Andy and Judy's Book Club

I just finished reading Rageh Omaar's excellent book Revolution Day, his account of his time in Iraq before, during, and after the liberation/invasion/occupation. I recommend this book very strongly: he doesn't write from a clear-cut ideological/polemical position (as far as I can tell), but his steady accretion of details, facts, anecdotes, and humane common sense demonstrates -- to devastating effect -- just how inept, ill-informed and clumsy the entire coalition operation/politicking has been, and how ill-served the ordinary people of Iraq have been by all the important players from the West/North: the US, the UK, the UN.

I came away from this book saddened, and much clearer in my mind about what a monumental fuck-up has been imposed on Iraq. Rageh Omaar illuminates -- in clear, compassionate prose -- the immense and disturbing gap between the coalition's political rhetoric and the reality for ordinary Iraqis. He's also very good at tying together the broader political/sociological background, and showing how the ham-fisted interventions of the coalition's military/political arms have made a deep-seated mess of the post-Sadaam Iraq. It ain't pretty reading, but it's a really valuable book.

Magnolia

While I was away, all the magnolia trees in the UK decided to mock me by exploding into their brief blossom phase. There's usually a period of three hours, late one afternoon, when the flowers are all fully open and pert. Come the morning, the petals are all over the floor. Another year's cycle begins.

I really like Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia: it's visually dazzling (check out the massive tracking shot sequence that opens the film, and watch all the camera moves and cuts -- poetry), it's very funny, and it digs away at the sadness and humour at the heart of every life. I guess the title is an allusion to the brevity of each life, and the preciousness of each day, and of the people we love. (?)
* * *
Postscript: that was a sloppy post; I need to get precise. When I talk about the 'opening sequence', I mean the opening proper, not the 'coincidences' prologue. And it's not a 'tracking shot' -- it's a whole series of shots: handheld, dolly stuff, quickfire editing, very clever and smooth and gripping. I'm glad I clarified that. Watch the film, and you'll know what I mean.

Impossible Reading Lists

I think that my life has been a triumph/defeat of aspiration over achievability. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the way that I have eternally bought more books than I could ever read in the time available. This is a habit that continues to this day: I think "Oh, that's interesting/I have to know about that", and so I buy the book(s). My intent is good -- I really do want to know/understand -- but there's only so much time, ain't there? And all those unread books I've got in store...and the books of my own that I have to write. Shit -- there just isn't enough time. Guess I'll either (a) have to live longer; (b) retire earlier; or (c) spend less time pissing about, and more time reading/writing.

Days

Just bear with me while I work through this mortality thing -- I mean, Martin Amis got a whole book out of it (The Information). So I'm hardly obsessive just yet.

So. I was working out how many days I've been alive: roughly 15,300. I figure that if I live for another 25 years, I've got another 9100 to come.

That's stark. I'm going to stop this now and do some writing...I've got to finish one novel in the time I've got left.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

The spectre at the feast

Something rankled with me in Paris, and I'm not sure how to square it with my Francophile inclinations.

Racism.

There was the suggestion of that subtle, implicit kind that's not very different from this country: most of the low-paid, low-status jobs seem to be held by people with dark skins. And then there's something more obvious, and which I find difficult to square with the idea (and, largely, as far as I can tell, the reality) of Paris/France as a cosmopolitan, tolerant, liberal, open society -- the kind of place I'd want to live.

There was an emblematic incident illustrating this later kind of racism while I was queuing at the Louvre: there was an Afro-American family a couple of yards in front of me in the queue -- grey-haired dad, a teenaged boy and a teenaged girl. You could easily guess from their clothes that they were Americans -- dad in jeans and a Washington somethings bomber jacket, boy in red 'street' clothes (I don't know the right term -- that baggy hip hoppy stuff), and the girl very smart in tasteful shades of brown. At the first gate (ostensibly a 'security' check), they were the only people asked to show their passports (everyone else ahead of me in the queue was white). At the next booth, twenty yards further on -- where they just check that you've got a valid ticket -- they had to show their passports again. The white woman behind them took out hers as well, but the guy on the desk just waved her through.

I wanted to catch up with the Afro-American family and talk to them, but I felt that it would be adding to their insult, and too intrusive -- none of my bloody business. Of course, I was too cowardly to challenge the French people on the gates.

It left a nasty taste in my mouth. Looking at some of the Louvre's exhibits -- particularly the Egyptian antiquities 'liberated' by Napoleon and 'donated' by the Egyptian government -- I started thinking about France's colonial past: about Algeria, and about the Algerians murdered in a 'police riot' in Paris in 1961 (I think it was '61); about Le Pen and the National Front; about the Vichy government's complicity in the rounding up of French Jews and their deportation to Auschwitz.

Paris is layered in history -- that's one of the things I like so much about it. But a lot of it is dark, and a lot of it is still haunting the place where it's so easy to feel culturally enriched and gastronomically flattered. I'm not saying that these people having their passports checked is morally equivalent with murder, or with assisting genocide; but the roots are the same -- discrimination on the basis of some arbitrary 'racial' identifier. It stinks.

Paris was lovely...

...and, as I'm a monomaniacal enthusiast, I will be boring about it for -- oh, about a week. Maybe two.

woof

My eating today has been...distinctive. I think I took most of my calories in as sugar (cakes), fat (cakes), and sugar (more cakes). I could probably count the jam in one of the doughnuts as a portion of fruit, eh? Eh? OK, not, then. It felt surprisingly liberating to throw of the self-restraint of calorie counting and just eat whatever I wanted. Shallow, yes. Selfish, yes. Disgusting and obscene, perhaps.

So...I thought I'd round off my massive debauch with fish and chips. As I walked up the hill, a dog behind someone's front door barked twice, paused, and barked twice again. It did it in the perfect rhythm/interval for the Johann Strauss's An der Schoenen Blauen Donau (aka The Blue Danube): Dum dum dum dum dum - woof woof, woof woof, dum dum dum dum dum - woof woof, woof woof.

Tomorrow: a tame weasel performs John Cage's 4" 33'. Funky.

Oh, and I only ate half of my fish and chips: even I had to admit defeat and give up in self-disgust.

service interruption

I'm using the word 'service' in the loosest possible sense, of course.

I'll be away for a few days after today, so my blog will be as silent as a deserted factory over the Christmas holidays. Maybe some small rodents will be nosing around in the canteen, gnawing on the crust of someone's discarded Marmite sandwich or licking the last hardened chocolate smear from an old Twix wrapper. And there might be some bits of paper stirring on the cold, concrete factory floor when the wind blows through the gap under the loading bay door. But mostly there'll be silence.

Try not to take it too hard.

I'm off to walk around Paris, feel the foreign air on my skin, and luxuriate in the tiny differences and novelties of abroad.

