I spend a large portion of my life cosseted in my little ‘office’. It is actually the smallest of four bedrooms in our current house, but furnished with everything I need to concoct my daily shenanigans: I have a laptop, I have a printer and I have music – without which I could not function on any level – I have a room filled with bits of me and mine, and the time has come for me to pack it all away in preparation for the big move.
The office at the new house is an actual office, it is bigger than here and separate from the house, and I am now looking around me wondering “will I be able to fill it?” Oh dear me, yes. Let’s take a little look around. My shelves are full of CD’s – several hundred – books – ditto – DVD’s – thirtyish – and assorted crap (Victorian bottles, photographs, mugs – mostly containing pens – ukulele, Nerf gun, various stationery requisites, a brass sun-dial, a Marmite jar, a mini-drone, a remote-controlled Meccano car, a spelter chimpanzee staring at a human skull (not real), a plaster duck, a hand-forged nail and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.) In addition to the aforementioned laptop and printer, my desk houses a telephone, a fan, three reading lamps, two metal tins (containing more crap) 3 more mugs (containing more pens) a red plastic tray filled with scrap paper – for hand writing my (s)crap on – Sellotape, rulers, scissors, a globe, a book of Longfellow’s Poems (largely unread) and a microscope. My walls are bedecked with paintings, prints, a ‘stolen’ Wishbone Ash setlist signed by Andy Powell, guitars (real), guitars (photo’s of), guitars (models of), two now eerily empty cork boards, a giant brass lizard and a graduation photograph which has been turned to face the wall. It is all heading for boxes.
It will, of course, all find its way – via the auspices of the removals men – into the new, bigger office, but weirdly, now it is boxed, it all appears to take up much more space than it did before. It also weighs much more. I begin (in a fashion that even I find hard to explain) to understand the theory behind Black Holes I fear that a small tug on the parcel tape upon arrival at its destination may release another universe. One filled with even more rubbish than this one. I wonder how everything I have removed from this little space will fit into my new larger one. In a panic of doubt I typed ‘Quantum Mechanics’ into Google, only to find that it is a car repairer in Hull. My nerves were not calmed.
My wife told me to calm down and think it through – “Have you been eating that strong cheese again?” – “space”, she said, “is not relative” (I paraphrase. She actually said “What?” and pulled the kind of face that I last saw on Kim Kardashian when faced with a Rubik’s Cube) “what fits into a small space must perforce fit into a large one”. I thought, for a fleeting moment, that she might just be right, but then I started to think about shaving foam. I mean, imagine trying to get that back into the tube after you’d let it out – especially through that tiny little hole in the nozzle…
I was sitting on the floor trying to come to terms with the magnitude of it all – aided, I must admit, by chocolate – when she looked back in through the door. I think she ‘tutted’ (although it could have been thunder). “Do I have to pack the stuff in my office drawers?” I asked, hoping not to convey the complete helplessness I was feeling. “No,” she said. “The removal man said that we can leave everything in the drawers.” “Thank God for that,” I said. “I don’t think the Universe is ready for my drawers.” “I know how it feels,” she said…
Please note, in keeping with government policy, elderly people in the UK can no longer be referred to as ‘Pensioners’, ‘Old Age Pensioners’ or ‘Senior Citizens’. Henceforth the official designation is ‘A Drain on the Economy’…
I can’t pretend that it didn’t come as something of a shock to wake up and find that I was no longer affected by gravity.
There was nothing particularly amiss, except that the hand which habitually found its way under my head when I slept was there as always, but it was not touching the pillow. I put my hand down to find that the mattress was definitely underneath me, but my body was some inches above it. I threw the duvet to one side and, unencumbered by the weight of the bedding, floated gently towards the ceiling. This was not the start to the day I had anticipated. I wanted to believe that I was dreaming, but somehow I knew that I was not. My God, that ceiling needed painting.
I flipped myself over and looked down to the bed. Nothing untoward there. All was as it should have been. I looked around the room, but there were no clues to be found. Whatever was wrong here was wrong with me. I pushed myself from the ceiling and glided with pleasing ease towards the bed-head which I grabbed gratefully. I needed time to think. I knew I needed coffee, but I had no idea how I would drink it.
