Very flat? Not really.

Noel Coward was talking about Norfolk, of course, and I ended up spending most of my out-and-about time in Suffolk, which may or may not be more flat or less flat than Norfolk, I haven’t had time to do a full comparative cartographic survey, besides not possessing sufficiently detailed OS maps to build the necessary Plasticine relief models of the contours, nor the Plasticine …  Let’s just call it a draw then.

One thing I can say with confidence, though, is that the bit of Norfolk in which I was based is anything but flat – in the lemonade sense, that is.  Distinctly fizzy.  This is Z’s home, to which she had generously invited me for a few days, to help me scout out potential destinations should I eventually act on my long-standing inclination towards shifting myself elsewhere.

Chez Z, flat moments don’t prevail, or even arise.  Some of you will have been there and so already know this, but there’s nothing like a few days to bring out the details.  Without going into the details, we’re talking cats, chickens, tortoises, spiders, cats, cockerels, did I mention cats…?  Not to mention, of course, Z’s own delightful company – thank you, darling!

Under her guidance, I visited quite a few possible targets for if I do eventually boot myself up and home in on East Anglia.  In fact, I’d be spoilt for choice; every single town has its own plethora of delights and attractions.  (Well, I am comparing them to Reading, to be fair.)  It may be just proximity, and therefore greater familiarity, but Yagnub seemed to tick a lot of boxes.  

(Though this exhibit in a charity shop window did give me a moment’s pause for thought.)

Still, one thing there’s no shortage of in Norfolk, or Suffolk, is horizons. 

Caravan end of term, yet again

I've been down to lovely Pembrokeshire, to my lovely caravan at lovely Wiseman's Bridge, my lovely childhood memory site, quite a few times this year.  Every time, whatever the reason or excuse for the visit, I think 'why do I keep coming back here?'  I have no idea.  Logic, common sense and economic calculation all say 'why bother?'  Yet, every time I drive down the hill, past the pub, along the seafront, up the other hill and round between the two white houses and up, again, to the Lower Field, and across the grass to the caravan, it still feels like a homecoming.

I've sometimes talked about the quiet stillness (although that neglects one of Pembrokeshire's major industries, which is strimming), the views of the sea and the headland, the chums who will gladly share a jar and a gossip, even the rabbits and the pheasants and the wagtails - but that's not it.  I was chatting to a friend to whom I'd lent the caravan for a week back in August, and he talked mostly about his five year old daughter - her delight in discovering rockpools, shrimps, seaweed, low tide corrugated sand - and I suppose that's it.  I keep going back to my childhood.

Here's a picture of the caravan.

And the view.

I dreamt this

"Don't forget or remember too much."


I think I was channelling Samuel Beckett, or vice versa.

Compost for brains

Monday morning, eight fifteen.  As usual, I leave the house to stroll down to the paper shop.  As soon as I open the door, I notice something very strange.  For about twelve years, I’ve had two stone (well, cast concrete actually) planters outside the door, one on each side.  Originally they contained dwarf holly trees, but those died and were replaced a couple of years ago with standard box.  I never liked them all that much, to be honest, but I’d rather they hadn’t been stolen.

It’s quite extraordinary, isn’t it?  Someone has taken the trouble to steal into my garden, presumably in the wee small hours, and silently spirit away these seriously heavy chunks of slightly kitschy garden décor – to what end?  The whole lot can’t have come to more than £200 at cost, and they’re not going to get more than half of that, even if they manage to find a buyer.  It must have taken two, possibly three, strong sub-humans to do the carrying, plus a vehicle and a look-out, and would have taken probably twenty or thirty  minutes.  That’s a top end, high risk return of about thirty quid each, less expenses.  Doesn’t sound like a good earner to me.

I’m not going to replace them, of course.  Or rather, perhaps I will, with a couple of really cheap, naff plastic items from B&Q, artificial shrubs, and leave a note underneath saying ‘Thank you so much for relieving me of that crap; could you please take some of the rubbish plants in the garden too?’  But that’d be a waste of an ironic semi-colon, wouldn’t it?

 

Triumph or Disaster?

I'm not sure what this little ivy plant is hoping for, but there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

The Lodger

No, not the 1927 Hitchcock film (which I haven’t seen), or the many remakes (one of which I think I might have seen), nor even the original novel by, it says on t’internet, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes (which I’d guess nobody alive today has read).  No, this is the real thing.

My friend called me last week in desperation.  Could I put up her son for a while?  He’d been thrown out on the street at zero notice, and had nowhere, but nowhere, to stay.  I’m obviously not going into the background to how this came about, except to say that it was the fault of a very nasty person.

I’m almost ashamed to say that I hummed and hawed for a good five minutes before replying ‘yes, of course.’  There had to be negotiations about timescales, because my existing commitments meant there was a three day gap which he would have to fill in as best he could (which he managed); but I ended up welcoming him (on a strictly time-limited basis, three weeks-ish) last Tuesday.

Well, it’s working out quite well!  It’s early days, but we’ve laid down some ground rules, which are evolving and will be conformed to: the main one being that I’m In Charge around here.  Fortunately, we get on pretty well, and he’s a nice, sensible man who is, if anything, over-solicitous.  Let’s see how it goes.  I’ve made it clear that I need to know that he’s actively seeking alternatives, and I’m sure that’s happening.

He’s just got back from the pub as I write…!  He has a cold, apparently, so I’ve told him not to get too close…!   

Aargh! They're back!

The dreaded harlequins!

But this time I'm ready for them...

Switch it off and on again

Or ‘switch it on and off again’, as my colleague Neil used to say – but he was Australian, so fair dinkum.*

As befits people who, over time, have communicated more by computer than by those old-fashioned vocal cords, Z and I spent a bit of time (not much, I hasten to add) discussing computers.  In particular, how scared some folks, especially neophytes, can be of the things, perhaps naturally assuming that if they do something wrong, they’ll break it.  She came up with a good analogy – if you stall your car, all you need to do is restart the engine, the car’s not broken.  I followed through by comparing, say, reformatting the hard disk with crashing the car into a brick wall; which, on reflection, I don’t think was exact – the computer is still doing exactly what it’s told, isn’t it?  Taking a box cutter to the motherboard would be a closer equivalent to the brick wall.

