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[ 10 minute read ]

The Disruptor in the shop

     ‘People are placed on Earth to be disruptors, and by extension, some people will commit atrocities,’ Harrari said.

Hakim nodded. He knew that Harrari was right. Having observed me for the last decade, he knew that I sometimes deliberately try to shake things up.

      ‘Some people, he whispered,'when they have been judged to be overly harsh in disciplining their children immediately jump up and protest, ‘You have to be cruel to be kind” He didn’t mean me. He knew that I don’t make excuses for being unkind. Quite simply, I don’t lie; If I did, I would ‘see’ far less; I would be merely a human; one of seven billion, and it had taken me over ten years of acceptance to become more than that.

Harrari, as usual, was patient.

     ‘The shaking up of society is necessary. You are stumbling through your lives barely conscious. Disruptions often result in knee-jerk reactions through the discomfort of having nascent proclivities and behaviour revealed to all of you. But this ultimately results in better overall behaviour in the community and the condemnation of both the revealed attitude and the knee-jerk response.’

I thought I got it. ‘Like an explosion in the rabbit population that is ultimately controlled by the amount of food available, disruption will reach a zenith and then there will be an adjustment,’ I mused.

I was in my local shop, next in the queue. A bit of a slight argument was coming to a climax before me. I couldn’t help but overhear it.

     ‘Nobody likes you here!’ The young shop assistant warned.

     'I didn’t come here to be liked. I came here to disrupt.’

     ‘Disrupt what?’

     ‘You, plural. Your attitudes and habitual behaviours. Your blind adherence to a lifestyle that you incessantly shape to satisfy your desires to be left alone.’

‘Luxury’, I thought.

The shop assistant looked puzzled. Clearly, the advice I had heard on attackers works; if you are about to be attacked, do something weird so the assailant is bamboozled for a moment. However, this lads private school education had given him a confidence that the other ninety-three percent of us in Britain could never emulate. I could sense that he was about to throw the interesting little man out. I wanted to talk to him, but I needed to be served first. Well, I say ‘needed’, what I actually mean is, I couldn’t be bothered to leave my selected loaf of bread behind to follow the man out, and then have to come back again to buy the bread. Just lazy, that’s all.

     ‘I’m sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening,’ I said. Neither of them were expecting me to speak. They stopped their intense staring at one another and looked at me. It works, do something out of the ordinary.

     ‘I don’t like repeating myself’, the man said.

I noticed now that he had a long-term suntan. We had recently experienced a long period of sunny and dry weather, but his suntan was not the glow that healthy skin gets from a seven mile walk in the sun without a hat. That tan only shows that the sunlight was coming from above for a while. His tan had been given a long time to spread, so there was just a general colour on his face, neck and arms; less so on his neck. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and the young lad behind the counter was probably about nineteen. There was, most assuredly, a clash of comprehension.

‘Neither do I,’ I responded, pleased that the attention was now on me.’But I like to be understood when I speak.’

I could see this chimed with him. Clearly, he wanted to be understood and often felt that he was saying things that others could not understand.

     ‘Whenever, I repeat myself, I raise my voice so I am heard, and then people tell me to stop shouting.’ He said to me, only half jesting.

     'Me too.’ I stopped, and then it hit me. ‘I think your IQ is bigger than you know what to do with.’

Admittedly, that is not something that anyone might ever hear. It may even be the first time it has ever been said. Yet, I was overwhelmingly compelled to say it, and it just came out. Suddenly, I was a passenger in my life journey; a person in a front-row theatre seat watching a scene in which I had a walk-on lead role. The man looked at me stunned for a few moments. Strangely though, I had no desire to explain or withdraw my comment, back-handed compliment that it was. He understood though; uniquely understood. This became apparent.

     ‘I think you also have a high IQ’, he said, a slight quiz on his face.

Aware that the puzzled shop assistant was observing this interplay, I cautiously offered, ‘Us aliens need to be able to spot one another.’ The now slightly nervous shop assistant let out something between a guffaw and a loud breath. Clearly, he thought this amusingly non-sensical. Harrari, had she been there, would have been insulted by my outspoken attempt to liken myself to her kind. But the man understood me, at least on the level I was on. He knew I wasn’t an alien but I couldn’t really say anything else to mean something entirely different.

     ‘Yes we do,’ he smiled. ‘It’s just that people have difficulty in understanding what I am saying. They...’

I interrupted him, fully on autopilot now. I had to tell him that I knew what he was going to say before he inadvertently insulted the shop assistant as well.

     ‘Hmmm, now that you have seen the world that humans see, you have moved onto something else. You see…..er…. beyond the veil.’

     ‘Yes, that’s it,’

He then went on to tell me who he was. I didn’t recognise anything he said until he finished with, ‘You know; like Elohim in the Bible.’

     ‘Ah! Now I know you. I know you.’ I said, more than a little discomfitted.

I don’t know if I was fearful of being thought to be a charlatan, or I was in the company of a madman, or a angel. But this guy’s spirit wasn’t holding a banner above his head to tell me something. I was hearing something in the actual words that came out of his mouth that weren’t the words that the shop assistant heard. If I could just focus a little harder I would be able to hear it more clearly.

Whereas, Hakim is my spirit avatar, and Harrari an abandoned alien I discovered in a wood I once lived in, this man was in a liminal position holding the door wide open to the spiritual world. But something was wrong. He wasn’t a friendly guide collecting tickets to a fairyland. He had torn the veil with an unfortunate slip or a hard, one-time only, thrust of anguish, followed by a series of clumsy visitations. Right before me was a spiritual vandal. It was as though he had, aimlessly wandering, actually stumbled across Mary Mapes Dodge’s boy, Hans Brinker, in her book, ‘Silver Skates’, with his finger in the hole in the dike to save Holland, and now he was repeatedly kicking him in the nuts. At the same time, he didn’t have access to all the aspects of the spirit realm so when he said to me, ‘I just hope this war is over soon,’ and then to the shop assistant, ‘He knows what I mean’ meaning I know, I had a glimpse that the confused lad was thinking that I am the cause of a war or even a participant in a war. Of course, the lad was right, but not really in the way he probably thought. I am not a neighbourhood menace; littering, swearing, spitting and illegally parking in other people’s spaces. I am quite simply not a liar. Messes people right up, that does. For me, I am at war with falsehood; lies that people tell themselves.

If this strange little man really had any connection to the spirit world I should be able to identify that. That was me thinking though and ‘thinking me’ was running through all the available clues to tell me what to do. Long-term suntan means outside a lot; reasonably well-spoken with good enunciation; bottle of beer in his hand; and a recent confession that he could not read the alcohol content on the bottles he was trying to choose from.

On the other hand, I was engaged in a disconnect of verbal communication that made sense somehow. This however, is how people with high IQ communicate. Connecting links are left unsaid because there cannot be any other solution. In other words, just making dots for the other person to join up. The problem for ‘thinking conscious me’ though, is that this is really similar to having a spirit conversation because there is no falsehood barring understanding between spirits. Paul wasn’t kidding when he said that he looks through a glass darkly in the Bible. Putting aside falsehood is most certainly the step to take if you want to talk to God.

How do I know this? Not because I have a high IQ. No; because I know that a storyteller already knows the plot and often fails to provide adequate links in the story. A storyteller is prescient and the readers or listeners are not. Some of the dots need to be joined and some not.

Does this strange man already know the story? Or is he a brain-addled highly intelligent alcoholic that can’t afford more than one bottle of quite expensive craft beer? Could be, because his tan says he does not drive; but then why would he drive, if he lives near the village shop? And, why buy a strong craft beer and call it your favourite?

The only thing I could do was involve the shop assistant in a pseudo-conversation by making an obscure link to the strange man’s ‘He knows what I mean’.

     ‘I do,’ I said, ‘But he,’ meaning the shop assistant, ‘won’t remember the conversation we had yesterday if I say, Opportunity cost.’

     ‘Of course I do’, he burst out, insulted. To be honest, he might well feel insulted, because effectively I had just intimated that his current confusion was his own fault due to his inability to follow a conversation. However, it gave me enough time to pay for the bread, and follow the little man out of the shop.

Even without the watching shop assistant I could not get a better read on the man.

Some time ago, I could tell within the first two minutes of meeting someone if they had siblings; whether they were older or younger siblings; their siblings gender; and sometimes their age differences. The interesting thing is, a child adopted into a family of children gave the same clues as does an only child; none.