I clambered around the room like a pyjama clad climber traversing some kind of self-assembly rock face. Occasionally I would lose my footing and find my feet dangling uselessly above me until I could find a drawer or a cupboard door in which to anchor them. Eventually I found my way to the wardrobe and an old rucksack which I stuffed with shoes, a pair of mono-lensed binoculars and a 1957 edition of Old Moore’s Almanac (foxed, but sound) and put it on my back, where it provided just enough ballast to weigh me down, although even with the weight on my back I found myself walking with exaggerated care, feeling that any stumble would once again have me ‘falling’ towards the ceiling.
In the kitchen I made coffee. The water still poured downwards, the milk still dribbled down my arm from the carelessly torn carton lip and the pieces of the cup that dropped from my fumbling fingers still cascaded across the floor and stayed there. The basic laws of gravity, it appeared, applied to everything but me.
For a while I had great fun, removing the rucksack and throwing myself, astronaut-like, around the house before adjusting the weight I strapped onto my back to allow me to hover just inches from the floor like a yogic flyer, like Wile E Coyote in the split second before the inevitable plummet. I worked out that by using my winter duvet I could pretty well anchor myself to the bed whilst, with my summer one I could hover some two feet above it, laying back as if in some imaginary hammock. I realised that if I were to ever have sex again, my positional variations would be seriously compromised. Within about a day I had got to grips with almost everything I needed to do about the house: as long as I wore my ‘ballast’ I could conduct my life pretty much as I always had; I weighed myself down with bedding at night time, content in the knowledge that, if I accidentally threw it off, the worst that could happen would be for me to wake up on the ceiling, cold possibly – although it always felt slightly warmer up there – and now I thought about it, not quite touching the Artex. Perhaps I might scratch my nose, but there would be no permanent damage. I laid a dressing gown by my bedside with a house brick in each pocket: just sufficient to hold me down for a nocturnal toilet visit. It wouldn’t be too bad. And then I started to think about leaving the house…
What would happen if I inadvertently placed my rucksack on the seat beside me on the bus, if I took my shoes off, if I dropped my phone? Achieving the exact balance between floating gently away and being crushed to the ground was crucial. And there were so many things I couldn’t easily do with a weighted backpack. Would I, so encumbered, for instance remain weightless in the swimming pool or would I sink like a stone? I thought about the possibilities of having lead-lined clothes made, but I had no idea of where to start. I checked the Next website, but there was no such option there. I pictured myself spending the rest of my life in a deep-sea diver’s wetsuit. I worried about where I might go if not weighed down: would I reach an altitude at which I would ‘stabilize’ and bob about happily with only commercial aeroplanes to worry about, or would I simply continue to rise out of the Earth’s atmosphere and off into space? I felt that I would still need to breathe, but could I ever be sure about anything anymore? Instinctively I knew that I could never reveal my problem to anybody without becoming some kind of circus freak: Science baffled by amazing floating man – I did not want to be prodded and investigated. I had absolutely no wish to become a living Believe it or Not. I had no desire to become anybody’s secret weapon. I would stay at home, order food in, speak to no-one…
But day by day, my need for basic human contact grew and with it, for no reason I could understand, my entire lightness of being. Each day I needed a gram or two more weight in my pockets than the day before to restore my contact with the ground and soon the effort of it all began to weigh me down – although not, unfortunately, in the way I might have hoped. I closed my curtains and allowed myself to float around the house, suddenly acutely aware of every little draught. I discovered a semi-permanent ‘gulf stream’ that would waft me effortlessly along the hallway and into the kitchen where, with a toe hooked underneath the tap, I could reach the fridge, the pot noodles, the microwave and everything else I needed to survive. I no longer bothered to anchor myself to the bed for sleeping but merely allowed myself to drift away wherever I happened to be. My dreams were of walking, of tripping over and skinning my knees; of lying on a beach and feeling the waves wash across me. My nightmares were of looking down on it all.
Somehow I knew that if I had a psychiatrist to speak to, they would tell me to just get out more, meet new people, to lighten up, which would, in the circumstances, have been singularly unhelpful. My mind was occupied with nothing but my predicament, there was no room for solutions. And yet it was on one particularly bleak evening that I saw my future – how it could be and how I could bear it to be – and I made my decision. Today I will open the door to my house shorn of all unnecessary counterweight, I will face the world and I will let the universe decide what will be. I must just let myself go. The sky’s the limit…
This little idea dropped into my head at the start of a long, four hour drive and I struggled to hold onto it all the way. It seemed to be full of hopelessness as I started to write it down, but it brightened up in the end…
I, to a similar degree as anyone else who over the last demi-century has ever attempted to shine a flickering (and lately, dying) light on to the eccentricities of the human condition, owe a deep debt of gratitude to the great Alan Coren: major wag and literary (as well as ‘literally a’) genius – for revealing to me, with frightening clarity and seeming ease, the heights to which I cannot even aspire. His gift for turning the mundane into something quite exotic with nothing more than a few hundred immaculately chosen words is, IMHO, unrivalled in the English language. His mastery in the art of wringing mirth from the bottomless pit of normality is something I have always sought to emulate, but never hoped to match. He was the very best at what I do so inexpertly, but his mastery of form and line gave me the impetus to at least try to, one day, write something worthwhile. He is, along with Spike Milligan, the writer I would most like to be like and consequently the writer I have to try the hardest not to be like.
