the display a critical viewing.
"I think you've really found your style with this collection", she said to the creator, fresh back from the shops.
Creator turned to hanging husband. "They're upside down", she hissed.



A frail white-haired lady at a table by the door tugged at the sleeve of the other artist and asked if she could have a cup of tea with a slice of walnut cake.
"I'm ever so sorry,” said organising artist lady, “we don't actually work here."
"Oh, are you the decorators? I do like the colour of the walls, it’s very soothing"

I'm worried that I am a catalyst; no matter where I go, no matter how quietly I sit at the back and try to be invisible, something or someone always starts to misbehave. Now it's little old ladies. Where will it end?

Love for sale, one careful owner

Near to where I live is an antiques auction house, small, but still a well-known place for the curious and the collector to congregate once every few weeks and raise their hands against each other in a trial for pieces of the past.

I was there last weekend, looking to bid on two lots; a box with loose 'meccano' pieces and some clockwork railway items, and a larger box containing some old cameras and a Bakelite Bagatelle game. I bid on the box with the game, and was about to drop out as the price cleared the estimated sale figure, but something made me keep my hand up and the other bidder backed down. I had gone ten pounds over my allocated amount for it, and was worried that I now would not be able to get the box with the 'meccano' and model railway parts, but nobody else bid against me, and I got it for less than the anticipated figure. I left the salerooms with both lots, at my expected cost.

The box with the cameras also contained some guide books to London, Switzerland, and South Africa, and several packs of photographs, all of which were negatives. There were two large cast-metal flower vases, a plastic Alligator-skin handbag and un-matching purse, and a small time-capsule containing someone's love of their life.

In a cream-yellow cigarette tin, (50 Players No. 3), I found a tightly packed wad of memories. On the very top lay a dried Edelweiss flower and the label from a bottle of wine.



Beneath it were several postcards from Scotland, Bath, Switzerland, all dating from 1952, and a photo of a young man in formal highland regalia. Then, an envelope containing a dozen or so black and white negatives, titled 'honeymoon'. Beneath that I found a few small prints, mostly two inch square.













































Beneath those prints was a larger greeting card with a photo of them both and their dog, then several more packs of negatives.

The items I had bought belonged to a woman, I am certain, and I assume she was the woman in the photographs. The memories she had cherished so much were mostly negatives, the original prints would be in albums or framed on mantelpieces. I am also sure that she is dead. Someone came in to clear out her last possessions, packing them all into old fruit crates, an odd mixture of vases, trays, and her treasured photographic items. Why did nobody claim the photos? Did she never have children? I cannot find any negatives showing a family, although I have only flipped through them in a cursory manner.

Whoever had been her executor must have opened the cigarette tin, and gone through the contents, just as I did. They would have known if there had been anyone who had a claim on the memories, so I assume that there were no children, and that her husband had died before her. The executor had faced two choices; destroy the memories on the grounds that they were too personal to be given to strangers, or put them back in the tin and let fate decide. They took the second choice.

And so what do I do now? Can I throw away these carefully ordered items, because they belonged to a stranger and have nothing whatever to do with me? Strangely, I cannot do it. I have looked through the evidence of someone else's love, and know that destruction would be wrong. I cannot say for certain why, but perhaps it is because I realise that there is no-one else in this world who cares that she existed, laughed at things, fell in love, and treasured the small collection. I have become an unwitting curator.

Would anybody else like the job? It is going to weigh heavily on my shoulders. Is there, somewhere in this world, a museum for people's lives, a place where ordinary and un-remembered souls can rest in peace for occasional visitors to take inspiration from? Please let me know if you can help.

Love, it sometimes seems to me, is so plentiful that you can't even give it away.I wonder what someone might leave in the future as their memories of me?

Overweight, and past my use-by date

I am the first, and worry about it. I am possibly also the second, and worry almost as much about that too. If I am lucky, I can reverse the first, but what can I do about the second?

I used to work for a communications company, analysing performance figures and fault incidents, and passing on the data I collected to a colleague who then calculated all the company statistics. My colleague was a Pole who had come to England after the war as a refugee, and had never gone home again. He is partly the reason I am overweight.

In the spirit of Kafka, I shall call him Statistician K. He was much older than I was, and had been an inmate in one of the concentration camps. He had ended up at Dora, by the underground facility where the long-range rockets were built that fell on the Southeast corner of England in the last few months of the war. I had been captivated by the whole program of missile development ever since reading Gravity's Rainbow. K knew things that I couldn't have known at the time, because there were several D-notices still forbidding the release of the full story.

He told me a lot about the secret side of the war and the aftermath. When the Allies liberated that part of Europe, someone realised the usefulness of a bright young teenager who knew the tunnels inside out and remembered many of the significant role-players in the Nordhausen saga. K went to work for something like the SOE, wandering around Europe looking for certain faces.

Most of our conversations took place in the restaurant over lunch, because our work was quite mentally intensive. At the time, I was an athletic ten-stone cycling smoker, a sort of Jarvis Cocker without the glasses, while K was large and round and jolly, with a waistline that nearly matched his height. He had a compulsion to eat as much as he could whenever the chance presented itself, which stemmed from his time in the concentration camps. I was also a hearty eater, but all I could claim was a spell abroad without money when I lived on fish, wild berries, and leaves, until the funds finally arrived at the Post Office and I could carry on my travels.