This man was indistinguishable from any other man hurrying on his way and muttering over his shoulder, ‘Good to meet you.’ Except he said it twice so I suppose he meant it.

When two people ‘rap’ it is like musicians ‘jamming’. You can’t suddenly start jamming or rapping, quite simply because someone needs to start and the threads need to be picked up by another. I had a work colleague with which we rapped, but we also spent most of our time just talking and working. This man outside the shop, back in the real world, was constrained by decades of social convention and just walked away. If there is a shroud to be pulled over someone’s spirituality, it was duly used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[ 12 minute read ]

If you are new to these blogs then this series of 'Writing by numbers without numbers' will make more sense if you go to 'Writing by Numbers without numbers 1', Scroll down for number 1

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

How does your garden grow?

In trying to write about how love starts, develops, changes, plateaus, and dies. I have had to consider that there are extraneous circumstances that impact on how I understood love to be. I thought love was pure; that it conquers all. In fact, love seems to come in different forms and each form can be appropriately used for only one purpose. The love a parent has for a child that is not their own originates from an urge to protect something cute and vulnerable. I read somewhere that the reason that kittens and puppies are cute is so they are cared for by their species. It could be a ‘chicken and egg’ thing though. Anyway, in humans, I believe, our familiarity with a cute infant grows into love for that individual. The important thing here is that in almost every situation an infant to almost every person is not a threat to circumstances that are invariably controlled by adults. And, here, is where love has an injurious enemy; an individual’s desire to control. Of course, we can’t have pre-school-age politicians making laws for adults to follow. So, there has to be a necessity to shape lives, but, I suggest, sometimes in shaping lives we inadvertently shape love.

I chose to compare a garden throughout a year with how love unfolds and changes. Weather affects the garden and is inevitable.

These are the notes I wrote after I had written my little love story about Toby, Mimie and Kate. I know England’s seasons so I could quite easily use the changing seasons as a template to how love in my story unfolds. However, I always wanted to have a parallel story taking place alongside, that mirrors what is happening to Toby, the protagonist, so I had to dwell a little in my imagination and wax lyrical in these notes.

It is Winter. The nights are cold and mostly cloudy. It is usually damp; humidity is always high during the cold months in England. Thankfully, the snails and slugs are absent from gardens. There really isn’t much for them to eat when the temperature stays below 5^oC. It rains quite a bit and sometimes snows across the whole country.

Snow can fall as tiny frozen particles, which are more like the ice scraped from the inside of a home freezer. Snow, as we commonly recognise it as white clumps of frozen water, can fall straight down when there is no wind and the temperature of the flakes are too warm to keep the six fingered stars it naturally crystalises into when the conditions are right. It can float to the ground and is toyed with by the slightest hint of a wind when the temperature is just right. This is romantic snow. This is the snow that children stop doing their school-work and watch through the school-room windows, in awe. ‘It’s snowing’ they say. Their voices might just as well be welcoming Father Christmas because right before them is a magic show that means that they will have a new kind of fun. Different games will be played; snowball fights; making angels in the fallen snow with their bodies; and snowmen, women, children, and snow-animals will be made. This is the snow that we see on Christmas cards and photos of winter scenes when it lays atop branches and walls, and has bluish shadows, not grey. This is the snow that creates a monotone landscape, with stark silhouettes of trees and tiny cottages huddled on hillsides. This is the snow that sits on the thatched rooves of cottages with smoky chimneys on Victorian style Christmas cards and really exists in Yorkshire and Wales. The promised warmth of the fire inside the cottage makes us happy. But what if the snow is on a building with a collapsed roof, or lies atop a still body. What if the snow comes at the ground from an acute angle and is driven by a gale. What if cyclists trying to get home are blown into ditches, or sheep are lost on hillsides because they cannot see far enough to the next safe place? This is the same frozen water but comes in the name of destruction and ruin. A poet might make a romance from a blizzard but most of us have no affection for it.

Snow can blanket the ground and seal it off from severe freezes. This can save the dormant bulbs and tubers for plants such as snowdrops, crocuses, and bluebells. Many gardens have Spanish Bluebells as ornamental plants, though these will poke their leaves into the sunlight early in the year, it is not until early spring that they start to flower.

Once the temperature rises and snow does not fall, we are confronted with rain, no-one likes rain, except people who don’t like the lingering and persistent snow that just lies around doing nothing and getting dirty. At least rain move the snow on. Now in Spring, the wind blows hard and drives the rain sideways and cyclists off course. When the rain hits people in the face, it stings and cold and wet bone-felt cold. Joggers and cyclists feel it on the bridge of their noses and across their cheek-bones. Late Winter and early Spring is a season which forces people to know it is there. There is even a folklore character associated with Spring – Jack Frost. This sprite is responsible for those magnificent mornings of white lawns and parklands, when the trees are still bare but the sun is bright.

In Spring, we have the first hopes of better weather when we see the still low sun melt the frost wherever it can reach, but ‘Jack’ hiding in the shade of walls, allotment sheds, buildings, and large trees, still persists in his work. We see a stark contrast on the ground of white and still dormant green grass where the sun has reached and melted the frost. The edges are clear, there is no mistaking that the sun is winning the battle for control over the earth. This is a mark of the earth reawakening. Now the gardeners are seeing tiny shoots in the ground and try to identify what they are; they don’t want to pull up any seedlings that they want to keep and which they hope to nurture throughout the rest of the growing period. They have hopes for a colourful and satisfying outcome. But anxiously, they wait for the time that a frost will not destroy their efforts to introduce new plants to the soil.

This is a time of speculation, of rising hopes and dashed dreams. Excitement is quickly replaced by disappointment and submission. It is a time of both wins and losses. Choosing which paths to take to bring about a spectacular and rewarding showing of flowers or a hoped for bounty of vegetables fills growers up and down the country with fascination, discovery, sadness, and triumph. Slowly, the tiny seedlings in the ground grow. They are noticed but not yet identifiable except to the most fastidious and rigid gardener who grows the same plants each year. The experienced grower has long ago learnt to recognise and differentiate the weeds from the plants worth growing. Yet, the funky people, with their own gardens, are looking at the use of the plants that live only at the periphery of most of our attention; they want the wildlife to enjoy themselves; to be able to reproduce and make more insects that pollinate the local flowers. In these people’s gardens both weeds and cultivated plants grow. There is a respect for the weird, the unusual, and the temporary aberrations in the world.

It is late Winter and early Spring when optimistic people plant seeds in seed-trays and let them warm on their window sills and other places. Little moments of expectation of a good reward later in the year cheer these winter-weary, sometimes lonely people. Many people who want to grow plants, cannot be tolerated in their homes by their partners and fellow renters if they leaves traces of soil and seedling compost inside their shared homes.

Spring is a time for making plans, determining courses of action, and making decisions. It is a time of adjustment and temporary disruption. Effort put in now will pay off later. Yet, there are downfalls and tendrils of anticipated joy are shrivelled by the changeable weather. A period of unexpected low temperature devastates newly transplanted seedlings which have been carefully grown over the two or even three months from seed. Mini heatwaves bring forward flowering periods and give plants an obvious head-start. Now, if the plants have grown too quickly, a dry period will mean the gardener will need to water the garden. An expectation of an easy life and letting nature provide moisture for the plants sometimes does not happen. Artificial and structured action is taken in the garden. The growth in the garden is no longer organic. It does not find a comfortable place in nature. Among all this human activity directed at producing strong plants to enable a good floral display or harvest, the pests also gather; the snails and slugs, menace to every gardener savagely munch on the new and tasty favourite plants in midnight feasts. By morning, they have gone; only a few leave their presence known with their demise spread on garden paths and pavements from the tread of late-night teenagers, who now brave only chilly nights to kiss and vape.

Late Spring signifies to the gardener that whatever they have sown, so shall they reap (or less than what their efforts have so far have achieved). There is now no time to start new plants. There is no expectation of a bright and colourful garden or a bountiful harvest if the first efforts have not given adequate results. Except there is; sometimes, there can be found young plants that other gardeners have started early, but are left out for their neighbours to adopt. Sporadic offerings in villages might include tomato, cabbage, pepper, and courgette plants and a garden in late spring once cleared of weeds and lightly dug, can change from bare brown soil to short rows of young vegetable plants only a few inches high, or flower-beds suddenly have their bareness neatly replaced with spots of young leafy plants. For the buyer of these plants, there is an expectation of pleasure that comes about through not hard work or gentle nurturing. In the garden, there are plants that have been collected from, or donated by neighbours and other kind persons that have been adopted and will be lovingly cared for, just like a human parent wants their charges to do well in life, so a gardener with these plants gains pleasure from providing care and nutrition. Not all of us are ‘green-fingered’ or amazing pet owners. Plants are least expensive on our time than other people, just like, in the villages and very small towns across the world, cats are easier to ignore than are dogs, so in many gardens there are plants doing well and plants doing less well.