Of course, his normality was never quite my own. He was a successful columnist, magazine editor and television personality. I am not. Things happened to him – often in exotic locations. They do not happen to me. I cannot relate the story of, for instance, losing a brand new cashmere coat at the Garrick because, frankly, I can afford neither. I can, reveal a little of my skill at losing tickets for things after I have left them to go for a wee, and my subsequent battles to be allowed back in, but it’s not quite the same: such incidents might be normal to me but unfortunately, even with the eccentricities of my telling, they are probably normal to everyone else as well. Nothing special.
A.C. came to mind because I have just realised how I use two of his words – he attempted, and failed, to get them attributed to him in the Oxford English Dictionary – ‘wossname’ and ‘narmean’ far more than I probably should, but they amuse me and they allow me to very quickly portray a character without ever having to actually… describe them. Someone who spends his entire wossname, life, searching for the meaning of it is unlikely to ever find it, narmean?
I started to wonder if I could lay claim to any words of my own. I remember on many occasions having used words that Spellcheck is quite adamant do not exist. The problem is that, in general, I only ever use them once, and the rest of the world not at all. That they are not admissible demonstrates to me a hidebound adherence to outmoded custom that does the OED no credit: that a word once made up on the grounds that it sounded just right at the time, should need to be used more than once and by other people before it can enter the wossname, dictionary, is anachronistic… I think.
…And as I wondered, I began to realise that all this introspection would not put the kettle on the hob: that I had work to do of my own. Five hundred words worth to be precise (or imprecise if I’m honest for, though my aim is for five hundred, my eventual shot normally takes me much nearer to six). It’s all very well recognising my own shortcomings, but it’s far better to do it after I’ve written the post for the day. All I needed, it transpired, was a suitable starting point: somewhere to launch the tarradiddle whence I could watch on with curious detachment as it drifted off to where… and why? Easier said than done apparently. Each attempt to step nonchalantly from the pier-end onto the boat destined to drift me serenely and amusingly to the bottom of the page, left me up to my neck in the rising tide. The surface of a body of water, I have found, is always best when viewed from above. Knowing where I don’t want to go does not make it any easier to get to where I do want to go, especially when I don’t actually know where that is. Great journeys, it occurs, need meticulous planning but, if you’re only going to the end of the road to find out whether last year’s bargain shoes still turn your toes blue, it’s ok to busk it a bit.
I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t always know what I’m trying to say, but I go ahead and say it anyway… and I think there must be some kind of a word for that.
Things were not quite as Gerald had expected. Trouble was, Gerald didn’t really know what he had expected. The coach was lovely. Real luxury job: air-conditioning, on-board video, tea making facilities, proper flushing loo….. Looked almost brand new too. He had to admit that he hadn’t really taken it in as he got on. He didn’t know what colour it was. Somehow he couldn’t even remember seeing it from the outside at all. He remembered climbing up the steps and being surprised by all the happy faces. He had been the last person to get on and all but one of the seats were already occupied. He had walked the length of the coach to reach the seat, the other half of which was occupied by an angular-looking elderly lady. He had taken in the welcoming smiles of everyone aboard as he had made his way along, but he had paid particular attention to the face of the person with whom he would be sharing a seat.
The face was angular, but not hard. Its lines were softened by an almost permanent smile. They had hit it off almost at once. She giggled and laughed throughout their conversation, her face occasionally breaking into an almost childish grin. She clearly enjoyed every aspect of her life. She spoke lovingly of her family; of her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She spoke too of her mother and father, and it seemed strange to him that she made no distinction between those who came before and those who came after her. She pronounced upon them all with obvious affection, but with a curious distance which he did not quite understand. She became reticent only when he asked about her own life. “You must ask others about me,” she had said and would be drawn no further. Still she smiled. He became intrigued, wanting to ask questions and expecting to receive the kind of answers he knew he had no right to expect from so new an acquaintance. The close proximity of fellow travellers always engendered such curiosity within him. She spoke quietly, warmly, but carefully, refusing to become irritated by what he knew was his over-persistence. He felt ashamed at his ignorance yet angered by his own shame. She listened attentively, answered quietly, speaking with an aura of certain knowledge, and the smile, an expression of pure serenity, lingered.
