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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Tell the truth

[ 6 minute read ] 

Come back, I haven't finished

For many years, I have been aware and wildly frustrated that people I am talking to take snippets of my words and run with them; off into a wilderness who knows where. As a teenager, I became aware of this, and bought a Thesaurus to help me try to explain my teenage angst, or whatever it was at the time that meant I had to try to make someone's mind stand still long enough for me to poke my own thoughts into. Really, that is so close to taking their mind hostage as to make me feel more than a bit queasy.

Realistically, I really did want the other person to stop thinking and just listen to what I am saying and then with all the facts, premises and other vastly important information I had elucidated, let their mind start working and process what I have said. Control was NOT in my hands!

Personally, I have a slight problem with making direct declarative statements. I think most people do.

       'Just say what you want to say. For Goodness Sake! Spit it out!'

       'Promise you won't be angry.'

But I never have those kind of conversations any more. If anything, the first person speaking, in that little conversation, is at fault. Their words show impatience, a lack of focus, and an inability to hold information in their heads. The second person might be scared, confused, or just not able to summarise what is in their head.

I suppose it takes training and a will to learn how to listen, in order to not make any judgement on what we hear. We should, I feel, wait until the other person has stopped speaking; interrupting is a sure sign that we are processing information, when we should probably just be listening, because most of us only pass information obliquely.

       'Does my bum look big in this?'

       'Does this shirt look good on me?' (Buttons straining just above the waist).

The second question could well be the perfect answer, under the circumstances, to the first question.

I was weirdly curious to know if anyone was using any of my old business names (dissolved now) so I Googled one. Actually, I 'Ducked' it (DuckDuckGo). I was amused that the returns, on the first index page, were all on how to write essays. I wish I had found those sites two years ago, when I started having to write essays. 

It has long irked me that The Open University doesn't have a unit on essay-writing and a unit on arguments at Level 1. Instead, I feel, that I had to fumble in the dark, guessing what I was supposed to do, and having no checks on my progress until the feedback from the first assignment comes back. For me, there is a huge lack of available information. Essay writing is not like riding a bike; none of us need to get a feel for it; there are hard and fast rules and personalising essay formats is just not tolerated. 

       'Do this, and do that!' 

       'Yes, but how?'

       'Work it out for yourself!'

Does that sound familiar? Now then; I want to be able to have conversations with people who know how to have good conversation. It is entirely useless to me if someone cannot present an argument, or give good instruction. Are there any lessons on how to give good instruction for beginners? Of course, they exist for school-teachers and qualified people, but wouldn't it be fine if everyone could get some kind of instruction on how to instruct?

       'Right then, young school-leaver. Here is where you will be working. Get on with it.'

       'How?'

       'Work it out for yourself' This said under their breath.

The first thing I would do is make sure no-one had a mobile phone they could dive into with the slightest excuse. I was on a forklift training course and there was a chap who had poor English. On the same course as him were two English people. Instead of engaging them in a conversation, he used his phone to translate a word, which he did not understand, in a 'work-book' .

Now, call me a fool, but wouldn't he get a better learning outcome by discussing the meaning of the word?

Anyone who is paying attention, must by now have noticed that I started by expressing my desire for linear conversation, without the bells and whistles; just straight-up honest and direct statements, and now I am promulgating an idea that fuzzy conversation works well for me. Am I confused? Not at all. Both modes of conversation are essential in good social interaction, in my crooked mind. The issue is, do any of us know how to effectively use each mode, and when is the best time to do it?

I can't help feeling that I am outlining the ever-frustrating position we all find ourselves in; there is no manual for life. Why not? Because no-one bothered to write one. Just like at a pantomime, the crowd shouted as one:

       'Oh, no-one ever could!'

Let's look at this from a different angle to how we might have become accustomed to looking at things.

If you have a secret, you use your mental ability to conceal it. If you know a secret, you might find it pleasurable to keep it or reveal it as gossip. In this latter position, of knowing a secret, we reward ourselves by thinking we are favoured to have been told it; trusted. If we reveal it, we hope to promote ourselves in the eyes of the other person, the listener; we are revealing our hierarchical position in another relationship.

This reminds me of a kind of joke I heard some years ago.

A man and Kylie Minogue are marooned on an uninhabited island. Eventually, she and he have sex. The next day, the man walks all the way around the coast of the island and comes back to Kylie Minogue, and says:

       'I just had sex with Kylie Minogue!'

       'I know!'

       'I just had to tell someone!'

