Older, but no wiser

Its over

2011-03-09T20:52:00.001Z

I’m going to be closing this blog down.

I wont delete it just yet; I may wish to salvage something from it. Although I’ve already downloaded the whole thing as a pdf, that doesn’t include the comments, and they are the most valuable thing here. So although I’ll let this stand a while longer while I figure out what, if anything, I want to do with the content, this will be the last post here.

The photos will most likely be the first to go. They’re hosted for free by my ISP, but in the interests of saving money I’m likely to change my ISP, or at the very least swap to a cheaper package which doesn’t include hosting.

It was good while it lasted, but looking back it only really lived for the first couple of years; everything thereafter has been essentially life support, a series of attempts to keep a dying dream alive. So I’m going to pull the plug on that life support. I stopped having anything to say a long time ago. I wish it were otherwise, but wishing doesn’t change anything. The new blog grew out of that wish, but has never really taken off, just proving how inadequate the wish is on its own, without any substance to support it. I doubt that one will be around for much longer, either. No regrets though, just recognition of the way things are.

What then? I’ll still be on Flickr and Twitter and Facebook - less demanding ways of staying connected, albeit with a connection that will never run as deep as those connections made in the early days of blogging.

It was good while it lasted. Thank you all for that.

A new home

2010-08-23T21:05:00.000+01:00

After an inordinately long gestation period, the new blog is almost here. It has, you might say, gone into labour (or rather its creator has), and birth can be expected quite soon. Although it rather destroys the metaphor, a sneak preview may be had here. No new material yet, but the couple of posts copied from this blog really belong in the new one.

At sea

2010-07-29T13:06:00.004+01:00

"A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for."
~ John A. Shedd

"One does not discover new continents without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
~ Andre Gide

"Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for a while. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way."
~ David Whyte

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life."
~ Dr. Alfred D'Souza

"There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be."
~ John Fowles

"Make the most of yourself...for that is all there is of you."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enforced Hiatus

2010-05-23T21:08:00.002+01:00

If blogging here is slow for a while, it's not because this new-found blogging energy has run out, just that I have 2 dead computers. Both were archaic and due to be replaced anyway, but things will be quiet until his'n'hers laptops have arrived. Such is life.

Whither art?

2010-05-22T22:44:00.002+01:00

It’s not that I actively enjoy suburban railway journeys – certainly not when encumbered by a heavy and unwieldy bass guitar – but I do appreciate the few minutes of guilt-free idleness. Absolutely no reason to do anything other than gaze out of the railway carriage window, following or abandoning whatever thought-paths are opened up by the ever-changing view. Today’s journey was a crossing from one side of London to the other for a bass guitar lesson with Steve Lawson.

Much of suburban London – especially those parts seen alongside a railway line – are frankly rather ugly. I was tired on this particular journey, unable for the moment to balance the ugliness with a rational acceptance of its context, and so the ugliness rather got to me. Instead of being immersed in this noise and dirt and decay, this unkempt rubbish-tip of a city whose back yard seems to mount a violent assault on the soul, how much more pleasant to be away from all this to live somewhere surrounded by green, by tranquillity, by space. A nice safe little island of a make-believe reality we create for ourselves, shutting out the nasty bits, the bits we don’t want to see, the bits that upset or disturb us. Islands of leafy suburbia amidst urban blight; islands of national (illusory?) well-being amidst a world heading for the brink – and perhaps art itself is another form of island, created as an escape mechanism from the harsh brutality of reality.

Does it actually matter that we act as if these islands are real? Or do we need the security they provide so that we can deal with the bigger reality that faces us when we go outside?

If we go outside, that is.

I sometimes worry about trying to justify art, since it sometimes seems to belong only to that artificial reality. Or more to the point, I worry about my art. My music. With working hours written off as worthless, shouldn’t I be doing something of some value with the hours that remain? I over-simplify the question, of course. I can present all manner of excellent reasons why art is valuable, essential even to the advancement of civilisation. How art mirrors the depths as well as the heights of human experience. I don’t have a problem with that, either intellectually or, if you like to put it that way, spiritually. And yet I’m still left with a nagging doubt when it comes to my art. It still feels as though art – my art - is a luxury, to be indulged in only when the real work has been done.

And this is why I miss those railway journeys: the idle thoughts and scribblings in my notebook, stimulated by nothing more than the view from the window, led me to this conclusion: the best way to deal with that question – if I accept that the ‘best’ art is not a luxury at all but an essential catalyst to the expansion of the soul – is to make sure that my art can be counted amongst that which can be such a catalyst. A mighty tall order, one that sounds almost arrogant in its presumption, but nonetheless not one to be shied away from.

In other words, to be the best musician I can be.

It sounds a simple enough concept, and one wonders why it should take such a tortuous mental process to reach this point. However, the ramifications are only just beginning to dawn on me. Some of them are rather scary.

I can be a creature of extremes; holding a tremendous, debilitating lack of self-confidence yet at the same time a deep and sure belief in a potential only just beginning to be tapped. I guess that’s not all bad; at least the lack of confidence prevents what self-belief there is from turning into arrogance.

Ye gods; is the old blogger, not seen here for many a year, at last resurrected?

30 Days of Music: Day 6 - a song that reminds me of somewhere

2010-05-21T13:46:00.003+01:00

Wind the clock back 28 years to 1982. (Good grief, is really that long? Half a lifetime?) It’s lunch time and I’m sitting in a pub in Sutton Coldfield, just outside Birmingham, along with a few work colleagues. We’re working on installing new VHF radio transmitters at the BBC transmitting station nearby. It’s a long job, running well over a year, and many weeks will find a number of us up here for much of the week, back home again for the weekend. It’s not that we’re hardened lunch-time drinkers (honest…) but with long working days up here it’s nice to get away from site for a while, just for a change of scenery. The pub doesn’t have a huge lunch-time trade, but every day we see another similar group here – tradesmen of some kind, I can’t remember what; electricians maybe – obviously in a similar position to us, taking a break from a long ongoing job. And every day, without fail, they select the same song on the video jukebox. I suppose they may have liked the music, but somehow I suspect that may not have been the over-riding reason for their choice…

(The YouTube version has embedding disabled, but the above link seems to work okay)

Anyway, their job finished before ours, and for a couple of days the pub was a lot quieter at lunch time. But something was missing; it just didn’t seem the same without that video playing, so, rather sheepishly, we carried on the tradition, secretly hoping no-one else was paying close attention to our apparent tastes in music and… ahem… visual entertainment. Hence that song, for better or for worse, is inextricably linked in my mind with jumbled visions of exotic yachts, bikini-clad girls, and a very English saloon bar of a pub tucked away in a sleepy corner of the midlands.

30 Days of Music: Day 5 - a song that reminds you of someone.

2010-05-20T20:56:00.003+01:00

I think the 90's was the decade in which I rediscovered the music of my youth; I remember commuting up and down the M1 with the likes of Led Zeppelin blasting full volume out of the car stereo. A circumstance which of course was completely disconnected with the fact that I also turned 40 half way through that decade... There was so much good old stuff to listen to that somehow I managed to miss much of the great new music that was around. So although I'd just about heard of the Crash Test Dummies, I hadn't a clue what kind of sound they made; I think the name made me think vaguely of post-punk rock. (Worth clicking that link, by the way, because you get a free play of their new album).

Enter Andrea. We discovered each other's blogs, as you do, swapped stories etc, and somewhere along the line, for a reason that now escapes me, she put together a tape of various Canadian artists - which incidentally was where I first heard day 1's contribution to this series. Included on that tape was this song. I'd never heard it before - or indeed anything quite like it - and it grew and grew on me. It appeals to the slightly off-the-wall side of my sense of humour, and I think there's probably something about it which reflects a side of Andrea too. Which is why this song always reminds me of her. (And I hope it's okay to say so, Andrea, but I figured I could always seek forgiveness if I had to ;)

30 Days of Music: Day 4 - A song that makes you sad

2010-05-19T22:03:00.002+01:00

When she first recorded this song in 1992, Eva Cassidy wouldn't have known that she was going to die of cancer just four years later. All of which renders that last line of the song all the more poignant.

30 Days of Music: Day 3 - a song that makes you happy

2010-05-18T19:29:00.002+01:00

In spite of [insert list of gripes here] it is still a wonderful world - for the moment. Unless we fuck it up irretrievably. On which day this song will instead make me very sad indeed.

30 Days of Music: Day 2 – Your Least Favourite Song

2010-05-17T13:22:00.002+01:00

I thought at first this one was going to be difficult; then I remembered disco… the enemy of all things musical.

It must be the enemy, because it induces a fight-or-flight response – smash the TV and beat the remnants into a pile of dust, or stick my fingers in my ears and run, screaming, from the room. Not being the owner of the TV at the time, I chose the latter option. Inwardly, if not actually.

But what have I done? I actually listened to a few moments of this video, and that sickening tune has insinuated itself into my brain; I even found myself involuntarily humming it in the shower this morning. Perhaps the men in white coats will come for me soon…

Thirty Days of Music

2010-05-16T14:25:00.007+01:00

There’s a meme doing the rounds; thirty days of music. Thirty simple prompts for songs you like/dislike/make you feel happy/sad etc – you get the picture. It’s curious that music is such a big part of my life yet I rarely write about it. Since these days I rarely write about anything at all (a situation worth exploring, perhaps, but not right now), I thought it might be worth using this as a means of getting back into the habit of communicating here. Heaven knows, I don’t communicate much anywhere else.

Day 1 – Your Favourite Song

Even though the very concept of a single favourite song, amongst so much great music of such variety, is one against which I instinctively rebel, nevertheless this was an easy choice. A song I loved instantly on first hearing it, and of which I never tire; a song I return to time and again when my soul needs something beautiful, something heartfelt, something deeply human.

These words, from the description of the album, from which this song is taken, give some background to the composition:

“The album closes with perhaps the most deeply felt of the self-composed titles. "Departure Bay" contains vivid and touching images of her hometown of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island but also a wrenching description of her family's first Christmas without her mother and a final verse that welcomes new love and hope for the future.

“Musically composed by Krall alone, these songs mark a lyrical collaboration with her new husband, Elvis Costello. Explaining how they worked, Krall said: "I wrote the music and then Elvis and I talked about what we wanted to say. I told him stories and wrote pages and pages of reminiscences, descriptions and images, and he put them into tighter lyrical form. For "Departure Bay," I wrote down a list of things that I love about home, things I realized were different, even exotic, now that I've been away".”

This song has personal associations too - I have Andrea to thank for introducing me to Diana Krall’s music, and her paintings of the corner of Canada which form the setting for this song help especially to bring the words alive.

Sometimes we just appreciate a nice tune, or a beautiful voice, but, like all art perhaps, music has most effect when it touches something personal within ourselves, when the art is the bridge by which an experience can cross from one to another. This doesn’t have to be some great epiphany, some moment of immense joy or sorrow; just an empathic experience when the music puts you into the shoes of the singer or the songwriter and your world is enriched because of it.

That, I guess, is why I call this a favourite. Yes, the tune is good; yes the harmonies are pleasing; yes, the band – jazz trio plus guitar – is as near-perfect as you could possibly hope for; ultimately though, even though the song takes its inspiration in the circumstance surrounding a death, it manages to communicate a wholeness of experience that places acceptance and hope as equal partners with sadness.

As such, it reminds me a bit of those famous words of the 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich:

"…All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"

Does that seem a lot to read into a simple song? Perhaps; but then this is a personal favourite because it elicits a personal response. Your response will be different – and that’s fine. Life would be very dull if we all saw everything the same way.