And eat cake, obviously, but not in the style of Marie Antoinette.

The fallacy of universal causation

I'm a bit down on myself today. I'm not sure why, and it doesn't really matter anyway. My habit has been to examine my navel and find a just so story to rationalise my mood, but lately I haven't found that very helpful. It seems more sensible to think fuck it and wait for it to pass.

Positivism was part of my mental furniture even before I knew the word existed -- growing up in an increasingly secular, technocratic culture, I metabolised a belief that investigation and observation were the only real sources of knowledge. This belief got embedded in every replenished cell in my body from the age of 12 until now.

Later, I hooked this unstated intellectual framework up to another energising concept: hierarchical reductionism -- if I could only analyse everything by breaking it down into ever-smaller pieces, I could understand everything. (Given my implicit commitment to positivism, it never occurred to me to wonder whether this reductionist project would actually be of any benefit to me. But never mind.)

These combined approaches worked well for me, in lots of contexts -- mechanics, model-making, politics, economics, computing, history -- and I sought to apply them in as many fields of intellectual endeavour as I could. At the same time, I harboured a continued romantic belief in the untouchability of human emotional/intellectual/aesthetic experience: that is, I thought that there was something unique, mysterious and...non-physical, I guess, about the individual human being and their consciousness. Something that couldn't be probed or touched by science. This fed my love of literature, and my attachment to humanist/romantic individuality, and it also informed my belief that love was the greatest thing, the ultimate expression of what we are, and what we seek to achieve.

Later, when I got interested in neuroscience in the late 1980s, my reductionist programme returned with a vengeance: I was fascinated by the electro-chemical buzz of neurones, dendrites, and synapses, and I was enthralled by the idea that if we could only understand the function of each cell and their trillions of interconnections, we could understand consciousness 'from the bottom up'. Increasingly, though, I found that I crashed into a wall: we could understand the processes at the low level (chemicals and electricity dancing around each other), and the processes at the top level (behaviours, moods, big chunks of the brain that 'did' particular things). When I started my History M.Sc., I was playing around with the idea of studying neuropsychology as a way of understanding history and causation -- the idea being that if we could only understand the historical actors and all the influences that played on them we could properly understand why stuff happened. Ambitious, eh? :-)

But these reductionist models broke down for me in the middle, where the very small components meshed and created the higher order organisation and patterns. (I may have been the victim of my own limited intellect, or of the mechanical/positivist models that had dominated my -- largely Newtonian -- thinking. Maybe.) Anyway, the upshot was that I went back to the 'we're a mystery' way of thinking about our minds, convinced (by despair?) that it was all too big and complicated ever to understand. That's where I've been for a little while, but I think I might buy some more books about neuroscience and get myself up to date: it's such a rich and thrilling subject.

Anyway. This is a long way of saying that you can think too much (I never thought I'd ever say that). Sometimes simplicity, acceptance -- or just getting pissed and forgetting about it -- can be the best approaches, rather than seeking some non-existent explanation/kernel of truth way up your arse.

Fine Lines

Driving home after evening class tonight, I was thinking about something that somebody had said about one of the 'read aloud' pieces. Coming up to the traffic lights, I was not really paying attention, and just following the rear lights of the car in front. The driver must have jumped the lights, and I followed on, 20 yards or so behind. By the time I realised what had happened, I was halfway across the junction, with the cross-traffic moving. Fortunately, the lead car from the left was turning into the road I'd just come out of, so they were moving slowly, and stopped easily. There was nothing coming from the right, thank goodness.

I accelerated away from the junction, frightened. How easy it is to lose concentration; to wreck your car; to hurt someone; to kill someone; to die. Just moments of inattention between you and those consequences.

Concentrate.

Apocalypse Sometime

I've been watching the Redux version of Apocalypse Now this weekend.

I didn't see the original film at the pictures when it came out in '79 -- I was a very young-looking 17, and wouldn't have been able to get in to a certificate 'X' film (as 18s were called in those days). I did catch the film a year or so later on a really snowy pirate video, and - a bit later on - I watched it on a 'pukkah' version.

I always liked this film. It appealed to me at lots of different levels.

Firstly, it was beautifully shot - I'm thinking particularly of the 'boat in landscape' shots, and of the awesome 'Ride of the Valkyries' sequence, from the trumpet-boy on the take-off grounds, all the way through the attack on the Vietnamese village: if there's a better live-action war sequence, I haven't seen it yet. (This segment appealed to me at a rather disturbing, visceral level -- the bit of me that gets excited by military hardware and explosive action. I recognise that these bits of me still get stimulated sometimes (eg, Band of Brothers), and it feels weird -- my intellect is saying no, but my brain stem is saying cor!.

Second, it keyed into a lot of the reading I'd done about the Vietnam war, and into the political beliefs I had at that time, particularly about the evils of US foreign policy. I remember looking at Tim Page's pictures of Vietnam, and going to see a play based on Michael Herr's Dispatches at the National Theatre -- the book and the play were brutal and compelling, and all of that fed into my 'reading' of Coppola's film.

Thirdly, of course, there's the whole Africa/Conrad/Heart of Darkness subtext, flowing through the film like a dark river. That parallel adds historical perspective and depth to Coppola's narrative.

The Redux version adds more depth and layers -- partly because of the additional footage, and partly because of the additional reading that I've done since I last watched the movie: in footage terms, I think the 'French Plantation' sequence is particularly telling, as it reveals more historical background, and deepens the 'depth of field'...the French as the former colonialists, the US as the original sponsors of the VC, and all of that 'superior European/white man' stuff; this also chimes with subsequent reading I've done on colonialism, European senses of superiority and 'ownership' of 'lesser' peoples and their land/resources, and the (racist) assumptions about 'civilising' others and drawing them into the homogeneous world of capitalism and (western notions of) liberty.

Finally...it made me keep thinking about current US foreign policy and overseas 'adventures': the flawed belief in the power of military technology; the kids operating the weapons of war; the uneasy alliances between 'sponsors' and native forces; the distance between rhetoric about the war, and its reality; the battle for hearts and minds; the demonisation of the enemy in racist and 'subhuman' terms; the sense that conventional military force is not the solution to this 'problem'; the double standards and lies.

So...quite a deep film. (I think FFC needs to upgrade the soundtrack, though -- those synths sound a bit dated...)

Homework

I've missed the last couple of weeks of my creative writing class, but this week I have managed to do my homework, so I'm all set for Monday evening. This week's homework had an 'Intruder' theme, and this is my take on it. (It's meant to switch from first to third person narration near the end.)