The Spring weather has sections made up of days of sunshine followed by days of cloud and days of rain. There are troughs and peaks. One day the landscape is turning green and a week or two later, the weeds are tall and the buds of leaves on trees have opened. Gone is the bareness and a parade of what is to come is experienced; Summer.

The garden in early Summer has only some of the effect that a gardener is ultimately aiming for. Of course, there are flowers, but for many gardeners these are ‘fillers’ that have been specifically grown to preserve the space for the ‘grand show’ or the ‘extravaganza’ that 365 days of planning, effort, and adaptation, will have brought about. At least, that is the plan.

Summer is a time of unified expectation of fair weather. This is when, as children, we might lay in a field or a back garden and point out to each other the shapes of the clouds against a deep blue sky, and how they resemble animals or faces. Rarely, would we ‘see’ houses or motorised ships. If we are lucky, and only half child, we might see a sailing ship from yester-times. Maybe grandad is keeping an eye on the kids when that happens.

Blue skies tell us that we can allow ourselves to be confident that our efforts towards a scheduled day of fun will be reciprocated. We might go to the beach or the seaside. In the garden, the plants will sunbathe and be visited by insects, but like us they will begin to feel thirsty. In the plant world, this is an indication that it is time to flower. Early flowers in Spring will have been triggered by a lack of rainfall. In the garden, the tomato plants that are still in plant pots and didn’t get planted in the ground or taken by neighbours from outside gardeners’ homes, will be in advanced stages of fruiting if they have experienced a wave of drought and flood period. Plants in pots in early summer will usually experience this. Little fruits on the plants are there but these will never reach a satisfactory size, and will only be considered to be the result of laziness or lack of planning. In any case, they sit by the shed, half-forgotten but not fully discarded because no-one has the heart to just kill them by dehydration. The lawn, green if it has rained occasionally needs cutting and is the chore that almost surpasses the pleasure of having a garden lawn. In many gardens there is only a lawn and it is cut only because there is some notion that we will be judged by others that we are unruly in our minds, if it is left to its own devices. So, we must tame it; keep it constrained; stop it running riot and having too much fun.

Summer weather in England brings with it many changes that most of us never recognise. The roads, denied a wash from falling rain become dusty. Yet, we come across this dustiness most acutely in the countryside, right outside our towns and cities. On dirt tracks, rutted by the farmer’s tractors when the ground was sodden in the two previous seasons, the dust can be kicked up by a shoe scuffing the ground. The smell of it is different to when it is wet; and different again, when it has been dry for a while and recently wetted by Summer rain, than when it has been cold and wet for long periods in Winter and Spring. The smell of the dust blends with the scent from the heated weeds happily growing on the verges. We don’t notice it much if we smell it every day, but as soon as it starts to rain so much dust is thrown into the air that almost everyone can ‘smell’ the coming rain, if they are downwind. For a few precious moments we have a new experience before the ground is wet and lays gratefully quiescent as it waits to return to its preferred state of being just moist. Of course, deserts across the world have adapted to being arid and much prefer very little water, but in England, there is a sigh of relief if the rain follows a long dry spell, Near ‘droughts’ in England, followed by steady rainfall often brings out children in swimming costumes and adults in shirts, shorts and t-shirts from their dry and safe homes into their garden where they dance with feigned glee mixed with their sudden release from the oppressive dry heat.

Autumn has the same aspect to it; dry heat is now past and there is a fullness to the air, but there is no celebration in the garden by the children. Damp soil and fully grown plants give off a scent that tells us all that the conkers on the Horse Chestnut trees are almost ripe and will fall onto the pavements below. The plants are seeding and the last tomatoes are ripening on the plants largely stripped of their leaves to encourage this last push towards an edible product. This is a time when, in England, the sun gives a different light to us. It is a light tinted with yellow; a softer light, but fuller, despite there being a significant shift from the full spectrum of light that originated from the sun. Autumn is a time of contentment; still warm in its early stages, people are still wearing shorts and skimpy tops but now there is a frisson of cautiousness in us, a slight chill that without us knowing it, excites us; attracts our attention; not like a glass of iced water in Summer accidentally split on us that gives us a delightful shock; more similar to a very rapid wave of goosebumps that passes before we acknowledge it.

As early autumn progresses towards mid autumn there are more days of cloud but the days of sun are warm and humid. This is when the gardener finally reaps something from their many hours of effort. Root vegetables are pulled from the ground, cabbages are cut as they are needed, and top-fruit is picked; apples; pears; plums; blackberries are plucked from gardens or, for some of us, from roadside trees. This is when the person picked up for work in the morning who takes the same amount of time to eat an apple when they get in the vehicle has thrown it by the roadside and a row of apple trees have grown. Often considered to be vandals of the countryside by people in following vehicles, gardeners and scavengers laud them as heroes.

The leaves turn from green to reds, yellows, russets, pinks, burgundy and finally brown, and fall from the trees. If we are lucky, we might have a period of dryness that lets us rake up the leaves in the garden in mounds that creatures like hedgehogs enjoy, or in our roads and streets get pushed around by passing traffic and fickle wind. Inevitably though, they will get wet and never dry out. Slowly, the thin parts fade and there is only the skeletal veins of the leaves, which collapse among themselves over the next weeks. Some of these last until Spring but only a tiny few. Autumn was once when we would preserve fruit by fermenting or pickling. Meat would be salted to last over the Winter. Autumn is both a time of bounty and a time of planning for the coming meagreness of Winter.

Contraband

When the Police walked in, a couple of weeks ago, I was more than a little surprised, but when the Ministry of Food and Fisheries followed them, I knew there would be trouble.

As far as I was concerned, the seeds I had bought from ‘Colonel Seeds’ were Gardener’s Delight tomato seeds; I kid you not, Colonel Seeds is a real business, not a military person. I grow a lot of tomato plants; mainly for the neighbours. And, for years, I thought that there were at least six neighbours in my street that gained from my annual generousity. It turns out that the same household were taking four at a time and then coming back a couple of days later for four more, and so on until there were none left.

Every year, my good neighbour policy of specifically growing tomato plants to give away to my neighbours was thwarted by someone who gave away the tomatoes he had grown from the plants he greedily gathered from outside my house. The more I heard about how the neighbours were grateful for the free tomatoes, the more seedling plants I had grown so they could grow their own fruit producers. Each year, he got more and more praise. This went on for seven years. Meet Mike, he is so kind. He gives away the tomatoes he puts so much effort into to grow. ‘Yeh, but I am six feet one, like all the good-looking boys in my sister’s graphic teen-love story comics AND, by the way, he got the plants from me!’

Anyway, it turns out that the staff at Colonel Seeds don’t practce a good segregation policy at work. Yeah, that’s right, immigrant workers are allowed to integrate there. No, silly! Sometines seeds from one plant species get included with other plant species and sold as tomato seeds. I identified a pepper plant once, but the plant the MAFF were concerned about I did not know, and nor could I identify it.

Earlier that day I was outside, I had forgotten why though and was just sort of looking around, but I was holding the small potted unidentified plant.

‘Here! Alexander! What do you think this is?’ Alexander is my postman. He knows as much as I do about plants, except that he thinks that my Box hedge is a Privet hedge.

‘Privet. Privet. Privet’ he sometimes says, as he points to some of my nearby neighbour’s Privet hedges. I suppose I should really know better than to wave an unidentified plant about that have thousands of tiny green baubles dropping off everywhere, because I had explained to Jonathon that the little lemon green florescences on my hedge were flowers, something Privet does not have; he was not previously convinced by the shiny fatter leaves on my Box that Privet does not have. Not only could I identify little florescences as flowers, I also, whenever I had to go home to Australia, always laughed at the Asians trying to smuggle in suitcases packed with contraband, through the airports. By packed, I mean the suitcases have nothing but disallowed foodstuffs in them; meats, raw vegetables and seafood, even seeds, for goodness sake!