Here’s the full list of 30 days’ themes if you fancy giving it a go:

day 01 - your favorite song
day 02 - your least favorite song
day 03 - a song that makes you happy
day 04 - a song that makes you sad
day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone
day 06 - a song that reminds of you of somewhere
day 07 - a song that reminds you of a certain event
day 08 - a song that you know all the words to
day 09 - a song that you can dance to
day 10 - a song that makes you fall asleep
day 11 - a song from your favorite band
day 12 - a song from a band you hate
day 13 - a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 - a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 - a song that describes you
day 16 - a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 - a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 - a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 - a song from your favorite album
day 20 - a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 - a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 - a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 - a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 - a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 - a song that makes you laugh
day 26 - a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 - a song that you wish you could play
day 28 - a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 - a song from your childhood
day 30 - your favorite song at this time last year

Hat tip to Steve Lawson (from whom, incidentally, I’m now taking bass guitar lessons) for passing on the idea.

Betwixt and between

2010-03-23T22:26:00.002Z

It was when playing in the last show that a realisation clicked into place; a new frame of reference for an old perspective, a self-imposed straightjacket miraculously falling away.

Take a typical amateur dramatic production – the cast spans perhaps 18 to 35, the band may be a bit older, and both groups with just the occasional (relatively) old ‘un. This time round, at 55 I was undoubtedly the oldest one there. I’m usually content to be 55, assuming I don’t really fit in a group that is mostly a generation apart. That doesn’t mean being aloof – or I hope it doesn’t. There’s no feeling of superiority by virtue of age, or anything like that – goodness, most of them, cast and band alike, are way better at what they do than I am at what I do (which if you didn’t know is play bass guitar). And I don’t really mean to emphasise age as much as I have done. The theatre set are, shall we say, quite an extrovert lot, and that also creates something of a gap between us. So this isn’t about where any of us sit on any linear scale, be that of age or ability or anything else; no, this feeling of not-really-fitting stems from an internal assumption that these differences – of age, of generation, of personality – are of necessity a divider. An intrinsic barrier, one that might be peered over from time to time, but never crossed.

I said this minor epiphany was down to the show, yet nearly everything about this latest show was just like every other show that has gone before; a cast drawn from the same pool of north London/ home counties talent, the usual suspects playing in the band. True, ‘Rent’ was an ambitious production for an amateur group, but then this is a group used to working at the top end of the amateur range, with production to professional standards. I’ve been part of similar productions before, yet come away feeling little different to how I started.

This time round, however, there was just one tiny difference. Usually, the band is dressed in black, hidden in the pit, essentially invisible, its presence known only by the sound. But this time, the band was to be an integral part of the show. Originally we were planned to be on stage, but space was limited so we did end up in the orchestra pit – but rather than wearing the usual black, we were to dress the part – a 1990’s New York would-be rock band. Such a trivial difference, yet I felt literally 10 years younger, or more to the point, I felt that division – be it of generation or anything else – narrow to the point almost of vanishing.

Now, just in case your imagination is running away with itself, let me put your mind at rest - I didn’t attempt anything that would embarrass audience or myself by looking as though I was trying too hard. No black leather waistcoat open over a bare chest! In reality my chosen garb was still decidedly conservative, certainly by rock band standards. But that isn’t the point – the important difference was not actual appearance, but the fact that, in a small way, we were playing the part of rock musicians. Hardly acting; the audience wouldn’t have noticed anything different. But it felt different.

The ‘costume’, such as it was, wasn’t so effective at the after-show party, I have to admit. No acting there, it was back to feeling like an old fart amongst a different generation. But in a way that drove the point home, a point that goes something like this:

These years where I now find myself are the between years. Between the fiery certainty of youth and the deep wisdom of old age; between career drive and the release of retirement; between parenthood and grandparenthood. Sometimes, in these between years, you feel as though you belong to neither side, but are wandering lost in a drawn-out transition. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Instead of belonging to neither world you can belong to both, having a foot in both camps. In one moment, enjoy the exuberance of youth, in the next, share the wisdom of the years; one moment be a brother, the next a father-figure.

I wish I didn’t keep quoting years and age. This isn’t only about age and ageing, although they provided the context for this post. No, this is about choices, about realising that there is a much wider spectrum of ways of being available to us, wider by far than the narrow confines of the persona we – or at any rate I – usually assume.

Sometimes all it takes for this penny to drop is a black T-shirt and a crumpled denim overshirt.

I’m going to start a new blog soon, once I’ve sorted out the layout, and I plan this to be the first post. I’m calling it ‘betwixt and between’, reflecting the focus on life in this period of later middle age. I've finally realised that his old blog here no longer really feels a part of me.

Voices

2010-02-26T13:18:00.001Z

There are so many self-talk voices, some encouraging, some, perhaps most, not; sometimes they get muddled and it’s not easy to tell which is helpful and which isn’t, which should be listened to and which ignored.

Sometimes even the true the voice of your own being can be inconvenient, telling you things you don’t know how to deal with, or don’t want to deal with.

So, for safety, or convenience, you deliberately lock those more troublesome voices away, because you no longer trust them, or know how to trust them. Or maybe you just don’t have time to listen. All that remains are the voices of banal chatter.

Then one day you think you want to open the door again, but it turns out there’s no-one waiting expectantly behind it, just a vacant space. Or maybe that’s the wrong metaphor, maybe it’s that the lock is seized, or maybe you lost the key. Whatever; either way you no longer have access to something which was once part of you.

That’s how it is with this blog. Whoever it was that used to write here, isn’t the guy who sits tapping the keys which form these words. Someone else sits in his place. Someone older, emptier, more remote; someone pliable under the forces of circumstance instead of challenging them; someone, in short, with nothing much to say.

Such does not make for good blogging.

Bipolar World

2010-01-06T21:22:00.008Z

A world described only by the presence or absence of its few defining features:

White and not-white;

Sun,

and not-sun;

frozen,

and not (altogether) frozen;

steep,

and not (quite so) steep;

wind-cowed,

and not cowed;

outside,

and not outside.

So much more elemental; so much simpler.

Remembering

2010-01-03T12:13:00.002Z

Dinner is cooked and eaten, the washing up done. The lights are dim, I lie curled on my side, warm and snug, half dozing whilst a sultry-voiced Diana Krall sings softly to me, courtesy of the ubiquitous iPod. At this moment, there is absolutely no need to do anything else, be anywhere else, be anybody else; for a few rare moments I’m completely relaxed, at ease – happy, in fact.

And this is in spite of the fact that underneath the down sleeping bag which keeps me so warm, underneath the two layers of sleeping mats, lies four inches of frozen snow – but snow which has gently moulded itself to my shape making this the most comfortable campsite ever – no tree roots, no stones, no hard lumps which magically grow bigger and harder and lumpier during the night.

Beyond the thin nylon of the tent walls it’s a wild night; every so often the growl of the wind in the treetops crescendos to a menacing roar, warning of a fresh onslaught to strike the tent a few seconds later, the sides bulging inwards under the pressure. But I’ve already checked and tightened the guys, adjusted a couple pegs here and there to give the most secure anchorage; let the wind howl – I can turn up Diana’s volume, snuggle deeper under the down and idly watch the circle of light on the tent roof dance as the fabric bows under invisible forces.

This is how evenings should be – all the hard work got out of the way during the hours of daytime, and a clear space after the final task – the preparation of the evening meal – in which to relax and reflect, to set a seal on the labours of the day before the descent into slumber.

It hasn’t been like that for me for a long time; life has become a too-frantic bustle of never-completed activity, from the moment the alarm goes off to the moment my eyes close at the end of the day, with the only pauses forced through sheer exhaustion. I’ve never set much store by New Year’s resolutions, but if I were to make one, it would be to give myself permission to keep some time and energy free from all those pressures of the day, and remember who I am.

Starting

2010-01-02T15:22:00.001Z

I need to start writing again. Need to, because I need to start thinking again, otherwise the already weakened thinking muscles will atrophy still further until they wither away completely. It has become too easy just to drift through the days and years doing little more than reacting to circumstances, rarely taking the initiative, rarely engaging; just becoming sufficiently involved to muddle through the day and survive until the next. Yet the thought just manages to form itself in this treacly consciousness of mine that unless something changes, this is how it’s going to be from here on.

This blog has stood all but abandoned for months now – the current front page contains posts dating back to September. I’ve been unable to find the energy or the will or the purpose to link a few words together. Or a few thoughts. It could really do with a major reworking – the 800 pixel wide layout is an anachronism, the blogroll is out of date – but changes there will have to wait a while. I could start afresh, but for some reason I can’t explain, the continuity of the stream of posts running back to 2003 feels important.

I had no real intention of stopping writing, I just allowed everything else to get in the way. A day, a week, a month, letting circumstance dictate the ways in which mind and hands are employed. That’s a risky road to travel, for it leads away from opportunities for self-examination, away from prospects of growth, towards only a kind of oblivion of the soul. And yet I still can’t escape that puritanical notion that any activity whose beneficiary is the self is by definition selfish and therefore in some way bad. Heads you win, tails I lose.

So I make no promises, either to you or to me. But taking a bit more effort to marshal a few thoughts and set down some words here would seem to be a Good Thing. We’ll see how it pans out.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

2009-12-25T11:30:00.002Z

Looking the wrong way

2009-11-07T20:31:00.005Z

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can't you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front."

- G.K. Chesterton

Oh, to have the imagination to use such simple imagery to express something so profound.

Hat tip to whiskeyriver.

Fiddling

2009-10-30T13:41:00.001Z

With so much potential on so many fronts for global catastrophe, doing anything other than something which just might help avert just one of the doomsday scenarios feels like fiddling whilst Rome burns.

We wring our hands helplessly, and carry on fiddling.

Work continues to be as purposeless and unfulfilling as ever. But I dutifully fiddle nonetheless. It seems the only option.

I gaze longingly at the crate of rock climbing gear in the garage and wonder if I’ll ever use it again. But anyway, it would only be fiddling.

My bass guitar looks at first sight like a metaphorical fiddle. Yet art – even apparently banal musical shows - has a way of touching the soul. So in spite of the pressure it brings to a self-doubting musician struggling to master his instrument, and the single-minded focus it requires, this is one form of fiddling of which I’m not ashamed.

I reckon kids growing up and leaving home is the biggest life transition I’ve encountered so far. Adjustment is proving surprisingly difficult, in ways I’m only just beginning to notice, let alone comprehend. This is the most real thing in my life today. In the final analysis, family trumps global catastrophe.

Change

2009-10-23T13:58:00.003+01:00

I might change my Internet Service Provider. It would be a worthwhile cost saving, but I'd lose the hosting service for the photos which appear on this blog, so all that would be left would be those little squares marking the place where something's missing. The blog's a mess anyway - the template was designed in the days when 800 x 600 pixel screens where commonplace. It's obvious too that I have very little to say these days; I've changed, I'm not the person I was when I began blogging. I'd delete the whole thing and forget about it, except for one thing. The comments. If I look back over old posts, it's not what I've written that matters, it's the conversations that have ensued, the connections, the friendships - although to my shame I've let those lapse. But I'm not quite ready yet to cut adrift from all that, so this broken space can stand a while longer while I figure out what to do with it.

Maybe...

2009-10-09T20:16:00.001+01:00

...I should just acknowledge that I can't do this any more.

Sidestreet

2009-09-27T21:36:00.002+01:00

A chance snapshot in Bury St Edmunds at the weekend.

A brief interval of abundance

2009-09-17T22:45:00.001+01:00

Shout these words from the Archdruid at any government you like, and you can be sure they’ll clap their hands over their ears and sing “LA, LA, LA; I CAN’T HEAR YOU” :

“The difficulty here is that faith in the prospect of a better future has been so deeply ingrained in all of us that trying to argue against it is a bit like trying to tell a medieval peasant that heaven with all its saints and angels isn’t there any more. The hope that tomorrow will be, or can be, or at the very least ought to be better than today is hardwired into the collective imagination of the modern world. Behind that faith lies the immense example of three hundred years of industrial expansion, which cashed in the cheaply accessible fraction of the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves for a brief interval of abundance so extreme that garbage collectors in today’s America have access to things that emperors could not get before the industrial revolution dawned.