We would both load up our plates with starter, main course, and a hefty salad. All too often, the plates would be picked clean before our conversations were even half-way through. So, we began going back for more. It wasn't long before we were eating two main courses each lunchtime. I justified it on the grounds that I never ate sweets, smoked like a chimney, and cycled more than ten miles a day. My weight moved up a little to eleven stone as I lost the lanky stringiness. I didn't care, it was worth it for the conversations. K leant me book after book on some of the wartime secrets that had already been published, and would then intrigue me with tales of what hadn't been allowed to go into the book because of the D-notices.

He also kept me fascinated with what he knew about computing. He had, after coming to England, studied by night, and was a founder member of the British Computing Society. I at the time was a self-taught programmer, and K gave me my first introduction to the principles behind numerical methods, algorithms and heuristics.

A young graduate who had recently joined straight from university came to see us both, wanting to access our collected data to solve a problem he had been tasked with, finding out why signals from place A to place B were sometimes routed three times up and down the country instead of by the shortest route. He had decided to use a well-known algorithm to determine the shortest route method for traffic. He had a book with him, open at the pages describing Dijkstra’s method for finding the shortest route that passed through all necessary points no more than once.

"Ah yes," said K, taking the book and turning over a page, "you might find this more relevant to your problem. This is my refutation of his claim that his method is generally applicable to all these types of problems."

The graduate nodded politely, glanced once at the page, and then flipped back to Dijkstra, and resumed his questions. Like many people, he was reluctant to believe anything that contradicted the history he had already learned. Also, I was amazed to see, he completely failed to grasp the fact that a name in a textbook was sitting opposite him, with a beaming smile and kindly eyes, ready and willing to show him how to turn the problem inside out. He had his plan, and he stuck doggedly to it.

Just before I left the company, I gave up smoking, and gained two stone in two months. It was frightening to me, because I still had the speedy reactions of a skinny athlete, but didn't have the muscle control to manage that extra bulk I had acquired. I regularly swung round corners and careered outwards on a tangent under the action of my own momentum, bruising my shoulders against the walls if there was nobody handy to cushion the impact. Someone jokingly asked me if I was trying to look like K's son. With the wisdom of fifteen years, I think now that I did use K as a father figure, for my own father had died many years before and nobody had ever filled the gap he left. K's stories of the past coupled with his desire to see that I knew what they meant did drop nicely into part of the void.

Sadly, I will never hear any more of them. He retired within a year of my leaving the company, and then died of a heart-attack a few weeks later. I have so far not managed to lose the extra two stone I gained in those months. I had to slow down in order to manage the extra weight, and as a result began to pile still more weight on. Last year I typed my height and bulk into a web-page, and was informed that I was borderline-obese. Mortified, I began to eat less and walk more, and after a few weeks got back to my fat fit man's status, or am I now a fit fat man?

I have three burning ambitions left on my list, and the second of them is to get back to my earlier weight. For the past three months I have gone out four times a week and walked for two hours. I have managed to lose several inches from my waist; I am once again a size 38, where I was previously looking at 42 inches and rising. But I have not managed to lose one single ounce; I am still fourteen and a half stone; no matter which scales I choose, no matter if I shave twice and squeeze every last fart and belch from my body, the needle on the dial always returns to the same place. Perhaps I am doing this to myself in memory of K.

Is it time for the awful D-word, or am I too old to change? How do I stop myself falling into the trap the graduate had placed himself in, becoming set in his mental ways before he was even thirty?

And today we have naming of pets

I have a long-running feud with the local vets. They insist on recording the names of all the animals that they treat, and they have been critical of some of the names I have given my cats. I do not care for things like Mr Tibbles, Fluffikins, or Purdy (which belonged to my mother's second husband, a police inspector, who obviously raised his flag for Joanna Lumley); not even for Claude, which I will however grudgingly accept as an excellent cat name. No, I like to call my cats according to their characteristics, either visual or behavioural. And so I've had, amongst many, a Slobber, an Arse-lick, a Pukealot, a Swear, and a Beaver. The veterinary receptionists have reluctantly recorded all these names and reproached me without mercy, although I got away with Beaver for a few weeks until one of the male vets grassed on me.

It takes time to name a cat according to it’s traits, you can't just shake them out of the cat carrier and expect them to perform straight away. So I ran into a problem when I had to take the latest acquisition up to the vets within 3 days of getting it. The receptionist, a Chinese or Japanese exchange student, flatly refused to accept it until she had a name for it, and I was already late for work. I had to make a snap decision. This strange timid little creature would spend ages hiding away, having to be teased out into the open, and then despite demanding attention, if you didn't stroke it in exactly the right way, would suddenly dart away and hide again. I still had only the vaguest idea where it hid, and what it took to get it out again, and whatever I did to it seemed to be the wrong thing. "Right," I said, "it's called Clitoris. Just sort it out". And I left for work.

When I called back to collect it, the student was gone, and the regular lady smiled at me as I came in the door. With a sense of foreboding, I asked how they had managed with the cat. "She's fine now, just needed some antibiotics. And you've changed a lot, giving her a sensible name for once. She really likes it, purrs when you call her and comes over for a cuddle".

This isn't happening, I thought, paying the bill, and then saw the name tag on the cat carrier as they passed it over the counter. My Sino-Japanese student had written "CRITTURS" in her careful and precise handwriting. Was this just another example of cultural communication issues, or part of a cunning global female conspiracy to curb the undomesticated male?

(The title of this post is based upon one of the poems I came across in school as an antidote to Chaucer. The full text of it can be found here. I recommend it and it's fellow poems, it has always been with me in my memory despite my best efforts to become an uncultured lout).

What will they do to the birds?