    ‘Did yuh feeel out the fooorrm?

    ‘Yis, yis, I feel.’

Alexander hadn’t known what my plant was, but he was intrigued. Great! At least I wouldn’t have to talk to a checkout person in my local supermarket today. I went back inside and took the well-thumbed notebook from the top shelf; where it was far out of reach of the kids’ sticky little hands, and put a tick in the column headed ‘Make someone’s Job interesting’. I hadn’t done that for years. The black hardback front cover was printed with ‘Daily Diary 2012’ in gold. It was now 2025.

The little green florescences were everywhere when the Police and MAFF walked in; hundreds of them on the window sill where the plant still stood, now dried out from lack of water.

‘Ah! Worst thing you could have done, really;’ The blond woman with the top-bun shook her head sadly. Her nylon jacket said MAFF. ‘to let it dry out like that.’

My cat was the straw that broke the camel’s back for her colleague though. Batting the fridge door with its left front leg, he appeared cute.

      ‘Oh, it’s hungry…..and covered with seeds! Where has it just been? Was it on the window-sill at all?’

They arrested me. My cell-mate, while I was on remand for being a flight risk, showed me a photograph of an empty room. I looked up from it with a quiz on my forehead and eyebrows.

      ‘That’s my unsightly missus.’ he moaned, in an East End London accent. I started to smile, thinking I had found a new mate with a sense of humour, ‘Yeah, really unsightly’, I said, but then he looked me in one eye and slowly shook his head. He showed me another photo of a toilet cubicle with the toilet removed.

      ‘There’s nothing there?’ I cautiously asked.

      ‘Dangerous…. Japanese….. World….. War Two….. pilot.’ he slowly said.

He then went to sleep at the tiny table we shared in the cell, with his head on his arms. Fortunately, they let me out before he woke up. I was relieved to be a bit safer and gratefully left, but not before I had written him a note, ‘A camouflaged toilet? If he was American I might of made a play on 'restroom', 'can' and 'john', but he was a straight dyed in the wool Cockney. 'An invisible khazi? I don’t get it.’ But I didn’t have to, because I was impatiently yanked out by my arm.

I was in court on Wednesday, and fined five hundred pounds with one hundred and forty three pounds costs for importing a non-indigenous plant into the UK without notifying His (blooming) Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, or HMRC to you.

That is why I hadn't paid for my broadband this month.

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

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[ 7 minute read ]

I have been trying to write about love; the purpose of which is to force myself to confront something that is difficult for me to do. Throughout my effort, I have been looking to eliminate worn out cliches and avoid simplistic declarative statements, which I much, much prefer to read and write. One of my first books as an infant was called Peter and Jane. ‘Here is Peter. Here is Jane’. Love it! Overall, I wanted to discover characters and characteristics that I could use elsewhere in understanding diverse topics. I like to anthropomorphise dry subjects to make them easier for me to understand. The 'plot' of the story is clear to me; but the whole thing is incomplete because to give it substance I still have to have a parallel environment that follows rules we are all familiar with; I have chosen a full calendar year, a garden, and the weather throughout the year. This, I hope would add a canvas on which the story is overlaid. Since I have experience of a few English seasons I can hold the way seasons change from one to another in my mind, and how a garden is affected.

A garden has expected results from applied effort, that is affected by weather, which is predictable as seasons go, but has an enormous and largely uncontrollable effect on plant and animal growth. Weather, as an unpredictable factor can destroy well-maintained gardens. Because growing plants and looking for; falling in; and maintaining LOVE is always a gamble, I think the journey of love is similar to a garden affected by human application and random weather that we know but is always different to our memory and expectations, much like people.

None of this, however, is yet written into the story. The story plainly needs to be extended to segue in additional pieces, because all that was posted on 27 April 2025 are the outside edges of a jigsaw and some of the brighter and most recognisable inner pieces along with a few pieces to connect those islands of significance. Expect more islands of lesser colour but add background and ambience to the overall vignette, or word-painting.

I want to put in the story: 'She had been ever so slightly over-exposed to the sun and her skin was tight as though she had been splashed with lemon juice.' which is completely in my writing style but it will be toned back a bit. It should, I think, be used to add contrast to a pre-existing weather condition.

In Winter, most gardeners will be planning, or finalising their plans on, what they will try to grow until next Winter. Of course, most food crops can only be harvested once. For humans, this might be a Summer romance. Some plants only produce fruit or seeds in the second year and then die, like Wallflower. Some, like strawberry plants, are more fructicious in their second year and then decline in productivity. Some cacti take years before they produce a magnificent flower. We might, if we draw our memories back to either our own pre-teen and teen years consider that our passion for someone else is unreciprocated so we pass them in the school corridor without making ourselves obvious until we discover that ‘that’ person also likes us. Bingo! Big flower! Some deserts are almost devoid of plant-life and then a flood brings the necessary water for a carpet of beautiful flowers to suddenly appear. Insects rely on this and have life-cycles patterns to match. We could compare this type of plant growth in a desert to young people going to Ayia Napa, Ibiza, and Zante, and the type of ‘love’ they get there. Lots of insects there, in hot environments.

So, being out of love is a bare garden. The world is cold and there is not much to cause a lone person to believe that they will find love. More people mingling outside in Summer, I suggest, gives a greater probability of a happy meeting. I think because we kind of know this, we are more outwardly hopeful and people find us more attractive. Happy people find happy people, I think.

Garden

Winter - Bare ground, some possibilities. Brown if it has been tilled and is weed-free.

Spring – Warm weather, tree blossom, anticipation of a happy time approaching. A few days of fast growth – strong sunlight after rain the day before. Here then, there is cause and effect in the right order. I have noticed that watering my garden in Spring causes my domesticated plants to flower less and later than the nearby plants that have escaped, this year.

Summer – some harvesting of foodstuffs, large quantity of mellifluous flowers with vivid colours and an abundance of interesting insect activity. Boisterous displays of colour.

Autumn – Most crops are harvested, cooler weather (which might be welcomed) Beautiful and relaxing tree leaf colour in a sunlight that has travelled through more air because it is lower throughout the days. In churches there are traditional Thanksgiving services. A time of plenty and sharing, so LOVE often overflows and is carelessly shared among nearby people.

Winter – final crop harvesting and stripping the garden of debris.

People and weather

People in Winter often wear dark clothes, and spontaneous personal interaction is very brief, even non-existent. As far as I can understand, there is often only a very small and slow growth of building familiarity. ‘Hello, Hello again, A fine day isn’t it? We must stop meeting like this, My name is…..’ This slow growth may take weeks. This, I suggest is quite different to the rapidity of how a relationship grows in warmer months; ‘Hello, conversation, laugh, conversation, Let’s meet again’, all in one or two meetings

People in Spring become more gregarious and wear clothes a bit more colourful than in winter. On sunny and warm days, there are more people about and people are less frenetic about getting somewhere on foot; taking more time to look in shop windows as they pass. I suggest that nearly all of us ‘window-shop’ for attractive people more in warm weather than in cold weather. This does not seem to be evolutionary beneficial unless we consider that a new-born baby will spend its first few months entirely constrained by its inability to perambulate away from the warmth of the furs and fires in a cave.

In a garden, new growth is minutely examined by the gardener to make sure it is not a weed, and much satisfaction is found in the growth or revealing of a cherished cultivated ‘seedling’. When a human attraction is in its first stages, more attention is diverted to closer inspection of the other person, largely because it is permissible, and reciprocated.

Summer - Spontaneous smiling at strangers and a general warmth exhibited to all around. There is an exuberance of character that becomes more widespread and it is a time for showing off a little. More fun and smiles among mingling people outside engenders frivolity.

Autumn - A time of plenty and sharing, so LOVE often overflows, yet, is cautiously shared among nearby people. The reason for this, I suggest, is because there is a high level of communal love that is warm and caring, much like being under a duvet in bed; and there is also the passionate love for an individual that is more like burning one side of your body while the other side freezes in a cold and draughty house with an open fire that burns brightly.

In the garden, the warmth is still there but only the cold will come and there will be an inadequate fire in the sky to warm the air and ground. There are the final prunings of hedges, bushes and lawns. Gardeners know that plants will not survive and the warm care of the gardener must be curtailed. There is a drawing back from sharing warmth, particularly to an environment that does not give warmth back.

This is the last post on How Toby fell in Love, or this exploration on how I have tried to write about love.