“That age of extravagance has profoundly reshaped – in terms of the realities of human life before and after our age, a better word might be “distorted” – the way people nowadays think about very nearly anything you care to name. In particular, it has blinded us to the ecological realities that provide the fundamental context to our lives. It’s made nearly all of us think, for example, that unlimited exponential growth is possible, normal, and good, and so even as the disastrous consequences of unlimited exponential growth slam into our society one after another like waves hitting a sand castle, the vast majority of people nowadays still build their visions of the future on the fantasy that problems caused by growth can be solved by still more growth.”

[more...]

And if unlimited growth really isn’t possible, what then?

A moment

2009-09-15T12:36:00.002+01:00

Once in a while, in a moment of inattention, I may teeter on the brink of understanding. Not head-understanding, but heart-understanding. Something unexpected lifts my mind out of its weary circles and shows me a place where the patterns of the world shape a different frame, where values and fears and goals and ever-so-important banalities are supplanted by a vision, a certainty, a rightness you always knew to be true but had forgotten. Teeter, out of balance, with the sense of a tipping point almost emerging from the chaos - but then the weight of the old balance reasserts itself. Ever-present threat; dull, numbing dread; gnawing guilt; the questions weigh in once more.

A chance meeting with a total stranger was one such moment last week; finding this poem, posted today on Panhala, is another:

Terns

Don't think just now of the trudging forward of thought,
but of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.

It's summer, you never saw such a blue sky,
and here they are, those white birds with quick wings,

sweeping over the waves,
chattering and plunging,

their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes
happy as little nails.

The years to come -- this is a promise --
will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought
where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,
than this deep affinity between your eyes and the world.

The flock thickens
over the roiling, salt brightness. Listen,

maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world
in the clasp of attention, isn't the perfect prayer,

but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,
is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

but of pure submission. Tell me, what else
could beauty be for? And now the tide

is at its very crown,
the white birds sprinkle down,

gathering up the loose silver, rising
as if weightless. It isn't instruction, or a parable.

It isn't for any vanity or ambition
except for the one allowed, to stay alive.

It's only a nimble frolic
over the waves. And you find, for hours,

you cannot even remember the questions
that weigh so in your mind.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Zambezi sunset

2009-08-25T22:02:00.001+01:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words...

2009-08-20T22:24:00.002+01:00

...this lot must add up to a small book.

Maybe I'll find the time and the mental space to talk about them, but for now let the pictures speak for themselves. These scenes of rural life in Zambia made as much - no, more - impression on me as the wildlife.

Zambian Traveller's Tales - Part 1

2009-08-04T21:43:00.011+01:00

We were up early and left at 6 a.m. - before sunrise, even though in all probability we’d get to Chipata, our overnight stop on the way to South Luangwa National Park, by early afternoon. When you take a long road trip in Zambia it’s a good idea to include a sizeable contingency in your schedule to ensure you reach your destination by nightfall - which is about 6pm, give or take a bit, all year round. Who knows what you might encounter on the way to delay you, and driving at night is definately not for the faint-hearted - for reasons which will become clear in a future post.

This one wasn’t blocking the road,

but this was one (seen on another trip) very nearly was. Such sights are common, we were told – a premise born out by our experience of seeing on average about one overturned lorry for every six hours on the road. Thankfully we could get around this one, but with a rock wall on one side and a steep drop on the other, we might not have been so lucky. If the only road is blocked, there's often no alternative but to wait until it is cleared. When a landslide blocked this same stretch of road in February - the only road linking Lusaka with Zimbabwe and thence South Africa - that meant a wait of 6 days. Even now, five months on, the surface still hasn’t been repaired – the gap is just filled with crushed rock, which even a 4 x 4 has to negotiate at little more than a walking pace.

And if you thought your troubles were over once the lorry was out of the way, think again. Once it has been righted, if driveable, chances are it’ll carry on its way with no further attention. Many a time we saw a lorry whose rear end was apparently trying to pull out and overtake the front, the back axle being twisted out of line with the body. Makes you wonder about the mechanical integrity of the juggernaut on the other side of the road thundering towards you…

Thankfully though we had less immediately disturbing things to take our attention.

It seems that wherever you travel, at whatever time of day, you will always see children walking to or from school. Rural schools often operate a three shift system - early morning, starting at 7.30, late morning, and afternoon – it’s the only way with a limited teaching resource of providing at least a basic education for everyone. You might be seemingly in the middle of nowhere, miles since the last town or village and miles from the next;

it might be before sunrise, or in the blazing heat of the day, or, I imagine, in the middle of a tropical downpour (logic says that must be so, although we encountered none at this time of year, it being the dry season) or when darkness is only an hour away; yet you’ll always encounter schoolchildren on the road, with a steady, purposeful stride designed to eat up the miles with apparent ease. It looks surprising to our eyes, used to seeing six-year-olds taken by car half a mile to school, to find youngsters of that age on their own, miles from anywhere, walking down roads along which the aforementioned juggernauts occasionally thunder. And even though this is rural Africa, and all but the trunk roads are just dirt so that every passing vehicle leaves a choking plume of dust in its wake; even though these children may live in a single-roomed mud-brick grass-thatched dwelling (or less traditionally, a tin-roofed one),

with no running water and no electricity; in spite of all this they are immaculately turned in full school uniform, with an obvious pride in themselves that would put many of their UK counterparts to shame.

The sight is almost surreal; it's the middle of the bush, the villages look little different to how they have looked for centuries - with the notable exception of bicycles and ubiquitous cellphone "Top up Here" signs - yet these children would blend in perfectly on the high street of any English town or village.

It’s a sight to make you think. I’m guessing that some of these children might walk for 2 hours or more to get to school – where they’ll spend 3 hours and then make the journey home again. 20 hours walking for 15 hours schooling a week. It seems tough enough at this time of year, when conditions are like a pleasant English summers day, but what is like when the temperature reaches 40 deg C or rain is falling in sheets? And how do their parents pay for the uniforms? Many of them will be subsistence farmers, most likely below the internationally agreed poverty level; yet they manage to scrape together enough to buy a uniform whose cost I can imagine some British parents complaining about.

I said it makes you think. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what I think. Schooling obviously means a lot to these people; probably they seek "betterment", whatever that is; parents hope it will provide a path out of the poverty trap for their children, but I wonder what options are really available to them, educated or not? Hawking oranges in the traffic in Lusaka? It's tempting to take a romanticised view that, with basic needs of housing - built entirely by hand from local materials of mud-brick, wood and grass - and food, home-grown or traded, met, perhaps this simple life, in spite of its hardships, has something to be said for it. But the reality of course is nowhere near as idyllic as that. Lack of clean water (unless some overseas charity has provided a borehole well);

limited medical facilities - perhaps a ride of several hours in a bumpy ox-cart to reach the nearest doctor;

parasitic infections; no, I wouldn't pretend it's a life to aspire to, however much 'downsizing' might appeal.

I don't know what their education will bring these children in the years ahead, but it clearly brings them pride in themselves in the present, and I'm guessing it gives them hope for the future. And even putting the content of the education itself on one side, those are two assets well worth having, assets in which these children walking several hours a day on dusty roadsides have greater riches than some of their better off Western counterparts.

Sights

2009-08-02T21:43:00.003+01:00

A few pics of Victoria Falls now posted on Flickr.

Window on the World

2009-07-29T12:57:00.005+01:00

I really didn’t expect Africa to have such an impact. The animals, yes; the land and its people, no.

We went, first and foremost, to visit our son and daughter-in-law. We’d have gone to whatever country he’d chosen as the place to start his teaching career – the fact that it was Zambia, home to some of the best national parks for wildlife viewing in Africa (the Bradt guide argues that South Luangwa is perhaps THE best), was a bonus – a very welcome one, but a bonus nonetheless.

Most of the national parks are, by their very nature, remote, and many have airstrips nearby; I imagine most visitors other than those on extended overland trips arrive by air and are driven only the last few kilometres to the safari lodges. Only if you already have a base in Zambia and own a 4 x 4 would you voluntarily spend hours or days of valuable holiday time negotiating bumpy, dusty roads and dirt tracks, dodging pot-holes sometimes almost the width of the road.

But those who fly almost direct to their luxury safari lodge are missing out on an experience which, if you let it, must surely set you wondering at the lives of the people you see along the way; lives that are incredibly tough by our soft European standards, yet they seem to thrive on what seems to us like hardship, with no shortage of smiles.

During the 19 days of our stay, we spent some 44 hours covering about 3,000km (at a rough estimate – I may be a bit out on that). True, the time wasn’t necessarily comfortably spent, but it was always interesting, P’s aged but sturdy 4x4 providing an ever-changing window onto rural Zambian life.

Of course, it was only a window – quite literally. We drove with the doors locked and avoided stopping other than for fuel and calls of nature, the former only in the largest towns and the latter only when sure of uninterrupted solitude. Car-jackings may not be commonplace, but they do happen. Of the relatively few other Europeans P. and R. know, one couple suffered a car-jacking – in the middle of the day and in the very centre of Lusaka – just a couple of years ago. Perhaps rural areas are safer - but perhaps not. We didn’t plan on putting that theory to the test.

So even though everyone speaks English (that being the national language and hence that used in schools) we didn’t have any interactions other than the most basic, at shops and fuel stations. All we could do was watch the scenes that flashed by, and wonder about the lives of the people we saw. And there was plenty to wonder about; some of my guesses may be wildly misplaced; others may be roughly on the right track. I’ll find out more, if I can, when I get the chance, but for the moment my guesses and wonderings will have to fill in the gaps between the simple facts of what could be seen, for a just a few seconds, in a narrow strip within a few hundred yards of the road.

Incidentally, in what follows, you might sense a rather unfortunate parallel between these behind-glass images of people’s daily lives and the viewing of game from the security of a safari vehicle; a parallel of which I was uncomfortably aware. In fact in many ways we were closer to the animals than we were to the people in the villages. The animals we could study as long as we liked (or until the guide got bored) - often so close that binoculars were totally redundant, unless you want to count the hairs on a lion’s head or the ticks on a buffalo’s back. But the people and their dwellings flashed by in next to no time. We were far more isolated from them in every way; I couldn’t escape the disquieting notion that I was thinking about these people in the detached way a social anthropologist might – the same way a behavioural zoologist would observe the animals. But even if we had had the opportunity to engage with them, the outer surface of their lives is so different from ours it’d probably be hard to find common ground there for the kind of conversation which might lead deeper into their collective psyche.

And I suspect it would be the junk in our own lifestyle that would get in the way of reaching the truth of theirs.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are so many images in my mind, all jumbled together, it’s difficult to know where to start. And not only images in my mind; I have over two hundred photos snapped hastily from the car as we sped past. It’s next to impossible to frame a subject properly when you don’t know what’s going to appear in front of the lens pointing out of a rear passenger window until it is almost past, and the camera itself is bouncing along at somewhere between 60 and 120 kph. Using a high shutter speed and image stabilisation, the camera does a fair job of extracting a stable image (albeit often a very wonky one), but the reflexes (and eyesight) of the photographer are definitely the weak link in the chain.

All the same, these snaps are as good a starting point as any, so I invite you to share with me over the comings days and weeks, as blogging time permits, the scenes we saw and the paths down which my imagination wandered as I tried to piece together aspects of the way of life glimpsed on our journeys.

But enough for one post; here for now is a taste of what we saw:

Sampler

2009-07-26T16:45:00.003+01:00

1,451 photos downloaded; now to backup and sort and select and process. Could take a while...
In the meantime, here's a taster:

The red stuff in the foreground is zebra, by the way. Hope you've had your dinner...

Visiting

2009-07-06T09:55:00.003+01:00

We'll be away for a bit, visiting family in Zambia. Feels like I ought to have more to say, but words have been in short supply of late. Maybe the trip will help them to flow again.

Note in passing: this blog was 6 years old a couple of days ago. The tide has ebbed and flowed since then. Or tides; tide of words, tide of friendships, tide of self-knowledge; it seems it's possible to forget what you once knew. I rarely look back over those old posts; I wonder who I'd find there?