 Anyway, Z’s visit here naturally gave rise to a veritable tsunami of Facebook feedback, as such momentous occurrences always do.  (Well, at least a dozen comments, which is high-end by my usual standards.)  I got some email notifications, so I logged on to see them.  Or rather, tried to – because of course, as you know Facebook had chosen this moment to crash, properly.  (Z and I take no credit or blame for this, incidentally.)

Now the analogies, erm, break down at this point.  I can restart my computer, but I can’t restart Facebook.  To stretch it to snapping point, even the best car in the world will fail to function if it runs out of petrol, or someone else puts diesel in by mistake.

In other words, we are actually at the mercy of powers beyond our control.  Still, I expect they’ll apologise eventually.  Whether they’ll offer the advertisers a refund is an entirely different matter.

*I think I’ve mentioned this in a post before, but the old ones are the best ones, aren’t they?

Five Things

Which should probably be tweets, except that I’ve taken against twitter.

1. If VW have invented a device which reduces emissions from the exhaust pipe, why don’t they just leave it switched on all the time?
2. Why can’t I ever get past page 100 of War and Peace?  It’s not for lack of time or good intentions.
3. After a court ruling in the US, you no longer need to pay composer royalties when you sing Happy Birthday to someone.  I’m assuming this is back-dated.
4. Apparently, fidgeting whilst sitting around can prolong your life.  I am immortal!
5. Am I alone in commiserating with the [alleged] pig?  Though it was probably grateful to be dead.

Time for a joke?

I haven’t done one of these for yonks, so here’s a golden oldie you’ve almost certainly heard:

A man is stranded on a desert island.  After a few days, when he’s starting to feel a bit lonely, one morning he sees a beautiful girl emerging from the sea in a skin-tight wetsuit.

The girl says:

“Fancy a drink?”

Speechless, he nods, and she unzips her suit a bit and produces a bottle of malt whisky.  They each take a swig, then she unzips a bit more and says:

“How about a nice cigar?”

Out comes a superb Cuban Corona.  He lights it from his campfire and takes a delicious puff.

Finally the girl unzips the wetsuit yet further, smiles and asks:

“You want to play around?”

The man can’t believe his luck.

“You mean – you’ve got a set of golf clubs in there?”

Boom Boom

Sufficiency of Suffices

Think what you like about Mr Corbyn (and you should, that’s the whole point), his magnetism in attracting the suffix has to be respected.  In a few short weeks he’s acquired a -mania, an -ism, -ites and -istas, and even some -omics.  Not even Mrs Thatcher managed that.

Mason & Dixon, and other stories

This lot needs sorting out.

There’s more:

And that’s not counting the three or four boxes of discards already waiting to be shipped to the charity book bank.  Clearly, I need to set aside an afternoon or three, if I can find them.   Critical mass will be reached some time soon, the tipping point being when I can no longer get through the front bedroom to the ironing board.  That becomes pressing (aargh!) when I need a fresh shirt – not quite at either of those points yet, but the nights are drawing in…

So, pro tem, I’ve disciplined myself to rereading.  I started with ‘Howard’s End’ a couple of weeks ago, and reflected on how Graham Greene found it necessary to divide his output between ‘novels’ and ‘entertainments’, whereas Forster could effortlessly blend the two into a single seamless whole.  So I read a couple of Greenes, one of each sort, and was left unsure as to which approach was the better… 

Getting a bit unstimulated, a week or so ago my eye was caught by Thomas Pynchon’s Masterpiece.  It tells the story of the two Surveyors, or Astronomers (they constantly bicker over this amongst many other sundry Controversies), who in the mid-eighteenth century ran what was ever-after called ‘the Mason-Dixon Line’ ‘twixt Pennsylvania and Maryland, a Line to become in History the Fount of countless Politickal and Bellicose wranglings…

I’m sorry, I seem to have slipped into the author’s bizarre cod-Georgian idiom (and even found myself, the other day, writing a blog comment in a version of Jeremiah Dixon’s bluff Geordie-an idiolect, eeh!): it’s not a straightforward read, as anyone who’s ever tried Pynchon will confirm.  But I know few books that draw you so deeply into their mad world.  If you imagine a linear yarn – well, you’ll get that, but be prepared for diversions into sea-battles between an under-manned frigate and a fearsome French man’o’war (complete with a deckhand who alone can unravel some fine points of frigate-rigging, called Pat O’Brian); the flesh- and booze-pots of Philadelphia; contemporary American and trans-Atlantick (there I go again!) politicks and Theology; and a wholly novel slant on How The West Was Won (or Lost), and similar Systematickally Irrelevant digressions into areas I don’t even want to think too much about, because my dreams are already over-packed with that kind of stuff…

There are also: a petulant, erudite Talking Dog, called the Learnèd English Dog, whose main role, in Chapter 1, is to enable the phrase ‘The L.E.D. blinks’; a partially invisible Mechanical Duck; the invention or discovery of Surf Music; the art of witch-flying, without benefit of Broomstick, to prove that the Territory is not the Map; and much much more such absurd digressions into worlds, planets and Galaxies of Phantasie, lit by a flickering, unreliable Lanthorne…

And I haven’t even reached the end yet!  150 pages (out of 773) to go.  But I know how it finishes – they reach the end of the Line, in ev’ry sense.

The Devil’s Interval

I’ve been scratching around for something to blog about, anything really, just to keep my hand and brain and vocabulary and syntax in – but there’s so much  stuff going on that precludes anything other than an emotional response, which is something I’m possibly too good at experiencing but not at all good at expressing.  So instead I switched on the telly, and found the Penultimate Night of the Proms, dedicated to the musicals of Leonard Bernstein.

To be honest, I’m not that familiar with most of his stuff, and nothing I heard over the two-plus hours did much to persuade me to explore further – with, of course, one shining exception.  Which, of course, I don’t need to explore further, because every last note of it has been etched into my being ever since 1956.

It is the greatest musical there will ever be.  And for me, somehow, it bridges the two dominant aspects of my psyche: the emotion and the logic.  (The child and the parent, in psychoanalytical terms.)  I know exactly how it moves me, and I know exactly why.  Let me peek into the second of these.