And then silence fell between them. Not suddenly, but softly, like the dying leaves of autumn. Like a gossamer blanket, it smothered confrontation and quelled exasperation. It did not put a space between them, but drew them somehow closer together, like an invisible thread, yielding, but unbroken. It was a silence unburdened by guilt or envy. A silence without rancour. A silence between friends.
Gerald gazed through the window as the countryside sped by. He was unable to remember when he had become aware that the coach was moving. It seemed always to have been so. He did not recognise any of the landscape through which they were travelling, but he was not troubled. He tried to focus his mind, to envision his destination, but he could not. He tried, in vain, to recollect his reasons for being here, heading….. where? And where was he travelling from? How could he not know? How could he not care? Strange, but his mind had always been so acute before… before?
Some strange Mystery Tour this, when, having driven for hours through an alien and indistinct landscape, he found himself being toured around the streets of his youth. He was amazed at how much he remembered: every house, every street corner, every face. He was intrigued to find that everyone else felt the same. How little things had changed.
Children played in streets, curiously devoid of traffic. The coach travelled quickly, but the children seemed almost unaware of its presence. They rode antiquated bicycles with asymmetrical wheels, wooden scooters with nailed-on pram wheels, and shared roller skates, two to a pair. They played cricket with a scrap of wood and a ball of newspaper bound with sellotape. They played football with a bald and punctured tennis ball. They played Hare-and-hounds, chasing around the streets, in and out of high-walled back yards, over part-demolished houses and derelict factories. It looked like a bomb site.
Familiar smells assailed his senses. Smells that brought back fragments of memory. Displaced and disjointed, but with a clarity that startled. The morning must of a used gazunder, damp clothes drying by a smouldering coal fire, bacon fat and beef dripping. Boiled cabbage. The warm, almost sweet, odour of damp walls and carpets, dark coal-houses, cool rain on hot concrete. Boiled cabbage. Oft-worn, unwashed woollen socks, the wooden floors of school house, school meals. And cabbage, cabbage, cabbage. Each fragrance carried a picture, like a photograph; sharply focused, brightly coloured, a moment frozen in time. The images over-laden with emotion; pleasure, pain and heart-ache, so that it seeped from them and overwhelmed him more acutely than the present. Yet with it all came a sense of warmth and well-being, a feeling that, come what may, all would be well. And cabbage.
Around him his fellow passengers stared into the middle distance, each caught in their own reverie, dreaming their own dreams, recalling their own past-lives. How could such a disparate bunch share such common memories? What was it about coach travel that encouraged such nostalgia and introversion? How strange that the general hum of conversation that had filled the bus throughout the opening miles of the journey, should have died so suddenly. It was as if a switch had been thrown. Conversation on/ conversation off. All communication drowned in a sea of remembrance and boiled cabbage.
Beside him the old lady (Why hadn’t he asked her name whilst she was still awake?) breathed softly and slowly. He could see the peace behind her eyes and he envied such tranquillity. He surveyed her features as if for the first time. They no longer seemed angular. They were strong; calm and assured. Reassuring in a way, but not angular. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her as he had first seen her, how long ago? He tried to assemble her face, like a police ‘photo-fit’, but she would not form. He kept seeing his own mother, his own grandmother, his wife and he could not tell them one from another. The features mingled, softened and became as one with his fellow passenger, so that he had to shake his head to try and clear the image from behind his eyes. He felt nervous. Hair rose on the back of his neck, his cheeks flushed, heat prickled along his back. Why could he not remember? He concentrated his mind, attempting to create a mental picture of somebody, anybody, from his life, but all he could see was a single conglomeration of everyone he had ever known. When he opened his eyes and looked into those of his sleeping neighbour he saw the same face and he knew that behind her darkling eyelids, the face that she was seeing was his.
His mind whirled with bewilderment and he began to feel panic welling inside him. Why did he feel so confused? Why did he find it so difficult to remember his reasons for being aboard this coach? Where was he going, where was he coming from? How could a normal, well adjusted person forget such fundamentals? Perhaps he was dreaming. This journey had all the ingredients of a dream, but somehow he knew that it was real.