Incongruous

2009-07-02T13:09:00.000+01:00

A tricycle, two wheels at the front, and between the wheels a huge box. Forty years ago, ice-cream vendors used something similar, pedalling their wares in more senses than one; in their case, the box was a fridge-on-wheels, packed with ice. What I saw in this box though brought an instant smile to my face - three small children, presumably on some kind of seats; behind them, her delicate summer dress catching the wind and fluttering in her wake, sat an attractive young woman, managing to convey a sense of carefree grace in spite of straddling such an ungainly contraption; the foursome seemed to be in lively engagement with each other and with the world they passed through.

Oh yes, and this was waiting to turn right on a busy urban dual carriageway in the London rush hour, a right turn which would lead them inexorably on to a long an very steep hill towards Hampstead.

The epitome of English eccentricity?

In a glass, darkly

2009-06-28T16:11:00.001+01:00

Aftermath

2009-06-28T13:09:00.004+01:00

of the storms last night...

Sunshine this morning though.

B.I.F.

2009-05-31T20:03:00.003+01:00

I need...

...more practice...

...at this.

Still less than ideal results, but there's a lotta luck involved. When's he gonna come out? Which way's he gonna fly? Which one has he gone in now?

On Objectivity

2009-05-31T08:20:00.001+01:00

"There is no such thing as objective reality. You color everything."

~ Deng Ming-Dao, via whiskey river

Wildlife

2009-05-30T20:34:00.009+01:00

You wouldn't believe how many failed shots of tadpoles it takes to get just a couple of passable results. The combination of light loss through the polariser resulting in large aperture and consequent narrow depth of field, manual focus so as see through the water's surface, shaky hands holding a 400mm equivalent lens at a metre distance... yeah, I know; bad workman blames his tools and all that. But I guess these are taken at the border of what's achievable in the circumstances. One moderate success to a couple of dozen failures.

But who's counting, anyway? Sitting cross-legged at the end of the pond, the sun on my back, oblivious to the outside world, absorbed in the lives of those who populate this watery universe in front of me - what better way to spend to warm and sunny Saturday afternoon?

We keep fishing out the blanket weed (Spyrogyra) that drapes this fella's nose, but I read today that that just releases more spores and make it grow all the more.

Two way traffic (unless they're up to something else. I confess I don't know much about the reproductive habits of snails):

I'm still getting to grips with the 45 - 200mm lens on the Panasonic G1. Sometimes things come out okay, sometimes they don't. This one was okay-ish. It's not a macro lens, closest focus is a metre, hence this is a crop. Nowhere near as good a result as I could get with the old Olympus C8080. As far as I know, Panasonic haven't announced any plans for a macro lens for the G1 yet.

The pond's not a year old, yet it's fascinating how much life congregates around water. These Large Red Damselflies for instance:

Wildlife, did I say?

Artistic universe

2009-05-24T21:22:00.002+01:00

For sheer wow factor, today's APOD takes some beating:

Suburban Jungle

2009-05-24T13:12:00.001+01:00

Isn’t it enough simply to survive each day?

2009-05-23T22:05:00.000+01:00

Isn’t it enough simply to survive each day? To make it through the conscious hours unscathed, completing one’s allotted tasks, without giving upset to another, without being unduly upset by another; to be fortunate enough not to know hunger, or physical pain, or disease; to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that the hours until dawn will pass undisturbed?

For almost all of human history, from the time our ancestors came down from the trees to live in caves, right up to just a few generations ago, this life of ours would seem, if viewed from the perspective of those ancestors, just a couple of degrees short of heaven. After so many millennia of struggle, you’d have thought it would be in our genes to welcome such an easy life; to be content with days that contain so few challenges, so few fears. No tigers outside the circle of fire, no brigands at the door, no secret police in the dead of night.

Why then do I feel so powerfully that mere survival is so far short of being enough that it’s barely worth the effort?

Words I would do well to take to heart

2009-05-18T20:46:00.005+01:00

"To laugh is to risk appearing a fool, to weep is to risk appearing too sentimental, to reach out for another is to risk involvement, and to expose feelings is to risk exposing one's true self.

"To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk their loss, to love is to risk not being loved in return. To live is to risk dying, to hope is to risk despair, to try is to risk failure.

"But all risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

"The person who risks nothing also does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. If we avoid risk we may avoid suffering and sorrow, but we simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love or live."

~ Leo Buscaglia ~

There are many things for which I thank my parents; regrettably, a sound education in the hazards of risking nothing isn't one of them.

Hat tip to Laura Young

Update: It seems more than coincidence that Rob Paterson posts this. The risk in my case is not about doing, it is about being.

MAS*H

2009-05-15T21:36:00.003+01:00

Idly flicking around, as you do, I came across something I wasn't looking for...

One of the greatest TV shows ever. Ever. Oh to be as human as those guys... They don't make 'em like they used to.

It is the process

2009-04-27T21:17:00.002+01:00

"We don’t think so we can write. We write so we can think. The writing is not something we do to merely record our creative thinking process. It is the process. I often sit down with no clue what the next words I will write are. The writing pulls them from me."

David duChemin

Chance Discovery

2009-04-10T22:11:00.000+01:00

Deja vu

2009-03-06T13:38:00.001Z

I guess I should just do it. Start; put pen to paper; write again. No matter, for the moment, that there seems little to say. After all, no-one has to read it.

Why? Because expression and identity go hand in hand. Without expression, identity fades; without a voice, the self becomes mute. I can feel it happening.

A few years ago I made a deliberate decision to put more effort into my work. Or to be more accurate, into my employer’s work, since I’ve never considered it to be mine. For a couple of years prior to that, I had had a job whose demands I could satisfy easily in little more than half the nominal working hours. That was when I began blogging, and much of that activity took place – ahem – in ‘working’ hours.

Then a few things changed. An office move to a totally open plan environment meant that blogging at work became a non-starter. In any case, the time available evaporated too as result of a change in role.

I felt I had to decide where my identity lay. Ever since I started blogging, I felt a conflict between my work persona and an ‘other me’ I was only just getting to know; I wrote about that several times in those early days, in fact the inner conflict was so intense at times that I went to counselling to talk it through, thinking I could resolve things in half a dozen sessions - and was still there 18 months later, only quitting when I finally understood that whatever help counselling was giving me wasn’t enough; there was still something I didn’t have access to within myself, and without that nothing was really going to change.

For a while, I had real hopes of developing something – although I could never identify exactly what – out of the creativity, the self expression, the companionship that was blogging. But in the end it didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and as with so many things that I do, I never really had faith in myself.

So it was that three years ago, after dreaming vaguely for a while of radical life changes, it seemed to me that the reality of my position was that I’d be in my current job, and most likely in my current suburban-like location, for the rest of my working life – which probably meant until I was 65, since some poor pension choices mean I’m unlikely to be able to afford to retire any earlier – so I’d better make the most of it. Try and get some satisfaction, some self-esteem out of the hours I’d be spending here.

I was going to say “But it’s not working”, but that would be too simplistic an assessment. Some of the consequences are good, some aren’t. I seem to be reasonably well respected at work, but the ‘I’ in that last phrase feels like a role that another ‘I’ is playing. Playing so well that the one has almost become the other, and the ‘I’ of those early blogging days is little more than a memory.

So unless I do something to change it, here’s how the future maps out: I mutate gradually from a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income mediocre nine-to-five wage-slave to a tired old cynic, and one day wake up to find myself in an old age filled with might-have-beens. Or maybe I don’t wake up; maybe the transformation will be complete. Hardly an attractive prospect, either way.

Show's Over

2009-03-05T19:53:00.005Z

That which filled two months of my life has been and is now gone.

Two months of commitment, of music of which I never tired even though it reverberated through my head in almost every waking hour, and most probably the sleeping hours as well.

Two months of being part of something larger than myself, part of a group of wonderful people.

It leaves a hole.

The Night House

2009-02-20T13:08:00.001Z

Been too busy lately to read all of the poems that Joe Riley posts each day on Panhala. The kind of being too busy that isn’t just about finding gaps in time which aren’t filled with activity, but is about being sufficiently able to still the clamour in the mind when between activities. A clamour which is the echo of all that frenetic activity and worry spilling over into what ought to be the quiet spaces in between, but isn’t.

It was an accident - or so I thought – that I clicked on the link that led to this poem. I’d intended to click the next email down – a list of job vacancies - but in my haste I missed. I’m glad I did; it seems kinda relevant…

The Night House

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass --
the grass of civics, the grass of money --
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
and leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body -- that house of voices --
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.

~ Billy Collins ~

Pieces

2009-02-19T10:01:00.000Z

Take a picture. Take a pair of scissors, cut up the picture, shuffle the pieces around on the desk so they are a random jumble of colour, shape, bits of detail. Hinting at being parts of a whole, but that whole is hidden in the confusion of cut edges, partial shapes, broken connections. That's the world in my head these days. Small scale detail still holds together, but the big picture is torn apart.

An unshakeable belief

2009-02-07T17:05:00.003Z

Eighteen years, three million pounds, and an unshakeable belief that those who said it couldn’t be done were wrong.

That’s all it took for the first steam locomotive to be built in the UK for nearly half a century to be running today.

And, by good fortune, running not half a mile from my house.

Passers by might have wondered why I had a step-stool and a plank of wood in my hands as I walked up the path beside the railway line. A few years ago there was only a simple low post-and-wire fence to keep trespassers off the line, but the world has changed since then. Now there’s a six-foot steel-spiked fence in the way.

No matter. I plant the steps up against the fence - only two feet are on terra firma owing to the build up of ground next to the fence, but I came prepared for that; with a short length of rope, I tie the steps to the fence and voila! My personal viewing platform.

After a 45 minute wait, it was all over in a matter of seconds. Bizarrely, I barely saw the locomotive – with the camera on burst mode, the viewfinder blacks out between shots so after the first shot I was effectively shooting blind. I didn’t get to see the loco until I got home.

Against the light

2009-02-04T23:22:00.002Z

I didn’t set out with anything particular in mind to photograph, but the recent heavy snow meant that my motorbike stayed in the garage and I took the train to work; with the remnants of snow on the ground, a bright sunny morning and a longish walk through some of the back streets of central London at the other end, it seemed worth taking the camera.

The G1 is so light, compact and easy to use I can hold it in one hand, secured with a hand strap, feeling quite unencumbered as I negotiate icy pavements and dodge other pedestrians on the mile and a half walk from King’s Cross station to the office near Oxford Circus. Had I purchased the D90 as I’d originally intended, I think the bulk and weight would have meant that even if I’d had it with me, I might well not have bothered with the hassle of stopping, taking it out of my backpack, to snap shots like these. But with the camera always at the ready, it is so easy to take advantage of the fleeting images which flash across the eyeballs as I hurry on the way to work.

Did I say I love this camera?

Still some left

2009-02-03T23:00:00.001Z

(This reduced size image doesn't do justice to the level of detail this camera is capable of capturing. Click the image for a larger version, or for pixel-peepers, the full size original is here).

The most snow for 18 years

2009-02-02T21:25:00.004Z

Clearly the motorbike was out of the question. Even the trains struggled;

the signal says it all.

Central London was surprisingly busy, although I don't suppose the outdoor cafe tables had many occupants:

A few hardy souls - or daredevils - risked pedalling, but this one had more sense.

Sound advice:

The pub lanterns are almost surreally orange:

Was he opportunistic? Or wildly over-optimistic?

Don't sit still for too long...

More from today here. Best viewed as a slideshow.

In lieu of the story

2009-01-19T22:23:00.003Z

I was hoping to say a bit more about my recent camping/hiking trip up into the hills of the English Lake District, but pressures being what they are, I can't see that happening for a while yet. So here instead is a slideshow of collected images from the trip. Some published here previously, plus more that weren't.

G1

2009-01-13T22:57:00.002Z

Did I mention I have a new toy (which took all those photos below)? A Panasonic G1...

