A Gap

I have just doubled the RAM on my computer, hoping that it will speed things up. Programs like photoshop and InDesign do like a lot of memory so maybe it will help. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do the same for our minds. To be able to add blocks of pristine and empty memory would be wonderful. I sometimes feel that mine, which was never wonderful, is full.

I won't be writing any more for a while. I thought I'd take a break and maybe pick up again and maybe not. I know that I haven't finished the story yet but I don't suppose that matters much, and who knows in a few days I may feel differently. There are episodes in my recent life that I will not write about anyway, as i wouldn't know where to start or when to finish. Perhaps if I do pick up again, I should just stick to the mundane and the day to day.

I was right about the meeting yesterday - it reminded me as to why I hated meetings. So much time is wasted in travelling to and attending them. I must make a note to myself- make excuses next time! The other downside was that I picked up a lot more work there than I really wanted to - and now Lindsay is hassling me about her website. It's as well that I haven't a lot more to do with my time.

I know that I have to write something; it seems to have become a part of my life. I'd like to think that I could write a novel but realistically I know that I don't have the skill or the ideas that are needed. Steven KIng's "On Writing" is a wonderful read and is in itself quite an inspiration, but he writes so well that I find that intimidating. That is one of my problems I know. Whenever I aspire to do something, I see someone doing that thing really well and realise that I can never reach that standard. That puts me off and so I don't follow it up, or if I do I will despise the creation and destroy it. Interestingly, this extended to relationships in the past. When placed into a competitive field, I'd always see the competitor as having all the cards, and mostly I'd back off. I am very easily put off anything; I guess that comes from a lifetime of criticism and not being good enough.

I am waiting for a phone call from the optician. My new glasses are due today but that means little. They are as likely to turn up next week as today. I am struggling still and can't watch TV with any degree of comfort. However the rain has abated and I can get outside, so that is what I will do.

For now however I will fade out. Thankyou for reading...............

The sun is shining today -  a welcome respite from the torrent. I have to attend a meeting at the social club this morning in order to get some design work sorted. I'd much rather that they simply spelled out what they wanted. I could just get on with it then. The trouble with meetings is that everyone wants to have a say and at the end of the day, few things get  resolved that could not have been sorted much more efficiently.

I have tried to attack some of the garden chores this morning too - the soil has the consistency of porridge and is best kept off for now.

Oh well time to go. Not much else to say right now.

Still it rains

What?

That's odd - I just posted a blog and it hasn't appeared.

receding of the waters

Just heard that the floodwaters are dropping back from the village in which I grew up. 60people had to be rescued from their homes at the weekend and now I guess they will think about clearing up the mess. More bad weather is expected though so maybe they should be a little circumspect. The pub in the picture should feature in a future blog.

memories

Saw a movie last night, and as always, the title escapes me. It starred Jim Carey and ah yes it was called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind. Kate Winslett was co-star.
It's about a relationship, and like all relationships it wasn't perfect. Anyway they both opt to have the memory of the other erased. This produces a whacky and surreal film that was compelling and thought provoking.

We all have memories that we'd rather not have, and maybe it would make for a happier life if those could be eradicated. On the other hand, as the characters found, removal of those memories may not be as desirable as one might imagine. In amongst all the pain and anguish lie wonderful thoughts that are worth clinging to, even if they do cause pain. If nothing else, memories may prevent us making the same mistakes again, though that is debatable.



It's raining again, My Mother says that her home town is cut off by the floods - Summer eh?

Sunday - Ha!

No rain yet today, so we can pretend that summer has visited us for a spell. Floods everywhere right now and more bad weather forecast. I guess that this year can be written off as far as sunshine is concerned.

Went to see Anne this morning. I always enjoy her company and conversation. That will be the last of the sunday morning visits as she is escaping to the mainland next week. Who will I talk to now I ask myself?

Unreservedly

If what I write should offend anyone, then I apologise.

Our Summer

Nasty brutish and short.

I am a self confessed cynic. I am also a natural pessimist and I believe that the two go together. Us pessimists are not born, we are made and I have been quite well crafted. I recognise that my basic training was carried out in the family "home", but my finishing school has been the university of life.

I have briefly tried optimism, and although it does have short term advantages, all that happens is that you set yourself up for more falls.

Those with a religious faith are optimists. They see the good in everyone and believe that there is something else after life. Believing that everyone is fundamentally good is a big mistake and makes one very gullible and subject to abuse. There are people out there who will buy anything from anyone, in the belief that people are honest. There is a whole black economy based upon that, oh, them and the other gullibles who believe in a free lunch and a bargain.