"I’ve had a couple of drinks, so I’m not thinking too clearly. But I can hear him downstairs. And I know what he’s doing – what he’s after.
I shouldn’t have left Louise downstairs on her own. She’s probably dozing down there, after all that wine. Christ, she’s vulnerable…but you forget, don’t you? You never think it’ll happen to you, not in your own house.
I won’t put the landing light on…I’ll feel my way to the head of the stairs, so he won’t know I’m coming.

Even half-cut, I know where everything is. Left foot -- pot plant. Left hand, at shoulder level, the long picture of the Titanic -- that’s Louise’s. Starlight, smoke and steam, the lights of the cabins slipping under the dark sea. Like your life: that can slip under, too. You can be sailing along serenely, and than – bang – you crash into something, and it all slides away from you, and you’re careening down a slippery wooden deck that’s tilting at an ever-steeper angle. Hmm.

Right hand -- the banister. Smooth gloss paint against my palm.
Wait a second. Listen.

He’s just picked up a glass and a bottle -- hear that clink? Cheeky bastard.

He pads down the stairs, placing his feet precisely, like a cat walking along a fence, and he can hear his own nervous breathing. The lounge door is edged with faint light from the table lamps.

He can hear their voices on the other side of the door, faint murmurs. What does he want? What’s he saying to her? He puts his ear to the door, but all he can hear is the swirl of sounds from his own body: breath, heartbeat, blood.

He takes a breath and pushes the lounge door open. The voices cease.
Louise is curled up on the sofa, propped on one elbow, resting her head on her hand. Her dark hair half-obscures her face. Clive is sitting in the other armchair, his whisky balanced on his knee.

“Billy!Thought we’d lost you up there. You all right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m cool.”

He sits down next to Louise, rests his hand proprietarily on her knee."

In-car entertainment

I devised an hilarious travel game in the car yesterday, as I traversed the country via the Roman straights and lovely smooth curves of the A14. This game doesn't have a name yet, but as soon as a good one comes up I'll be trade marking it and getting legal acknowledgement of my intellectual property rights.

All you do is use the names on the road signs to create the cast and crew of a 1950s/60s British movie. If you come up with a suitable film title, all the better. Sadly, because my memory is going, and because I didn't have a dictaphone with me yesterday, I can't remember any of the sidesplitting combinations I assembled over the several hours I spent on the tarmac yesterday. However, the following list provides a flavour.

• Milton Swavesey -- an avuncular 50 year old, in the role of Parson Roberts


• Felix Stowe -- an up and coming matinee idol


• Rampton Westwick -- an irrepressible rake


• Ely Woodhurst -- that renowned northern comic and character actor

We laughed until we stopped.

Incidentally, it was quite difficult to find names with a female feel. I wonder why the place names are all so blokey and tweedy?

Hilarity ensues

My wife/mother-in-law/sister/mother/daughter/aunt/girlfriend/grandmother went on holiday to a major city in Indonesia.

Jakarta?

No, she went by plane.

Sad

Seeing how fragile an elderly relative is getting, and thinking about how one of these springs will be their last spring. Realising how much I love them. Not knowing how to think about those things in combination.

A dead swan on an overpass near Huntingdon: a tangle of weight and feathers, thrown against the metal fence, the white feathers spattered with grime and spray. The long neck, doubled back on itself. The traffic whooshing past.

The ten year old boys standing on the seats in the supermarket car park, spitting on the pavement, swearing noisily and unconvincingly, and dressed in pathetic, cheap imitation of [insert name of contemporary rap artist here].

Beautiful

The sun going down into the mist in the west, and the vapour starting to rise in the fields. A field full of sheep and spring lambs, bathed in soft, golden, evening light. Made me feel a bit weepy, it was so lovely. Ahh...

Light and Dark

Light: Up early today to take my parents over to Norfolk. It was foggy at 5 AM, and the dawn chorus was already in train -- blackbirds, mainly. (At this point I usually comment on their looping, sweet, clear song, which cuts through the air like the taste of anchovies cuts through porridge. But I won't do that today.) Everything was still, and damp-smelling (not my trousers, of course), and the early morning felt...poised, as if something significant and beautiful was about to happen.

Dark: Being at my parents, I got on their scales before my morning wash. Got off them again. Checked the calibration. Got on again. Got off again. Took off my socks, shaved off all my body hair, planed down my rib bones until they were mere millimetres thick. Weighed myself again. Harraumphed. Decided it wasn't fair. Then... accepted reality: I am a porker. 14 stone and 6 pounds. Blimey. Soon, people will be shouting "fatty" at me from passing cars, and white van men will cease wolf whistling as I pass by in my Grease-era John Travoltaesque bun-hugging polyester slacks. Which would be a loss, obviously.

So...this week = anti-porker week. Except...I'm off to Paris on Thursday, innit?

Trousers...off!

There's a Tom Waits song called Broken Bicycles. It's from his wonderful soundtrack to the Coppola film One from the Heart, and it's about the baggage and wreckage of old and broken relationships. There's a couplet that really fits my mood today. It goes:

The seasons can turn on a dime,
Somehow I forget every time...

A week ago it was chilly and grey, and subzero at night. Today it was maybe 17 degrees Celsius in Oxford, with blue sky, warm sunshine, and pink and white blossom in profusion. Sharp shadows everywhere, and the colours of the brickwork all warmed up in the sunlight.

Nature has whipped off its metaphorical trousers, kicked off its shoes and socks, and is running naked across a green field of grass towards a shallow river of clear water. Gaia's idealised personification will soon be splashing about and kicking water into the air for sheer joy.

Glad to be alive.

Moaning Manky Minky Monkey (alliterative reprise)

Well. The lager didn't tune me in to any profound cosmic wavelengths (surprise). Instead, I ate nuts and watched Boogie Nights on DVD. My admiration for P. T. Anderson grows. Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love. What next?

Minky Manky Moan in 3/4 Time

Now, you know I'm not one to complain, but...bugger this.

I want to trade in my body for one that I can rely on. Today, I started off feeling like crap -- no energy, could barely keep my eyes open, my ears were buzzing, and I was mega-irritable -- outstanding!

I was planning to go home and rest, but then I got an energy burst that lasted for a couple of hours, during which I went out, amidst the warm sunshine and sweet smell of blossom blowing off the trees, and bought a distinctly attractive baguette (can you get bagus? are they bigger?) -- mozzarella, basil mayonnaise, and sun-desiccated tomatoes. My enjoyment of this delight was somewhat compromised by someone elucidating a story about medical rot and purulence when I was halfway through my bread-based munchery, and thereafter my energy levels took a massive tumble. By hometime I was knackered and irritable again...perfect!

My spirits were rallied in Sainsbury's by some hilarious 'cheeky cockerney boy' banter with sparkling-eyed sales assistant, and then it was back to my wee hovel to survey the wreckage of my virus-ravaged day. It wasn't pretty: there was a half-devoured shrew on the back step, courtesy of next door's snipey ginger cat, and the dead mammal's wizened head and exposed spine (so delicate and pale in the early dusk) didn't inspire me to cook up the mole I've had in the freezer since Michaelmas.