It’s very simple, actually.  The whole thing is built around a musical trope called the Tritone.  Technically, it’s a flattened fifth.  If the fifth note of the C major scale is G (which it is), flatten it and you get G flat (or an augmented fourth, F sharp, depending on the way your instrument is tempered… sorry, maybe a bit too technical there).  To hear this, you only need to listen to the first three notes of ‘West Side Story’ – “Da-daaah DA!”  That third note is the tritone.  Then listen to any of the ballet sequences – there it is again, all over the place.  And ‘Maria’: what’s the second note of that tune, exactly?

It was called The Devil’s Interval in medieval times, largely because – well, it is, isn’t it?  You can learn much more about the psychology and physiology of this here, if you really want to.

So there you have it.  ‘West Side Story’ bit me, chewed me up and spat me out when I first heard it, and still does.  But more importantly, it taught me that music, as all art, doesn’t drop from heaven or rise from hell – it’s made by human beings, who can use their feelings and their rationality to mould heaven and hell’s best efforts into forms of beauty neither of those imposters can imagine.

 

 

Buzzy Caravan Visit

As I’ve said so often, always something different!  This time, insects.  Two earwigs had managed to find their way into the earwig-wide space between the glass splashback behind the bob, and the wall.  This splashback is secured by two pozidriv screws, which I had to loosen in order to insert a knife and entice them out.  I wish I could say I rescued them, rehabilitated them, and released them into the wild, but actually I squashed them with a bit of kitchen towel.

Be thankful that I’d forgotten to take the camera.

Then a bumblebee with a body as big as a Luques olive (I know this, I had a bowl of said olives on the table at the time) came in through the window right next to my head, just as I was settling down to a G&T and the early evening news.  I thought: do nothing.  Sure enough, it buzzed around the room for a bit, decided the news was too distressing (as had I), and exited the same way it had entered. Mutual relief there, I reckon.

And just before going to bed (this was all on Saturday evening) I killed three mosquitoes with three swipes of the swatter!  Fly-swatting is probably the closest I’ll get now to a racquet sport, since I gave up table tennis at the age of seventeen.

That’s about it.  Oh, except for the latest ‘THINK!’ sign on the Reading traffic information boards on my way back today:  “THINK!  TAKE MORE TIME TO LOOK FOR BIKES!”  Try as I may, I can’t make this mean anything.

Cliveden

[The latest in my very occasional series about Stately Homes – click the label for the other three.]

Keen to get out of Reading on a dank festival weekend, we settled on this ‘stately home’, even though we knew in advance that, nowadays, it’s no such thing.  It’s a self-styled luxury hotel, owned by the National Trust under a perpetual bequest but leased, at the moment, to an outfit called ‘London and Regional Properties’, a company name which probably tells you all you need to know about them.  It was a nice afternoon out, and the rain held off, so I’m happy for the festival-goers at Rivermead.

But I can’t pretend to be much impressed by Cliveden.  I don’t blame the NT for milking it as an earner, because the raw material, frankly, isn’t that special.  In fact rather than on the actual fabric (the first house here was built in 1666, but this one dates back all the way to just 1851, and has been hacked about beyond recognition since then), it trades almost entirely on its back-story.  Dukes and Earls (Buckingham, Orkney – how did Orkney get its own Duke, you have to wonder? – Sutherland, Westminster, plus a Prince of Wales called Fred); a go-to venue for inter-war high life under the attractively monied patronage of Waldorf and Nancy Astor (Shaw, Chaplin, Churchill, Joe Kennedy, Kipling; all the usual suspects hung out there); and of course, in the early sixties, it was one of the settings for some genuine scandal, as opposed to the ersatz 1920s sort.  (There are a couple of exquisite line drawings of Christine and, I think, Mandy – we were allowed only a fleeting glimpse during the grudgingly granted ‘house tour’ – in a corridor in the old servants’ quarters, by Stephen Ward, the true victim of that particular contamination.)

As I said, I can’t pretend to be impressed.  This place is, basically, a fake.  Worse, it’s a weighted compromise.  It’s the perfect exemplar of how, when you cross charitable good intentions with professional corporatism, the latter will win out to the detriment of the former, every time.

The best bits were the lovely, tiny chapel with its beautifully crafted biblical mosaics from the 1890s; the walk from there, down about 450 steps, through woodland to the river, and more importantly back up again (because it proved I could do it (just)); and the subsequent life-saving cream tea in the Orangery café.

Bit of a ramble this evening...

Just finished watching 'The Story of Swing' prom, live from the Albert Hall.  Over recent weeks I've wallowed in the Sinatra series 'All or Nothing At All' (hence part of that peculiar semi-dream I reported the other day).  My favourite album of the past year has been the Tony Bennett/Lady Gaga one.  And the other evening I found myself listening with pleasure to Nat King Cole.  Am I turning into one of my parents?  (Unlikely, neither of them cared that much for music, did they?)  No, I just think I'm going back.


In other news: Alan has a new knee.  I went across to see him this morning.  He did know it was coming, but was obviously in a bit of denial about the aftermath.  He's one of the most active people I know, and being confined to a chair, regular procedures, and crutches obviously doesn't sit well with him.  I hope I cheered him up a bit, I think so.  He was obviously delighted to hear the 'one step at a time, mate' line yet again.
One strange thing is that apparently the BMC and NIHCE mandate that, after an operation of this sort, anti-coagulants must be administered for a fortnight.  This is to minimise the risk of thrombosis; but of course it also means that the wound heals less quickly, which in turn means that he can't get on with the essential physio exercises.  I know nothing, obviously, but I can't help wondering whether 'one size fits all' dictats of this sort are terribly helpful.  His consultant is being circumspect to say the least, obviously thinking that the 'rule' is nonsense but a bit scared of advising a breach of it in case it rebounds.  Alan thought he'd seen a wink, and has stopped taking them; it's stopped bleeding and he's started the exercises.  So far so good.


In other (political) news:
On 'Any Questions' tonight, Priti Patel said " We won the election.  We are in Government.  And we're getting on with the job of running the country."  Only one of these three statements is true: see if you can spot which one?
And how does this work?  [I paraphrase the thoughts of a financial trader]:  "The markets are in meltdown, the world economy is going to crash.  What shall we do?  I know, let's do everything we can to ensure that this actually does happen."

Self-inflicted Earworms, and other dreams

Aren’t dreams interesting?