I believe that there are plenty of really good people out there and that they outnumber the others, but I also believe that some are born or made bad and that any vestige of goodness has evaporated. These are dangerous people and their numbers increase day by day.

Cynicism comes from experience and continually being let down and or disappointed, believing in people and then having that taken away, being fed lines and having expectations raised, only to see those dreams torn away.

Cynicism and pessimism have their advantages too. I am not easily convinced by any argument and very dependent upon evidence, I will no longer be sold anything at all. I may choose to buy but I will not let another person sway me. I guess that makes me a cold person, and one that people don't get close to, and that is fine by me. Having no expectations means no more disappointments.

It seems a shame to me that those who devote thier lives to preparing for the next, will never experience the disappointment of finding out that they were wrong. Maybe that is an argument in favour of optimism!

The futility of hope

Burden of a lie

End of days

Departures

People move into and out of our lives all of the time. Some welcome and some less so, but inevitably most of them leave. There was a time in my life when this concept was absent. Everything seemed permananent and nothing much seemed to change. I remember the day when this all became clear and I suppose that this must have been a first step on the ladder towards growing up. (I am still looking for the next one!)

I must have been nine years old when I first became aware of death. I was back home from the hospital/school and was told that a kindly old man who lived almost next door had died. It hit me that this was forever and that it would sooner or later happen to us all. The impact was profound and no death since then has had the same far reaching and mind altering effect. Oh yes other deaths have been far more upsetting but from that point onwards I understood.

As children, we were sheltered from death. No-one ever talked about it and when family members passed on, we were not taken to see corpses or to attend funerals. There was no attempt to explain - not even platitudes about people going on to a better place - they just disappeared - forever. Death became fascinating and I'd register each one as the elderly and sometimes young members of the village ceased to be. None of the deaths that occurred in my childhood were people that were in any way close to me, (Having said that, it would have been hard to find anyone that was close to me at that time) so my fascination was detached and morbid.

I was standing at a bus stop one morning and I overheard some village women talking about the untimely death of someone that I knew. He was in his thirties and married with a young child, and had died the previous day. The conversation was positively surreal and i almost laughed out loud when one said to the other -"What did he die of?" and the other replied "Nothing serious - just his heart!" For some reason that has stayed with me all these years

I visited the village recently and wandered around the graveyard. There were so many names there that I could put faces to, and yet few of them meant anything to me at all.

I remember being told of the deaths of three of my grandparents and my great Aunt and Uncle. I wasn't taken to any of the funerals and felt no sadness at their passing. My father's death came as a relief to me and although I did attend his funeral, it meant very little to me. I could only think that the religious content of it all was fatuous and totally inappropriate.

The first death that hit me hard was that of my young brother. He was only seventeen when he drove his motorbicycle into the front of a car and was killed outright. I was away at college when my mother called and told me the news. I was devastated. I couldn't leave straight away for a number of reasons and had to spend that rainy sunday in college. I walked in the rain, getting soaked to the skin and then secreted myself in the darkness of my room, unable to comprehend the reality of what had happened. When I did get home, no-one talked about what had happened, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and silent blaming, while each one of us dealt with the situation as best we could. The funeral was awful, and again there was the religious ceremony accompanied by the empty words from the vicar who barely knew any of us by sight, let alone by heart.

Mark is buried in the graveyard near to his father and periodically my mother will visit the graves and pull out the invading weeds. I go with her on my rare visits home but the masonry and inscriptions mean nothing. I know that I will not be joining them.

Sole survivor

Forbidden fruit

Butterfly effect

reflecting

Dullness

song

I have just been looking at U tube again. My young friend has posted another 2 songs and they are wonderful.
If I have a reader then please take a look at - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gWyD6JATC7c&mode=user&search=
or www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXO5KhkHY14&mode=user&search=

More likes

Walking on the beach
Guinness
Playing Pool just for fun
Cooking
Making a game out of a bad TV programme
Gin and Tonic
Scrabble
Poker
Feeling whole

Choices

Siblings

This is the sixth form uniform. I am standing with my brother. More about him another time

Miscellany + Chemistry

I'd like to think that I didn't waste all of my time at school, though I have to admit that work wasn't the most important thing in my life then. I did take a range of O level exams and even passed some of them. History had no appeal for me, I couldn't see the point in all the political shinanegans and might have been interested had the emphasis been on the social side- I failed that. I quite liked aspects of geography but hated shading coastlines on maps and failed to find any interest in the Canadian shield or the crops grown in Florida. I had a geography teacher who threw various objects at recalcitrant students. These included, chalk and wooden board rubbers, he was a great shot too and i was hit many times. I failed that too. I did better in Maths and the sciences and strangely my best result was in Physics. However my maths wasn't good enough to take that further and so I ended up taking Chemistry Botany and Zoology at A level. Oh that Ron had been the A level teacher!