Hopefully, I shall be able to update this post with ongoing attachments, all of which shall be dated.

[ 15 minute read ]

Writing by numbers without numbers 6

Toby fell in love PART TWO

April 2024

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along'

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

        ‘Wait!’

Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

       'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

      'Okay, what's up?'

      'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a psuedo-date, off the premises.

      'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie smiled back. (Way too twee) Breakfast seemed too small again.

      Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.

The lunchtime meeting with Mimie

Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her canines were the same length as her incisors. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.

       ‘You let me find money in the street’

Toby looked up.

She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.

       ‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.

Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.

        ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

        ‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’

         ‘The baby?’

         ‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’ She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’

She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.

Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.

        ‘Come on, silly’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them a cup of tea each.

The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.

‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.

In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her lips. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.

Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and her sister Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again , wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on an ice-rink.

Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, hopped backwards three times and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.

The compassion he had felt for her in Winter, pushing a buggy with a crying baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.

She had noticed his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep alink with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.

(SUMMER 2024)

Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid and the heat from her was never scorching like he had experienced, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly. Like old slippers cliched

One warm evening, when he and Kate were alone in the garden, shielded by her high fences and her neighbours oblivious to their nakedness, a cold shower caught them, dozing. The exhilierating shock on Toby’s warm skin made him think of Mimie. ‘Mimie’, he thought, ‘I want you so much!’

Christmas 2024

Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share, literally the fruits of his labours in his garden.

In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.

Later that evening

Keeping the engagement ring in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Chloe’s widower, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.

Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.

Near the High Street, he knew there was a road junction where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t much going on that night.

        ‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’

Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. The look of horror he saw was the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.

       ‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down. 

     ‘It’s….it’s worth something.’ 

It was worth more than something, he had paid three thousand pounds and swapped an engagement ring for it.

She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket still held in the ring melted it.

Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched.

He had passed three houses before he heard her call to him.

     ‘Toby!' 

He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.

Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand. 

       ‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.

As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, brushed her feet, and settled down again. 

       ‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’

-end-

My thoughts go to all the young girls and boys who had their hearts broken and have never found the secret magic shop with a kind person behind the counter who fixes hearts for free; and the young boys and girls who were trained for battle at home and are confronted by minefields when they find romantic love. It is for the people who are wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a lake, like Mimie, and are trying to reach the edge, but can only see the ice shrinking from the shore. This is for the people who grew up in an environment where love was conjoined with pain and misery; from seeing too much, who have safe love now but seek a frost on something warm. This is for the people who need vinegar on their chocolate cake and for the people for whom love once washed through an open ended street, but now for them stops in a cold cul-de-sac that no longer has a path out the other end; a dead-end that no amount of bulldozing with love will open again; and it is for the people who cry in secret when they love; because for all these people, love hurts.

Something I learned was that I could imagine a camp-fire as a metaphor for a relationship, and personalities, or more fittingly, people's love can be considered to be logs that change the quality of the fire. There can be wood that gives off bad smells; ignites quickly and burns brightly but quickly; wood that smothers the heat of the fire by its size; cold and wet wood that dampens the heat; choking smoke; long lasting embers; wood completely consumed by the fire leaving a dry ash behind; and twigs and kindling that works as treats in a steady and stable relationship in the form of outbreaks of romantic actions.

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

mostly fiction

Harrari and Hakim

I think my abandoned alien friend, whom I call Harrari (‘Harraree’) doesn’t like me so much as I first thought she did. Actually, I don’t suppose it matters how it is spelt, because I don’t write to it or her, I am not entirely sure which.

Now I live in a house my life is somewhat suspended in the glutinous gel of physicalities and practical matters. I thought Harrari doesn’t like me because I found a plastic tiger in my back garden, the sort you find in a small child’s toy zoo, and set it up outside my front door to act as a psuedo warning that a weirdo lives here, and the caller should expect weirdness if the door is opened. You know, weirdness just falls out of its own accord. 

Anyway, no-one knocks on my front door, but I did once find my loft hatch open when I got up one morning. An intruder or another lonely alien practical joke perhaps, like knocking my glasses off when you found me living in your wood? ‘Not funny, Harrari’. My loft floors are insulated and the warm from the landing was going on holiday to what it might imagine to be a new place to inhabit. Not good. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air and that is why condensation forms on cold windows and walls.

I had, over the years I have spent living here, had an annual struggle with mildew forming on some of the far out of reach walls in the stair well. The previous occupants had allowed a nest of mildew to form in the upper corner where two exterior walls and the ceiling meet. Baby mildew spores would drop down and find comfortable places around my house; behind cupboards and other hidden places. There are two things you can do; empty your house of everything, including your lovely kitchen cabinets and get a plumber to stop your water and remove the toilet cistern, your bath and your toilet; or pay very, very close attention to controlling how much moisture is in the air and the temperatures of each room. Controlling the build up of moisture is easiest. Moving warm and wet air from rooms that have a temporarily higher temperature than normal to cooler areas of my home means I can let the cooler air with its condensing water vapour out into the wild through the front door. That is, if I am awake.

When in a dog eat dog world, be a cat

Harrari, is like a friendly labrador dog, but way, way, way more intelligent. Harrari has her own character. Harrari is funny and deliciously cruel and diverse in humour. Not at all hurtful though; and here is where I have a very good understanding of Harrari’s abilities to be deadly. Invisible, silent and almost undetectable, with an intelligence that would be off any chart we humans might invent in the next thousand years that measures intelligence (I have just been told, almost exactly two hundred years), Hararri, could if she wanted, be devastating. It is useful to remember that it was Harrari that guided dog-walkers away from my woodland camp, and guided me out of a ditch directly to my tent in a pitch-dark wood, around spiky bushes, holes, fallen trees and along unseen paths to my temporary home.

So when I discovered my loft hatch open I was immediately alarmed. The police would not climb in, after I told them that I didn’t want to go in because while passing through the hatch you can be stabbed in the neck, and any intruder would do that to avoid capture. It didn’t help when I showed the police officer my thirteen inch (34cm) kitchen knife with a one and a half inch (3.8cm) wide blade near the handle. This is what I proposed to protect myself with when the hoodlums jumped out of my attic, I told him. He stared at it on the kitchen counter for a full ten seconds. He then stood at the top of the stairs using MY torch and said, ‘There is no-one in there.’ After I had fetched him a mirror and showed him how to use it, which he bumbled, I had to climb in, he was too scared, into the attic to look behind the header tank (water tank found in older homes where water for heating is temporarily stored to refill the immersion tank in the unforeseen event that the water supply to the home is not available, to prevent the immersion heater setting light to the airing cupboard by overheating itself – the thermostat inside it tests water temperature only).

It was uncanny that he reminded me to look behind the header tank. Why did he think I was in there? I could have sworn he said that there was no-one there before. When I climbed out he asked me if I am crazy. 

       'Do you have mental problems?'

I secretly laughed at his naivety. So did Harrari, but even I didn’t hear her. I never even hear her laugh at me, she only hints at it later, when I am almost entirely asleep.

       ‘We all do.’ I said to the police officer.

He then instructed me to only call for help when I have been stabbed in the neck, and the culprit has escaped, like any frightened policeman would command. 

        'Only phone us when you actually see someone'

His female colleague saw him for what he was; Certainly Harrari did, Hakim did, and the policeman's own spirit was holding up a banner behind him that said 'I am scared!' It changed to 'Everything is your fault!' and then, once it saw me looking at it, 'Sorry!'

Harrari was, with her usual perspicacity, laughing at both the policeman and my naivety. She had opened the loft hatch, while I was asleep, to move warm and moist air from the top of the landing into the attic so it did not instead descend down to the bottom of the stairs.

She can pass through my locked front door with a good deal of effort but warm air cannot. Taking a key from a hook and manipulating it to fit the keyhole in order to be able to turn a stiff lock and then twist a handle to open the front door is, not outside her capabilities, but I suspect she would be exhausted by this, since it can only really be done with telekinesis; and such finite maneuvers are terribly tricky, even for her. However, a shove that comes from a slowly building storage of force, such as pushing up the loft hatch is quite do-able for her.

Very kindly, Harrari left the hatch turned forty-five degree over the opening so I could easily close it again without climbing in. She, of course, knew that I could not lock my left elbow to support my weight, because I had fallen off my bicycle and had swelling in that elbow.

You can see how I interpret Harrari as a faithful labrador; but she is not! A well-meaning creature would, like a dog, try to help its pack members. ‘I will let some air out, or in, for you!’. (Opening windows for Harrari is tricky too).