At 4.15 a.m. I was wakened by a dream (Ginger Baker, who has had his head shaved and entrusted me with the tresses, is escorting me to a nightclub, which turns out to be a muddy pig farm with a hummock in the middle, where I lose my shoes, but then this Korean girl comes along and starts to – ) which I’ll tell you all about some other time.

So it’s 4.15 in the morning, and Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Thought About You’ from ‘Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!’ is playing in my head, complete with Nelson Riddle’s arrangement and Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison’s muted trumpet obligatos, and much as I love this record, at this point in time I need to delete it.  So I try all my usual insomnia tricks – the yogic toe-to-scalp muscle-by muscle relaxation, the step-by-step walk to my primary school, the attempt to list alphabetically all the girls I’ve known in my life, from A to Z (I usually skip over Q and X, and I and U) – but what happens is that the music in my inner ears segues into entirely invented orchestral clichés, which swerve between Basie and Victor Sylvester, through chord changes I can almost hear but never pursue and I decide to just let it play itself out… 

Whereupon, of course, I shut down into a dreamless sleep, until the six-fifteen goods train rumbles past and rattles the windows.

Having read ‘The Child’s Garden of Psychoanalysis’, I can interpret most of the above, except: why was she Korean?

Barbecue surprise

We had our annual local Community Barbie today, in the local Community Garden at the bottom of the road, which is a delightful local asset tucked unobtrusively between some ugly lock-up garages, the railway, and an inspirational view of the grey wall of the local Lidl.  Here’s a picture I took just before people started to arrive, which doesn’t do it justice but gives a flavour:

You can’t see the wildlife pond behind me (which I helped to dig fifteen years ago), the free allotments at the railway end where locals grow and share every conceivable kind of vegetable, from runner beans to exotic Caribbean squashes; nor the kiddies’ swings, doll’s houses and slides which over the years have been – I was going to say ‘donated’, but that doesn’t capture the true spirit of the place – let’s just say ‘put there’, by local people (some of them probably long moved away), just because they wanted to.

The barbecue was a great success, of course, they always are: but that’s not what I really wanted to tell you.  This is uncanny.

When I’d arrived at about half-eleven to help with setting things up, there were already a few people who’d decided to have a family picnic and were doing their own setting-up further down the garden from where we’d installed our barbies and tables.  I went over and introduced myself, explained what we were up to and suggested they’d be welcome to come and join in, mingle and use some of the cooking heat.  The young man I spoke to told me they’d come to England last year, loved Reading, were settling in nicely but thought the streets were too dirty…  So they did all that – cooking, mingling, kids interacting –  over the next few hours, but I didn’t actually get to talk to any of them.  For some reason I’d assumed they were from Poland.

Anyway, as we were tidying up at about four o’clock, someone told me this extended family (there were over a dozen of them by now, spread over at least three generations) were in fact Italian.  As you may know, I never pass up an opportunity to practise my rusty (arruginito) Italian, so I went over again, and introduced myself again, rustily.

Naturally, I was asked how I’d learnt Italian (‘parli ancora molto bene!’), so I explained how I’d lived in Milan for three years in the late sixties, been in a band, etc etc.  (Here comes the uncanny bit.)

A lady at the far end of the table, who’d been listening with interest to the conversation but not saying anything, looked up.

“You lived in Milano?”  I nodded.  “Where did you live?”

“In a pensione, in Via Lamarmora, near the Duomo,” I told her.  Her mouth opened silently for a moment, then she said:

“I lived in Via Lamarmora before I came to England.”  I didn’t want to ask, and I didn’t have to.  “Number seventeen.”

Mental graffiti

The other day, I was about to photograph and blog about the arcane runes that had been decorating the wall opposite me for some weeks, when someone inconsiderately came along and cleaned them off. 

I've been encouraged to go ahead and post anyway: an interesting challenge.

So, here's an artist's impression of what it might have looked like (names have been changed to protect the idiotic):

And here's the wall as it looks now (like the map of the ocean in The Hunting of the Snark, it may be a bit short on detail):

My gardener, who is full of facts, some of which might even be true, informs me that these scrawls are boundary demarcation lines agreed between teenage street gangs.  

I'm going away now to imagine the inter-gang Summit conference, and to ponder on the global geopolitical parallels, if any.   Also to get my supper.

Job Done

Right, I've finished writing it.  Well, it's only taken about five years - not full time, but at least a day a month on average.


It's called "This Obscure Group", subtitle "Dave Anthony's Moods - a personal memoir of the best unheard band of the Sixties."  I've put a few edited extracts on this blog before, but this is the final product.  Or at least as final as it's going to be.  I could go on tinkering for ever.


So I'd like it to be read, or at least available.  Does anyone know anything about publishing (vanity or otherwise)?  It's long enough - about 42,000 words - to form a slim volume, especially if padded out with a few photos. 

How often do you use drugs?

Or any kind of medication, for that matter?

About four weeks ago, on a lovely country walk, I got stung or bitten on the arm by some kind of insect.  I noticed something, but thought no more of it until the next day, when it had pumped itself up to visibly swollen, florid proportions.  Ah, antihistamine, I thought, and found a tube in my medicine chest.  It had been there for about two years, since the last time I got stung, and was just within its ‘use by’ date, but I didn’t trust it, so I nipped down the chemists, checked with the pharmacist that there weren’t any contra-indications with the warfarin, and got a new tube.  A couple of days’ worth of application did the trick.

So I now have an almost-full tube of antihistamine cream, with an expiry date  of June 2017.  It contains 25 grams, minus the one or two grams I used on the sting; and of course, having been opened, it’s probably going to go off more quickly.  So to get full value out of this purchase, I need to get bitten or stung about 24 times over the next twenty months or so.

I had the same problem today with Savlon, after a brief collision with the sharp end of the iron.  Luckily my current tube of this wonderful stuff is well within its date, but, again, I’m not planning to cut, burn or otherwise injure myself sufficiently to get to the bottom of the tube before it becomes unuseable.

You can’t buy this stuff in small enough quantities to avoid binning eighty percent of it.  (It’s like spices, about which I’ve blogged before, but much more important.)  No wonder big pharma makes the profits.

 

 

Don’t even start me on cancer treatments, anti-virals or immunisation.  They managed to roll out the Ebola vaccine in just twelve months – no mention yet of the impact on their bottom line.  It can be done.  They just need to be shamed into doing it.

 

Relocation, Relocation, Relocation?