We fly across the line in ragged order, through a dirty boiling mass of sickly green and swirling grey. Their side has sent gas upon our trenches with devastating effect; behind us men and horses choke and vomit and stagger blindly in the mud. Neither machine-gun nor barbed wire can halt the rolling fog; it parts beneath us as our wake reaches down, but then silently heals itself and creeps stealthily upon an evil course.

We have bombs slung hurriedly beneath our wings, and full belts clipped into the ugly Vickers sitting snugly in our humps. Yellow ribbons flutter gaily from the Flight-Leader's struts, and we have been told to not lose sight of them for any reason save death. There is to be no exploring, no playful forays over haystacks to look for amorous encounters amidst the noise of war. This is deadly serious, the war has begun to reach into the skies with this pollution of the innocent air.

I heard the news as I drove back south before getting hit by a different biological weapon, Scotland has the poultry pestilence. What horrors are we now going to face? I was living in Cornwall when they began gassing the Badgers, because the government scientists had determined that they caused TB in cattle. One of my closest friends worked to stoke the pyres five years ago as they shot and cremated herds of animals that were unfortunate enough to have contacted what I suspect to be a man-made disease. Killed, not vaccinated, because vaccination was thought to be potentially damaging to the economy.

What are they going to do to the birds in the name of economic stability? Sometimes, I feel that I understand the animal rights activists who take the cruelty to those whom they see as guilty of plotting it and profiting from it. Who, I wonder, is more de-humanised? The government workers with the gas bottles and the captive bolts, the laboratory staff patiently studying the reactions of caged creatures, or the revolutionaries dreaming of reversing the roles and tormenting the tormentors? How long before we start treating people that way? (Again).

We find what we are looking for, the choking gas has no way to conceal the smokescreen it creates, and we have followed the foul river to the source. To our left three streams of tracer draw patterns across ugly containers on their horse-drawn wagons, and as we hurry on towards the next emission point dull thuds and thumps rush up to overtake us. We are too low for shells to reach us but the bullets are beginning to whisper hello, and then we are replying, dropping the nose and pulling the toggle when the cross-wires are filled with ugly belching fumes.

There is a crash and shudder and bloody wetness everywhere. Goggles go red, the smooth arc of the blades has jagged patterns through it, the engine noise is no longer a purr but an angry snarl. Pushing up the goggles to see the earth standing up in front of us like a curtain, hauling in a panic on the stick, levelling out in a rough and bumpy path, we are confused. A plane bobs up alongside, shreds of yellow ribbon still clinging to the struts. The pilot waves at us, angrily. Turn back. Go round. What, again? With no bombs or bullets? The wave is repeated. We turn round and crawl back, towards the lines, over the sites where the gas had been let loose, over the heaps of twitching horses and shuffling cripples, the yellow-streamered plane pacing us, while, to his right, where his friend of two years had faithfully kept station, there is a vast emptiness.

At the field anxious voices ask where we have been hit. “Nowhere”, I reply, “I'm alright”. The flight-leader has reached us, looks questioningly at the blood on our face and chest, the smashed tips of the propeller, and then turns to the lead mechanic, who is fumbling in the engine cowling. I wait, sick with guilt, as the mangled remains of two birds are produced. They had been fleeing the deadly gas as we came hurtling through on our merciless mission. Around me, the body language says that the flight-leader's friend and two others will not be coming back, and I am here instead, unharmed, a mere killer of birds. He turns accusingly to me and points at my blood-spattered mouth and chin. “The least you could have done,” he says, “is brought a couple more back for us to have a chew on”.

The gloomy spell is broken as officers and mechanics double up together and scream with laughter, forgetting the dead as the brandy-flasks pop open.

Don’t let me fade away

I have a horror of being in the same place for too long, listening to the same sounds, watching the same visions, dreaming the same dreams. In my worst nightmare I am presented with an award for 25 years endurance. Inside the box is a barometer that always reads ‘Fair’ and never says ‘Change’, and a chiming clock that stands on the mantelpiece and always seems to take too long to go from tick to tock. When it eventually stops, so do I; I have been sentenced to long drawn-out oblivion as my reward for surviving for so long. I cannot do this thing a minute longer, let someone else get the congratulatory telegram from the Palace on their centenary day.

I always get this horror when I spend an evening playing old records from the past. I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself, I am not by nature masochistic, and I should by now be aware of what’s in store for me when I start rummaging through the bottom of the CD towers, but yet again I am standing on the brink of the promised land with my eyes turned the wrong way, fixed on the trail that got me here. Part of me knows I should go forwards and enter this unknown country, and another part of me is fearful, knowing for certain that this is going to be the end of me. It wants to show me what I am going to throw away if I gamble on the future.

It is part of being a human being to be torn by contradictions. I love the memories of the past, the warm glow that nostalgia seems to bring out in me, the pleasurable sense of old feelings rising gently from deep within to come into the light once more. And yet I have an immense chasm within myself that demands to be filled with something new, something I haven’t felt before, something fresh and excitingly unknown. I need to be tried and tested in the fire, I have a death-wish that wants to risk everything for a dream.

I feel like a badger by the roadside, safe in the darkness on a well-known bank that twinkles with glow-worms and glitters with fireflies, looking out through the gloom and wondering what is out there. And then the sun comes up unexpectedly, and I can see, in the distance, a different bank. It looks so new and fresh and ready for me, and despite my inner self saying ‘No, don’t go there, you like it here with all your friendly feelings’, I am compelled to rush out into the light and scuttle to the other side. Will I get there and find my future, or will I be utterly crushed? Should I rush at full speed to catch the golden vision, or should I trot cautiously, suspecting the worst will yet again be waiting there to greet me?