So...I've given up on the day, and will comfort myself (in truly immature fashion) with the nuts and lager that I'd ordinarily have on Friday night. (This week, I need to keep myself fresh for an early start on Saturday, as I've got a 300-mile round trip to the east coast, taxiing maw and paw over to my god mother's place.

Doubtless I will be back later with more lager-inspired self-centred, self-pitying drivel. What an attraction that will be!

Or maybe John C will cheer me up again. Ah, the mystery and tantalisation...

Toodle pip.

Funny. Spring. Rambling.

Funny evening: funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha -- as my dad (and mum) would have said when I was a kid, and when they were still married. But I digress. (Surprise.)

So...earlier, I was feeling a bit out of sorts: not quite past being ill, and mentally and physically inert. And now...it's like something's changed: you know those Philip Pulman books, where the protagonists have a subtle knife that lets them cut through the fabric of space-time and open up a window to another universe? It's a bit like that.

I have days like this, when things seem to turn suddenly -- usually in autumn or spring. It's as if I've reached the end of a long swing, or the full extent of an elastic constraint...as if the tautness is suddenly loosened, and I'm moving freely again. Moving freely, through unresisting, clear air -- rather than through murky water that's been lapping up to my waist, impeding movement and smoothness. It's a lovely, liberating feeling; one that I associate with spring evenings, and with being able to sit with the windows open, hearing the faint hiss of distant traffic, and with smelling the earth coming back to warmth and life, and with the sense that the world is opening up to me again, rather than running down.

So what's made that happen this evening? Music has played a part: the open, relaxed colours of John Coltrane's saxophone playing -- the way that he took a melodic line and played around with it, playing all around the line while keeping it nailed down solidly, so that you can follow the melody even when he's adding trills (terminology?) and little twists. There's that beautiful sense of completion when the melody comes home after an excursion. And you listen to that beautiful control and flawless technique, and you have to marvel. And you think "Maybe I should just give up dabbling in artistic endeavour and listen/read/look at people who have real talent?"

The strange thing is, I bought this Coltrane box set (The Classic Quartet -- Complete Impulse! Recordings) about four years ago, when I was at my Amazon-spending peak at Wrox Press, and I've probably only listened to 50% of the music before...but it's beautiful, and complex, and engrossing, and it's like I'm rediscovering it all. Which is wonderful.

I've also been listening to a John Barry anthology -- Themeology -- which is a compilation of film and TV themes, mostly from the 60s and 70s: stuff like Goldfinger, Born Free, The James Bond Theme, Midnight Cowboy, and The Persuaders. If I allow myself, I can be quite touched by the rich nostalgia this music can evoke: it's from a time before I developed a self-conscious sense of what was fashionable or likely to be approved by the...intelligentsia/arbiters of good taste. A time when I could watch Shirley Bassey on a Saturday night TV variety show and see an effervescent, genuine performer giving it all she'd got, and get the sense that she was genuine, and genuinely enjoying what she was doing; a time when I could watch a Carry On film and not have my enjoyment hamstrung by the sexism and crudity. There's something here about innocence and ignorance, about the 'innocent eye', but there's also something that's not nostalgic, and which is about having the capacity to fully enter into something without your intellect getting in the fucking way and stopping you from enjoying it; something about immersing yourself in the moment.

On evenings like this, when I feel relaxed and open, it's a pleasure to find that I still have that capacity for simple immersion and enjoyment, even with my awareness of all the shit everywhere. Huzzah for the self-perpetuating triumph of human hopefulness!

Humble

Been a bit pants at this lately: I keep logging on, but my brain's not coming out to play. Mainly because of this funny head cold/virus thingy, but also because I'm just not quite there creatively: I'm feeling a bit dull-witted and inhibited. Not sure why.

Maybe because of what I've been reading -- first that Einsatzgruppen book -- which got more and more harrowing as it went on -- and now a book about the US eugenics movement in the early 20th century; the author's thrust is that this US movement closely informed the Nazi euthanasia/'national cleansing' philosophy. I haven't got far enough to see how plausibly he makes the case yet, but even reading about the shallow, pseudoscientific value judgements these people -- scientists, legislators, doctors, judges, 'philanthropists' -- made about the 'feeble minded' is disgusting and chilling, and a reminder of what too much power and too little sympathy can result in. (It's called War against the weak, and it's by Edwin Black, who also wrote that IBM and the Holocaust book.)

At times like these, I just need to follow Susan (?) Cameron's advice, and just turn up at the page (or text file editor) and put something down. I'll come back and do that later. (I'm listening to a rather beautiful John Coltrane boxed set at the moment, back to back, and it's making me feel much more mellowed out and Fridayish already.)

It's warm, the birds are frantically making nests, and the rain's brought out the smell of the earth and the pavements. I realise that it's pretty good to be alive in the springtime. (How rapidly can my moods cycle? I'm the Chris Boardman of serotonin release...)

Pillock

Not content with my head being strange and fuzzy (at one point this morning I wanted to twist it off and replace it with something more inert and less internally fizzy), I banged it on a piece of wood: I'd bent down to take some socks out of the bottom drawer, and, as I stood up, I must have swayed a bit -- somehow I managed to bang my left temple on the right hand side of the tall chest of drawers. There's a bit of a bump there, and it's tender (my head, not the drawers).

I wonder if I need a carer? Or whether I should wear my bicycle helmet around the house? (If I'd done it after an evening on the beer, I could understand, but this?)

Must get back to work and distract myself from lying around dozing. I will be better after a good night's sleep, I will be better after a good night's sleep...(etc)

A...

...tchoo!

I was right about that cold. :-(

Synaesthesia

There's a short article in last week's New Scientist about a Swiss musician with synaesthesia (the condition where people experience a crossover between sensory stimuli -- e.g. 'seeing' sounds or 'hearing' colours). This particular individual tastes sound combinations. That is, different pairs of notes (i.e. specific intervals) evoke certain tastes: for example, a major third tastes sweet, a fifth tastes like pure water, and a fourth tastes like mown grass. I must say that I would probably retire as a musician if I was getting a storm of tastes while I was playing in a symphony orchestra (especially as tritones taste of disgust, and minor sevenths taste bitter).

I wonder...I wonder if the same kinds of mechanisms are at work when we associate particular memories/visual images with other types of sensation? For example, when I picture that 'lying down on the playground roundabout and spinning round' game, I get a real sense of dizziness/queasiness.