Back to my point:

If we keep a secret, we are measured in our conversational approach. If we are clever, we will not have conversations that might elicit any questions on our activities that match the secret we are trying to keep.

       'Who ate my biscuits?' cried the woman holding the cupboard door open. In this case, it was you. You ate them.

A fool might mention biscuits in a conversation in the following week if they stole the biscuits. But, most of us wouldn't; quite simply because we know we would re-ignite the wounded and silent accusations that the victim might be harbouring.

From this, we can easily understand that we can indeed control our conversation if we are properly invested in it; emotionally, financially or academically. So why do we not feel invested in our everyday conversations? Why do we have only passing respect for the people we just shove our feelings at, or carelessly push information towards?

It took me over ten years to stop practicing not lying, and just be comfortable with the truth. It took me the same ten years to be confident that I am honourable. There is a problem though; it scares the heebie-jeebies out of some people. It might even make them feel somehow inadequate. It shouldn't; I chose to make an effort, that's all. If I was fit and energetic, I wouldn't run past people shouting, 'You lazy slug!' It has had a negative effect that Jack Nicholson in the film, 'A few Good Men' brought to the fore:' You can't handle the truth!' I never remember that important point.

A while ago, I had a problem with someone jumping on my 'band-wagon' of what I had written about. I was, at the time, practicing giving just enough information to allow the reader to be stimulated and then ponder the subject. The 'idea-thief', excited by his new thinking, filled in all the gaps in his own subsequent blog posts; effectively giving out 'spoilers'. How crass! In his fervent desire to be relevant, he robbed readers of their own thoughts and any chance of waking up a bit.

'For many years, I have been aware and wildly frustrated that people I am talking to take snippets of my words and run with them; off into a wilderness who knows where.'

https://www.monash.edu/student-academic-success/excel-at-writing/how-to-write/essay/how-to-build-an-essay

https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/referencing-style-guides/harvard

(includes how to reference all sorts of sources, including Act of Parliament, emails, maps and films, etc.)

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

[ 8 minute read ]

Spitting

Spittle, I recently read, 'has genuine soothing qualities, and in folklore it has strong magical properties, especially when used fasting.' (Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, E. & M.A. Radford, edited by Christina Hoyle, 1974, Book Club Associates [ 1964, Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers) Ltd ] )

When I was growing up, teenagers used to spit on the pavement but no-one ever asked them to spit onto the little pieces of chewing gum stuck near them. Instead, people would write letters to the Council to tell them of their disgust and exasperation. Every now and then, the Council would unstick the chewing gum.

We think that we live in enlightened times and things work more efficiently now than before. I might disagree. Lots of people were disgusted by the spitting youths. They were told to be upset by everyone else. You see, the awful behaviour of teenagers gives other people things to talk about. The Councils, when I was growing up, actively ran a social interaction policy to make up for chopping local trees down and clearing derelict sites. When everything was manicured and trimmed they discovered that neighbours started to spend less time talking to one another; there were no cars stuck in hedges on a Saturday morning after a good Friday night piss-up; the local kids no longer ran away from home to doss in the derelict 'haunted house', and milkmen, postmen and busy housewives no longer needed to clamber over fallen tree branches in gardens. 'It's unsafe...got to go!' the Council said. Suddenly, electric milk-floats could go everywhere!

Once the roads and lanes got cleared up, local village shops grew quiet. Without constant mental stimulation from conversations on the way to the shops, people grew dimmer and more forgetful; they started making shopping-lists just for something to do. Many people were loathe to throw them away and because their walk to the shops was in a zombie-state they needed to refer to them in the shops. No-one was interested in hearing how other people were.

     'Hello, How are you?'

     'Fine. There was a clear route from my house to here and nothing happened along the way.'

     'Yeah. Me too. Let's see. Ah! I need carrots. Bye.'

Recognising that the Council had messed up people's lives by clearing up the streets, in an attempt to re-invigorate villages and small towns, they covertly hired tourist businesses to bus in visitors. They figured that an insertion of new homeowners, those who were idle and were impressed by clean towns and villages from bus windows and short walks to a dirty river and back, might provide some much needed stimulus. The result however was terrible.

     'You're not from round here are you?'

     'No'

     'Looks like rain. Goodbye.' This on a day with clear skies.

The local pubs went suddenly quiet when these 'foreigners' disguised as locals entered. The barman, local of course, would reluctantly break off the weak but long conversation with a 'local' customer about how nothing happened that day.

     'What?' to the unrecognised new customer.

     'What bottled beer do you have, please?'