Ice

2009-01-13T20:24:00.003Z

Middle aged

2009-01-11T22:05:00.003Z

It’s hard to muster the energy to write any more, hard even to find the will to think. The building-with-words machine may never have run freely, but at least the wheels used to turn, with a bit of coaxing. But now the cogs have become rusted together; put my weight against the lever and all I feel is the implacable resistance of a thousand seized wheels locked in immobility.

What’s changed?

A couple of things. One, which ought to have no bearing on this, but feels as though it might, is that I’ve become more conscious of age. I used to be puzzled by my own age – the calendar may have said I was fifty something years old, but I didn’t relate to that number; I could feel a direct line stretching back to my boyhood, and in many ways still felt I was that youngster yet to find his place in the world. Yet now I find that in whatever group I find myself, I’m often the oldest. I can’t quite make sense of it, perhaps because I haven’t found the position of some authority which so often goes with age. I’m the oldest in the office at work, yet one of the most junior; the oldest in the group of musicians with whom I play, yet the least experienced. A case of cognitive dissonance?

Anyway, how is the age thing significant in terms of motivation to write?

I look in the mirror, and I’m not sure I recognise myself. The face looking back at me has aged; sometimes I see my father’s face, as he was when I was growing up, when he was the age I am now. I always thought of him as old – am I really that same age now? I’ve left behind the person I used to be, the person who used to think and write and engage in some kind of meaningful dialogue, the person who wanted to make a difference; he was part of the self that grew – or was growing - out of that youngster. The very self that inspired the original name of this blog – ‘Older and growing’. This middle-aged person I’ve become; he doesn’t seem to have the same drive, for him it’s enough to survive one day to the next.

It’s odd, being between two people and ‘being’ neither. Do you remember the scene in 2001 where the astronaut, Dave Bowman, has gone through the stargate and finds himself apparently in a hotel room? Still dressed in his spacesuit, he sees an old man lying in a bed – and realises that the old man is himself, and in that moment of realisation we move along with his consciousness into the body of that old man.

It feels a bit like that. Not such a dramatic contrast in terms of years and incapacity, perhaps, but I suppose you could call it an identity crisis, except that crisis implies something sudden, an impending catastrophe that must be resolved one way or another. This isn’t quite like that; identity has become uncertain, for sure – youth is far behind and old age is still a long way off (although there are occasional flashbacks of the one and premonitions of the other), and here I sit in a no-man’s-land between them.

Perhaps that’s why the thinking and writing have become so hard – I don’t have a place from which to do it. No perspective, no place to stand and observe and show you the world from my viewpoint. Adrift between youth and age and out of sight of both.

“Thou hast neither youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.”

~ Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, quoted by T S Eliot at the opening of his poem Gerontion

Stunning

2009-01-11T15:26:00.004Z

Eclipsed by Saturn, courtesy of the Astronomical Picture of the Day.

"Far in the distance, visible on the image left just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth."

African travels

2009-01-10T19:49:00.002Z

"I considered asking the driver what time he thought we might arrive in Nairobi. But, as others have noted, time in Africa is not the same as time in the Western world; questions concerning when something might or might not happen are generally meaningless, at least if you want or expect a precise - meaningful - answer. As far as would concern most Africans, we would arrive in Nairobi when we got there, that was as much as they would ever need to know. The most accurate and honest answer I could expect was ‘later’ and this wouldn’t quite meet my exacting Western standards of a given hour, or even a given day."

Nice piece by my son about his travels in Africa - read the full post here.

View from the top

2009-01-05T21:36:00.009Z

The top of Bowfell, that is - the peak in the distance, one-third of the way in from the right hand side of this shot. Our way led leftwards from where we sat here for a quick break, then up over the succession of summits - Crinkle Crags - running left to right:

Bowfell is also visible as the appropriately-pointy right-most peak of this panorama:

Looking south-east from the summit:

South-west, down Eskdale...

...an almost fairy-tale landscape of meandering stream, interlocking spurs, and misty mountains:

West, towards Scafell and Scafell Pike, with the step of Broad Stand on the direct route between the two clearly visible. These days, although not quite a true rock climb, it's rarely climbed without a rope, as a slip will most likely lead to serious injury. Amazingly though, the first recorded passage was by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and was made in descent. Clearly he was no softy, no drawing-room poet, but a poet with balls!

north-west:

And another take on that sunset I posted a couple of days back:

This shot is just a little way down from the summit; it was dark by the time we were two-thirds of the way down, but my son with his army training wouldn't let us use headtorches - he said once you've turned them on it destroys your night vision. There was no moon, yet it's surprising just how much you can see in the dark when your eyes become accustomed to it. The descent - the path known as "The Band" - is quite steep at the bottom, often more a succession of rock steps rather than a path, yet somehow eye and brain manage to make sense of the shadows. Eventually though we had to succumb to the need for artificial illumination when the way became icy and we couldn't tell the difference between rock and ice. That however was about half an hour after I'd first been inclined to dig the headtorches out of our packs - so a useful lesson was learned about just how effective night vision can be. If it hadn't been for the ice we'd have got all the way down by the faintest of glows in a hazy sky lingering well after the sun had set.

Frosty morn

2009-01-02T22:16:00.001Z

Still no time for words, so here's another picture:

A Taste

2009-01-01T16:39:00.002Z

The laundry is done, the tent hangs in the garage drying, the photos are downloaded. Now I just need some time and space to string a few words around the pictures. In the meantime, here's a sample:

Sorry for the silence...

2008-12-11T23:16:00.001Z

I have other things on my mind at the moment.

These too shall pass... hopefully...

Profound secrets

2008-12-07T08:29:00.004Z

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."

"In any of the burial places places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?"

~ Charles Dickens, from A Tale of Two Cities ~

Wow...

2008-11-25T06:53:00.003Z

Explanation here

A bit of fun

2008-11-20T21:16:00.002Z

According to the typealyzer, my current writing here in this blog is representative of

ESTP - The Doers
“The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

”The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.”

I can identify with the stuff about outdoor activities and not sitting still, but playful? Talking and joking? Nah… that’s not me.

Although the site doesn’t say so explicitly, the categories used appear to be the Myers-Briggs types, derived from Jung’s work. Last time I did a Myers-Briggs, I was an INFJ – the exact opposite of the above.

"Quietly forceful, original, and sensitive. Tend to stick to things until they are done. Extremely intuitive about people, and concerned for their feelings. Well-developed value systems which they strictly adhere to. Well-respected for their perserverence in doing the right thing. Likely to be individualistic, rather than leading or following."

Intrigued, I decided to try putting some archive pages through the test. The first came up INTP – half way at least to an INFJ. I tried some more archives – and was surprised by the consistency of the result - INTP 7 times out of 8, on archives from 2003 to 2008

INTP - The Thinkers
“The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

”They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

Still not really something I’d recognize as being me. At any rate, I hope those occasional bouts of insensitivity are indeed only occasional...

Curiously, my long-abandoned but not deleted other (anonymous) blog comes up with INTJ “The Scientist” – which is what my Myers-Briggs type used to be 20 years ago, until I lost faith in analytical thought and began to trust my feelings more - which makes me wonder whether, were I to do a Myer-Briggs test today, I’d have reverted to the INTJ type, having now seemingly abandoned feelings.

Now, I don’t suppose there’s really very much to read into a machine-based interpretation of a small sample of writing, but the consistency of the results suggests that maybe it at least isn’t totally bogus.

If nothing else, it’s prompted me to think once again about how external behaviour reflects the inner self, and to wonder whether I put too much control on my external behaviour, and don’t allow full expression to the inner self.

Hat tip to Andrea for the link.

A beautiful line…

2008-11-20T14:26:00.004Z

…from today’s posting at Panhala, a line from St Thomas Aquinas:

“Our hearts irrigate this earth”

Update: I was so entranced by that line, I completely missed the significance of the line which follows it:

"We are fields before each other"

Okay, I lied

2008-11-18T19:59:00.004Z

I have been many people. The one I seemed to be becoming when posting here, or when scribbling in my journal (neither of those increasingly rare activities could I class as writing) was not much to my liking. But I have been others; I could be others again. Like I could be one who says one thing on Saturday and contradicts it on Tuesday.

I realise now that I wanted to see what it felt like really to say those words “I quit”. At first, it felt good – free, at last. But then something was missing.

I could just ditch this blog and start a new one, but that’s too much effort, and there ought to be some continuity.

I could resurrect my other, anonymous, blog, but that doesn’t feel right either. I don’t want to be nameless; I want to find a better name. Or my real name (one or two long-time readers might recognise that long-forgotten theme).

I don’t have the energy right now to Write. Not Properly. Not even the energy to write badly. So I need to figure out once more what this space is for.

For now though, the new job is keeping me busy. Starting bad habits – bringing work home. Best get on with it then. See you around?

Oh yeah, one more thing. A few months back, I put a note in my diary that today marks the point where I have been blogging for exactly 10% of my days here on this earth (calculated courtesy of Excel’s goal seek function). It seemed noteworthy. Not sure why exactly, never having been one to worry about anniversaries and the like, but 10% feels like a sizeable proportion. Not something to be dismissed so lightly.

Did I put that note there knowing that I would need it to tie me to this space a while longer?

I quit

2008-11-15T17:59:00.002Z

at least for now. Maybe I'll be back if this depression lifts.

In the meantime, a shot from a few years ago:

Dreaming

2008-11-14T19:23:00.003Z

If only

Hat tip to Chris

So much talent

2008-11-13T21:26:00.002Z

And for an encore, something a little more modern...

Repurposing

2008-11-08T15:12:00.003Z

It was never my intention to abandon blogging in favour of twittering (and still isn’t, although on the face of it, the evidence would seem to point to a contradictory conclusion). But twittering requires little in the way of deep or structured thought, which makes it a much better match for my current mental modus operandi.

Brought together and grouped, the first couple of weeks of twitterings do I suppose reveal something of what goes on in my head; a shape and structure, if you can call it that, which analytical thought would pass by without noticing.

Trivia

• I don't mind doing the shopping, I quite like doing the cooking - but I have no imagination when it comes to figuring out what to eat

• Sensory stimulation: It's nice when there's too much washing up for the dishwasher and some has to be done the old-fashioned way :-)

• Parcel delivery man arrived at the door wearing shorts. It's 3 degrees C out there - what's he trying to prove?

• Rescued a tiny mouse the cat brought in. Seemed barely alive indoors but perked up when it sniffed fresh outide air.

• Trimmed the low-hanging elderberry branches where they were rubbing on the felt of the shed roof as they move in the wind

• Really ought to give my blog a makeover - it has the feel of a room in an abandoned house, full of stuff that hasn't been touched in years

• Cat is head-butting my hand on the mouse, wanting strokes, while her tail tickles my chin

New job

• Counting down the days... start a new job (albeit in same dept of same employer) next week. Out of the frying pan into the fire?

• Totally knackered. Intense week of finishing Excel mega-workbook before new role starts on Monday. Square eyes and brain dead.

• New role, new responsibilities, new people, new location = 100% CPU usage = stress

• Huge widescreen monitor in the new office = total immersion computing. There's a world outside this screen??

• 'New' office has old-fashioned aircon - opening windows. Half of body nearest centre of room too hot, half next to window too cold!

• This wide screen is so wide I keep losing the mouse pointer!

• If you've got to work in a city, working in the heart of one of the world's great capital cities ain't such a bad option (W1 better than W12)

• Only been here 3 days, and the lady in the canteen smiles, says hello and knows I have a black coffee :-)

Motorcycling

• Grey skies depositing their load on the road - not my favourite motorcycling weather :-(

• Clocks back = riding home in the dark :-(

• 2nd morning of the season for winter motorcycling gloves. Roads quiet tho 'cos it's half term

• 2mrw's weather: "cloud will bring showers becoming increasingly heavy and wintry. It will feel cold". Ah, the delights of winter motorcycling

• First frost of the season - thank heavens for heated motorcycle handlebar grips!

• Icy road means no motorcycling today :-( Pain, because it's only the 300yds to the main road which is impassable. Clear after that

• Mind you, people-watching on the train can be fun. The novelty soon wears off though

• Is it going to thaw tonight, or do I shovel the ice off the drive so I can get the m/c out & not endure the tedium of public transport tmrw?