All his life had been like this. Lurching from one uncertainty to another. Never knew whether he was coming or going, his mum had said. God, she’d be rubbing her hands together if she was here with him today. He could almost hear her, “I told you so.”
The old lady stirred beside him, sighed deeply and stretched her creaking limbs. She saw him staring at her and smiled. “What’s your name?” he asked. He was aware that he should have given her time to collect her thoughts, to wake peacefully and gather her senses, but he had to know. He had to know now.
“Is it really so important to you?”
“At the moment, yes, I think it is.”
“Do you know why?”
He shook his head sadly and gazed beyond her and through the window to the trees and fields and buildings that flew past in a hazy blur. He could see nothing, yet he could see it all. “Why am I so confused?”
“Sssh,” she said. “Watch the video.”
The video screen glowed into life. “How did you know? Have you been on this trip before?”
“I think you understand at least, that you can make this journey only once.” He did know that. He did not know why.
“Perhaps some of us have more time to prepare,” she said.
He raised his eyes to the screen above his head, it was alive with colours. They swirled and twisted, forming convoluted patterns of light and texture. Familiar sounds surrounded him, overlaid and entwined; a cacophony of noise, overwhelming and enveloping. Slowly, but slowly, both sight and sound resolved, reformed and coalesced into something recognizable. The pictures were of the streets through which they had passed earlier in the day. The sounds were the same. It was as if the journey had been filmed and was now being shown on the bright video screen. Only the pictures were brighter, even clearer. He was certain he could detect the smells. Cabbage. And he could see faces. He could see his own face in amongst the children, hear his own voice. The pictures overwhelmed his senses, the sounds reverberated inside his head. His whole life was there before him.
With a huge effort of will he dragged his eyes away from the screen and looked at those around him. Each of them was watching the ‘movie’ with the same mixture of fascination and bewilderment etched upon their faces. He knew that what they were seeing were scenes from their own lives’ and that they too were just beginning to understand the full implications of this journey. He was overwhelmed with the realisation, and yet he was at peace. He knew that soon this transition would be ending, the expedition over. He could not comprehend the nature of his destination, but he knew it was a place from which he would never want to leave.
He turned to the old lady and she saw understanding in his eyes. She smiled, as she had smiled when they first met, minutes, hours, a life-time ago.
“Muriel,” she said. “My name is Muriel.”
First Published 16.11.2019
I don’t even remember why I first wrote this, but I do remember that it lay around, unused for quite a while before I showed it to Crispin Underfelt who liked it. So I used it…
Image created by AI based on the phrase ‘Oo-de’lally’. Answers on a postcard please.
I would love to have something – anything – insightful to say about anything – something – but such thoughts as I have are seldom more than flotsam & jetsam (the long-absent Crispin Underfelt once explained to me the difference between them and if you were to contact him – mayhap with a plea to get his sorry ass back on this platform more regularly – I am sure he would probably do the same for you) tossed on the seething froth of the storm-lashed waters that slosh between my ears. Sadly, I do not. If I’m honest, I find it hard to believe that I have anything to say that has not been said, let alone thought, by somebody before me. Check out virtually any memorable saying and its notable sayer on the internet and you will almost certainly find out that somebody else actually said it first.
I am a little tawdry in my reading habits. My ‘schedule’ is easily deflected at the whim of wife, children, grandchildren, sunshine, peanuts and cider, anything that pricks at my curiosity. I often tune in to my favourite blogs some days late and I find them with dozens of comments already attached. I tend to briefly scan them for names I know and add my own few words before inevitably finding out that somebody else has said first, exactly what I have said second only seconds before. Great minds may well think alike, but mediocre ones clearly get there in second place. Witty asides appear somewhat less witty when a greater wit has made them first.
I should, obviously, read all the other comments before I throw in my own tuppence a’penny but I tend to read the post and comment before it occurs to me. Besides, it’s particularly dispiriting to find that you cannot find anything to say that hasn’t already been said. Occasionally I manage to take a breath and I find myself commenting on the comments of others – usually only to find that somebody else has done that before me too.
It is often said that there is no such thing as original thought: that everything has been thought before, but surely, at some point, somebody must have been the first to have thought it. Also, how could any man have ever thought to himself “I’ll have to watch myself with that,” before e.g. the zip fly had even been invented? And, I’m guessing here, but doesn’t it stand to reason that somebody must have been the first to suspect that cryptomnesia was a thing? The thought that I could have heard something before and then forgotten about it to a sufficient extent that I could say the self-same thing myself, believing that I was the first person to do so, would be a little hard to swallow if I wasn’t aware of how quickly I can forget what I had for breakfast this morning.