Silence.....

The clocks ticked loudly on and eventually, 'Er...Pardon?'

Invariably, the Council's plan went wrong. Many of the visitors had ideas. This was a completely alien concept to the locals. The visitors bought houses locally and before long the roads and lanes got even tidier. The cows returning to the farm to be milked no longer splattered their khaki poop over parked cars, and front lawns were levelled. Many moles recognised that times had irreversibly changed and they moved away leaving the worm population to explode. Because there was a new desire for weird garden plants; ones that the locals had never seen or heard of before, but the new people had seen in books, libraries and garden centres opened in towns. Shops started to sell more than five different types of seeds. This was part of the Council's plans to hide their mistake of clearing the trees and derelict houses away which had resulted in local zombies. No-one suspected that granting planning permission for garden centres instead of leaving the fields and meadows fallow for dogs to run away from their owners would further devastate the conversational and financial environment.

     'Hello. How are you? Hello Bonzo! chased any rabbits lately?'

     'We're poor! He just follows me home these days. Eating us out of house and home, he is. We are going to have to sell up and move to Wales at this rate.'

     'I know! Have you heard about reading? It's quite new.'

     'How Odd! You used to be fun to talk to. Bye'

Gradually the ground improved in people's gardens from both heightened worm activity and the compost from the once potted shrubs leaching into the soil. Newcomers, those that had moved into villages less than thirty years ago, planted flowers. The Council spotted an opportunity. They recognised that the happy years of bumbling chat was forever in the past. The future was about to be permanently set. By now the 'foreigners' who looked like the locals, and spoke like the locals, and to all effects were indistinguishable from the locals except when they ordered bottled beer in the pubs, had gotten jobs in the Council offices. These were people who had gotten used to complaining. 

     'That blooming farmer has a cockerel that wakes me up every blooming morning!'

     'Do you know, I saw a car with an area of rust on it parked outside the shop today? I think I will get on the parish council and put a stop to the locals just quietly living.' 

     'I quite agree. It is just plain ugly to see. Better still, let's make it universal that the locals' noses are put out of joint.'

     'That will teach them to play dominoes and darts and drink draught bitter.'

When a man in a long overcoat and a trilby hat knocked on my parent's door to speak to my father, I answered, age twelve. 'Punks and American Rappers.' I told him. 'Forget about the rappers for now though; we are just not ready for them just yet. It will come, but wait a while.' That advice is not what he had come for, but he remembered it

It was natural then that many Councils embraced the idea of employing a crack team of disruptors who 'individually and creatively' came up with punk rock. Soon, the UK Government passed a secret Act that Punk Rock would be given the 'green light' to displace disco music. Queen Elizabeth ratified it immediately; she and her sister, Margaret, had already tasted excitement outside of the Royal castles, shaking their heads and jumping around.

The Councils actions didn't work out well though. True, I made a lot of pocket money from envelope drops in the woods from Councils to hire young lads to spit on the ground. I also employed teenage girls to stick their chewing gum everywhere just like in 1950s movies. Unfortunately, spontaneous kissing became a thing of the past. By the time I was fifteen I almost always had to wait for someone to get rid of their chewed blobs. No-one wanted to swallow because it stays in you forever, they thought.

My expectation was that the spitting youths would with magic saliva undo the Council's efforts to dash the wonderful life that generations had always lived. The Councils, however, were convinced that complaints would enliven local communities, since normal and friendly chat was frowned on by the 'foreigners'. It never occurred to me that there was another force at play. Someone had realised that mass unemployment could be alleviated by cleaning up the litter and chewing gum. But first Punk had to go. 

     'There will be a cute girl in 'Neighbours' played by Kylie Minogue we might be able to use.'

     'That will take a least a decade to engineer. We shall have to invent Indie Rock and dilute the record companies hold on new artists. Keith, go and make some small record companies. Take Branson there with you. Sorry, Richard is it? Scott, Aitken, Waterman, you will be at the forefront of this, Okay?'

The overrun from Punk Rock and Rock Music lasted well into the 1980s and the invention of New Wave and the Romantics just ended up producing sullen figures dressed in black. Conversation might have picked up because many kids missed school and ran away from home but, interest in them soon fizzled out.

     'Hello Sarah. I haven't seen Mopey for a while. Everything okay?'

     'Dunno. I haven't seen her for weeks. She might be in her bedroom.' Parents had caught the mood from the general attitude on the street.