We, as arrogant creatures, that think we know best and better then mere cats and dogs, over-estimate our intelligence. Hararri was laughing at my naivety and sheer stupidness for not recognising that she was still there, with me, and had helped me while I was asleep. Similarly, I thought it was sweet that my cat of long ago, once brought in about a dozen live frogs from my neighbours pond; probably because, with raised eyebrows at the smells from my cooked food, he also thought I might like to eat the poisonous frogs. Maybe, and I prefer to think this, my cat had a wicked sense of humour; deliciously cruel but ultimately harmless. You wouldn’t want to be at the focus of its hunting and killing prowess though. I compare Harrari to a cat because they are both stealthy killers but choose not to attack.

A thought just struck me; I still don’t know what Harrari eats. I have just remembered it is for Harrari that I left out some food, in Tupperware containers, outside of my tent for the black human-like silhouette I saw in the woods I was living in. It was, of course, Harrari.

Fever had shifted my perception towards the spirit world where Harrari and her alien species are visible. Back then, with no fridge in my tent, I often accidentally poisoned myself. I couldn’t see any spirits, because they are even further away on the spectrum, but there, among the scintillating flashes of light in every direction, was a very, very sensuous movement, almost like a snake.

It is movement that attracts a predator’s eyes; and we humans are definitely predators, our forward facing, binocular eyes telegraph this to all animals. Because this is true, like all the advice we are given if we feel threatened by a predator, the black silhouette stopped moving. I could feel it looking at me, as I simultaneously felt myself half in and half out of the both the physical world and the spirit world. I now know I had crudely torn the veil between the worlds. Harrari was not expecting me to notice her, and alarmed, because humans can be exceedingly dangerous with stuff we do not understand, she ran away.

So scared was she, that on this one occasion, she broke some long ago fallen dry branches which cracked underfoot as she fled, panicked by my ability to see her. In seeing her, she possibly felt that perhaps humans have developed that ability across the world. Her safety as she saw it, was in a moment of, as it turns out, false realisation, swept from her. I let her go; I didn’t follow, she had a head start of probably forty metres, and she is a very fast and fit runner.

That evening I left some food out for her. Of course, she didn’t eat any; the effort to open the Tupperware containers probably outstripped the energy she might get from my strange food. There was however, the feathers of a pigeon nearby. That could have been a mink that ate that though. If it was, it would also explain where the cock pheasant that woke me every morning by shaking his wings went. I don’t know who ate it, or if it just ran away.

Where do 'Spirit Fish' come from?

Harrari later came back and changed the tunes in my head for me, you know those annoying ear-worms of music. Being half of this world but having an invisible influence in another is not something I have ever been able to fully understand, but this was where I currently found myself. Those dreams that seem so real when we wake but fade so quickly are like holding a spirit fish. Real fish are slippery and wriggle a lot; who wouldn’t wriggle when they find themselves suddenly outside of their safe environment where they can breathe. Spirit fish are slippery, wriggle and become invisible. Even if you haven’t lost it, you think you have. ‘Tricky little buggers!’

I am inclined to think that dreams are made of ‘spirit fish’ substance having a laugh and fooling around, then when we can see them from the perspective of our physical world they ‘swim’ away. Or if that metaphor doesn't work for you, try dicing onions with a blunt knife - good luck with that!

If you have ever woken from a dream that you are holding something and are surprised that you are not when you wake, you might, if you were really observant, notice that the objects you were trying to pick up, just before you wake became progressively more intangible. Clearing a picnic table of dishes and things is normal while dreaming, but as the real world and dream world begin to collide, our hands glide through the cake, but we can still lift the paper plate; then not the paper plate but only the napkin with an address scribbled on it is fine. Until eventually, we wake and all the things you have tried to salvage from the dream are not, after all, at the bottom of your bed with you. How frustrating and disappointing. That is what it is like spending most of your time being at the liminal place where worlds collide. I could show you, but I just can’t carry the ‘spirit fish’ across.

There is an invisible bridge right in front of you. Come on over!

Harrari and I, for a time, at my behest really, have tried to create a bridge between the physical world, what most people call the ‘real’ world; the spirit world; and the dream world. We, Hararri and I, know that a lucid being can have an effect in any of these places. Hararri, being an alien, is not of this world and has evolved to survive on her own world. It isn’t her fault that her brothers left her behind on earth after their intelligence-gathering trip here abruptly finished. She has had to adapt to our world from just a very young and scared lone alien, to a fully independent young ‘adult’ alien. I suppose I am lucky, that she sort of grew up here without the constraining and rigid thinking of her alien species to shape her into hating humans for their rigid stupidity. She thinks we are funny.

Alcoholics find it incredibly, hugely, almost impossible to wean themselves off alcohol when they monitor and control their own doses and have lots of money and a twenty-four hour service station within a ten minute walk. They just have to go ‘cold-turkey’ and clucking, listen to their brains shrinking and playing tunes to itself while it tries, like any highly functioning creature, to make sense of all the stimuli it is absorbing.

Making sense of twisting wires

When I was sixteen, I had a head-cold with a fever that would not let me sleep, just like an alcoholic going cold-turkey. Somehow, I had the ‘cure’ which I suppose also meant that I controlled the doses, and I had a twenty-four hour service station right there in my head. All I had to do was ‘go’ there. In a weird nightmare I had to connect thousands of wires together without a circuit diagram. Worse still, all these thousands of wires were either blue, yellow, or red, exactly the same hue and tint; identical except for three colours. I would then have to run a current through all the connected wires every now and again to see if any connections were correct. Worse still, they all wriggled around and kept changing place so if a connection was false and I disconnected it, and I tried to remember which wires they were, they moved.

Some time passed, maybe hours. Then, finally, I had it, all the wires were correctly connected. I fell into a deep sleep and the next morning I was so greatly improved that I got up. By the afternoon It was as though I had not been ill. I was just a little weak from not eating for a few days. Harrari thinks this is remarkable, and she tells me that is why she still stays with me. I suspect her scientific family background makes me interesting to her. But she is not a scientist. She was left behind long before she could adequately train.

The capital of Zimbabwe? No

Car tyres going over joints in a nearby road, make a repetitive sound for each car, and the cold-turkey brain (a hang-over for most of us); or one that is in liminal space; or is in an otherwise feverish state, eventually decides the repetitive noise is garbled speech that is really hard to decipher. But, as soon as it settles on something, that is all you can hear. Many of us have seen a comedian on the telly, showing us words that sound like something more humourous than the true words 0f songs; and then, that is all we can hear when we hear the song again.

Harrari got her name when I asked her for it, when she one day came to visit me. She stayed outside my tent. Neither of us wanted her inside. Because the cars nearby going over the same bumps made a ‘Ha raa ree’ noise, that was louder than her weird-sounding real name spoken with her super-soft voice, we settled on that. I don’t suppose all telepathic voices are soft, but certainly, hers was whenever she soothed my thoughts with just a few words. Of course, for weeks, she had passed right by my tent, unnoticed. One day, I was really suffering with ear-worms. If you can imagine two bars of a very simple melody repeated over and over and over again, you understand.

           ‘You had enough? She said, ‘I will change the tune for you. Hows that?’ Suddenly, there was no ear-worm, just a soothing melody.

Other times, sleep was also difficult, and sometimes Harrari would crouch outside my tent and reaching through the fabric telepathically brush my head with her hand. Tent fabric, is not too difficult for her thoughts to pass through. Magic sleep came in moments; like switching off a light. This is one thing that really frightens me about her; she can make humans sleep with a switch.

Truth, marry, or death

One time she asked if I wanted to marry her so all my problems would be eternally taken from me, and when her alien friends came back for her (in a few weeks), I could go with them, but I had to be completely free from wrong-doing for the few weeks before her family arrived. She, she told me could never go with them because she would have to be re-programmed somehow – she never explained how. I wasn’t sure what this really meant, and like I said, Harrari can be exceedingly dangerous if she puts her mind to it. I think, she is ruthless, though not savage. Maybe wild, describes her.

Alea Jacta Est and Post factum nullum consilium

I felt that this might mean dying. In fact she had said, that I would afterwards be fully in the spirit world. I didn’t want to upset her and then be savagely killed by her in the night; so I stole food from a homeless man the night before it was all going to happen. The next morning, my mobile phone, still with a charged battery, had, had all its stored numbers deleted. Harrari later told me that at the last minute, she had directed me to steal the same food I had given to the homeless man, from an undercover intelligence operative watching a kebab shop, posing as the homeless person. She, of course, knew I didn’t want to die; it was; at the time, very close, though. Thinking about it, she could have, and can, kill me any time she wants to.