Pick me up, I'm too low to tango

I don't normally do what I'm about to tell you I've done. I have this instinctive mistrust of tablets and potions, but I'm still not back to full performance after having been wrung dry by the Norah-Virus (sic) strain I recently wrote about. Breathless after walking from the car park to the supermarket, I bought two sets of vitamin supplements; a Seven-seas tonic liquid to be taken three times daily, and a one-a-day tablet pack aimed specifically at 'men of all ages with busy lifestyles'. The Seven-seas tonic is smooth and tasty, and makes no great promises on the label. It follows the thinking that people who believe that the only medicine that will do you good has to taste nasty are far more likely to go out and dig up the wild plants to make the potion themselves rather than buy it ready-made, and I can see the logic.

The other pack used more of a hard-sell approach, suggesting that I would benefit in health, vitality, and general goodness by trying their product. In addition to suggesting when and how frequently I should swallow the capsule, they added several other useful tips that they felt would help me get the best out of their product. The advice on the tablet pack is to

1) eat a balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. OK, I'm already doing that, with eggs, fish and chicken featuring in my main meals rather than pork or beef.
2) Reduce the amount of fat in the diet. I'll have to research that, but I think I'm fairly safe with my dislike of meat, and I don't eat chips anymore. And I forgo beef dripping as part of my 'eat nothing you wouldn't be prepared to kill and prepare yourself' ethos. A shame, I loved the golden jelly and smooth creamy fat of dripping.
3) Avoid bingeing, try to drink no more than three alcoholic drinks in any one day. OK, for four days a week I have two bottles of Newcastle Brown with my evening meal, and at the weekend I might have a bottle of red wine, taken diluted with plenty of water. I don't even try to cheat by drinking three bottles of wine in a day and claiming that's three alcoholic drinks.
4) Make sure to get enough sleep. Tricky when you have to get up at 3:30 on a Monday morning to drive 270 miles to work, and are also a bit of a night-owl, but I'm managing well enough now I'm in a comfy bed in the hotel.
5) Cut down your caffeine intake. OK, I have started doing that, I have a single cup of coffee for breakfast, and one to two more during the remainder of the morning. I don't touch it after lunchtime now. And I never have it just before going to bed as I used to do.
6) try to drink 8 glasses of water a day. All in one go? Does Dandelion and Burdock count as water? Have you seen the state of the water that comes from the taps? I think I'm fairly well behaved on this one, although I'm wondering if squashes count towards the water intake or not. Tai Ch'i thinking is that any concentrates or re-hydrated substances are intrinsically bad for you. This probably explains why nobody who manages or works in Chinese restaurants is an obvious Tai Ch'i devotee.

So what is missing from all of that? No exhortation to exercise frequently. Why not? It is one of the single most crucial factors for a healthy lifestyle that there is; in fact you could probably indulge in more than half of the other forbidden activities if you went out seven days a week and walked a brisk five miles. Is it because demographics have shown the supplement manufacturer that the people who will buy their product lead such hectic lifestyles that the only exercise they are likely to get is pushing the trolley around the supermarket and unloading the car when they get home? Or is it that people who exercise regularly don't need the supplements that they are trying to sell?

Yet another of the mysteries of modern micro-controlled living to go on my corkboard, together with why do people in supermarkets park their trolleys diagonally across the aisles whilst making up their minds which of the five different packets of chicken drumsticks they are going to choose? And why, when they do that, do they park the trolley on the opposite side of the aisle to where the chicken drumsticks are? And why, when I pick one of the reduced items, is it always the one with the broken barcode so that the checkout girl has to holler into the tannoy system for a price and incidentally tell everyone that the customer at her till is a cheapskate who wants to take a chance with the only-two-hours-left-to-salmonella-time chicken sandwich and is it really worth saving 30p just for that?

Virtually good for you

I’m a virtual vegetarian. That used to be such a simple concept; I almost didn’t eat meat. I understood what it meant, I didn’t like beef, or lamb, or pork, or veal. I was fine with fish, cheerful with chicken, would peck at a partridge or fiddle with a pheasant if it was set before me. I just didn’t eat meat. Except for Doner Kebabs. I don’t know what goes into that strange slug-like thing that goes around in front of the grill, in fact for all I know it is a slug, but I don’t care, it tastes delicious.

I had a quite rational explanation for why I was the way I was. It was reincarnation. I was, many years ago, a Vulture, and one day, blown off course by desert winds, I found myself circling around a small mount by a pond listening to an engaging ruffian talk thousands of people into trying to care more for each other whilst handing out sardine sandwiches. I took his teachings to heart, and resolved to become a vegetarian. It was a fruitless attempt, and I died of malnutrition less than two months afterwards, being eaten almost immediately by the other vultures, all oblivious to my attempts to persuade them that grass was really tasty if you picked the right bits.

Over the next few hundred years I came and went as a vulture hundreds of times, determined that I would somehow find a way to live the perfect non-predatorial existence. Somewhere around the time of the second Ottoman empire I gave in and started eating Doner Kebab scraps from a street market near the ruins of Troy, and was rewarded for this relapse by being granted human status on my subsequent reincarnations.

But, and this is my point, I was happy with the way I was, despite my partial loss of faith in the Nazarene's harmonious path. And then two things happened to me.