I also get a 'head spinning' feeling when I smell chlorine: this is because I slipped over at the swimming baths when I was little, banged my head and passed out. I've felt wobbly whenever I've walked on tiles since, and the smell of chlorine is enough to bring back the banged-head-dizziness sensation. Weird.

Clutter

A couple of months ago, I downloaded a nice bit of free software (Mac only, I'm afraid) called Clutter:

Clutter Homepage

This lets you put album cover images of your iTunes music onto your desktop. When you click on the image, it opens up that album in iTunes and plays it back. I love having those album covers on my desktop: it puts me back in touch with the CD/digital music as something concrete and physical, rather than just being a list of files. It also provides a visual history of your musical tastes, from which you can't hide. Fortunately, I'm not really interested in being musically trendy or fashionable...I just like what I like, and I've lived long enough to have had different periods/genres of interests. My Clutter-focused desktop indicates the main streams of music I've been listening to via my Mac in recent months -- W a r n i n g :: 164k file download...

My desktop

Life goes on

Riding to work yesterday morning, it was grey, quite gloomy still, with a chilly, gusty breeze drying out my face. Labouring up to the top of the bridge that spans the West Coast Mainline, I looked up and saw a crow drifting across my eyeline, wings angling into the wind, about five feet above me. I could see the splayed wing feathers, and it was carrying a big knobbly twig (like a Twiglet) in its beak. The crow gave a couple of more vigourous flaps, lifting it up towards the electricity pylons and their overhead wires. I watched it circle upwards, and then saw the nests being built in the highest cross-arms of the pylons: untidy piles of twigs, perched up there in the wind, just feet way from the cables carrying the power. It made me think of how we all adapt to what changes, and how the spring comes round every year and kicks off the hope of new life, and of some kind of redemption/starting over.

Resignation and hope

Overnight, my voice has dropped an octave, and my head has been swapped for a fuzzier one, full of cotton wool. So either I've got a cold, or I've been through an amnesiated alien abduction experience. Whatever. I like to try and resist illnesses, but this one has hooked onto me like the face hugger in the original Alien, so I shall just resign myself to feeling a bit crap for a couple of days...

On the more hopeful side, and caveated with the infamous inaccuracy of the long range weather forecast, I am looking forward to feeling better, because next week looks great:

Warmer

The Editorial Cat Sat on the Editorial Marie Antoinette

There's nothing else to say.

Call for submissions: on the familial transmission of self-denial

At lunch today, my dining companion offered me some of her food as a taster. My ingrained reaction was to say oh, no thank you, even though my gluttony genes were all switched on, fully expressed in the most rapacious phenotypical configurations (ie I did want some).

We talked about where that automated response came from. For me, it's embedded in my implicit childhood training, when the messages I think I got were:

• Don't show off


• Don't make everyone look at you


• Don't show us up [by displaying you childish emotional behaviour]


• Don't be greedy


• Be grateful


• Don't make a fuss

The meta-message I think I inferred from this was: You don't deserve good things; anything good you get is not down to merit, but fraudulence and manipulation. Irrational, of course, and not what my parents intended, but I was young, and I didn't have at my command the sophisticated analytical tools I now have (ahem).

With that irrational foundation securely laid, I could then go on and get it reinforced. An emblematic reinforcement: I had a friend at junior school called Kevin. He had snaggly teeth, and he smelt a bit plasticky, but hey, we were friends. One day, we swapped some things: I gave him a disintegrating rubber monster that sat on the end of a pencil (gonk?), and he gave me a rather snazzy Captain Scarlet portfolio -- a soft plastic wallet with lots of Captain Scarlet goodies inside...pictures, information cards, and so on (all that good listy stuff that collecting-obsessed little boys love). It wasn't a fair trade in financial terms, but we were happy with it: it was one of those 'exchange of items betokening friendship' rituals, I guess, the kind that Hans von Schliefen observed in his 1867 expedition to Eastern Borneo, and which he documented in his seminal book, Die Borneanien und Ihren Freundschaft Mutualische Gegiftengegeben. (I recommend it, it's a classic.)

Sadly, my mum had never heard of von Schliefen (nor Munchhausen), and as soon as she saw me come through the door with my precious new wallet, she said "Where did you get that?" (it was obvious that I couldn't have bought it, as my pocket money was more in the 'one gobstopper and a bag of salt' ballpark. When I told her, she demanded that I "take it straight back".

Ever the dutiful son and rule abider (and anxious not to make a fuss), I set off towards Kevin's estate. The only snag was that I didn't know his address. However, my desire to do as I was told -- and not to be greedy, or keep things that I didn't deserve -- overcame my anxiety about walking around the unfamiliar council estate on the other side of the main road, across the big roundabout. By some fluke, I saw Kevin playing on the grass between the blocks of flats. The late afternoon sun was shining on the white painted metal balcony fences. We had to climb a gloomy concrete staircase to reach Kevin's mum's flat, which smelt of gravy and the hot valves in the TV. He was reluctant to part with his rotting rubber monster (even though another one of its legs had dropped off), but eventually I persuaded him to my mum's point of view.

So I returned home with the rubber monster sticking to my hot palm, and I felt a bit disgruntled. But at least I followed the rules, and didn't have something that I hadn't earned.

Things I don't understand today (1)

1. My automatic behaviour I've been eating really healthily these past few days, and exercising well. Today, though, I woke up a bit lethargic and distractible: I could tell that it would be a day where I might get a bit keyed-up and excitable. But I didn't connect that feeling with my plans for what I should eat and drink -- instead, I went for the things that my body craved. For breakfast, I had (liberally) buttered toast, and then some more toast. Carbs and fat a go-go. I had some coffee, too. Three cups. This all added to my slightly edgy feeling (I reminded myself of the Harry Goldfarb character from Requiem for a Dream -- but four stone heavier). Next up, I had a meeting that contained an element of intense exasperation. When I wrote up the meeting minutes, I was so distracted that I left out a big chunk of stuff, then sent off the minutes without a vital attachment. I decided I needed some fresh air and a cake. (Actually, I didn't consciously decide about the patisserie component -- my body slipped that in under my consciousness' radar umbrella.)
   
   By this stage, as you might gather, I'm starting to feel a bit like a robot, controlled by an embedded logic that I don't have access to. I couldn't get a space in the shops' car park -- it was unusually full, and richly supplied with numpties who couldn't make up their minds where to go. In my wired state, impatience and frustration cut in after 278.4 nanoseconds, and I executed a nifty, scowling three-point turn and headed for Sainsbury's instead. They have an immense car park. On the way back to work, I suddenly felt flooded with well-being...that 'Friday afternoon' sense of peace and well-being, when you know that you're going to have all the time you want to do whatever you like; that feeling you used to get in July when you were a kid, the sense that the whole summer was in front of you, with each day an endless stretch of responsibility-free, sunlit freedom.
   
