OU blog

Personal Blogs

Stylised image of a figure dancing

Can the village fix my bike?

Sunday 8 March 2026 at 09:59
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Martin Cadwell, Sunday 8 March 2026 at 19:09

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

silhouette of a female face in profile

You just can't rely on guesses anymore

[ 8 minute read ]

There is always something going on in my village and groups to connect with other people. On the back page of a frre A5 sized booklet we get each month, in colour, is a notice that the 'Men's Shed' group will soon be recommencing meetings at the Recreation Ground Pavilion. It really is that type of village that calls the playing fields a recreation ground.

I am thinking of taking one of my bicycles to the 'Mens Shed' on the 18th March; they have a little note on their page saying if you have a small item that needs fixing, bring it along. I know that my bike is not small, but it isn't a washing machine, and I have all the right tools to fix it but don't seem to be able to make any progress. The thing is, this particular bike is so old that it seems the gear-set has sort of bonded to the spindle.

I am fairly certain the men in the shed will simultaneously raise their hands to their chins and as one say. 'Well, if you have tried all that and it didn't work, maybe you should think of buying  a new bike.' Even the old men these days are consumers and not fixers, I feel. I shall, if they do this, not tell them that I have four more bikes just the same, because I believe in experiencing bikes and not just throwing things away when things get ugly. Of course, I may be wrong, but I am familiar with my village and its residents. When I helped one of them with a puncture on his bicycle he offered to pay me! You know, I am a villager so let me monetise it!'

I sometimes pass some women riding horses, and I am on speaking terms with one of them. Well, I asked her how fast her horse goes. She said she had a pick-up car drive alongside her in a field and her horse reached 30 miles an hour (48 kph).

I think she might know someone with a Shire Horse or Percheron or Suffolk Punch, or something to pull the gear-set off. I will try anything, because the project to renovate the bike has gone on for over three years now.

St Mary's Church and the Baptist Church Centre is a good place to have some light fun. At St Mary's church there will soon be a 'Music Cafe' on two Saturday afternoons. It is free but seeks donations. I always keep the booklet page open to remind me of places and events I want to go to and attend, but never go because something distracts me. The Church is looking for local musicians to play music while tea-drinkers carefully and smoothly sip. In my village there will be no slurping. On the booklet page there are images of a clarinet and a guitar. One can't help imaging that we might hear 'Strangers on the Shore' by Acker Bilk and possibly 'Take Five' originally by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, but we have an academy, and not a secondary school in our village, so perhaps it will be something by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov or Brahms.

I doubt there will be anyone wrenching a guitar to mimic Jimi Hendrix, but maybe we might get 'Sunrise' by Norah Jones or 'Cavatina', the theme tune to 'The Deer Hunter', composed by Stanley Myers, or maybe just a cavatina.

I just 'YouTubed', 'clarinet music' and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra arrived with Mozarts, 'Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622'. How kind of them to scour the island to find so many classical musicians from a population of only about 349,000; nearly 70,000 of which are immigrants.

At Customs:

     'Hello. What is the purpose of your visit? Business or pleasure?'

     'I can play a musical instrument.'

     'Wonderful! Would you like to live here...please? '

     'Thank you. I can chant at important international football matches too.'

     'Marvellous! Would you consider running for mayor?'

Surprisingly I have met a few Icelandics, and they are great fun and not at all a subject for disrespect. I am just following a comedic line based on the low population. I once remarked on it and joked with an Icelandic man and asked him if he had met everyone there. He said, 'Probably'.

I somehow doubt that a clarinet and guitar will be paired to play Gypsy Jazz in St Mary's church, but I have heard Dr Seuss quoted in an Anglican church by a lay-person in my birth-village.

Do you want to know how your grandad lost the family estate in a card game? Because when he threw a used match in the ashtray after lighting his cigar or pipe, someone else threw in another match that landed cross-wise over your grandad's. That is how to cross out luck, according to the book on Superstitions I have. We just never know how we came to be so poor.