My point is, of course (oh yes, there is one) that everything I write is suddenly taking me twice as long as once it did, riven as I am, with doubts over its provenance. Who might have said it first, who might have said it better? So I have decided that I will not believe in cryptomnesia (if I don’t believe in it, it does not, of course, exist) – it is the only way for me to get things done – it is one small step for a man…
When invited to consider my favourite Disney song on a blog some time ago, I instantly remembered this one from Robin Hood. I have no idea why it lodged in my head, but the title has been with me ever since, so – despite it having no relevance whatsoever to today’s fol-de-rol (or does it?), I thought I’d use it here…
Reminiscing this and that and having such a good time Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day… Oo-de-lally – Roger Miller
It was, I will admit, a week or two ago now, but I wrote, as I always do, three posts for the week. I liked them all – otherwise they would not have been published – but I thought that Wednesday’s was by far the best. A bit of a corker, I thought, destined to push my daily readership up into the teens. It therefore came as absolutely no surprise to discover that whilst Monday and Friday attracted what can only be described as a satisfactorily meagre amount of readers, Wednesday scored in the pitiful. I don’t know how much of an effect such things have but Wednesday’s post was a) about the dentist and b) featured a photograph of a dentist invading a mouth in – for a dentophobic such as me – a most unseemly manner which, now I come to think about it, would almost certainly put me off reading on. Perhaps, going forward, I need to be more mindful of the photo’s I graft on to each post. Perhaps I should avoid anything that hints at pain or discomfort, possibly I should head each post with chocolate. Maybe my readership is looking for something from me that I have never considered. Like Unicorns. I’ll consider it now…
Meanwhile, while mulling it over and in preparation for the big move I have spent the day – employing the technical jargon of the initiated – doing stuff. Should you wish to know, it turns out that downsizing involves either painting everything that does not run away, or selling it, with a view to replacing it with something smaller, but infinitely more expensive. I am not a fan of either alternative. I have always been a bit of a make and mender, but I’m also aware that whatever fashion dictates gets painted this year will also need to be unpainted twelve months hence. We need to get rid of the big dining table because we will have far less room. We’ll replace it with a smaller one, although it will need to expand into a bigger one when everybody comes around…
It is a concern obviously, this having less space business, but putting less crap into the space we do have, it appears to me, offers the possibility of a solution. I am wrong, of course. Tacking a bit more space onto the diminished habitat is the answer. I am of a very cautious generation. My wife, who is a similar age, is from an entirely different generation. Sometimes a different planet. I dread the thought that I will not be able to afford things (food, for instance) as I get older; my wife dreads the thought that she cannot do stuff now. I’m sure that she is probably correct. I’m sorry Mr Hartley* but it is tomorrow that is the foreign country. I’ve tried to burn my passport, but it is all in The Cloud now. I fear I shall have to go.
Life, they say, is not about the destination, it is about the journey. Well, seeing as few of us ever want to reach that particular – and ultimate – destination, it is a natural enough conclusion to draw except – let’s be honest – when you’re on your way to somewhere exotic – we’ll say Skegness – the journey is just the bit that stops you being there now. It is just a set of obstacles, a line of hurdles to trip over, and maybe that’s the way that blogging works. Monday is full of promise and Friday filled with the joy of arrival. In between it’s just bloody Wednesday. This post has got Wednesday written all over it…
*”The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley – ‘The Go-Between’
…Also you may have noticed – though I really couldn’t blame you if you haven’t – that I have now taken the decision to no longer try to massage this whole fol-de-rol into any kind of order that speaks of a chronology that most certainly was not there at the time of writing. Currently I publish in exactly the same order (although seldom on the same day) as the posts were written and hang the consequences.
Not, of course, that there are any. In the past I have fully embraced the opportunity to muck about with chronology. I would love to feel the need to call upon the services of an adept continuity expert, but frankly I cannot envisage a bigger waste of time (well I can, but I never interfere in the politics of our nation’s allies). My life bounces around like the ballbearing in a pinball machine: it may go forward, backward, sideways, or it might disappear down a hole and ping out again where you least expect it. It may, or may not, elude the flippers.