   I have no idea where that post-Sainsbury's euphoria came from...surely not just the prospect of my snail-shaped Viennese whirl? (These cakes could also double as Princess Leia-style hair extensions: must buy two next time.) Wherever it came from, it made the rest of the afternoon a real pleasure to be in (although I'm sure the people who share the office might disagree). I also lunched on fruit, sushi, and a small sandwich. And a (liberally buttered, of course) hot cross bun. I smelt like a hot cross bun for a while -- there are worse things...
   
   Then, when I got home, I felt a dreary lassitude creeping over me: itchy eyes, achey shoulders, lack of concentration. Odd. Tomorrow I'm back on my bike...maybe I've rapidly become addicted to exercise, and my weird energy oscillations are related to that?


2. My inwardness:I used to be really engaged with the external world -- especially with pub-based socialising, and with politics/activism. I used to be engaged with 'big issues', with changing the world through argument and politics. But that's all slipped away: as this blog demonstrates, my attention is mostly inwardly focused -- navel, fundament, etc. How did that happen?

My cultural week

This week, I have mainly been watching films on DVD: Three Colours: White, and Requiem for a Dream.

I think White is the slightest of the Kieslowski's trilogy, but there's enough in there to satisfy and entertain: luminescent cinematography, lovely depictions of mood and place, and the concreteness of the everyday, re-illumined in new ways by the context and the action. The lead actor was excellent, and Julie Delpy -- a pale porcelain muse -- was beautiful and engaging in an unsympathetic role. It's more of a 'caper' than the other two films, and there was something a bit unsatisfying for me in the way that I never really got a sense of where the intensity of their love came from in the back story. It's still a film that I'll watch repeatedly, though, because of the world of light and image that it conveys: there's lots of cool reflections, snow, and steaming breath.

Requiem is a much more harrowing, downbeat, piece: a relentless nose-rubbing in the pleasures, pains, and banality of addiction, be it TV, drugs, affection or slimming. Excellent ensemble acting by all four leads (Leto, Bursteyn, Wayans and Connelly), and a great sense of conviction and anger. The conviction only wavered for me when the Ellen Bursteyn character is undergoing her hallucination-rich breakdown -- the TV studio material didn't feel as authentic as what surrounded it. Aranofsky has a really original eye, and I particularly like the way he had those repeated flash-cut (terminology?) sequences of addiction to stress its habitual, comforting nature -- the TV onswitch, the diet pills popped, the drugs hit.

Tomorrow I'm off to see Hotel Rwanda in Oxford, and on Saturday I'm going to see a Beethoven/Tippett double bill at the Sheldonian. I'm a bit of a culture tart at the moment.

Wiggy

This is my heavy metal drongo look (for Comic Relief).



It was weird having hair again.

Two good things about this particular Tuesday evening in (very early) spring

1. The male blackbird on the roof ridge opposite my garret room window. His yellow-orange beak has a dull luminosity in the dusk, and he's singing his little heart out: that fluting, fluid, plangent song echoing through clear air, and which sounds like a summer evening. It convinces me that spring can't be that far away. I guess he's singing variations on "you looking at my bird?" and "get off my manor" -- but I'll let that ride, and hang on to my romantic image (you can never have too many of those)


2. Lying in a hot bath, reading a book, after a chilly, breezy ride home. Hearing the creme bath's bubbles rustling and popping as the walls of their tiny spheres dissolve into water and air. Thasssss ressssssssfull...
   

Fused

Andy's brain refuses to be creative.

Won't come out of the corner of the cardboard box it's hiding in, despite promise of choccie treats and an extra walk round the block. Sticks its nose into the dark corner, shuts its eyes, whimpers like a new puppy that wants its mum and siblings.

Decides to have early night and recharge batteries.

Will check on puppy status in the morning. (Hope its heart-rending yelps don't reach from downstairs and keep me awake all night. You have to be cruel to be kind in the early days.)

Ahhhh...

Dying

Hm. Mortality kept crossing my mind this weekend, particularly when I was out and about on my bike, and when I was feeling -- ironically -- full of life and energy, and feeling my body and brain returning to the states of alert and fitness that I want them to have.

Mortality means thinking about your aged relatives, and surprising yourself (again) with the intellectual certainty that they will die, probably before you. I confess that my brain tries to protect me from this reality, and that I think (at some level) that we're all going to live forever, like this, and that our happy state will not pass away. Sometimes, though, a bit of clarity seeps into my conscious mind, and I remember that they -- and I -- will die. I'm glad that that thought isn't in the forefront of my mind all the time.

Mortality also means looking at yourself, and at what you've achieved in your life, and at what you want to do. In the same way that I surprise myself by remembering that we have to die, I also get taken aback when I remember what my age is. 42. 42!? Surely not. And yet it is so. After being taken aback, I get a bit scared, and think "Fuck, I'd better crack on and start doing the important stuff that I want to do before I die...like writing those bloody novels that are doing circuits in my mind...". And I feel a tremendous sense of waste, and of urgency, and I feel galvanised into action -- there's so much to do, and so little time... But then I tend to think, "Tomorrow, I'll start that tomorrow...I've got this cooking and ironing to do, and I should go out on my bike, too, for fitness' sake."

You have to wonder, though, how many more tomorrows you might have.

There's an Ezra Pound poem I remember (ish):

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
      Not shaking the grass

Although he was a deplorable fascist, he said it better than me.

Good News

On Friday 11th March:

Sunrise 6:31 (GMT)
Sunset 18:00 (GMT)

Yippee!

Skittering

There's something moving about in the loft, a few feet above my head. Mouse? Bird? Compact psychopathic killer?

I hear these noises occasionally. If it's in the middle of the night, when you've just woken up, it's a bit startling.

Makes me think of egg shells, feathers, tiny bones: dry, scratchy, delicate things, rustling against dry wood and plaster. And beady little eyes with a faint sheen of light on them.

Please sir, I want some more.

There are some things I don't do enough of, and which I enjoy:

• Buying cut flowers and sticking 'em in a vase: tulips, I like a lot -- they're so elegant and beautifully shaped, and they retain their dignity, even in an advanced state of decay; irises -- I love the rich purple, with the yellow, white and black (?), especially those little spotty bits that look like leopard skin; lilies, with their penetrating scent and silky smooth petals, and that wonderful crisp structure and rigidity.


• Singing aloud.


• Making curry sauce: I love that mixed, fragrant sizzle when the garlic, ginger and chillies hit the hot oil...especially on a summer Saturday evening, with the kitchen window open, and the sound of neighbours laughing in their gardens.


• Burning scented candles. Especially vanilla flavoured ones.