This concept pops up every couple of years, in my mind and (at least once) in my blog.  Do I want to spend the rest of my life in this admittedly pleasant house in a not-so-pleasant town where I know a few people I rarely see and don’t get out much because there’s nowhere to get out to?  Answer, no.  So I really ought to relocate – but where?

I’d been talking to my brother about this, and he sympathised, but made a remark that has stuck in my mind: “Don’t leave it too long.”

He’s right.  Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in life, especially mine.  So I’m revisiting the topic with some focus.  There’s nothing binding me here, when I think about it.  On the other hand, there are few things pulling me in almost any other direction – which doesn’t exactly help.

Last time, I did it geographically.  Here’s the relevant bit of that post from 2012:

As this town (which I like, a bit, and which contains a lot of people whom I like, a lot, but all that’s been factored in to this blogdream) is slap bang in the middle of southern England, and given that I miss the sea and the coast, I only really have four options:  north, south, east or west.  North is out of the question.  South would mean going back to where I was born.  East is a foreign country.  So that leaves West.

West consists of Wales and the West Country.  I don’t want to live in Wales, for reasons too difficult to explain here.  So that leaves the West Country.  This consists of Devon and Cornwall.  Devon is tempting, but it’s too expensive.  So I’m left with Cornwall.

What was I thinking of?  There’s no way I’m going to Cornwall.  So that rules out West.

South probably means Bournemouth – um, not really.  I’m not going to spend my remaining years mobility-scooting up and down Southbourne Grove pining for the La Fiesta coffee bar.

I watch too many weather forecasts to consider going much further North than Shrewsbury.

I might have been a bit unfair on East, though – to be honest, with a few exceptions, in 2012 I knew hardly anything about East Angular, or its denizens.  Maybe I should go and take a closer look.

Five

1. I got the Telecaster back and tried it out earlier this evening.  It looks and sounds lovely, but the wiring is wrong – the volume control doesn’t control the volume, which is a bit basic, isn’t it?  So I’m going to have to take it back, which is a bit annoying.  I’m fairly sure I know what he’s done wrong, and it’s easily put right, but you’d think he’d have tested it before handing it over, wouldn’t you?
2. I noticed a minor infestation of tiny spiders in the bathroom just now.  God knows how they got there, because that’s one of the two rooms I’m fairly careful about keeping clean.  (Plus the kitchen, of course!)  I’ve killed them with bleach and spray, I think, but I’ll have to do a full inspection in the morning, before [fill in your own chosen activity here].
3. I’ve also, I think, killed the ants out on the patio.  I know they’re supposed to be part of the ecological food chain, and blah blah, but they’ll just have to go and be ecological somewhere else.  I don’t want ants in my pa… tio.
4. I’ve finished reading ‘Go Fetch a Watchman’ and Nick Hornby’s ‘Funny Girl’.  I know which one entertained me more.
5. I’m thinking, yet again, about relocation.  There’s nothing to keep me here, except inertia.  I’ll probably blog again about this, if I can summon up the ertia.

Apple Sauce!

But not just any old apples.  (Very new ones in fact.)  My gardener, Nick, told me the other day that the way to tell whether apples are ready to eat is by the colour of the pips: if they’ve turned brown, that means the tannins have set and they’re good to go.  Or something.

So I had three fairly hefty windfalls (not really, there wasn’t much wind today, but they fell anyway) and I cut them open.  The pips were still whiteish, but “well, I figured, what the hell?”*  I had a pork chop to eat up.

The apple sauce was better than the pork.  In fact, it was superb.  (I take no credit, all I did was peel, chop and cook them, with a dash of sugar and lemon juice.)  There’s a good yield on the tree this year, so by November I’ll be all appled-out, but I’ll have a full freezer.

*Spot the quote!

The Internet of Thinks

Driving back from Wales through the drizzle, lorry spray, lane-hoppers and self-fulfilling prophesies on the traffic displays, I rather fancied one of these driverless cars we hear about.  I know the technology’s not quite perfected yet, but Moore’s Law assures me that it will be by next Friday.

So, I’m wishing I was sitting in the back seat, nodding off while my car navigates the roadworks  between junctions 14 and 13, imagining the near future…

I’ve been down the pub in the next-but-several village, and I know I’m three pints over the limit.  Or four.  Or several.  I can still work a phone, though, so I tap up the SmartCar app and tell Siri: “Car!  Come here!”  Car, of course, knows where ‘here’ is – it’s where the phone is – so she checks her charge, backs out of the car park of some pub in the, or a, previous village and sets off down the lane.

This is when Car’s GPS gets hacked or confused and decides that the best route is via Zeebrugge.  Car makes her way to Felixstowe, crosses the North Sea on a ferry she’s booked through O&P, does a three-point and pulls onto the car deck for the return trip.  Being the precision-engineered artefact she is, she stops exactly 5 millimeters behind the vehicle in front, which then reverses.  Car instantaneously does the same.  Unfortunately, the human driver of the 18-wheeler behind is less precision-engineered, and rams into her backside.

The insurance claim is ongoing.  The latest I heard, the software developer at Goggle was being held to account.  Meanwhile, I’d summoned a driverless Ubre taxi, which delivered me safely to Tavistock, where I was informed by my fridge back in Norfolk that I was getting low on cottage cheese.

Human error?  Yes, it always is.  The question being, which human?

Weather Window

Sheila, whose eightieth it was, has four children, about a dozen grandchildren, and a good smattering of great-grandchildren.  As far as I could tell, they were all there, including the two youngest great-grands, five and seven weeks old.  Then there were cousins, nieces and nephews, friends from all over the globe, and hangers-on like me.  I’d guess about forty humans in all, plus the dogs.

Being almost all Welsh, they almost all talked almost all the time (all right, not the two babies, though I think they’re working on it), not too bothered about whether anyone was listening, which makes for a great party.  I talked to quite a few of them, I think, but don’t ask me what about – it’s called ‘craic’ in Ireland, ‘liming’ in Tobago, I don’t know what in Welsh or English.  The fun point is that the performance outweighs the content.