• I shovelled. It was a mistake putting a coat on though...

• Bright sun, dead ahead, low in sky = monochrome 2D world = rather less than ideal conditions for motorcycling

• Left untinted driving specs at home today. Bugger. Hate using varifocal specs for motorcycling - peripheral vision is crap. Glad to be home

• Scanning through my first 50 odd tweets, motorcycle related matters top the charts. Is that really the most noteworthy feature of my days?

• Switching from riding a motorbike in traffic lanes to between lanes is like dropping an X-wing into the equatorial trench of the Death Star

• Route to new office is same as I used to cycle a few years ago. Reminds me of the fun I used to have playing in traffic on a push-bike.

Photography

• Ooooo... just discovered Canon flash (without a Canon camera) I have will work as a slave with the Olympus 8080. Creative possibilities...

• Oh for image stabilisation - even at 1/200s, handheld macros at arms length still suffer from camera shake

• Went to look at the Panasonic G1 DSLR http://tinyurl.com/4ral4f Very compact, nice to hold, still can't think of it as a 'real' DSLR though

Music

• Listening on headphones to Bach (English Suite no 4 played by Andras Schiff) as I work. Or not work - totally in awe of Bach's genius.

• Ah, boy's toys - a new pedal (chorus) for my bass pedalboard, arrived yesterday, fitted today :-) No space for any more :-(

• Just playing along to a CD I'd forgotten I had, by a Canadian Band by the name of Dyad. Nothing lifts the spirits like good music :-)

• Favourite Bob Dylan track - Tangled Up In Blue

• ... or maybe Jokerman...

• Jamming along to Joe Jackson (love Graham Maby's bass lines). Fingers still working even if head isn't

• Finally got around to hooking up PC, CD, FX, pitch shift, bass, all via mixer for an instant jamming set-up. Cool, if I say so myself.

Thoughts

• Wonder why Gmail gives me this quote in the context-based link at the top - "If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style." :^)

• A day of half-hearted nothings so far

• Waiting... for nothing. For inspiration? For someone to find the on switch? Filling time with doings and nothings

• Oscar Wilde, paraphrased: Work is the curse of the thinking classes

• The world seems a friendlier place this morning, knowing that several tens of millions do have some sense after all

• The main reason I'm blogging less and less is that communication is just so darn difficult

• Is there a point?

• - a point to whatever I happen to be doing at the time?

• It is possible to go through every day without really thinking. It's habit-forming; I do it all the time.

• Coming to the conclusion I just don't do social in any way shape or form. Solitary, that's me.

Weather

• The sky mutates slowly from the faint orange glow of reflected street lights to a grey autumn dawn. Time for a shower

• @euan ooooh, snowing here too - if you can call this wet soggy stuff snow! Actually, pretty big dollops of it coming past the window now

• snow's settling on the grass now

• more snow on Friday, please - maybe it'll keep the bloody-US-import-trick-or-treaters at home. Bah, humbug

• Power failure last night plus circuit breaker trip when it came back on in the wee small hours equals no heating this morning. Brrr!!

• Still a thin patch of snow left in a shady corner of the garden

• Still and quiet outside. Must have had a lot of rain in the night - the garden pond is full to the brim. The air too is heavy with moisture

Life

• SMS working again from/to my son Paul in Zambia - technology out there is all a bit flakey - good to feel that contact alive

• Practical recycling: helping my son sand down an old sideboard he got for nothing via Freecycle, ready to stain and polish

• Only primitive internet connections in Lusaka so it's great to see pics and news from my son in Zambia: http://ourafricanlife.blogs...

• I wonder if I'll ever go rock climbing again? All that gear sitting in the garage just waiting to be used; I miss it.

• Up at sparrow-fart to drive 200 miles to my daughter's graduation

• Back again, 15 and a half hours later. Long day; need more caffeine

• looking at pics of my daughter's graduation yesterday. Mine was a lifetime ago (or several) in another world

Letters from Africa

2008-11-02T12:05:00.003Z

Who remembers Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’, broadcast weekly from 1946 until Cooke’s death in 2004 at the age of 95? As a teenager, I used to listen to them sometimes on Sunday evenings, delighting in his gift for moving effortlessly from the specific – some personal experience during the previous week – to the general - informed and insightful commentary on America, its politics, or on humanity in general.

Now there are letters coming from another continent. My son Paul and his wife Rachel have started blogging their experiences of teaching in Zambia.

It looks as though he faces ‘interesting times’ ahead, whatever the outcome of the Zambian presidential by-election:

“If Banda does prevail, and that is the result most White Africans and foreign nationals are hoping for (many justify their preference with a catalogue of clichés: better the devil you know, the lesser of two evils), then with Sata’s overwhelming support in Lusaka there is likely to be trouble in the capital. If Sata is victorious then, in short-term at least, problems are less likely. But in coming years White Africans and foreign nationals might find Zambia an increasingly difficult place to live and work.”

Pleasure though it is to read them, and much as I wish him every success in both his teaching and his writing, I rather hope his letters don’t span the half-century-plus which Cooke managed - we’d rather like to see them both again somewhat sooner than that!

A flash of inspiration

2008-10-30T22:20:00.002Z

Nothing stunning photographically, but something just dawned on me.

I have a fairly decent Canon-compatible flashgun - the one that went with the camera my son now has in Zambia - but no Canon camera. I have an Olympus camera, with the usual basic built-in flash but no 'proper' Olympus-compatible flashgun.

Light-bulb moment (how appropriate!): I can use the Canon flashgun as a slave, triggered by the on-camera flash. And by adjusting slave power and/or blocking the direct light from the on-camera flash to the subject, I can balance the light between the two sources.

Result: creative possibilities. More experimentation needed, but the results are sufficiently promising to warrant a more thorough investigation.

White Christmas Halloween?

2008-10-28T20:51:00.000Z

Also Twittering

2008-10-22T21:12:00.001+01:00

here

Waiting

2008-10-21T20:29:00.001+01:00

The fire has gone out. Blowing on the embers raises only a cloud of dry ash. With no kindling to ignite, sparks flicker momentarily and then die.

Treasure

2008-10-12T22:12:00.003+01:00

"He is lucky who, in the full tide of life, has experienced a measure of the active environment that he most desires. In these days of upheaval and violent change, when the basic values of today are the vain and shattered dreams of tomorrow, there is much to be said for a philosophy which aims at living a full life while the opportunity offers.

"There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that in itself is wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived."

~ Eric Shipton, quoted by Simon Yates in the lecture from which I've just returned.

Contrast, and an explanation

2008-10-08T21:12:00.002+01:00

No wildness today. Quite a contrast to yesterday – blue skies speckled by polka-dot cloudlets, a warm sun on my back (which this lunch time rests on a bench one position removed from yesterday’s) and a gentle breeze to rustle the leaves without yet stripping them from the trees, looser though their attachment grows with each passing day.

Yesterday I was reminded of how when weather wildness comes to town, it brings with it a taste of wilderness – in a similar way, when the elegant sophistication of today’s weather ventures into the hills, it takes with it an association with civilisation – so much so that many are tempted out with no more equipment against the elements than that which they would take to accompany them on a walk in the park.

The hills do indeed feel a little too park-like on days like this. It was nearly 18 months ago when I was last in their company, and remarked at the time how I almost felt cheated by the benign atmospheric conditions. One comes to expect wind, rain, clouds, mist and rarely a clear view of the way ahead. It’s all part of the fun; without such features, the experience is incomplete.

Nearly 18 months ago. Too long. Oh, except for one solitary day a few months later. One day out of the last 500; it’s not enough. No wonder I’ve been feeling out of sorts.

Wind, wilderness and memory

2008-10-07T20:37:00.000+01:00

Wind. I lean into it walking down the street, am buffeted by it as it funnels through a gap between buildings; I sit here on this bench hunched before it writing these words whilst autumn leaves dance about my head – it’s an infrequent visitor here in the big metropolis, except when approaching these times of equinox. At other times it’s easy to forget that cities and towns live under the same skies, the same clouds, the same rains as those which also pass over the fields and hills. Having no horizon other than encircling monoliths of glass and concrete, the skies might just as well be as far away as the stars, and as unobserved by city-dwellers. Winds though are harder to ignore; wild-ness comes rampaging out of the wilderness into the heart of civilisation.

Oh, what happened? Once I would have delighted in trying to capture in words the essence of this moment. Now, the struggle is almost too great. Too much bother. Almost, but not quite; not quite yet. So I cling on by my fingernails rather than let go altogether and sink into the wordless oblivion of the writer who has forsaken his craft.

But I wonder… I’ve been assuming that if I let go I’d fall, endlessly; a fall that being free-fall seems to have no movement at all – an equilibrium state of fallingness you might say. But suppose instead the wind of fate took me up and bore me where it will?

No, it’s a myth; it never happens like that. Fate never intervenes with any purpose of its own, even at our bidding. It may offer a helping hand along the way, or point out some signposts we’d otherwise miss, but the pathway must be chosen and trodden by us and us alone.

Wind. It awakens memories of the hills. Wind has its dwelling in the hills, wanders amongst them daily, unleashes its greatest energies in the highest places. Just occasionally though it allows the hills a moment’s respite and takes a day out to visit these lowland city places. Feeling the chill on my back as its fingers reach through the fibres of my jacket, feeling the hair blown across my face, listening to the rustle of leaves chased along the pavement, awakens a longing for wilder places, a longing I’ve had to suppress because to feel it too keenly all the while it remains unfulfilled only serves to heighten the ever-present dissatisfaction.

Yet when it is felt rather than imagined, the memory is a fond one.

Lessons

2008-10-06T18:58:00.003+01:00

"Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!"

- Friedrich Nietzsche, courtesy of whiskey river

"Better the devil you don't want to know than the one you daren't."

Hydragenic

That was nice...

2008-10-03T13:55:00.001+01:00

“Chilly, isn’t it?”

So began a brief exchange with a fellow motorcyclist whilst stopped side-by-side at the lights this morning.

Usually that’s about as far these conversations go – nothing very deep, but then you’d hardly expect to get to discussing the meaning of life in the course of a 30 second exchange with an unknown biker.

“You ride well.”

Eh? Now that was unexpected – unsolicited compliments? I’d been aware of him behind me for a few hundred yards and a couple of junctions. Now side-by-side I could see he was of a similar age to myself, riding what appeared to be a BMW R1100, albeit sporting a VW badge on the side of the tank.

“Been riding long?”

Given that his following remarks were more about behaviour on the road – his observation of my own observation and awareness – rather than the actual mechanics of riding the bike, my guess is that he held one of the advanced riding qualifications – either RoSPA or IAM.

Interesting on three counts:

One, purely for the feedback. Welcome and much appreciated feedback.

Two, that he managed to get so much across in such a short space of time. Direct observations, direct feedback, with just enough preamble to create an opening.

Three, he didn’t have to bother; there was no need or expectation. But he did, I learned something, it made me feel good, and I expect it probably made him feel good too. I’m very poor at giving compliments or feedback. Something I could do with improving.

I may even sign up for an advanced motorcyclists course.

Show 'n' tell

2008-10-01T21:11:00.005+01:00

I realised I'd missed a trick here. For nearly a month now, large chunks of the weekends, plus a couple of days taken as leave from work, have been occupied with enlarging our garden pond. It would have been an ideal subject to follow on a day-by-day basis, but I never got around to it. So here instead is the whole (hole? sorry...) story in one go, told in pictures.

The bright, sunny appearance of the finished hole completely disguises the fact that the two days spent digging it were mostly very damp, and for the two days prior to that it was veritably chucking it down. So every trip with the wheelbarrow through the garage and up the precarious ramp into the skip was preceded by the Ceremony of the Scraping of the Boots - removing the layer of heavy, sticky clay which made me temporarily two inches taller and a couple of pounds heavier (or so it felt).