• Feeling strong: I've got soft and flabby since my bike accident. I need the daily burn of exercise, and the endorphin-rich brain of a healthy person. I want my legs to feel like they're coiled springs, or pistons, rather than like wobbly columns of porridge.

Sort it out, Corsham.

Privilege

I had a traditional late-Saturday-evening-watching-Match-of-the-Day last night, pleasantly full of Merlot and pistachios. Although I don't have any candles burning for Arsenal, it did strike me how lucky we've been to have seen Thierry Henry in his prime: a wonderfully gifted player, and (seemingly) a good role model, too.

Everything passes (no pun intended).

Velocipedic Faux-profundities

I cycled into Oxford this afternoon to visit Blackwell's (I love buying books after pay day, and it's been a while since I've felt flush enough to treat myself). I wanted to buy some history books and memoirs -- stuff that feeds into my novel. I got the things I wanted: rather gloomy tracts about prejudice, war, and memory. If I'm to get back to work on the novel properly, I need to have my head in a miserable space for a while...a place where I'm up to my neck in the language of persecution, mass murder, and the bureaucratic banalities of killing. (So my blog might not be much fun for a while.)

Riding along the Woodstock Road in the sunshine, with hardly any traffic on the road, I hallucinated a better world: one where I lived in a city where there were no cars, and where the transportation system was bicycle-centred; there'd be miles and miles of cycle tracks -- properly integrated ones, which weren't interrupted every fifty yards, which were properly maintained and respected, and which didn't have stupid cambers, crumbling edges, or dangerous potholes. A better world, where fuckwit drivers of prestige German automobiles didn't park in the cycle lane and force you out into the traffic, and where people didn't open their car doors just as you reach them.

You can probably tell that my imagined better world bore little resemblance to the very concrete, crumbly, potholed, uneven, rutted, and fuckwit driver-infested reality I encountered on today's journey.

A more positive effect of this cold-but-sunny ride was the realisation that I'd like to move into Oxford proper when my current rental terminates. I've been a village boy for the past few years, but those broad north Oxford streets, the easily accessible bookshops and eateries, and the promise of weekend mornings in cafes are persuading me that it's about time I gave city living another shot. (When I moved out of London, I wanted peace and quiet and solitude, but now I'm turning back towards noise, bustle, extraversion and engagement. I'd like to move there right now, actually, while the thought's fresh and the spirit is willing.

It would be lovely to wander around a city again in the evening, with all the lights coming on, and the bars and restaurants filling up and coming to life. OK, I'm bored with the country life now.

Displacement Activity?

I really enjoy doing this blogging thing...thinking about what to write, or just launching in and seeing what old rubbish emerges. It's also good to have a sense that some people other than me might read and enjoy it. So that's all good.

On the down side, I wonder if this is (was) actually an unconscious displacement activity -- a relatively easy way of doing my creative thing, while keeping me from the discipline and focus that my novel needs if it is to keep moving. (Or even start moving again, given its current catatonia.)

That said, there's no reason why the two activities can't coexist: I just need to find -- no, make -- the time to fit in concentrated, regular work on the novel. I've got out of the habit, and I know full well that I do things best when I immerse myself in them and do them regularly.

So...I need to come up with a plan for how I'm going to make that happen, starting Sunday. (I think the essential thing is that I need to start living in the novel's mental world again...immersion, immersion, immersion...)

A Confession

Back in the early 90s, when I was an (old) Labour party member, I voted for Tony Blair in the leadership election after John Smith died.

I'm sorry.

Gloom

Goldfish Boy (reprise)

Did I tell you that I thought my memory was deteriorating?

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Goldfish Boy

I'm sure my memory's deteriorating.

She said she'd do it, and she did: fed me a line in a meeting that gave me my 'in' to use the 'global minky trousers in a chunky monkey autonomous trouser press' phrase (and win a fiver, too). And, like a kipper, I missed it -- the set up went straight over my head. Twonk.

Feeling Sick

I'm feeling a bit queasy this evening. It's nothing to do with all the chocolate I've eaten today, and I don't think it's the after-effects of the week-old curry I dug out of the fridge last night (there were enough chillies in it to preserve a dead dolphin).

The cause of my sickliness is a bout of hysterical chair spinning in the office this afternoon: this was an experiment to test the efficacy of the spin-counterspin (SCS) technique in combating spin-induced dizziness. I was not a participant, only an observer. (As an observer, I have to note -- with some sadness -- that no protective elbow pads or goggles were worn.)

The reason this made me feel a bit dizzy was that it brought to mind a game we used to play in the park when I was a kid: you'd lay on your belly on the roundabout, your head towards the outside, and one of your mates would scoot the roundabout up to high speed before jumping on and taking up a similar position to the rest of you. Typically there'd be four of us, evenly distributed around the roundabout's disc. One of you would have a lolly stick, which you'd set down on the tarmac, half under the spinning roundabout's platform. The game was to pick this up on the next revolution, then put it down again somewhere else. And the cycle kept repeating until the roundabout slowed and stopped. I can't remember if there was any way of winning.

I can remember how it used to make me feel, though: dizzy, sick, wobbly-legged. And all the high frequencies seemed to drop out of my hearing, leaving just a muddy slurring of sounds in my ears.

I can feel a strange swirling behind my eyes, even just thinking about it and remembering it...the horrible dizziness and nausea I only get now when I've had way too much to drink (increasingly rare, thankfully. How does the memory (just synaptic firing patterns) evoke that sense feeling? Odd. It's one of the most vivid memories of my late childhood. I also remember that I didn't want to play that game, because it made me feel so horrible. But I had to play, initially because me fear of being thought a cissy was greater than my fear of vomiting. Later, it was the fear of an intensely bullying 'friend' that forced me to join in -- I couldn't go against his wishes, or something terrible would happen. But that's another story, and not something I can write about while all these spots are circling in front of my eyes. Yech...

Colonel Mustard's Place

(aka the conservatory)

When I was sitting in that snowy-roofed conservatory yesterday morning, there was a little battle going on in my mind...a tug of war between hope and resignation.

I like my own space in the morning. Space to relax, and prepare myself for the day. (This was particularly apparent to me on this week's course, but I realise that it holds true generally, too -- that's why I like getting in to work early...to 'set myself'.)

So...the hotel conservatory was a good place to do that: I could stare intently off into the distance, a cup of coffee resting on my knee, and nobody would disturb me. (Even if they did disturb me, I'd soon see them off with a tight smile and my cutting disdain.)

I like what a glass conservatory roof does: creates a bright, light space, with some nice slopes, and a space where the light cuts across the room in ways that windows-in-the-wall can never do. That light opens everything up, seems to bathe you in an unusual brightness. I confess that these simple tricks of light lift my mood, make me feel like I could be different, and do different things. Breath fills my lungs.