The first was that I let a meat-eating lady move in. It was bliss at first, as she re-organized the house to her satisfaction, demanding hot running water in any room that had a cold tap, killing all the spiders that the cats were on first name terms with, banning saucepans and any other cooking utensils from the dishwasher, and installing segregation baskets in the laundry room. Strange boxes of tissue sheets appeared on top of the tumble drier. An extra medicine cabinet was ordered for the bathroom. After I had installed it and left it alone for a week I found it full with boxes of tampons. “Are you having some sort of girly party that I don’t know about?” I asked, and got spat at by way of reply.

Then the meals changed. I found more and more chewy lumps turning up in the meals.
“What’s this?” I enquired once, and was told it was four-legged chicken.
“Could we have some fish tonight?” I asked.
“No, they’re slimy and untrustworthy.”
“What exactly is trustworthy?”
“Anything that has hooves and bleeds when you kill it.”
“Alright, could we have Doner Kebab then, please?”
“That’s not proper meat.”
I dared not mention Quorn.

So we settled down to a grudging acceptance of each other’s tastes and needs, she serving up various poor slaughtered beasts meal by meal, which I would carefully push to one side of my plate and replace with a tin of tuna or sardines. For some reason she persisted in serving me what I plainly refused to eat, as though one day I would suddenly crack and scream “Alright, bring it in alive, I’ll chew, I’ll chew!”

The second thing that happened to me was more gradual, and equally unexpected. The internet arrived. Not in a rush, of course, first came dial-up connections to the larger machines I worked on, from which I could reach out via gateways to the wider world, then dial-up to Compuserve, (I’m sorry, but I had to start somewhere, and I sacked them as soon as they changed the access numbers without giving me prior warning), and finally, after threatening to install a metre-wide satellite dish, half-megabit broadband. With the world now flowing in and out of my screen, I found myself able to exchange views with thousands of unlike-minded people, each of whom had an opinion that was usually better than mine. Sooner or later, I started to discuss with other people what things I liked, and what I didn’t particularly care for.

In a conversation one day, I said to the unseen spirit at the other end of the link “I’m a virtual vegetarian”.
“Oh, that sounds interesting,” they replied, “what’s their URL?”

So I think I’m going back to the Doner Kebabs, I don’t care if they’re Mugwump babies snatched from their grief-stricken mothers and reared in total darkness on a diet of MacDonalds kitchen slops and non-stop Westlife music, it’s meat that doesn’t make me flinch when I eat it. And it never has gristly lumps in it. And it’s not about to get several different strains of flu.

Could you help me with these trucks please?

Another blogger has been reading a book about how to be a bad mother, and claims there is a section in it describing how to fit sex into a Thomas the Tank Engine video. Not, I suspect, into the actual video, children don’t need to know where trains come from, certainly none of the Train Operating Companies have any idea on that. What she means, I think, (I hope), is how to sit the little ones down in front of the box and slide behind the sofa to let off a bit of steam in the few minutes between having to wipe the next face and change the next nappy.

It’s just I don’t think I would be able to play my part, if I were to be offered the role of Bad Mother’s Inamouratum. Partly, I’m just not that good at hurried assignations. I like a bit of time to survey the landscape, sample the vineyards, amble across the plains and through the hills, stroll around the forests; actually, I might just be ready if you’ve got a moment.

But mostly, I just couldn’t concentrate with Ringo’s voice going on and on from the other side of the sofa.

“OK”, said Thomas’s driver, “we’ll just shunt these trucks into the siding in a minute or two”,
“Peep-peep”, said Thomas, “I’m ready”.
“Wait for it”, said the Fat Controller, “There’s still a red signal, you’re not allowed to go in there yet”.
But when the signal went green and Thomas started to huff and puff and shunt the trucks, he couldn’t move.
“What’s up, Thomas?” said his driver.
“I don’t know, my pistons are going as fast as they can, but nothing seems to be happening”.
His driver looked out of the cab at the rails.
“I see what the trouble is”, he said, “the track is all slippery and your wheels are just sliding around. I’ll just try some sand”.
So he pulled the lever, but still nothing happened.
“Oh no, not again”, said Thomas, “they’ve given us the wrong type of sand”.
Just then the guard came running up and said “What’s the matter with you lot today?”
“The track is too wet, we need more friction, but they’ve given us slippery sand again”, said Thomas.
“I’ve got an idea”, said the guard, and ran to fetch something from his guard’s van. He came back with a small polished urn.
“These are old Mr. Crumplehorn’s ashes. He was always a kindly soul, I’m sure he won’t mind giving us a little help now”.
And so they got the trucks all the way into the siding just before Thomas ran out of steam, and then they all went happily off to sleep without asking each other what they were thinking about.

OK, I'll drink the Hemlock.

Rummaging around in the attic...

is one of the perks of getting over an illness. This is the first time in eight weeks I have not been at home either unpacking my bags, or almost immediately re-packing them getting ready to leave again. It is the first time in several months I have been up in the attic without swearing at leaking pipes or stuck valves. It is the first time in several years that I have thought about someone I once was.

An attic is a wonderful place in which to bury treasures for yourself to rediscover further on; in this case twelve years further on, and I seem to have lived a lifetime since I hid them away. Two other bloggers had seperately jolted my memory with tales of MoominTrolls and desires to see the midnight sun. I had a very burning urge to open up the box and see myself again.

It is a dark and very messy attic, with untidy heaps of wood for my half-finished building project; some old computers and stereo systems that, although they are broken, are still just capable of being mended one day when I need to save the world or host a loud party; stacks of old motorsport magazines that really should go on ebay; a spare mother gaffer-taped to a rocking chair in case a blonde starlet should come to call and want a shower; and finally, after an hour of searching, my wild ride, six months of my life in three ragged cardboard boxes.