After the back-breaking work of digging, shovelling and barrowing (not to mention scraping every off every sticky spadeful into the barrow) this bit was fun:

The bare earth is lined with a layer of soft sand. Initial attempts at using a plastering float to apply it were soon abandoned in favour of daubing and spreading the sand with bare hands. Just like building sandcastles. I could almost imagine myself at the seaside...

Horizontal surfaces, which would have plant baskets standing on them, had an additional protective layer of old carpet, before the liner underlay was added:

The liner itself was a humungous affair:

It would have lined a pond nearly twice the size.

It was late when the pond had finished filling, and too dark for photos. Next time I remembered, I'd already trimmed the liner back and added York stone paving along one edge.

The final stage of construction was to add rockery stone around the edge

Now all that remains is the planting, both in and around.

The whole exercise, hard work though it might have been, has been thoroughly therapeutic. Hard physical labour with a tangible - and if I say so myself, rather attractive - result to show for it, does wonders for one's self esteem.

Visualise, plan, create, appreciate - a very satisfying cycle. One that I hadn't realised how much I'd been missing.

Webbery

2008-09-27T19:42:00.004+01:00

The season of mists is upon us...

Fred's really the expert in this, although there's none yet from him this year.

A few processing tweaks, admittedly

A string o' pearls:

Dragons

2008-09-27T18:28:00.000+01:00

You might think,
reading only the words here,
that I spend my time gloomy,
melancholy, anguished.
Actually,
it’s not like that;
not all of it, anyway.

People, life, worlds,
have many layers;
that which is so often exposed here
- or partially exposed, and ill-expressed at that -
is a place where dragons live:
angst, doubt, uncertainty;
self-loathing, fear,
I could go on...

Dwell here too long and
the dragons grow out of all proportion
seeming to be all there is. But really
there is so much more.

Locked

2008-09-24T21:41:00.001+01:00

Nearly October already; where did the year go? Days follow their familiar pattern, each weekday punctuated by the same routine as every other weekday, the colours of each weekend looking like those of every other weekend, the cycle of monthly work activity endlessly repeating.

No real variety; the content may vary a little but the structure remains the same. Time, space, and consciousness too it seems, all locked into their set patterns, as predictable as the sun and the seasons.

I barely notice the years passing; just the continual stream of days, weeks and months. One day I’ll wake up, find I’m old, and wonder where the years went.

A day out

2008-09-18T21:45:00.008+01:00

The bike ride… What can I say? Perhaps it did achieve its objective of giving me a much-needed ego boost. But why should I need such a thing? Why do I keep falling into a pit of self-doubt? Why do I need constant validation of worth? Indeed, why do I seem to equate achievement with worth? Isn’t personal worth about who we are not what we do? Although on the other hand, isn’t it inevitable that who we are is made manifest in what we do? I have some ideas about answers to some of these questions, but they expose areas I’m not yet ready to discuss here; nevertheless there’s no doubt that without regular fresh evidence of ability – any kind of ability - I have very little faith in myself.

It went well though. An 8am start to rendezvous (in the drizzle) with the small group of extra-keen (extra-insane?) cyclists who had started 2 days earlier in Cardiff,

meeting up with the main group who were starting at Epping, about 20 miles further on,

then a pleasant ride through quiet Essex lanes (though not all as leafy and narrow as this short-cut alongside a ford between two roads)

with a break for a fish-and-chip pub lunch.

Much needed calorific fuel, but rather heavy on the stomach! Eventually more persistent rain set in, necessitating the donning of waterproofs, nevertheless spirits remained undampened.

(In the interests of personal safety and the avoidance of wrecking the camera as I crash to the ground whilst trying to follow the road through the camera viewfinder, I'm afraid photos are only of occasions when we were stopped.)

Perhaps I should have chosen something else for lunch, but the poor girl’s face fell when eleven hungry lycra-clad cyclists descended on the pub, eager for a full cooked lunch – she was on her own; clearly the pub is usually very quiet on a Tuesday lunch time – and scanning the menu I thought fish and chips would be less trouble to cook. The only snag was that our evening stop turned out to be at – a fish and chip shop! I couldn’t face more of the same so just nibbled a few spare chips. I wonder if it occurred to the proprietor that his sign in the window appeared to represent a cannibal? Or maybe the fish only ate the chips...

It was getting dark by the time we arrived at Harwich, but we’d made good time so I was able to catch the 8.06pm train back to London, whilst the rest of the group occupied a local hostelry until it was time to board the overnight ferry bound for Hook of Holland from where they would continue to Amsterdam. By the time they were on the ferry and settling into their cabins - or were propping up the bar - I had reached Enfield Town station from where it was a short-ish ride home.

It wasn’t long though before I realised I’d made a poor choice. I took this route to avoid an unfamiliar late night cross-central-London ride from one railway terminus (Liverpool Street) to another (King’s Cross) which would have landed me up within a few hundred yards of home. Enfield is close – by car – but much further than a few hundred yards, and I’d never cycled it. Close in car terms turns out to be nearly 7 miles, 6 of which are uphill - gradual, but for the most part unrelenting. Not pleasant when they feature as miles 94 to 100 a the end of a 15 hour day! I suppose the merit though was it did take me just over the magic 100 mile figure.

Was it worth it? Undoubtedly. Will I do it again next year? Quite possibly. Will the beneficial effect last? Unlikely. But it still feels good right now.

Direction of view

2008-09-18T21:13:00.000+01:00

Well, well, well. Have I come out of the tunnel yet? Is there hope once more? The sun seems brighter, certainly, the air clearer, the colours bolder. No reason why, but then, there was no reason why not. No reason for the onset of hopelessness, it just happened. The colour ran out of the world. No reason then why it should not just un-happen.

Talking of happenings, I’m woefully remiss in recording them here. My excuse has been that no-one would be interested, but such reasoning doesn’t stand up against the interest I find in others’ happenings. So, an update is long overdue. Part one today, parts 2 and 3 to follow.

My son – and his new wife – have finally made it to Zambia and his new teaching job, having had their departure delayed by four weeks. The first set of work permit application support paperwork failed to complete its journey and is no doubt languishing in the bottom of a mailsack in some forgotten corner somewhere; the second set made it, but the application was rejected and had to go to appeal (a practice no doubt intended to discourage employment by the school of foreign teachers), the hearing of which was further delayed by the unfortunate death of the country’s President and the resultant grinding to a halt of government administrative processes, which I suspect are not exactly fleet-of-foot even at the best of times. Thankfully it eventually all came good – but not before both we and they had begun seriously to doubt whether they’d ever depart these shores – an eventuality which would have left them newly wed, without jobs, without a home, without money. That prospect hung over all of us for a while, a cloud growing bigger and blacker with every passing day of no news. History shows though that he has a knack of metaphorically falling on his feet - a practice, incidentally, in stark contrast to his childhood ability physically to land on the opposite end of his frame, resulting in at least three visits to hospital casualty departments and a still-visible scar amongst his hair, if you know where to look.

But back to that tunnel for a moment. We call into being the world we imagine. I foolishly allowed myself to imagine a personal world of hopelessness and lo, it came to be. Why do I find that so easy; why do I find it so hard to imagine my world full of hope, of possibility? It wasn’t always thus, but something has changed in the last few years, coincidentally within the lifespan of this blog.

I was looking today at a friend’s photos of Egypt. Two very different scenes, yet both were taken from the same spot, the only difference being the direction of view. One of a barren desert, one of a green and fertile plain.

100 miles in a day

2008-09-10T22:15:00.003+01:00

It went well. But I'm in no state at the moment for story-telling, what with one thing and another. More words another day.

A step

2008-09-08T22:08:00.001+01:00

It’s getting pretty desperate that I find a way out of this current slough of despond, as Bunyan would call it, even if only temporarily – say by finding a small island and clawing my way onto its low summit to catch a glimpse of the land beyond this place. Whilst mired deep in the bog, the view of the landscape seems endlessly hopeless in every direction. With no hope, there’s no reason to move. So rather than moving anywhere, the first step must be to find hope.

Tomorrow therefore I join a group of work colleagues for part of their sponsored bike ride to Amsterdam, in aid of the BBC’s Children in Need charity. Last year I did the whole trip; this year I couldn’t commit the time (a story I’ll tell when it’s fully unfolded) so I’m just cycling 90 miles from St Albans to the ferry terminal at Harwich; when they get on the ferry, I’ll take the bike back on a train to London, which should see me home about midnight.

Charity event though it is, I have to admit I’m doing this primarily for myself. Work is becoming, shall we say, problematic. My overwhelming negative feelings towards it have built such a barrier in my mind that, struggle as I might, I barely manage to achieve anything at all from one day to the next. Yet no-one seems to notice, or if they do, they don’t seem to care.

(See? This is why I’ve stopped writing –every post, one way or another, turns into a whine about work).

So, tomorrow is about doing something – putting a marker post of achievement in the ground to remind me that I do still have some capabilities, however under-utilised they may be.

As I say, it is a charity event so if any UK readers (or anyone anywhere for that matter) wants to make a donation, here’s where you can do just that.

Innocent pleasures?

2008-08-21T21:41:00.002+01:00

With apologies over matters of style to Mr Dickens, whose tale of Great Expectations is my present companion at those times when neither salaried labours nor domestic duties have prior call upon my attention, and whose manner with words – at once particular and precise whilst yet maintaining a certain emotional detachment from the circumstances he describes – I find most agreeable, reflecting as it does my own persuasion in such matters. So much so that I may continue in this vein upon these pages to enlarge upon such matters as vex me, interest me or otherwise make their presence felt upon my consciousness.

It happens that I have recently been considering the purchase of one or other of two items. It matters not for the purposes of the debate which follows what these items might be; suffice it to say that both are quite expensive relative to my normal outlay (if such there be) on goods intended purely for my own benefit; both are luxury items in that neither could in any way be said to be accoutrements absolutely necessary in order to maintain a satisfactory way of living; both are items which I imagine have the capacity, through my use of them, to provide me with much pleasure. However, being financially constrained I have to choose between them, at least for the time being, and so I entered on a debate with myself as to which might be the bringer of greater enjoyment.

To begin with, the debate was abstract, since spending money on myself is such a rare occurrence as to have the feel of a work of fiction, not of potential fact. Nevertheless, it came to me one evening as I sat and considered the choice that I might indeed possess or one other of these items. The possibility became very real, not at all the distant product of an imagination many stages removed from practicality but rather a sober matter merely of taking plastic card in hand and with my fingers tapping a few letters and numbers on the keyboard not four feet from me. It could all be over in as few minutes as five; not three days more and either object could already be held with those same fingers, existing no longer merely as an image upon the cathode ray tube before me, or lingering on the phosphor of my waking dreams, but tangible, solid, robustly embodied in the present, ready to open the door to pleasures long hoped for.

Yet even as the prospect of such pleasures drew closer, even as I strove to make the choice actual instead of hypothetical, I saw their being pass through my grasp as might a ghost; the goods might indeed transform from fiction to fact, but alas the pleasures would be unable to achieve that transition, and would remain a prospect no more real than the transient dots of the picture on the phosphor of the screen, forever anticipated, forever out of reach.

For what pleasure can there be if that pleasure comes about through satisfaction of the cravings of one’s desires?

One must surely first have a desire for something before one can find pleasure in that thing. One could certainly not find pleasure in something undesirable, so does it not follow that in order to be the source of pleasure the thing must first be desirable? Yet desire by its very nature has a flaw. Does not desire lie at the root of no less than four of the so-called seven deadly sins? Do not lust, gluttony, greed and envy all begin with desire? That being so, if pleasure is so closely entwined with desire as to be inseparable from it, and if allowing desire across the threshold is to pave the way for its evil relations to follow, how can any kind of pleasures ever be said to be merely ‘simple’? Rather, do not all deserve, at least to a degree, the tag of ‘guilty’, being so associated with selfishness?