If I told you that I am not superstitious and take such nonsense with a pinch of salt, would you think it much different to me saying I am not superstitious because I think it is bad luck to be superstitious? There are fourteen separate pages on salt in the Superstitions book. Be careful what you do with it; even pinches.

However, I have just had a thought on how to fix my bike. I might 'manifest' it fixed. 'Manifesting' is something I think I used to do when I was a teenager and wanted to borrow some money from my mum. I was pretty much left to my own devices when I was sixteen and lived in a house with my nineteen year old brother as my guardian. Think Cinderella for boys, and me never going to the ball, and you will get the picture handsomely. Back then, I read in a book titled 'Mind Games', that if you want to borrow money from someone you should, before asking for the loan, think about the money at every moment in the conversation preceding the request. As far as I know it worked, because my mum, who lived a three hour cycle ride away, never refused me.

I know that I have, in the past, accidentally cast a 'spell' by saying aloud. 'Who stole my...(whatever it is I cannot find)' and whatever it is appears right away, just a few feet away from me. I think things only reappear in order to make me feel foolish, and clumsy in my attempts to hunt properly. I suppose I should learn from that, but I also know that I often get tricked, just so someone or something gets a laugh at my expense. Nonetheless, it always works. Maybe there is a supervisor who slaps the imps down and says, 'Leave him alone!'. I have never stretched the way of it by saying aloud, 'Who stole my fortune' with a hope that a huge amount of money will suddenly arrive on my kitchen worktop and spill onto the floor. I know it won't. Years ago, I did my Chinese Horoscope, and it quite plainly told me that I will not be able to accrue any savings, so there is no fortune to be found. Incidentally this is the Chinese Year of the Horse. I think I might try saying, 'Who broke my bike?' and accuse the world, but I actually know the answer to that, and if there is a 'supervisor', so do they.

     'Oh, I say, dear spirit, would you be a dear and fix my bike. I simply must break my fast with chickpeas, egg and rice.' (I have run out of bread and Baked Beans).

I think if I really wanted to, I might be able to cheat and bend the edge of the spirit world over my bike for a time, but I am afraid that the bike might try to kill me one day by letting one of the brake cables snap at a vital moment when emergency braking makes me squeeze the calipers firmly shut. I am pretty sure that I only need to loosely tie a limp piece of string to the front gear set tonight with the other end tied to another bike, and I would be woken by a loud 'clunk' and tomorrow the gear set will be on the floor. But I would have to 'pay the piper', as they say.

There is a lot going on in my village; maybe the garage owner can help me.

Tags: spell, bicycle, village, superstition, magic, guess
Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Stylised image of a figure dancing

Teams, Feedback, Leadership, Magic and Learning of Requited love.

Sunday 2 March 2025 at 21:15
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Martin Cadwell, Wednesday 9 April 2025 at 14:50

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

black and white image of a female face in silhouette


Confidence

At some point we are all asked to give feedback to at least one person. Many of us lie to our most intimate persons. ‘We ask OURSELVES what does this person want me to tell them? ‘You are a great singer, Ingrid, you should go on Britain’s Got Talent!’ Of, course Britain’s Got Talent is very well produced, so we really have no idea whether Ingrid really can sing, or if she has been set up by her malevolent family team. Yet, what if Ingrid lives at home with her parents and she is tone deaf and just will not shut up.

       ‘Shut up, Ingrid!’

       ‘But I love singing, and Vicki says I am really good.’

Her parents looked at each other, popcorn en-route to their mouths, and eyes rapidly returning to the dance troupe on the telly.

      ‘What she needs is a shock to set her straight.’

      ‘Yeah, let’s apply for Britain’s Got Talent on her behalf.’


It could happen. If Ingrid trusts her friend Vicki, who let’s face it, is not so pretty as Ingrid and works well as a wing-woman when they are out on the pull (you know, as a less attractive foil); then Ingrid is the leader of their team, while Vicki is always trying to keep up with the standards of someone she is convinced is superior to her, merely by dint of Ingrid’s looks getting more attention from intoxicated boys on Friday nights than Vicki normally gets.