Nearly to this day, twenty years ago, I left England on the start of a mad venture. Six months later, I returned, venture complete. Halfway up the world, between those two points of transit, I let someone take my photo.



Make the most of it, there are precious few shots of me around, and only one other of those is from the same era; although the lady shown above made her boyfriend take several photos of us, she only sent me this one as a momento. I would have liked the one where she had her arms around me.

But it is another story, another mission, possibly another blog, and for the moment, just another mindless interlude in what we call reality.

“Playing dirty water from a swordfish trombone…”

I was left a little parting gift by the baby girl whom I had found sprawled on the sofa, not a “thank you for having me” present, more of a “got you, sucker”. And she certainly did get me. Less than a day after I had got back for the weekend, I was sitting on the floor muttering that I felt strangely queasy.

“Oh, that’ll be the bug”, said my little petal. “Don’t worry, you’ll have the runs for a couple of days and then you’ll be fine”.

“And if I don’t want the runs for a couple of days?”

“Just learn to love them, you’ll be fine”.

According to her, the runs lasted for about two days, accompanied by stomach cramps, and endless gurgling noises, followed by a vague lassitude. She and her granddaughter had both suffered together, and had even gone to paint eldest daughter’s kitchen in the tail end of the illness. Youngest daughter’s partner, however, having dropped the biological weapon on our doorstep and run off gleefully to his training course, had ended up in hospital within a day.

“Why?” I asked, alarmed.

“He was throwing up as well, simultaneously. It worried them”.

“Yes, I could see the course instructor not welcoming the interruption”.

And so, preconditioned by her casual announcement that my world was going to turn inside out, I struggled on for half a day convincing myself that I was far too tough to be laid low by a babies’ bug, before collapsing in a very messy heap. My sphincter was singing strange tunes, and I was no longer conducting the orchestra.

From out of the delirium I have one very remarkable memory. Waking from the fitful doze, seeing moonlight flooding through the window, and realizing I felt peaceful. Collecting my senses, I found I was lying in the position of the hanged man, one foot cocked up with the sole resting against the knee of the other leg. My limbs, however, were icy cold, and if I hadn’t been so glad of the respite from the pains I would have been scared by their deathly numbness. Then, sometime later, when the moonlight had passed across the window to shine in on the wardrobe mirror, finding myself again in the hanged man’s repose, but with the other leg crooked, and this time my limbs were comfortably warm.

I was so amazed by the realization that, as well as the inverted meanings to the cards, there could be a pair of reflective meanings, I completely forgot to remember which side was hot and which was cold. And there is no way I intend to repeat the experience, let some other eager student out there open themselves up to the spirit of occult discovery.

The green-eyed tabby cat has slept on the pillow beside my head to make sure I don’t get molested by inquisitive shrews. There are a lot of them about at this time of the year.

Trust me, it's chicken

Trundling smoothly through the dark, dashboard lights glowing sweetly green, catseyes flicking into view and ducking underneath, playing Bowie and singing along, I had slithered down the greasy pipe and would now be heroes for ever and ever, when I fumbled a juggle and swore. I swerved briefly from one lane into the other and back again. I straightened up and started mopping at my shirt and lap, when the headlights behind me went to full beam.

I flicked the mirror to dip, and changed back into the left-hand lane. The bright lights followed me over, and were much closer and brighter. I sped up a little, and they fell back for a few seconds, and then closed rapidly on me again. I slowed, and so did they. I switched on my left-hand indicator for a couple of winks to say, 'pass me, then'. They switched on their blue flashing light. I said 'bugger', and pulled up.

One figure got out of the car and walked up through the headlights to the side of my door. I wound down the window. "Turn off the engine and get out of the car please, Sir". I did as he said. "Take your hands away from your trousers, please". Reluctantly, I did so. There was a long pause.

"You filthy, stupid, mindless piece of wasted scum", said the voice.

"It's not what it looks like", I tried to say, but was cut off.

"We've sat there for the past five miles wondering just what someone has to have been drinking or taking to be driving as badly as you, and I put my money on weed, but neither of us would have guessed this".

"It really isn't what you think it is", I repeated, but I wasn't going to get a chance to finish.

"It looks, Sir, to me, Sir, that you, Sir, are a filthy perverted twisted piece of arse-wipe cloth that shouldn't be let loose on the streets. Sir. It looks to me, Sir, that you need a lot more than just a ticket for careless driving. Sir."

The lights on the police car flashed, and a voice called "Trouble on the slip-road, three involved, we're called".

He took the torch beam off me, and said "If it wasn't for the fact that there are decent people up there trapped and injured, you'd be in the back of my car in handcuffs. Don't ever let me catch you on my road again. Ever."

The car sped off. I watched it go, then opened the door and felt around under my seat, then under the pedals, and finally found the cup. Most of the chicken soup had been soaked up by the footwell carpet, some was still left in the cup, and a small but adequate amount was plastered over my waistband and the front of my trousers.

Half-life

I am still having trouble sleeping, even after five weeks, and not just away from home. It is a Sunday night, and I have just rolled over for the fifteenth time and buried my face in an alternate pillow, as if there was any chance of that making a difference. The sheep I have been counting are starting to misbehave. Instead of jumping over the stile they've begun to perform a mystery play. A young and tender lamb is garlanded with Ox-eye Daisies and symbolically whipped with strands of Meadow-sweet, an older sheep has donned a wolf-skin and circles her, answering each plaintive bleat with an eerie howl, while the remainder chant “We shall not be shorn till the moonlight fades”. And then the picture stops, without the enticing link that says “click here for unlimited downloads”.