Sixth form was much the same as lower school in many respects but we did have some freedoms, and of course we had the whole of the lower school to look down on. The uniform became more expensive and the work that I didn't do was much harder. Classes were mainly smaller and we were expected to be much more grown up. Oh I wish that I had met some of those expectations. Somehow I always managed to find myself in the wrong company, or maybe it was I that was the wrong company. Whenever there was a rebellion, I was there; whenever there was trouble, I was in there somewhere. Needless to say, I was not enormously popular with some of the old guard of the staff.

My Chemistry teacher was a total disaster. I won't name him as I am pretty sure that he is still alive, though thankfully no longer in a classroom. He was young and inexperienced though he would sweep into the classroom with a haughty air, sporting a long black gown, as was the trend for teachers in those days. I am sure that he knew his chemistry, but alas he didn't know a thing about students. His class control was missing completely.

Now in a chemistry lab, there has to be someone in charge and students should not have access to whatever chemicals they want. This was not the case and although learning of sorts did take place, anarchy probably described the state of things best.

There were so many incidents that I would find it impossible to record them all. Water fights were the norm. Wash bottles of distilled water are liberally distributed in a lab, and in those days so were their contents. Wash bottles even got customised to give a greater range and often while Mr X was writing some complex formulae on the board, water would be falling like rain on all and sundry. I even recall a swathe of water appearing aver his neatly written notes on the blackboard. He didn't even pause in what he was doing. I feel ashamed of my behaviour and that of my cohort. I would have hated to have had us in any class of mine.

One other memory was the discovery of Nitrogen Tri-Iodide. As I said - access to the chemical store was easy and ingredients for whatever our imaginations came up with were there for the sampling.

If iodine crystals are dissolved in ammonia solution, a black sludgy, insoluble material is made. This can be filtered off and the sludge can be applied to any surface. It is fine when wet but as the water evaporates, it leaves a very unstable material that explodes on touch. Painted on door catches or the edges of cupboard doors it makes a lovely noise when touched. Scattered on the floor, it simulates a world war two mine field, but when someone suggested painting it on a toilet seat, they had to be restrained. Not only would that be dangerous, it might also backfire on the perpetrator. One of the anarchists did make rather too much on one friday afternoon and decided to leave a beaker of this stuff in his desk over the weekend. When we came in on monday, the contents had dried and exploded in his desk, coating it and its contents in a beautiful patina of Iodine. Everything in there was purple and ruined.

So Chemistry was fun but alas I messed it up. That is something that I seem to do well.

Reminders

What a wonderful world we live in. Al Qaeda are now threatening terrorist reprisals on the UK for bestowing an outdated and inappropriate "honour" on Salman Rushdie. The crime seems to be that the world of Islam has been insulted again. It is as well that we don't all respond to insults with attacks on innocent people, and I am sure that not all Muslims behave in this way, but it does seem that someone out there wants all Muslims tarred with the same brush.

Rushdie, as far as I know, was targetted for telling the truth, or his take on it, about the Muslim world. I admit to never having read any of his books, and so can only comment on reports that I have seen. Is it ever inappropriate to print the truth? especially in a country that prides itself on freedom of expression. I'd like to think that here at least, I can write whatever I want, and express my own views and my take on the truth. After all, no-one is forced to read my words. Islam is supposed to be a religion based on tolerance and peace. Where is the evidence for that?

Today's news is a reminder of why I loathe religion- all of it. It gives people an umbrella to hide behind, and a permit to justify whatever action they choose to take. Religious organisations should all be given "cult" status and avoided by anyone who wants to think for themself.

Promises promises

Tuesday and sunny

I haven't blogged for a few days. Some days I have lots to say but somehow what I want to say seems "inappropriate", and so like always, I keep my mouth shut (metaphorically that is!).

The rain seems to have abated a little, though I suspect that the respite won't be long. I am going out for a cycle in a while, and that is sure to bring the weather down once again. At least now the deluges are interspersed with some spells of warm sunshine. The weekend gave us a break from the rain and the Genesis Concert was wonderful.

As time goes by, and bonds get forgotten, I find it harder and harder to write. Even this short entry is difficult and I am struggling to string enough words together to make much sense. I know that I need to do all sorts of things, one of which is to thoroughly edit this collection of ramblings. So many past entries refer to a part of me that has died, and like dead parts of anything they need to be cut off. I will do that one day soon, it's odd that I find even that difficult, as the only person that they ever effected was me. Self delusion is a dreadful thing. I guess that I am worried that when I remove the dead bits that what is left will be worthless.