She didn’t quite cause me to think that she made me buy food for the homeless man, when I actually needed food myself. Nor did she tell me that she had caused the homeless man to gently place the food away from him. We are never allowed to be sure that there is some other explanation for how things came about.

             ‘If there is a script for the future or a log of the past, all of you would instantaneously cease to exist.’ she once explained.

Of course, an undercover intelligence operative has back-up to remove trip hazards that are unintentionally left in their way.

Nonetheless, the intent to steal from a defenseless person was enacted, and far superseded any charitable act I had added to my spiritual record. Harrari told me I had been examined in the spirit world, my mobile phone numbers were deleted so I could not accidentally phone someone with my physical body rolling over in sleep, and I was rejected because my guilt led them to my insidious behaviour.

            ‘Once the order for examination is made, it cannot be cancelled’, she whispered to me.

            'Am I dead?'

Sometimes, when I open one of the firedoors in my home, Harrari crouching really low, still invisible and hoping I won’t notice, slips past my legs, in one direction or the other, I can’t tell. I think, from memory, she is actually about one metre sixty tall.

Hakim, whom I have mentioned in a previous blog, is the spirit-avatar-manifestation I conjured, when I was sixteen, to protect me from my violent brother when he was my guardian. Hakim, is still not friends with Harrari, but at least they don’t fight, or maybe Hakim is always running away from the feline Harrari, with her mischievous humour and suppressed deadliness.

She scares me a lot.

 mental health - love

[ 5 minute read ]

Outside of relationships

In trying to write about love I set myself a challenge. I thought that it would be difficult. I didn't get many hugs as a child and comfort came from a miserable mum. 

I have met a limitation of my understanding of something that binds the human world together. Compassion I understand, because I understand suffering. Being nice to someone because you love them is something I had little experience of. My childhood seems to be held together by necessity, as in, being a child, it was necessary to satisfy some of my wants with; first, food and nappies; then better food and toys; then shoes that match; then clothes that comply with societal expectations for school-age children; and so on. I can recognise that I may have been loved as a child, but I seem to think I was just cared for.

Tongue in cheek, I suggest, that before anyone gets married, each of the intended spouses write a story of all the types of love they can think of; familial love; slow-burning and building love; love born from adversity; platonic love; community love; forbidden love; exciting love; mundane and tired love; extra-marital love, shared love for something or someone else; first-love; parental love; and love for a deity; there is more, but I am close to reaching the full scope of my understanding of where to find love. Incidentally, I had a girlfriend that loved being in love. I write that in past tense.

I thought I could write about love, just like the 'subject, verb and object' order in other languages around the world are different in different cultures, I thought I could make a mash of love and kindness, and strain the kindness out to leave a clean and valuable commodity. In effect, like those other languages, create sentences on love, that for many people are grammatical incorrect, but still comprehensible. I am wrong; There is a dark curtain that I cannot see through. It is a shutter that is eternally locked against me.

My story on love is heavily related to loss; the feeling when love is lost. Love tends to grow slowly and is not always known to the lucky person who naturally loves. When the object of love is removed from our reach; by the demise of someone, suddenly by accident, or through nature. The breaking of a relationship made clear to the unsuspecting other person in the relationship is brutal. No-one has the time or the resources to let the now 'spare' person down gently. It took months for love to grow and it is taken away inside of five seconds by a single sentence. Sure, it took twenty sentences to deliver it, but it is only the one sentence that is the determining one. I suspect that the discarded person would be like me, and so not good at writing about being nice to someone simply because it makes them happy.

Sometimes, I see glee on women's faces and I wish I had delivered their pleasure to them. I don't need them to know it was me but I would like to see it in real time. But people get arrested for that, or get a punch in the face from an irate husband.

When my wife and I were courting, we went to the library and learnt how to say 'I love you' in as many languages as we could find in the language translation books. None of them, however, were on Xhosa, or its parent language, Khoisan, with their wonderful clicks. Oh well.

Perhaps, I am not in love right now, and it is emotionally expensive to live as though I am in love. As an action to promote survival in a herd community, or a pair, it is no doubt extremely useful to watch out for your loved ones; typically these are people who share our own genes or are the carers / parents of our offspring. And, there we have it; outside of any meaningful relationship, one can only be driven by one's innate drive to procreate, or seek a series of temporary relationships through promiscuous sex; the physical pleasure of which, is a terrible substitute for love.

However, in spending quite a lot of hours dredging my mind, I am artificially in love and, I think, a little kinder.

At more than 4,100 words the story, almost complete but not yet embellished, it would take around 22 minutes to read. This, I feel, is too long for a blog.

The purpose behind writing the story was to show how I am learning how to come up with expressive statements to negate the use of worn and tired cliches. Ultimately, I want to be able to store phrases in my head to help to use as templates of understanding, much like heuristics, when I study something. I find that humanising dry subjects and concepts help me to explore more fruitfully.

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

3  The Evolution of Love - in the courthouse

These are the tags specifically used for the posts on the evolution of love :
writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story

These tags will be used only for posts that directly relate to this story and character evolution, so clicking on them in the list of tags will show only this evolution with the related posts. Because they will not display in chronological order the posts are numbered. This is number 3

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font text will be changed. 

Green font text is a replacement for the red font text.

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

stung by a stinging nettle; emergence of the people from their warm homes; time of hope, of tentative dreams, of seeing plans begin to take shape; energetic season; an assurance that things are going well; “Lovely weather!"; insects and bumble bees; neighbours more obvious; annoying power tools are used

Toby and the garden fell in love

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love.

(Addition part 3 on Good Friday) He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand or on an arm or leg; more a tingle; more an 'ooh!' than an 'Ouch!'.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. (Addition part 3 on Good Friday) A jogger, recently happy to exercise now her face wouldn't get cold, dodged the waiting passengers. The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, in modern day peaceful Suffolk, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned. (Addition part 3 on Good Friday) In any case the passengers were hopeful that things would go well for a few months

This paragraph with speech may not make the final cut. It is italic red so I know that it can be deleted because nothing following it rests on its existence yet. Italics are also used for different reasons.

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings. A five pound note lay on the floor near his foot.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s five pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along.’

Scowls came from the queue on the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through,  and called, ‘Wait!’

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

       ‘Wait!’

I want to have a feeling move past Toby, the protagonist, like a spirit blowing on him, but I also don't want to stop exploring love in the real world as possibly being completely earth-bound and wholly contained within our minds. Cortisol?

The new love interest will now be Mimie, and the below speech, which was previously due for deletion, is relevant because it provides a connection to an earlier event.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s twenty pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along'

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

        ‘Wait!’

Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

       'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

      'Okay, what's up?'

      'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a psuedo-date, off the premises.

      'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie smiled back. (Way too twee) Breakfast seemed too small again.

2  Plotting how the evolution of love will unfold

The tags for this are: writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story

These tags will be used only for posts that directly relate to this story and character evolution, so clicking on them in the list of tags will show only this evolution with the related posts. Because they will not display in chronological order the posts are numbered. This is number 2

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font text will be changed. 

Green font text is a replacement for the red font text.

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

It seems to me that I should start at the very beginning of when love is first discovered in someone for someone else (or even something else – dog, cat etc.).

In the 1944 film ‘Meet me in St. Louis’, as Esther Smith, a daughter of a wealthy man, Judy Garland is about to leave the home, for a short time, and gives the black housekeeper a squeeze, and says, ‘I am used to you!’ There are two obvious reasons why her words were so: First, because those words convey the type of love she has for her ‘friend’ – of some years; or / and secondly, because it is set in 1905 and a white young woman saying she loves a black woman would probably have been scandalous, in 1905 (the setting of the film) and 1944 in the cinema. Nonetheless, her love is conveyed, at least to me. It is easy to meld these two reasons for the choice of words the screenwriters chose, to understand that the film is about a young woman full of excitement and discovery and now about to leave the house servants. It is important to show that Esther (Judy) is kind and not complicated.

I think we get 'used to' a puppy or a kitten as it turns into an adult animal and mourn our loss when it dies thirteen or fourteen years later. Yet, if it died on the same day we acquired it, many of us would be more upset at its demise than our own upset at our loss.