Mixed images float in and out of view, a glimpse of a cubby under the stairs painted pink, where a bald-headed man stoops over a cot and cooes, a television that contains a family of hamsters, a car that I'm following far too closely behind, and then finally I am forgiven.

Waters rush noisily around a sloping rock, swirling together in a plait that rolls and coils around itself between two smooth gyrating surfaces that hint at hidden fish. The air is hot and wet and cool at the same time, and spray tingles on the skin. Tall trees stretch up above to a blue that is not of a temperate zone, and in the distance snow shimmers on the peaks of violent mountains. There is a sense of danger lurking in the bracken floor beneath the trees that goes as quickly as it comes, with just a rustle. Kingfishers swoop and swerve across the surface of the pool, challenging to other to flinch first as they aim their spear-like bills towards each other. And underneath the rich chocolate of the water lie the dreaming fishes, locked into their laminar world of flow and eddy, waiting to be teased and taunted.

I come awake, alive, tingling, feeling the blood in my veins and the breath in my body, refreshed. I have been let into the great blue yonder again, I am no longer an earthbound outcast. The alarm clock realizes it has dozed and lost the game and bleats only once before I flick the switch and rise, at half-past-three, Monday, England, Earth. This dream might be an easy one to place, for my youngest brother is out in India on a fishing trip, stalking the elusive mountain carp.

The bed beside my rumpled imprint is empty, the door into the main room pulled close, and behind it light glimmers. This is strange, and I pad silently through towards the kitchen and an appointment with the coffee-maker. Passing the open door to the sitting room, I see that a baby girl lies face-down upon the sofa, head turned towards me, eyes closed, mouth open, little hands palm-up beside her as though she had tripped and fallen and still lay shocked. I pause for a second, asking myself if she is alright and should I turn her over? Another one of my selves has momentarily made contact with me, someone with a life that has run more smoothly than mine, and we gaze together as though both of us were fathers, he telling me that they always look like that. Then I recognize that it is my partner's youngest grandchild, and my other self says goodbye.

The coffee bubbles gently into the jug as I listen to the story, youngest daughter's partner has just been offered a new job, and they cannot arrange childcare in time, since both of them need to work their hearts out just to have next-to-nothing, so grandchild was delivered to our door last night, as I watched sheep confront their hidden urges. I carry bags and a flask of coffee out to a cold car as Madonna carries child to a warm bed. Rumbling gently through the blackness that is Wessex before dawn, I have a disturbing thought, what will a young thing make of the strange male smell to the bed she now slumbers in? Will it disturb her? Will it soothe her? What dreams will she have to brighten up her life?

Free Will and Indignity

I live comfortably in the shadow of a high sandstone bluff that keeps the worst of the winds away, and enjoy a stable relationship with an aging mare. She herself has two fillies and a colt from a previous alliance.

The colt has just bolted to Australia, one filly has foaled three times and is readying for the fourth issue, while the other filly has just recovered from the first foal and is moving at unstoppable speed towards the arrival of the second. God help her if she doesn’t have the sense to have what’s left of her reproductive system removed. (Ovarian cancer before she’s 22, they grow up so fast these days).

The most-foaled filly is having attention to her works, having finally realised that four is enough; the mare realised it after three. Which leaves me with a stable-mate who can take any amount of mounting, but isn’t going to further my line. I am a stallion un-studded, rampant upon an empty field, accompanied by a mocking Jaybird.

Since I am therefore to be denied from adding to the stock of the world, I wish to leave my imprint on it by other means. Not for me a comfortable rest beneath the turf in some far-forgotten field, or a curling ascent to the upper atmosphere followed by a steady settling over the surrounding countryside; I want to directly participate in the life and land around me.

Render down my flesh and feed it to the pigs, it seems appropriate enough to me, or to the cats if you prefer, but please not to dogs, I’m not a dog-person.

Feed my liver and kidneys to the birds, and let them unload the result upon the heads of the opinionated and fashion-conscious from a great height.

I would like my gall-bladder and spleen to be dried and made into wind-chimes to be hung from a branch somewhere in the mysterious coppice behind where I live.

Grind my bones into a powder and use it to grit the roads and pavements during the forthcoming bleak winters brought on by climate changes.

Divide my heart up, a large portion to a Spanish lady from Alicante, if you can find her, and split the remainder between the mare, and a lady in Berkshire who loves to pretend she doesn’t really care.

My brains, what there is of them, can be chopped up and fed to trout in fish farms, in the hope that they will develop a really useful disease which will cause sheep who drink the infected water to go barking mad and start to savage four-wheel drive vehicles in urban areas. If they take it upon themselves to also molest MEP’s and local planning councillors, I can only say it is an unexpected blessing.

Tell anyone else who thinks they have a claim upon me that they should serve their notice soon, before the wheels are set in motion.

On the carpet

The Sopwith Camel is grounded, in the barracks on a charge; Insufficient Subordination.

When words fall out of my mouth they usually tumble down like snowflakes on a summer’s day, quietly melting away in a harmless mist. Sometimes, though, the weather confounds me and these words land crystalline upon the ground and rearrange themselves to spell the kiss of death for my unfortunate and long-suffering self.

It has been a hard week for me, with decorators in to smarten up the office, and no alternate place for me to work. I’ve skulked in corridors and been reproved for blocking the fire exit. I’ve parked myself on the edge of desks and tables, only to find the other occupants of the room needed to spread out their papers there or need to dismantle the printer. On the Friday morning, having managed to cheat the system and get my timesheets submitted early, I was told there was a phone call for me. I picked up my phone and showed them the cord that would normally be plugged into the wall socket, if I were in a room that had a wall socket. They grudgingly allowed me to sit on the edge of their desk and take a phone call from my little petal.