The debate may even be transposed (to reverse a common saying) from the ridiculous to the sublime. I was many years within the Christian faith before I became aware of a deep contradiction contained within the arguments by which people might be urged to ‘join up’, as it were; a contradiction whose opposing premises I have yet wholly to reconcile. Whether one chooses to take such a faith upon oneself in order avoid the stick of hell-fire and damnation, or whether one’s choice is motivated by the carrot of eternal salvation, is it not the case that gain for the self can be the only driving force behind either manner of reasoning? Yet is not selfish gain also anathema to the tenets of Christianity? To be a Christian solely on such terms would be in fact un-Christian; would it not therefore be a noble display of Christian selflessness to forego the personal gain of salvation?

Of course, there is a flaw in this form of argument, for the duality of the pulpit-thumping entreatment to seek heaven or avoid hell is akin to the salesman’s ploy of asking: “Would sir like to buy the green one or the blue?” Either response results in a sale; other options, of which there are any number (not to buy, to buy a competitor’s product, to buy tomorrow, to buy a red one) are cunningly pushed into the background lest they be seen and acted upon.

So, if one’s reason for adopting Christianity may be other than to avoid hell or to enter heaven (one such alternative – and to my mind better - reason being independent of the appearance on one’s horizon at some future time of either of these mythical places, namely to adopt a better way of living in the decidedly un-mythical present), then the apparent paradox – that of requiring a selfish act deriving from un-Christian motivation in order to become a Christian – is shown to be false.

Is there also a way to negate the paradox that pleasure, once almost grasped, must inevitably prove elusive owing to the inherently selfish nature of pleasure?

Perhaps there is a parallel with altruistic behaviour. Does is matter whether one is altruistic for the sake of the beneficiary of the act, or for the glow of pleasure one receives from knowing one has been responsible for the benefit? Either way, the benefit has occurred. Pleasure for the initiator of the action is the by-product, not the end product.

No; there is a better way out of this dilemma. There is a degree of truth to be found in the notion that the trap lies in the connection of pleasure with the fulfilment of desire, but that is not the whole truth. Like the salesman’s ploy, that simple equation belies a greater truth. The best pleasures, those that are truly simple and innocent, are those that arrive unexpected, uninvited, unanticipated. Birdsong in the morning; a smile from a stranger; a glorious sunset; a poem never before read – such as these cannot disappoint because there is no preconception by which they might be judged; lacking the taint of desire, they can never be selfish.

"...pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
...
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us"

Lines from Ash Wednesday, by T S Eliot

Conundrum

2008-08-05T22:08:00.002+01:00

A blog is for communicating.

So when you've lost the desire to communicate, what use is a blog?

Perhaps not altogether lost; else why would this post be here?

Good question...

a little church

2008-07-18T23:06:00.001+01:00

Yes, I know I said I’d be away for a while… but this dropped into my inbox yesterday, courtesy of Joe Riley and his wonderful Panhala poetry group, speaking simple quiet words of calm acceptance; words I’m happy to leave here to watch over this space should I not be back for a week or two.

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

~ e.e.cummings ~

Way too stressed

2008-07-16T22:29:00.000+01:00

Taking a break from blogging. Back in a while.

Blossoming

2008-07-13T20:50:00.006+01:00

Doesd any horticulturalist reader have any idea what this is? Although it grows in our garden, neither of us has any idea.

And for a completely different kind of attractiveness, albeit sharing something of the same hue, here's what we found under these.

This 'n' that

2008-07-09T22:18:00.000+01:00

I guess from my blog stats that there are still a few faithful visitors dropping by every now and again, and I know from Google reader that there are no end of posts I’d like to take more time to absorb properly rather than skim just sufficiently to catch up on the headlines. However, every waking moment seems to be spoken for, at least for the next few weeks. Not until the latter half of August is the pace likely to relax.

In lieu of anything more blogworthy, here then is an update on recent happenings, on the remote chance that someone might actually be interested.

Lots of time spent testing and getting to know the Canon 450D. Mostly, I’m impressed. Very easy to use, excellent menu structure, and results can be really good. Can be, but aren’t always. The autofocus doesn’t always deliver pin-sharp focus. Just a slight error, but noticeable when viewed 100%, since the 12MP sensor out-performs every lens we have between us. The forums seem to point the finger at the kit lens, but I’ve seen the same results with two other lenses. Several dozen test shots taken; many, many combinations of focus point, lens, focus method; camera tripod-mounted and mirror locked up to eliminate camera shake; every time it’s the live-view contrast-detect focus which can be guaranteed to give spot on results. But that’s not a method one would choose for general use. The results otherwise are in reality perfectly acceptable, it’s just a little niggle knowing that for perhaps in three shots the result is not quite as good as it could be. I shouldn’t be such a perfectionist…

The job change is going to happen. Not just yet, but by November at the latest and possibly sooner. To an outsider it might not look like a huge change – same employer, same division, similar work – but I know that the changes will be in areas where it matters most to me. For one thing, I’ll be working towards an outcome I actually believe in, something worth getting out of bed for. For another, I’ll be working for someone I not only respect, but with whom I know thoughts can be shared – both ways – with complete honesty. Knowing that all that is coming is already starting to have a profound change on my attitude to my daily labours.

More good news; my mother in law came out of hospital on Monday having made a remarkably good recovery from her recent stroke. There’s every chance she’ll be well enough to come to the wedding.

Ah yes, the wedding… 15 days away and thankfully all the vital arrangements are now in place. What a rush it’s been though! For the moment, we have a few days relative calm (my wife, currently covering tiny buttons with silk for the wedding dress, might disagree with that…) but I’m sure that as the day gets closer the pace will hot up again until we’re all in near-panic mode again.

And finally, here’s something to think about. We just heard of a friend who recently paid almost as much for her daughter’s wedding cake as we jointly will be paying for this whole wedding. Maybe they iced it in gold leaf…

Tones

2008-07-08T21:35:00.000+01:00

3D leaf

2008-07-04T20:13:00.003+01:00

Just playing with the new camera... I took this for the adjacancy of the colours... but I rather like the 3D effect as well (best seen when viewed larger - click the image)...

A Do-It-Yourself crash course in wedding photography

2008-07-03T14:00:00.005+01:00

I was 7 when I had my first camera. Even then, landscapes were my first love, and they've remained so ever since. I’ll often go to great lengths to avoid getting people in shots. So what am I doing committing to photograph an event where the people are the whole raison d’etre? Although the couple are keen on the idea, and it saves a considerable sum of money, I was very reluctant to take it on. What if I foul it up? What if they’re disappointed with the result? There are no second chances.

I browsed a few websites of wedding photographers, looking at what you get for your money. Some seem to take nothing but gimmicky shots – the horizon at a different rakish angle every time; some take ‘reportage’ photography to the limits; many showed what I though were poor choices of lighting angle and obvious technical flaws. Judging by their websites, some seem only to deal with those clients whose budgets are as big as their egos, although at the other end of the scale was one whose offering looked more like a set of awkwardly posed snaps taken with a the digital equivalent of a box Brownie.

I found just one site that I liked, a photographer whose work I could honestly say I admired. He had far fewer samples than any other site I saw, but every one demonstrated an understanding of light. Moreover, his charges were surprisingly reasonable. He wasn’t available though, although he very generously answered my technical queries about the way in which he used fill-in flash.

However, even if I said yes, there was a flaw - my camera is not really up to the task. We can’t use flash in the windmill, and an ageing ‘compact’ camera just doesn’t have the necessary high-ISO performance – even ISO 200 is too noisy for anything but snapshots. So the deal is that we buy a new DSLR which my son will take with him to Zambia to replace his film SLR, and I’ll use it for the wedding.

In amongst all the thoughts – apprehension, worries, fears on the one hand, but also excitement at the opportunity - as if from nowhere, a formula dropped into my head. Five things to think about for every shot – address each one, get the balance right, and it might just work. Five isn’t too big a number, and thankfully we’ll have plenty of time so I wont have to rush. If I keep my head, I might just be able to keep all of this in mind.

1. First there’s the location, the context of the shot. Angles, background, light, shade, colour. The risk in my case, especially with such a stunning background, is that I’ll pay more attention to the background than to the subject. Or indeed that in countering that tendency I’ll swing too far the other way.

2. Then there’s the subject itself. Composition: the subject in context. The subject is the reason for the photo; in general it could be a thing, or a colour, a shape, shadow, light itself, or even a feeling – a personal response to a scene. But here of course the subject is the very ‘thing’ I usually avoid photographing – people. Somewhere in the 3 weeks I desperately need to get some practice…

3. The obvious worry is the technicalities – getting a perfectly focused, perfectly exposed image. That, at least, I can work on. Every spare moment I’m playing with the new camera – trying to find its weaknesses, exploring the new facilities it offers (subjectively lower noise at ISO 800 than my own camera at ISO 80!!), experimenting with flash (something I almost never use, but judicious use of diffused fill-in flash is a great way to bring faces to life), trying out different image parameter settings, trying out RAW processing. I want to be as familiar with it in just 3 weeks time as I am with my own camera after – what is it – 3 or 4 years.

I’ll preface the next remark by saying that the Canon EOS-450D is a very nice, very well thought out camera – but it’s not perfect. Perhaps I was expecting too much of it; it is after all ‘only’ an entry-level DSLR. However, I was quite surprised to find that the lens can’t deliver the same resolution that the sensor can, by quite a margin – in fact, it’s no match the lens on my Olympus C-8080. In fairness, its not that the Canon lens is particularly bad, it just reflects how amazingly good Olympus lenses are. And the out-of-camera jpegs are rather too saturated, too punchy for my liking. If I want to make a worthwhile upgrade from my 8080 I’ll have to aim higher than an ‘entry-level’ DSLR. An EOS40D with a lens to do it justice? A Nikon D90 when it materialises…? Such a shame that the Olympus SLRs are let down by their sensors.

4. But enough dreaming. Thing number four is the light itself. I read somewhere how landscape photography is all about waiting for the light to do something interesting. I wont have the opportunity to wait for it, but I can at least make sure I take note of what the light is doing and aim to work with it.

5. It’s the last of these five things which worries me most. The least tangible, the least manageable and perhaps the one thing that, if you get it right, can make up for failings in all of the other areas. Capturing feeling, emotion, sparkle, in pixels. Good photographers have the social skills to bring out the best responses in people, and the total familiarity with their equipment so that the technicalities remain where they should be – unobtrusively ticking away in the background. I’ll most likely be fumbling with both of those skills…

A Pretty Good Guy

2008-06-30T22:13:00.001+01:00

Rest in peace, Winston. Even though we never met in realspace, I thought of you as a good friend - someone always ready with words of encouragement and companionship. I still can't quite believe you're gone; we're gonna miss you, buddy.

Manic

2008-06-27T22:45:00.002+01:00

Excuse a terse diary entry; there’s scarcely time to draw breath, let alone try to be creative about blogging.

Tomorrow we go shopping. Turns out I’m going to be the photographer at this wedding, but I’m afraid my ageing ‘prosumer’ compact isn’t up to it, so the deal is we buy my son a DSLR (Canon 450D as he already has Canon lenses for his film SLR) as a combined going away-plus-Christmas-and-birthdays-for-the-next-2-years present, and I get to use it for the wedding. Maybe one day I’ll get one for myself.

Meanwhile, the women (wife, bride, mother of the bride) are going fabric shopping for the wedding dress, which my wife will be making. While she’s doing that I’ll be getting to grips with a strange camera and learning its idiosyncrasies, together with practicing portrait photography – lovely as the windmill and the marshes are, I wont be popular if I make them the main subject of this shoot!

Sunday we drive back up to Norfolk (6 hour round trip) to view a couple of prospective venues for the reception, since the first choice turned out too expensive.

Oh, and by the way, as if everything else wasn’t enough, it seems I’ve talked myself into a new job. Well, a new role, new boss, new project within the same organisation anyway. I’s yet to be dotted and t’s crossed (what is the correct punctuation there…?), but I think it’s going to happen. Perhaps not the dream job, but a step in the right direction which should make working life more bearable. All as a result of a chance conversation…