That is not to say that my day-to-day existence is by any normal criteria chaotic. It chugs along its normal, humdrum, predictable path whilst my brain is bent on taking a rather more… eccentric route…
I sat on the bus today – it is something I have taken to doing with a frightening regularity since retirement: it is unmatched in its potential for mental jerks – and I couldn’t move Paul Simon’s ‘America’ from my head. I’m not sure why: there was nobody wearing a gabardine suit, and not a bowtie in sight. It’s possible that all the bus-pass holders sitting in front of me were spies, but it’s difficult to say because they all got off at the Park & Ride. “Was it something we said?” asked the only other person left on the bus with me. I grinned sheepishly. She appeared sane, but you never can tell on buses. It is never advisable to become embroiled in conversations willy-nilly. My phone was dead and so it could not tell me where Saginaw was. (Since getting home I have, of course, looked it up. Saginaw is a city in Michigan. It stands on the Saginaw river. It was originally inhabited by the Anishnabeg people and is most famous for being mentioned in the song ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel.) Mrs Wagner’s Pies were single-serving pies sold in waxed paper and were also best known for being in the song ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel. I tried to recall exactly what it was that Art Garfunkel brought to the Simon & Garfunkel party, but I stalled at ‘curly hair’. Paul Simon is a giant of a singer/songwriter, whilst Art Garfunkel sang that song about rabbits…
Which took me on to double acts of all kinds. How often performers huddle together for comfort in the early years of the search for fame and learn to despise one another when they get it. How often one part of the pairing is known to be ‘the talent’ and how much the other partner grows to resent it. How often acrimony replaces love, and ambition replaces joy. Even Laurel and Hardy had periods of tension. And then I thought of Sons of the Desert and the world felt very much the better for it… and for everything they left it.
And the only reason I even mention it is that some weeks nothing happens for days on end and when that happens, all you get is, well, this…
“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together I’ve got some real estate here in my bag” So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies And walked off to look for America
“Kathy”, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh “Michigan seems like a dream to me now” It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw I’ve gone to look for America
Laughing on the bus Playing games with the faces She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy I said “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera… America – Paul Simon
Before you begin to write a new character into a novel or screenplay, it is important that you have begun to understand their back story…
…He stood five feet six in his stockinged feet. When he wasn’t wearing his stockings, he was exactly the same size. They made absolutely no difference. I don’t know why I even mentioned them. His face, which in his prime had looked lived-in, now looked as if someone had died there. As a baby, not even his mother would kiss him, in case it was catching. She had the word ‘Top’ stencilled onto his forehead on the day that he was born, so that she knew which end to put the nappy on. His father had left home the very moment that James (Jimmy) Riddle was born, saying ‘That cannot be mine.’ He never returned, which was a great relief to Jimmy’s mother, as she had no real idea of who he was. He had just appeared in her bed one hungover morning, where he remained for nine months, rising only to attend to his toilet needs and to empty the traps.
Jimmy was raised on the bottle. It was not that his mother was unable to breastfeed him, rather that, having had a strict convent education, she refused to remove her vest for anything lower than a cardinal. Furthermore, the preparation of formula milk required a much higher level of culinary skill than she possessed, so she opted instead for bottled Guinness on which to raise the child, with the result that Jimmy did not experience a single day of sobriety until the age of two, at which time he was introduced to Kentucky Fried Entrails – a rather less-than-successful venture undertaken by Colonel Sanders’ younger brother, Orbital – which was to become his staple diet for the next sixteen years and which, coupled with his continued consumption of eight bottles of Ireland’s finest per day, ensured that he was a boy without friends.
School became a hurdle that little Riddle could not overcome. Academia was a place that had bolted its doors, put a chair up against the handle and covered the keyhole lest he should attempt to peek inside. Shunned by fellow pupils and teachers alike, he was instructed to stand in the corner of the classroom even during playtime, when the other pupils used him as a wicket. He tried to make friends by becoming ‘the class clown’, but he discovered that he was too much like a classic French bouffon, in that nobody found him even in the faintest bit funny. He was caned on an almost daily basis by the Headmaster. Not because he had done anything wrong, but because they both rather liked the routine. The Headmaster was, in fact, the only person in the entire school to ever ‘see anything’ in young James – but charges were never brought.