“My car’s blown up. It will cost at least £500 to get it fixed. It’s the head-gasket. The car’s wrecked. It’s not even worth that. I can’t live without it”

There was an unspoken reproof in her words. As readers of “Toad Patrol” will know, I was out the previous Friday night in a rally. In her car, to be precise. I bit back my immediate thought of “It was alright when I gave it back to you”, and said “I’ll be as quick as I can” instead. Which, when I was 270 miles away, was not going to be the blink of an eye.

It is no fun living in the countryside without a car. There is a bus-service that passes close to us; one of Wiltshire’s quaintly named Wiggly-Buses, that runs along a nominal route and will divert off it for a short way to set you down where you want to go, but it only runs one day a week. Poor petal would be stuck at home unable to get to the supermarkets for food, or her daughters’ for grand-parenting. More importantly, she would be unable to get to the post-office to hand her parcels over for delivery to customers, so she would be destitute. Her prison sentence would be far worse than mine, because at least I got let out twice a day for commuting, and each weekend for bad behaviour.

I left work and drove solidly for five hours, probably getting caught by one of those ominous speed cameras near Silverstone that gets your face in grinning glory as you revel in the thrill of driving ten miles over the speed limit. I arrived home with less than an hour to ring around and see who could save our dead Daewoo.

My first thought was, drop another engine in it. The local scrapyard had one, because we’d already had the exhaust manifold from it for the last MoT, so I got a price of £150 for buying the remainder of the engine compartment. Then I rang up a garage who I knew did engine transplants and got a firm quote of £200 to do the swap if I got the engine delivered to them together with the car. Then, I rang the garage we normally take the car to for servicing to see if they would like to revise their quote for changing a head-gasket to a more competitive figure. They said that until they had seen the car, they couldn’t quote any firm figures, because the extent of the damage was unknown.

“But didn’t you look at the car when you gave her the estimate?”

No, it seems that they simply listened to what she had been told by the breakdown man who had collected the car. So I stopped the frantic phoning, and asked her for the story.

She had been crawling through Bath in stop-start traffic, and had just started moving at a reasonable speed again, when there was a noise that she thought sounded like running over a plastic bottle in the road, and steam exploded everywhere. The breakdown man, when he arrived, had said to her “I don’t even need to open the bonnet to tell you what it is, the head-gasket’s blown” He had hoisted the car up on a spectacle carrier and driven them back home.

I went outside, opened the bonnet, looked down at the first hose that I could see, and saw that the plastic thermostat housing had exploded. One final phone call to the scrapyard confirmed that I could have the thermostat housing next morning, if someone else hadn’t beaten me to it.

So I went back inside, jubilant, having negotiated the cost of repairs downwards, first from £500 to £350, and then, if we were lucky, to all of £10, and a couple of hours of my precious time. I was cock-a-hoop, and probably a little dazed in the head from the long drive, because I then said “Right, we’re going out to celebrate, get dressed up, it’s you I want tonight, not your mother”.

Thinking back, that last wisecrack was unfortunate, but apparently it was also unforgivable. Having spent the week sleeping on my own, I’m now forced to spend the weekend also in solitary confinement. And, to make it doubly unjust, I was correct; putting on an unbroken thermostat housing has restored the Daewoo, but she now states that she knew all along it wasn’t anything as catastrophic as a head-gasket.

The cats have come to show me sympathy, curling up beside me on the sofa, kneading my stomach, and purring contentedly right beside my ear. I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight, but not in the way I originally planned.

Forced Furlough

I have driven myself away from the softly-undulating Wiltshire countryside that means so much to me, and spend over three-quarters of my time, exiled, in the flat fens south of the Humber. The East wind sweeps in from the North Sea and goes right through my clothes, flesh and bones, all the way to my soul, and my conscience has caught a cold. I've been in this part of the country before, and have some mixed memories that I had forgotten I'd forgotten.

The village I am lodging in is mostly modern, a few old brick buildings for a post-office and pub surrounded by late-sixties stone or rendered bungalows with large clumsy chimneys, scattered around a river that is nothing but a savage gash in the ground. The ducks clustered around the bridge across it look as though they are there serving community orders for bad-behaviour elsewhere. There is a sign beside the bridge saying "please do NOT feed the Ducks"; if W.C.Fields had passed by he would have scribbled "it makes them shit everywhere" at the bottom.

I have no satellite TV. That might be a blessing, since I hardly ever watch the one I've got when I'm home, but it was there if I wanted to watch Dead Like Me, and now I have to try and get interested in the Apprentice, or Desperate Housewives. I have three takeaways to choose from, Indian, Chinese, or good old Fish and Chips. Is there a Sushi bar nearby? I should think not. I have no e-mail or usenet connections, not even web access, and can only scribble pages into my laptop to blog when I get let out for a too-short weekend.

For the time being, I must accept severe restrictions on everything I have come to enjoy. No internet access. No pets to play games with or laugh at. No partner to wind up or be nagged by, and I can’t remember how long it is since I slept alone for this length of time. Work is noisy, dirty, and completely male-oriented. It's like being in prison, although as someone sweetly pointed out to me, without the sodomy. So, I might be banished, bored, and bloody-minded, but at least I'm not buggered. And I'm doing this for money, by the way, this is not a career move at all.