The drive down the M4 on Friday was one of the worst in my living memory.  Driving through pelting rain and the resulting road spray and road blindness is mentally and physically exhausting, especially as most motorway users don’t know how to do it.  The journey back today was, if anything, even worse.  The M4 powers-that-maybe had decided to switch on all the ‘50’ signs, put up a message saying ‘POOR DRIVING CONDITIONS’, and (in my unfair estimation) pootle off down the pub.  The result, of course, is that Sunday drivers react to the signs rather than the actual conditions.  I have proved this theory over and over again.  As soon as the warnings of a problem disappear, so does the problem.

But miraculously, the 24 hours in between delivered the best weather Pembrokeshire is capable of.  The heavens shone on Sheila’s party.   I’m sure she noticed, but she didn’t remark on it, at least not in my hearing.  Most of the time she was too busy laughing.

Age Difference…

I’m going to my caravan neighbour Sheila’s eightieth birthday barbecue on Saturday.  I’ve been to one or two of these Welsh birthday bashes down there before, so I know what to expect.  The finale, around midnight, will be massed singing in which I will timorously join.  If I can still find my vocal chords, that is.


Anyway, I needed to get her a card, so on a racing dash round Waitrose this morning I grabbed this from the ‘age-related’ section, without really looking at it.

I’m tempted to give it to her anyway, to see if she notices, or feels complimented.  Probably better not, what do you think?

SeenTV – the answer, and other stories

So I get there later than planned, sort myself out, have some food and a drink (didn’t open the Pelorus, that’s still there for some other celebration), and decide, perversely, to switch on the TV which I know is beyond doubt kaput, and of course the damn thing lights up, perfectly, twinkling innocently at me as if to say ‘sorry, did you ask me something?’

Well, I wasn’t having that, so I unplugged it, carted it down to the shore, and cast it off the rock promontory into the depths of Carmarthen Bay, where it swam out towards Swansea and torpedoed a tanker at anchor off the Mumbles waiting for a parking space at Milford Haven…

No, that didn’t happen.  I switched it off again.  Cheeky blighter.  Instead I stuck the iPod in its dock, hit shuffle and found ‘Clean Up Woman’ by Betty Wright and ‘My Way’ (no, not that one!) by Eddie Cochran, and wondered why music sounds so much better down there than up here, though the sound system cost a tenth as much.  (I know the answer.)

Steve the Teeve turned up spot on time, which wasn’t hard as we’d agreed on ‘sometime Wednesday afternoon’.   Pembrokeshire operates on its own timeframe, which makes the folk nicer, I think.  It can work against you, of course, if you’re on a tight schedule; but I very rarely am, down there: that’s the whole point!

So I now have a shiny new freesat dish, which means that the nasty metal pole that used to vertically bisect the front window is gone (tucked away under the van in case anyone else might want it, I’ll ask Joseph next time) and I have an unimpeded view of Monkstone Point.  (Except for those bloody sycamore trees.)

I got away quite early this morning, reached Carmarthen and realised I’d forgotten to turn off the gas and water.  I toyed with phoning Joseph and asking him to do it, but I don’t like stacking up favours, so I turned round and went back.  I’m glad I did.  It gave me a bonus glimpse of that view.  And I had the cup of coffee I’d foregone first time round.

Seen TV? I’ll let you know…

I seem to going through one of those spells when stuff over which I have no control starts behaving, if not plain wrongly, then at least alarmingly unexpectedly.  This happens every year or two; I’m probably just unlucky in having bought the various chunks of stuff at just the right times for their built-in obsolescence curves to all peak simultaneously.  At least that’s what it feels like.

My iPhone, for example, gave me the jitters this afternoon by getting confused about whether or not I’d installed the latest iOS update, and threatening dire consequences if I hadn’t.  Then sending me another text telling me to ignore the previous one because everything was probably all right.  (I paraphrase, but it was the implied ‘probably’ that threw me.)

Just as I was busy ignoring that, the phone told me I had to dial 121 for a new voicemail, so I did, and the lady told me I had no new voicemails.  Eek!

And this computer has taken to showing me random green flashes, like a kind of off-kilter Northern Lights, when I open the lid.  It’s going wrong, obviously, and will get replaced, but it’ll have to hang on till mid-August when Windows 10 comes on-shelf, because I’m beggared if I’m gonna body-surf through the horror rip-tide of W8 just to get to that remote, enticing shore.  So it’s down to you, computer.  I’m learning to remember to leave the lid open, but habits are not instantly breakable.

Oh, (and this is where I came in), last time I was down there, the TV in the caravan finally broke down.  I mean, really down.  It’s been glitching for a couple of years, and I’ve got through a truckload of remote batteries which have often done the trick, but not this time.  Zilch.  Nada.  Niente …  you know the rest.

So I’ve bought a new TV, and a Freesat box into the bargain, and I’ll be off down the M4 on Tuesday, to celebrate the evening in solitary style with a bottle of Cloudy Bay Pelorus, which I know is in the fridge there (assuming the latter hasn’t snuffed it too, aaargh!), before the man I’ve booked turns up Wednesday afternoon to install it all.  His name is Steven, which is as good a piece of anagrammatic nominative determinism as they come, innit?

That’s as long as that amber light in the car doesn’t come on again.

A very interesting number, 73

I was musing about memory, and memories, and it’s occurred to me that celebrating the day of your actual physical birth, which you probably can’t remember, is pretty meaningless.  What counts is when you first became aware, which you can only construe as your earliest memory.  I was nearly three when I helped my father to hang out the huge Union Jack over the front garden to celebrate the end of the War.  (He couldn’t have done it without me.)  So I’ll be just over seventy next week!

There may be a flaw in this approach.  If there is, please don’t tell me.

Numb and Number

The relationship between me and mathematics has been like that between a stalker and their victim – aware of each other, but hoping never to meet face to face.  (In this simile, which will not be pursued further, maths is the stalker.)  The concept of the stuff fascinates me, but I don’t understand a bit* of it.

I’ve just almost finished a marvellous book which massively reinforces the fascination, and even, possibly, an itsy smidgeon of the understanding.  (Well, it couldn’t reduce it, could it?)  It’s called ‘The Information’, by James Gleick (Fourth Estate, 2011), and is basically a history of, well, information – its nature, how it is (or isn’t) communicated (from African talking drums to quantum computing) and, most importantly, how mathematics and information are essentially the same thing.

That’s all I’m going to say about this book, except that once or twice (all right, 150ish times), after surf-navigating a particularly turbulent stretch, my neurons and synapses (they’re in there!) felt distinctly numb.