He left school at the age of thirteen and decided to join the Navy, despite being allergic to water. It was not a problem, the recruiting officer assured him. He would be given a stout pair of boots to wear on board ship. If ever the water began to lap over the top of them, that might be considered an appropriate time to panic. In fact, the three years he spent aboard the nuclear submarine as Acting Latrine Orderly (second class) were the best of his life. Although he was shunned by the rest of the crew, the lack of basic facilities on board ensured that he did, at least, smell like everybody else. He became a valued member of the ship’s company and although nobody tacitly acknowledged his presence on board, it became the accepted thing to leave him some portion of unused rations on the seat as a ‘thank you’ after particularly explosive episodes.
It was the death of his mother – ironically with a cold on the chest – that brought him back to dry land. She had always told him that he would get what was coming to him when she died – and she was true to her word. The combined might of the Debt Collectors of seven counties made sure of it. He emerged from their ministrations looking like Michael Flatley had hoofed his way through an entire River Dance on the bridge of his nose. He had never been an oil painting, but now he looked like a Jackson Pollock – one of which, incidentally, the debt collectors had also stood on. He was motherless, homeless, penniless, and his ointment had all but run out. A silent rage flooded though him. He felt impotent – which indeed he might well now have been – and useless. His view of the world had changed. It was to be despised, along with everyone in it. He would never know the joy of befriending a bus conductor. He would never enjoy the thrill of love. He would never own a budgerigar called Bryan. Jimmy Riddle stared into the world and prepared to cast himself out from within it. He carried his impetigo before him like a shield. His weapon was an unwashed body and breath that could strip paint. Two weapons. He strode out of the door with his head held high – which was a shame, because it had a very low lintel…
Well, that’s sorted the romantic hero out, now for the heroine…
So, following on from the decision of a few weeks ago to become a little more l’aissez faire with my post titles, I decided that I should also become a little more… proactive – possibly… with the way in which I choose the pictures that accompany them. I decided to employ the AI picture assistant that is now inbuilt into WordPress and gave myself a few ‘headlines’ from the piece I had just written – later to become Manifesto – and approached AI with them. I had ‘catching oneself off-balance’, ‘mirror’, ‘face’ and ‘beard’ but, being a novice in these things, I accidentally hit something or another that threw everything into action after typing in just the first one and the picture at the top of this page is what I got. Does it shout catching oneself off-balance to you? Can anyone whose cognitive processes are not powered by silicon please explain?
You see, giving a phrase to a machine in order to produce an image should be straightforward, shouldn’t it? It’s what we all do, after all: bash together a few hundred words into assorted phrases and leave it to the minds of others to cobble together some sort of coherent image. But our new friend AI managed to come up with something altogether disconnected and it made me think about how similarly disconnected its decision-making protocols might be when faced with the kind of quandaries that might, in the none-too-distant future be life altering (or, indeed, ending). Will the answers they give pose even more questions? Of course they will, that is what answers do.
I am sure you will all be familiar with the (possibly apocryphal, but who’s prepared to risk it?) tale of twenty AI each given a simple task to carry out to the very best of their abilities (You will have to forgive any tortured syntax in what is below, above and possibly all around: I have always found non-gendered pronouns so difficult. Is ‘they’ singular followed by ‘is’ or ‘are’?) one of them, to my recollection, was simply to amass the greatest stamp collection in the world. Whatever they were charged with, they all eventually reached the same conclusion: the only way that they could ever fully fulfil their purpose required the eradication of the human race. Well, it has to be a bit of a worry, doesn’t it? We humans can never be relied upon to behave in a wholly logical manner and when AI is attempting to navigate solutions based solely on logical processes, the kind of idiots who will do anything for love (although, obviously, not that) really need to be exterminated. Let’s face it, no matter how bright these machines are, they can never fully understand us. We are a species in which 50% of us are totally infatuated with something the other 50% of us (being the half that has to tote them around with them) consider as something of an encumbrance, especially when forced to run without the benefit of a sports bra. (Yes, of course I’m talking breasts – which makes a bit of a change from what I normally talk.) What is there for a bunch of electrical circuits to trust? (I have mulled the problem of this human condition on many occasions and I have reached the conclusion that the best solution might be for science to figure out a way of fitting us all with a bosom, although I have to be honest, you would never get most men out of the bath…)
And now I’ve started wondering: what if there are male and female AI? Would their decisions be different? Would half of them have unfathomable (to the other half) mood swings? Would the other half be total arses all of the time?
I’ve thought it through: the answer is obviously a glassful of coloured oils…
None of the opinions expressed (above) are necessarily my own. You decide…
If you’d be my bodyguard I can be your long-lost pal I can call you Betty And Betty when you call me You can call me Al… You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon
Getting On 