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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Confident Spontaneity

[3 minute read ] 

One of the things I enjoy most is cooking. I have a really small kitchen though and not much worktop space. I swear at my sink because it should be bigger, but it is fashionably small and probably suited the housewife of the late fifties and early sixties because it is not a Bedford Sink. Not that all women found their position suitable. Oooh! Brushed aluminium. Lovely! Proper cleaning though was done in sculleries with Bedford Sinks and larders were where food was stored, not these new-fangled fridges that you can't open if you have just opened it a few seconds ago.

Because I don't have much space on the worktops I cannot take everything out of the fridge I need all in one go; I have to swap items going into the fridge for items coming out. I am a brute to my fridge door and nothing breakable can be stored in the areas on the inside of the door. I use a good lot of my body-weight to snatch the door open quite a lot. It ruins my equanimity.

After years of practice I can maintain a reasonable edge on my knives. There is nothing worse than trying to dice an onion with a blunt knife. Shoppers in supermarkets practically sneered at me when I shared the telling of my incompetence. I like supermarket shoppers a lot.

Creativity is personal, I feel. I eschew the idea of creating something for the approbation I might receive. I don't measure success by how much something is worth; my time or my work. If I ever write a book (I won't); I would probably give it away just as soon as sell it. When I finish my degree with the Open University I will not write blog posts on the OU personal blog pages anymore. I don't get validation from writing and pretending that I will be a writer; I won't be one. It is not my future. In fact, to this end I make it clear to my tutors that I do not want to read in their TMA feedback what I done right because they are wasting both of our times. I am only interested in what I did wrong; that information is far more valuable. Stroking my ego has no value whatsoever. I will never improve by resting on my laurels.

My existence is not authenticated by any message I feel I have a need to give. I don't need to snipe or claw my way up in some kind of imagined hierarchy. Top of a leader board just means not being anywhere else in the list.

There is absolutely no chance of me showing what I have learnt with the Open University in a blog post. I have no need to show myself to be anything other than flawed, and even that is not a goal. If  I subconsciously feel inadequate, I might one day devote myself to endlessly regurgitate other people's words, critique them and rehash other people's ideas. I might pontificate in pubs. It is then, if I was not an actual teacher instead of a fantasist, that I should know that my useful and productive life has truly and irreversibly ended. I would be a hanger-on; a ghost; a nuisance; and a brake on progress. Just imagine everyone recognising that you are all of this and you don't have the nous to recognise it in yourself. Tragic!

       'Can we have our ball back, mister?'

       'No! You shouldn't be playing here. You're breaking the rules and you're not even playing the proper rules in your game! I have the manual, you know?'

I like cooking because there are no rules in creativity. Following a recipe will, if we are all diligent, produce precisely the same dish. Whoopee Doo! We have achieved nothing except candidacy as a potential sous chef in a mediocre restaurant. 'Good Cooking is done like this' went into my bin a long time ago. I never want to be part of an hegemony wherein everybody else is wrong because they don't do what the majority does. 

If you find foreshadowing, deliberate placing of allegories or allusions, metaphors edited in or 'show and don't tell' in my blog posts you can be sure that you guessed right - I didn't write it for me, I wrote it for you; for you to wonder at how marvelous my writing is. No-one takes blog posts seriously and to use them as a pedestal to showcase learnt material is just plain egotistical and nothing else. Just a minute! Blog posts can consolidate learnt information, but only if you are a current student. I do use amplification and analogies though, but these are always on the fly. In fact, I write from beginning to end with the editing consisting of only spelling and afterthoughts.

I like supermarket shoppers because they don't follow the rules in conversations. It is unusual to engage in humorous conversation with complete strangers. It is unusual to laugh in a supermarket. it is unusual to be awake and relaxed in a supermarket. Supermarket shoppers have no 'hierarchy of ability' to express to others; there is no jockeying for position and no negative framing of other people's efforts. If someone suggests frying fresh mackerel with a blob of Marmite, then Great! The only people don't talk to are the sticklers for tradition who have no sense of creativity, who believe that they studied and so now they know; the one's who copied everyone else at school; the one's who believe their tutors taught the only way to do things. They didn't, they taught only to our abilities.

The sad thing is if I tamed a supermarket shopper with rules by meeting the same one, they would ultimately be spoiled. Spontaneity is key for me; it is the preserve of the young, the fit, and the confident, and the carefree.