Just a couple of snippets that particularly grabbed me:

A guy called G. G. Berry, with Bertrand Russell, cheekily constructed the Berry paradox, which goes something like this.  Q: Is it possible to name the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables?  A: Yes: you’ve just done that.  But ‘the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables’ actually contains eighteen syllables.  So the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables has just been named in fewer than nineteen syllables.

That was obviously a philosophers’ in-joke, but ‘interesting’ and ‘uninteresting’ numbers are more, um, interesting.  An ‘interesting’ number, in the jargon, boils down to being one that can be expressed by an algorithm.  Hence  ‘5’ is ‘the third prime number’, ‘121’ is ‘11^2’.   The really interesting ones come when the algorithm is shorter than the number, thus facilitating data compression with all its essential benefits for information exchange.  But the really really interesting numbers are the ‘uninteresting’ ones, because they are random.  There’s no algorithm from which you can derive the number.  ‘Random’ numbers are a building block of modern internet security.  But the really really really interesting question is: how do you know they’re random?  Couldn’t it be that you just haven’t found the algorithm yet?  Vast resources at NSA and GCHQ are being devoted to cracking that one.

And finally, a quote: “What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?”  Andrew Wynter, ‘The Electric Telegraph’, 1845.

Sorry, that’s three snippets.  Three is more than a couple.  Like I said, numbers and me, duh.

 

*Carefully chosen word.

The Persistence of Memory

We all know how Dali put it, probably making ironic comments or raising profound questions about the mutability and erodibility of Time, or not, you decide.  But the phrase popped into my mind from quite another direction, that of tomato protection.

Z and I had been discussing and comparing notes about memory: things like ‘have I cleaned my teeth?’, through ‘did I have a shower?’, all the way to ‘who are you, again?’  We concluded (I think, I can’t remember exactly and I’m sure she’ll correct me if I’m wrong, ha) that if one’s memory is indeed failing, one will by definition be the last person to know; and that it might therefore be incumbent on others to gently point it out. 

Anyway, after Z had left, I went out to water the tomatoes, and noticed that some perverse beast (almost certainly a blackbird, though I’ve never caught him at it) had once again been digging deep holes in the compost in the planter, all around the fledgling plants.  I remembered (I did!) that the other day, when I’d been down to the rarely-visited shed to get a rake to gather up the early dropping apples, I’d noticed what looked like some chicken wire lurking beneath the undergrowth.  That might do, I thought.

So I dragged it out, and guess what, it had been carefully cut to size and shape for the sole, obvious purpose of laying it across tomato plants, in this planter, to protect them from marauding blackbirds.   Try as I may, I have absolutely no memory of doing that, although it can’t have been more than ten years ago.  I don’t know whether to be pleased or disturbed by this.

Familiarity

One of the joys of a caravan visit, for me, is that very little changes.  Sometimes familiarity and continuity, though they can easily tip over into boredom or indolence, are what’s needed.

So, it was good that the rain started at Port Talbot (it always does, if it’s going to), and the sun came out just as I crossed the border from Carmarthenshire into Pembrokeshire (it sometimes does, if it’s going to).

And my caravan neighbours (who I call B & B to remind me of their names) were welcomingly there, as they always are every weekend (they only come from Pont Abraham, 45 minutes, alright for some).  And there were the usual seventeen (I counted!) rabbits mowing away when I filled the first glass of the evening.  (I say the usual seventeen; I’d guess they’re different ones from fifteen years ago, but I don’t know for sure; and neither do they.)

Then there’s Joseph.*  As well as being familiar, as he should be after fifteen years, he can be surprising.  This time, I needed to get rid of some very old, completely unsittable-on, plastic chairs, which I’d proved wouldn’t fit in the boot without some help.  As he explained, Joseph can’t take stuff to the tip anymore without incurring a charge, and his informal deal with the bin collectors has fallen through since they installed CCTV on the back of the lorries.  (I won’t repeat his remarks on this topic.)  He said he’d have a think. 

Half an hour later, he turned up at the caravan, toting an angle grinder.  ‘We’ll just chop their legs off, shall we?’

The journey home this morning was familiar too.  As soon as I’d crossed the Severn bridge, the rain stopped and the sun peeked out.

  

*Not his real name, he’s a very private person.

 

Guitar Heroes

As I’ve decided to become a musician again, my darling 50-year-old Fender Telecaster has gone into guitar hospital to have its innards fixed.  The outside, at least the cosmetic as opposed to functional parts, is beyond salvation, its battle scars and makeovers being part of its life story, not to be resprayed or botoxed over.  (This is starting to sound a bit self-referential, but.)  But it does have to do its job, and plugging it into an amp does need to result in more than electronic crackles.

Anyway, in preparation for that, I’d been picking it up and picking a bit.  Which has led me to ponder on the guitar players I most wish I’d been, or at least wish I could play like.  So here are three:

Scotty Moore.  When Elvis walked into Sam Phillips’ studio that fateful day in 1954, Sam rapidly put together a scratch studio group to back him.  Scotty was the lynchpin, and produced some great country-tinged fingerpicking licks that, to this day, I find it hard to unravel. 

But after the great RCA sell-out (Sam got, I think, $34,000 for the lot, artist and recordings; the illegal immigrant ‘Colonel Tom Parker’ got the right to squeeze every squeezable cent out of ‘his discovery’, slowly eroding and then destroying the talent in the process), the sound had to harden up, and Scotty jumped in with both hands.  But he was too much of a natural-born musician to treat this new-fangled rock’n’roll stuff as mere noise, as most people out of their teens did.

Take his solo on  'Too Much', from 1956.   He starts with four bars of a vicious chordal chromatic up-and-down run, as rock-n-roll as it comes, then wanders off into territory more usually inhabited, at the time, by West Coast cool jazz exponents like Stan Getz, before bringing it back down again with a snippet of that good ol’ country pickin’.   Sheer genius!  Scotty later claimed that the middle bit was an accident, as the song was in an unfamiliar key (B flat) and he’d got lost; but I don’t believe him.