On the other hand, conservatory architecture reminds me of one of the most miserable periods of my life: the time when I edited two new book series into existence, with tight deadlines and inadequate supporting resources. I sat at a makeshift desk in the conservatory of a rented house, editing text and testing code that I barely understood.

The upshot of which was...I spent a lot of time in the winter/spring of 1999/2000 working at home; during the day, during the evening, at weekends -- driven by some weird perfectionist sense of wanting to make these books as great as they could be. (I remember working on an ActionScript chapter 2nd edit until 02:30 one Sunday morning. I'd never heard Bob Harris all the way through...)

The broader idea here is how a particular image -- the conservatory -- can embody an internal struggle: between light and dark; between hope and regret; between optimism and pessimism.

The thing I like to remember is that one of those books was great. and the other one was not bad. (The 'great' book is still being technically -- but not structurally -- revised every time the base software changes. That makes me proud of the job I did.

All that stuff goes through my head whenever I sit in a conservatory.

Absence makes...

Just a brief dribble today: I'm knackered, and I'm going to watch "Three Colours: White" in a minute. This will help me unwind and refresh. It may even cleanse and moisturise. (If only you could get a tube of stuff that performed those functions for your brain...)

Popped into work this evening on my way home from the last day of my course. (I'm such a child: I really wanted to pick up the goodies that had been delivered for me -- new phone, plus book/CD packages from Amazon. I love getting parcels full of intellectual and aesthetic gorgeousness.) Anyway...it surprised me how good it felt to be back in that building: lots of smiling, familiar faces. Aw...

It was also noticeable how the sun is higher in the sky at that time of the evening -- standing by my desk, lovely parcels in hand, I was bathed in a warm wash of orange before-sunset light. I struck a pose, my angular cheekbones casting early evening shadows. Nobody noticed, damnit.

Introvert

It's official: I am an introvert. Conclusive proof has been provided this week in two ways:

1. I've been spending a lot of time with an extravert, and their flood of chatter and (attempted) direction of my actions has worn me out -- it's like being under a hailstorm of noise that won't let up. I fix my grin and grit my teeth, but it's hard work not to say please be quiet for a bit.


2. Being in the course environment all day has meant that it's difficult to find time and space for myself: this makes me realise that being with other people all the time drains energy out of me. (Look like Jung got that energising/sapping thing right).

I was thinking about this this morning, as I sat in the hotel conservatory, watching the wet snow splosh down onto the wet glass roof: I've always felt like this -- at big (or small) social gatherings when I was a kid, I was always looking forward to them being over, and to getting back to my house, my room, where I could be alone with a book, or a favourite toy. For a long time, in my teens and later, this preference made me feel as though there was something wrong with me -- cultural and peer pressures are to be sociable and outgoing. I remember going on a boozy weekend to a wind-swept holiday camp with a load of fellow shift-workers in the early 1980s. I drank bitter heroically in the seafront pub, having a wonderful time talking, laughing, and putting all the Abba songs on the jukebox to irritate the 'hip' boys. We walked back to the holiday camp in a straggly crocodile, and I played my usual crowd-pleasing clown role by jumping into the swimming pool, fully clothed, and full of beer (for extra buoyancy).

An hour or so later, a little switch tripped in my head, and I knew that I needed to be on my own for a bit. So I said goodnight and headed off for my plywood and bitumen chalet. After a while (in bed, after towelling myself dry), I could hear giggling voices outside, encouraging me to come outside and stop being such a miserable git. But I'd had enough extraverting for one day, so I carried on dozing.

Did my peers -- my friends -- respect my desire for the introvert's quiet space? Did they fuck. Next thing I knew, I woke up in my bed, but outside the chalet, on the strip of grass between the blocks of buildings. The sky's getting light, the birds are chirruping, and my hair is damp with dew.

That kind of made me feel like my desire for peace was somehow abnormal. I'm over it now, though, and I know that it's OK to do what makes me feel comfortable and happy.

I don't know how they got me outside without waking me up. Respeck.

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Ironic, naturally

My 'strangelandscape' blog title is ironic, of course: it's not strange, and it's not a landscape. How could it be strange? -- I'm a pretty quiet, mainly safety-seeking bloke who's lived a pretty narrow life.

I'm an overpolite, conservative (small 'c'), forty-two year old middle class male who's never lived abroad, and who's spent less than four months out of Britain in 42 years. I've always lived within 100 miles of my birthplace. I've never been married or had children. I've never had a motorbike. I've never written a string quartet (and doubt I ever will). I've never climbed a mountain, and I have never been to a desert. The only substantial bodies of water I've swum in are the North Sea, the English Channel, the Bristol Channel, and the Pacific. I have never eaten a chocolate-covered insect (at least, not knowingly).

I have never drunk Pina Colada, nor got caught in the rain while doing so.

I haven't had any near-death experiences (touch wood). I have never been flabbergasted by someone making a (long suppressed) declaration of love for me, and neither have such long-suppressed declarations of my own been rewarded with a reciprocal declaration. I haven't been to the top of the Empire State building. I haven't been to China. I have been to me, though.

My horizons are narrower than I'd like.

None of this is bad, and it doesn't make me angry with myself. It's just an observation.

How could my blog be exotic and strange? It couldn't, could it?

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My Time as a Life Traveller

Just popped back from 2007 to let you know that I posted the first post on this subject in 1932. It was raining. There may be other posts on this subject still worming their way through space...

;-)

My Life as a Time Traveller

Hm. Is it really only Tuesday evening? I've been on a course for the last two days (with two more to come), and I think the variation from my usual routine has made my sense of temporal displacement go a bit wonky (and I've lost track of time, too...) It may be something to do with the fact that the unfamiliar stimuli (new knowledge/concentrating on stuff for seven hours a day) are confusing my brain...that, and the light continuing to change. Whatever it is, it's left me feeling knackered. And I feel like it should be at least Thursday night.

And...I don't like having my evenings 'stolen' by homework, even when I know that the course will benefit me personally and professionally. How childish am I? (Don't answer that...I still happen to be in touch with my 'inner teenager', and he's a stroppy little bleeder -- though lovable.)

A W O L

My words and muse seem to have gone missing -- anybody seen them? Think I need an early night.

French Vocabulary

As I'm off to Paris in less than a month (yea!), I need to practice my French, so that I won't look like a pillock to any judgemental Parisians I interact with. Let's review what I've learned in the previous 42 years:

• Oui, non, maintenant, le, la.


• Ou et le sange? Le sange et dans l'arbre


• Un Kronenbourg, S'il vous plait.


• Deux Kronenbourg, S'il vous plait.


• Amelie


• Belleville Rendezvous


• Troi Kronenbourg, S'il vous plait. Pression.

I may need to add a few more phrases. There's plenty of time. Really.

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