Oh well, I will get on with the day. There are lots of other things that need doing too and a cycle ride might clear my mind a little. It will be good to get out for a while anyway and another opportunity to take photos.

Bee season

Thank you for the music

Music has always been important in my life, and I dearly wish that I had even a grain of talent that would enable me to play or sing. As I don't have that, my musical enjoyment is limited to listening.

I have a young friend that I met only recently, and I envy her so much, not just for her prodigious talent and enthusiasm for music but for the fact that she has so much music out there to discover. There are few joys that can compare to "finding" a piece of music, a song or a whole new composer or performer.

In my teens, music mainly came from my father's old radiogram and so at home it was all his choice. I didn't mind that too much as i liked the old swing and jazz records, but I revelled in the classical pieces that would often thunder out around our tiny house.

At primary school, we'd isten to the schools radio broadcasts and sing along to songs that I still recall. At grammar school the singing continued in formal music lessons as well as in school assembly, the daily ritual of enforced religious worship that I grew to detest. Music lessons were with Curly Edwards, and he was an inspiration. He would introduce us to pieces of music that we'd never experienced before and would through his explanations, paint sound pictures that were a revelation to me. I still remember hearing Dvorak for the first time and being transported, over the Atlantic to the New World. I loved Music lessons and wish that I could have learned more of the theory-at that time I couldn't see the point.

I joined the school choir, partly because I loved singing but mainly because that was where the girls were. The only benefit that I got from it though was the music. I never even got close to any of the girls. The choir was well supported and we sang internal concerts mainly. Sometimes they would consist of secular pieces, often by Elgar or Gordon Jacob, but what we enjoyed mostly were the Carol concerts. If they weren't steeped in religion, I'd still enjoy singing carols, though the magic of Christmas has long since evaporated. We always processed into the hall, filled with people, with a soloist leading us in "The Boars Head Carol" while we thundered in with the chorus. This was performed in semi darkness for maximum impact, and it sent shivers down my spine. We left the concerts in the same way.

I did try to learn an instrument. I took violin lessons and had to practice at home. You can imagin the encouragement that I got as I set the dog howling as soon as I took the instrument out of its case. Needless to say, I didn't keep it up and was forced to return the poor tortured instrument.

In the sixties we were lucky to experience the great revolution in music, and we were all swept along on the tide of change. It sounds corny, but it was the Beatles that made the most impact. Their records were lapped up by their adoring fans, and everyone wanted to be like them. They became role models for our generation. We all bought their discs and we listened to them until we knew them by heart and then listened some more.

In 1965, I think, we were taken on holiday by my mother, who, by this time was working. We stayed in a caravan at Weston Super Mare for a whole week - a new experience indeed. An aunt came with us too and we enjoyed staying in out tiny tin box next to the sea. One day while we were there, Mother came back from a walk into the town with tickets to a concert in the cinema. We couldn't believe it - it was The Beatles.

They did a large number of cinema tours in those days, but the histeria was already building and these small venues were soon to become a thing of the past.

The cinema was of course packed out and the air was filled with hormones. The excitement was tangible and the staff looked nervous. The concert began with the support band, Gerry and The Pacemakers, who were wonderful. Gerry Marsden sang superbly and the performance was well received. They must have played for about 45 minutes and then the curtains closed.

Within minutes they opened again and the house erupted into a wall of screams that was really quite scary. The Beatles were on stage and playing but little of them could be heard. The crowd, mainly girls and young women wanted to express themselves. I have read since that in many of these shows, seats were soaked and the aisles ran with urine. i can believe it, I have never before or since witnessed crowd behaviour quite like it. I don't remember much about the concert itself. I think I felt that Gerry and the Pacemakers were better, but that may be because they could be heard.

monday and no rain yet

A good weekend despite the continuing wet weather. Visiting family is always unpredictable, but on this occasion, things went well and some bridges were built and there was no friction. It's also nice to spend time with friends and so the weekend was a pleasure. I did drive quite a lot of the journey so I hope that I didn't trigger any of the multitude of speed cameras that blight the landscape.

So it is monday again and back to normality. Having said that, the week looks like being a busy one and we are away again next weekend, seeing more family and then the Genesis concert at Twickenham - still wondering how to get back from that one!

Another blight this weekend was the news of the car bombs. This is always worrisome but more so when your kids live and work in the capital. I could go into a rant at this point but I won't. I don't think i have the energy and besides, what is the point. I shall no doubt launch into an anti religious tirade at some point anyway.

So that is it for this morning anyway. I need to go out for some exercise in order to counteract some of the excesses of the weekend and also I note that there is no bread in the house. I'll get my chores done and maybe try to write again later.