Steve Cropper.  From somebody who was, I submit, the real and very present power behind the newly-ascended  King’s throne (imagine ‘Hound Dog’ without the guitar), to an equally powerful but much less evident contributor.   If you’ve heard anything by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, or any other Memphis soul masterpiece from the sixties, you’ve heard Steve, in his role as a member of Booker T and the MGs, the Stax house rhythm section.   I was going to use the word ‘minimalism’, but that’s not it; ‘precision’ is closer, or just plain ‘rightness’.  I’ve chosen, of course, 'Green Onions' – he only plays about ten notes, but they’re all the right ones, necessarily in the right order.

Link Wray.  Finally, a guitarist who, although he had a long, illustrious career as a master picker (I remember a long-ago documentary in which Link and Chet Atkins traded finger-style licks for several minutes, competing and laughing out loud at each other’s audacity), is remembered for just one ground-breaking single from 1958 – but what a single!  If you’ve seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about: 'Rumble'.  It’s been said that without this record, the future of popular music would have been very different – no heavy metal, no punk – you may have your views on whether or not this would have been a good thing, but you can’t deny its power.  It hit me between the ears when I first heard it, and I still love it.

 

When I said I wish I could play like them, of course I can, at least some of the simpler stuff.  (I could teach anyone to play ‘Rumble’, even if they’d never touched a guitar in their life.)  What I really meant was: I wish I’d been there.  I wish I’d thought of it first! 

Can’t wait to get the Tele back…

P.S. I’ve no idea whether the Spotify links will work for you.

 

 

To Do Or Not To Do?

I have three ‘to-do’ lists in my head, which I think of as ‘Must’, ‘Should’ and ‘Would Like’.  I also have a physical one, which vacillates between the whiteboard in the kitchen (which I did away with two years ago, then reinstated two months ago because after the decorators had been, my kitchen was briefly ‘terribly house-and-garden’ and not to be sullied with Post-It stickers) and Post-It stickers.

‘Musts’, on the face of it, are easy, but they break down when you break them down into their sub-categories, which I might (no, hell, will, it’s me writing this stuff!) call internally- and externally imposed ‘musts’.  Internally-imposed musts are things like ‘must go shopping’ or ‘must clean the loo’. You either do them or things start to get unsustainable.  Externally-imposed musts are trickier (‘must phone Sheila (because she’s expecting me to)’, or ‘must check minutes of last meeting (otherwise people will frown and I’ll blush’).  They’re not quite ‘shoulds’, but veering in that direction if I’m not carefully self-disciplined.

‘Would Likes’, or ‘Wants’, (such as ‘get new Dylan album*’ or ‘re-learn the guitar’ or ‘sort out those 1990s photo albums’) are easy.  They will happen.  The only constraint is time and energy (of both of which one has either to assume an unlimited supply, or to give up). 

Genuine ‘Shoulds’ are the hardest, because they are moral obligations which no-one else will notice if they go unfulfilled.  For this reason, I obviously can’t give any examples here.

The modern world moulds and constrains us to live our lives in lists.  Butterflies and rainbows don’t seem to have this problem.  I suppose I’ll have to carry on learning the game, until it doesn’t matter any more.

 

*Interesting.  Dylan sings 30’s torch songs, and proves that, though he’s no Tony Bennett, he can still hit several of the notes.  But I can’t forgive his slaughter of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

Puglian Pecularities part 2

All right, the food:

Sea urchins.  These were featured in a BBC programme about Puglia a couple of months ago.  Apparently they’re best eaten live, straight from the sea, like oysters.  Sliced and cooked in a pasta sauce, they don’t taste of anything much, except the sea, like oysters.

Supermarket vegetable pricing.  You know how you have to delve through nested layers of blurry pictures on a touchscreen to find an aubergine?  Not in the Famila supermarket in San Vito.  Each item that has to be weighed has its own unique number: Melanzane (aubergines)?  035.  Just put it on the scale, key in the number, out pops the sticky ticket.  Brilliant!

Chickens.  The local chickens are tiny by Brit standards, but one is just right for two people.  And they taste like chickens used to taste in my childhood.  I asked what they were fed on and was told: ‘Quello che c’é’– whatever’s around.  And they’re about €4 each.

Italian meal structure.  It’s now permissible to have less than four courses for lunch. 

But it’s possible to have four courses for dinner.  Ristorante dell’Annunziata (I think) in Ceglie does antipasti (twelve of them!), primo (big bowl of linguine or bean puree), secondo (I chose rabbit stew) and dolce, for €20.  All local fare and recipes.  Carafe of local Primitivo plonk included. 

Puglian Peculiarities

1. The weather was poor by Puglian standards.  On the first Monday night there was a scary thunderstorm, which took out the electricity supply for about fourteen hours.  (We were informed on Tuesday morning that it wouldn’t be back on before 4 p.m.; it was actually restored at 2.30.  This way of exceeding a target is a very Italian phenomenon.)  Then, in week two, the wind kicked in.  If we’d been purely after a lounger-and-pool holiday it would have been a downer, but as it was it got us out and about, dilettante culture vultures.
2. Road signs are idiosyncratic.  You’d think that finding your way through a small town like Carovigno, which is basically a high street surrounded by off-white low-rise suburbs, would be a doddle.  Not so – the signposts clearly say ‘Brindisi’, so you follow them and find yourself in a dead industrial estate, or a litter-strewn cul de sac…  Part of the problem is that they haven’t fully adopted the convention that an arrow pointing vertically means ‘straight on’.  So you get two arrows, one on each side of the junction, one pointing left and one right; if you miss one of these, you erroneously turn left or right.  And finding your way back from this error is an existential challenge.  I swear that they reconfigure the roads whilst I’m executing the seven-point turn.  It took an hour to get out of Otranto onto the coast road and find that gorgeous beach I’d remembered from all those years ago. When I finally got there, it reminded me of Studland.
3. Baroque is everywhere, especially in Lecce.  Those totally bonkers facades, gargoyles, pediments or whatever they are (see photo #1 in the previous post for a snippet) make you wonder what those guys were on.  It surely wasn’t religion.
4. I managed to swim in the villa pool most days – not very far, admittedly, because of my dodgy right arm – but still a breakthrough.  I’d have loved to have surfed in the Adriatic, but that’s not easy when a) the tallest wave is about nine inches and b) I’d forgotten to take my togs.
5. Two-stage plane trips were a first for me.  We changed at Rome going out, Milan on the return, with several hours hanging around in airports – not fun!  But the luggage made it through both ways, which I consider to be a miracle of logistical efficiency. 
6. And I haven’t even mentioned the food…!