Some years ago, I was very fortunate to be a secret player in an impromptu game I suddenly sprung on a young woman, Donna, the one who got the most attention from boys, and her friend Carla. Our first meeting was brief and we only swapped names; and, yes, I spoke to Donna before I addressed Carla that time. However, I knew we would meet again another weekend. ‘Carla’, I thought, ‘Remember her name! Carla.’

A couple of weeks later, Donna was more than a little bewildered the next time we met, when I spoke to Carla first.

      ‘Hello, Carla’

      ‘You remember my name!’ Eyes wide, bless her.

       ‘Of course. Who’s this?’ I already knew.

       ‘I’m Donna……!’

I interrupted her.

      ‘So, Carla, what you been up to? Do you wanna a drink?’


Such fun. Carla really was good to be with that night. I thought she would be. Unfortunately, she was in a team in which she was never the leader and her candle was always burning with a guttering flame. Her position, I am sure, is what she, not consciously, felt she deserved; to be eternally in second-place. I think she might have had some control, though, in not letting another good looking friend also join her and Donna's team.

A couple of years before I met Carla and Donna, I was already interested in magic; the type of magic that makes someone yawn when someone else yawns. I had also seen a teenage girl transform from an evergreen ivy to a beautiful lily because she felt loved; her love, she suddenly realised, was requited. Oh, how she tried to be kind while she struggled with her secret desires, and how vulnerable she felt until he one day said, ‘I really like you’. That is the type of magic I like. So, I was delighted to throw some magic at Carla, years later. She didn’t know it, but I was on her team and the leader of her new team, working behind the scenes with nobody recognising me or my efforts; but this was only for one night. Very much a Cinderella event. I hope Carla woke up the next day feeling at least a little bit special. If she did, she would, I suspect, have got a lot more deserved attention from then onwards.

What shape would you like feedback from your peers to take? We know that words with letters that have a hard sound to them serve to cause our minds to consider the thing associated with the sound of the word to have a similar shape. The sound of a ‘k’ for example is hard and jagged. It is, I am convinced, why we ‘see’ a sharp angle when we hear the word, ‘kink’. We also know, that the order that single words are used to describe a person changes our perception of that person.


Word Order

‘Interrogative, pedantic, diligent, focused, intelligent, inquisitive, open’

is a different person to:

‘Open, inquisitive, intelligent, focused, diligent, pedantic, interrogative’.

Yet the word order is the only thing that has changed.


Let us imagine these two characters in a story. Both are book-keepers. Plainly, the first is crotchety, irascible, and terse. The second, is polite, a good listener, and reliable. Given a task to impress a new manager who would get the team-leader role? And, who would find it hardest to recover from a problem that is ultimately revealed to the boss? I can hear the sneaky first person. closeted in a corner, quietly grumbling about the second one. ‘Oh, get a life’, I say, ‘You are grumbling about yourself. YOU have chosen which personal attribute you promote above another.’ 

If you discovered each of these attributes one by one over the course of a few chapters in a book, or scenes in a film, I think you might think these are two very different people.


In feedback to team members, then, we might look to a martial art style, from Chinese philosophy. Something like: Retreat, Strike, Defend, or Yin, Yang, Yin, which could be considered to be soft, hard, soft, though that is not the proper translation for Yin and Yang. In the Western world, we think of this as sandwiching a hard criticism between compliments. 

In returning to the earlier order of words to describe someone, which go from hard to soft for one person and soft to hard for the second person; and we change those words into insults and actual physical violence, and if we consider the hardest word to be an actual physical blow on a work colleague, it would be difficult to keep your job if you started with this action, but your point is painfully made. However, if the second person, in our scenario, is building towards this physical blow, the recipient may get the message of warning long before they are punched; both the work colleagues then get to keep their jobs.





Tags: feedback, teams, confidence, requited love, magic, word order
Permalink Add your comment
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 330616