In the end, the streets got cleaner This was largely because Goths and Emos hid themselves away to avoid getting tanned skin and they avoided eating their greens to bring on anemia, and only girls with bunches played in the streets with their television-fashioned brothers sporting expensive hair cuts that they didn't want to ruin by trying to give themselves headaches from heading footballs.

But there were some people working for the Councils, who had been tucked away in broom cupboards who never got the memo. They still worked on providing situations for people to complain about. To them, conversation was all about complaining. People were encouraged to write indignant letters to the Council, by stooges and plants at the bus stops and supermarkets that suddenly cropped up. These closeted bespectacled denizens wedged into cupboard that had clean mops regularly replaced with mucky and smelly ones by a special contractor, invoked misery by following the movement set up by a prominent woman in the 1960s and 1970s, who had been specifically trained to moan.

Teams of workmen drilled small holes in roads and waited for Winter to freeze the water in them to make pot-holes. At the Councils, one hand never knew what the other hand was doing.

Eventually, spitting was outlawed by mutual consent. Many people had found that they simply could not work up enough saliva anyway, because ever since a Government Minister had made a crazy suggestion that UK citizens should drink a pint of beer a day to ward off de-hydration during the drought of 1976, and cheap, cold, and rapidly-brewed lager filled in the gap left by the sudden and unpredicted shortage of real beer, everyone was dehydrated during the days and years that followed, and could not gather good spittle in their mouth. Soft-drink ads on the TV were used to help viewers at home drool. 'Lilt' was born.

Spitting these days is largely left to the honest gypsies who spit on their hands when they shake on a deal, to ward off evil or draw magic to their agreement - I don't know which.

Almost nothing is true in this; but if it was a film it would surely have a message saying it is based on real events and it would then become part of our history.

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

My best friend's loss

[3 minute read ]

A long time ago, on a lonely planet in a quiet solar system where all the other planets had died, Maureen Lipman said, 'It is good to talk.' This was a time when talk was not about the moon landing only a decade ago. Instead, it was about the BBC MIcro home computer and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (which had a Zilog CPU chip of 1 megaHz). My ten year old, cheap lap-tops have dual core 233Ghz CPU chips, which by today's standards is fast enough for me, but still incredibly slow by modern comparisons. 

Maureen Lipman was advertising the only land-line telecommunication system in the UK. It was B.T. which later became O2, the mobile service provider. If memory serves me right, it was the break-up of the monopoly that B.T. had on telecommunications that gave us Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile on our Nokia 3310 'bricks'. I didn't experience that break up; I read about it.

It is good to talk. A conversation I have been having with a linguistics professor has pretty much run its course on a topic we settled on. Don't get me wrong; I should very much like to continue comparing ideas with her but, as with every conversation, things come up as meaning develops, and there comes a time when we start to pull up the drawbridge to our castle of personal privacy. Yet, it is not personal privacy that I am thinking of, because I have a myriad of safety protocols that I can implement whenever I choose. No, for me, on this occasion, I am sealing the castle because, I have to stop myself giving away a crucial aspect in a particular story format that is developing in my mind. Interestingly, the professor thinks that if this aspect in a fantasy world is called upon the readers would get lost. I, however, wholeheartedly disagree; I see it as integral to a plot.

Yesterday, I talked about how we set a Table of Contents for our day, first thing in the morning. The difference between me and the professor is, she is an academic writer, teaching an M.A in English, and I am about as far away from academia as you can get. My first thoughts are not at all linear, and there is no introduction or conclusion that I care to write. There is no goal or end-strategy to consider. In fact, my first thoughts today were about what happened yesterday, which, once I encapsulated the day, I will use as a template to throw over today, except without any torn bits. Of course, I have tasks to complete but they are fairly routine and mun-nal and ba-dane.

Even writing about writing, about my garden, gave enough time for dendrites to form in my brain; and the links gave me sufficient motivation, in the form of reminders, to replant some hedge and accelerate my crop growing activities (I planted some garlic) and I briefly thought about digging up some strawberry plants so the Muntjac deer don't dig them up before me. They really are poor gardeners and leave them uncovered.

Just when a subject gets interesting I have to withdraw from it. It seems then that I am interested in the fine detail, and all the arguments I have on people with PhDs are arguments against myself.

Yet, the Linguistics professor thought that the fine detail I proposed, in a story, would lose the reader. Is there anything else more desirable than to fall into intrigue, and an idea that we have been given an exclusive free ticket to secrets and intimacy? Are we not jealous if our best friend has another best friend, or a new romantic partner that draws them away from us and less time is spent with us? Don't we want to belong to something?