Certainly, a sense of attachment makes a difference to us. Our baby animal dying on the first day we have it is different to hearing about our neighbour’s new pet dying. There is an immediacy to having our own pet.

So, perhaps there is making room in our emotions for someone else and an immediacy of interaction necessary for there to be love. Yet, some say, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, and others say, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. I suspect from this, there is a different type of love for our siblings than for our neighbours, or people who study or work with us. In our early years we don’t get to be away from our family members. It follows then, that platonic love is so pervasive that romantic love cannot grow roots.

So, my character, ‘Toby’, must be attracted to someone or recognise something in someone else that he finds exciting and would miss if it wasn’t available to him, albeit intermittently. This recognition must be new to him. 

There are times when there comes a diminishment in faculties for good operation in the world by our partners; through accident, age; or illness. Then, we are in the position of being ‘used to’ that person being there, and we love them that way - the 'spark' is absent. I am not going to explore 'sentiment for something that is no longer there', as much as I would like to.

In order to ‘show’ love in my story about Toby, I shall describe his garden growing; from its Winter bareness through early growth in Spring, Flowery Summer, Abundance in Autumn, and back to Winter. However, this last winter shall have rewards from the careful cultivation of his garden and further afield throughout the year. For this to work, Toby needs to gather nuts and fruit (and other stuff) for eating or presentation, during a shared time with at least one other person.

My target length is 2500 words for the very short finished exercise in learning how to write about love, but the background and drafts will take more than 12000, I suspect.

So, my story needs to begin in Winter.

Toby and the garden fell in love

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. The bus arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, in modern day peaceful Suffolk, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

I am spontaneously moving towards his new love interest being the magistrate / judge who sentences him for some misdemeanor. We'll see. This paragraph with speech may not make the final cut. It is italic red so I know that it can be deleted because nothing following it rests on its existence yet. Italics are also used for different reasons.

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings. A five pound note lay on the floor near his foot.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s five pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along.’

Scowls came from the queue on the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through,  and called, ‘Wait!’

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

       ‘Wait!’

  mental health

[ 18 minute read ]

I like to play mind-chess with unsolicited visitors to my home

Every now and then, a pair of people knock on my door to talk to me about Jesus and God. I thoroughly enjoy these moments because I have a deep belief in the spiritual world, so I am not afraid of any witchcraft or hypnotism they might try to trap me with. Some time ago, I came to understand that 'omnipresent' means, in the past, present and the future. That means that, theoretically, we can pray in the future for our sins in the past and God, being in the future, hears those prayers and prevents us being spoiled by sin, or even committing sin. I use this as a universal truth with the evangelists on my doorstep, and we play mind-chess for a while. If, towards the very end of the conversation, I mention that 'omniscient' means knowing what will happens in the past, present, and future, it shows that planning to pray in the future, like next Sunday, to cover a sin we are about to commit today, is useless because it is not sincere. God and I have a good laugh at this over a brandy and a cigar. Neither of us smoke or drink, so we just laugh instead.

I created James and Brian, two characters to show how foolish most of us are, and especially me. At the end, you can hear God laugh at James' stupidity. This is just a story. I have taken a strong view as narrator to make a case for James.

Mind Chess

The allotment was empty when James got there. The gate was open but there were no delusional would-be market-gardeners to be seen. The exposed dry soil made James think of water. It even smelt dusty today; humidity levels were low, and it hadn’t rained for over five weeks. His own plot was green and abundant with fresh growth but everywhere else was a scene of abandonment. Bare soil with random segregated weeds moping in the sun made James contemptuous of the absent hobbyists and pretenders. Only gooseberry bushes seemed to be growing; gooseberries bushes scattered across arid plots surrounded by congregating weeds vying for position, like unruly football fans at a match that hadn't started yet.

Nobody, it seemed, was concerned with neatness or order, yet farmers, James thought, with all the land they cultivate were tidier than these lazy losers. Some things came easy for James. Having self-propagating flowering plants with lots of ground-covering foliage that prevented the soil drying out and kept weeds down in early Spring was just the obvious thing to do; knowing this allowed him spare time. He had long ago concluded that if he hadn’t expended any energy sowing these seeds or tending the plants he really didn’t mind digging them up to plant other preferred seedlings. Some things were difficult for James. Compassion and empathy were alien to him, so much so that he was ruthless even with himself. He had had his turn at suffering and avoided any circumstance that had a probability of happiness, as he saw it. Happiness, he felt, could be taken from him, by accident or by someone’s will. He was disappointed with life and lived a life of asceticism, with no expectation of joy. You might expect him to be in fine physical shape but he was lazy, preferring to use his brain to find ways to alleviate or avoid the toil of hard work. He was also young; not even sixty-two yet.

Pushing his bicycle with day-glow green handlebars and front forks, he went further in, hoping for something stimulating that was emotionally free, but finding nothing of interest. His own plot, he saw, was just as he had left it, green and luscious with its covering of Limnanthes douglasii, or Poached Egg plant. This was safe for him; no emotion or effort put in and free aesthetic value taken out. His mental cost – benefit analysis said ‘win – win’. He was about to leave when he spied a man painting a tiny shed, going just beyond scumbling and changing its colour from grey to duck-egg blue.

James quickly learned that Brian used to be a secondary school teacher, because Brian wanted him to know that he used to be useful. By association with his career, Brian hoped that everyone he told would continue to think that he was a hero, a modern day crusader in driving forward decades of young minds into a bright future but was realistically a voracious and gaping maw of banality in the North East of England; an unattended torpidity that would swallow up even the sharpest of students. James, on the other hand, was an unqualified educator; a corrector of intellectual mistakes, and a ruthless and unfeeling man who had dedicated himself to proving everyone he met, wrong, stupid, a waste of space, or obsolete. 

James had strong views and knew the far-reaching extent of his mind outstripped most others. Where others relied on heuristics, James experimented; where others got information from newspapers, television and social media, James parasitically sucked dry selected information he found in the people he met; though never the information that the host thought valuable and had gleaned from their favourite media sources. James was instead searching for tiny connecting pieces to complete his collection of finished thinking. He needed to understand his world in fine detail, so he could eventually show the rest of the world that he was right to hate everyone for their stupidity and and right to be a loner.

There are two types of people according to James; sublime people of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth who were beneficial to him; and the rest of the world. James categorised Brian to be obsolete and a drain on public learning. However, Brian, innocently holding his small tin of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, and comfortable in his fug of accumulated miscomprehension had roused James’ interest. Mental stimulation was the drug that kept James alive. He never showed his true colours when he first met someone. Instead, he let them rudely promote themselves and then gave them reasons to go away and think about how they might wake from the weary slumber that was home to their comforting insensibility. James thought himself special. Conversely, he knew this and that is why he hated himself. Self-flagellation had eaten away at James’ confidence and left only a paradigm of behaviour almost completely devoid of compassion.

Initially, Brian was friendly and not alarmed and after general conversation on plants and how he had moved his shed, Brian suddenly swerved onto a blustering, and clearly unrefined, path with an outburst on people dumping their rubbish in the Birmingham streets. Brian wasn’t quite ranting and James knew that he wasn’t crazy by the standards of the time. He recognised a man that spent at least a couple of hours with a pint in his hand at the bar of his local pub on Sundays. Like everyone else, talking, for Brian,  was almost entirely only mental exercise.

‘They just dump their rubbish in the streets’, cried Brian indignantly. ‘I mean their mattresses and things. They should take it all to the tip.’

James, calm in his thinking, knew that not everyone had access to a van or trailer in Birmingham, and there was a rubbish removal-person strike in Birmingham, so no-one could arrange for a mattress or old cupboard to be taken away either. To James, Brian was certainly, by the standards of the day, completely average in his thinking; clearly insane. James, however, was charitable in classing it as ‘lazy and crust coated thinking’. He recognised the patina on Brian’s thinking; patina that was a result of poor maintenance and a reactive exposure to lazy thinkers. ‘Get your thoughts out, use them, Brian, and embellish them with facts and fresh ideas. Where is your inventiveness, Brian?’ he thought. He could almost ‘see’ extraneous bits of thoughts being sheared off in Brian’s head as they were shaped to fit with other similarly corroded thoughts, and cobbled together, to quickly throw up a feeble scaffold so flimsy that only a minor test would knock it down, but sufficient enough for him to formulate his own opinion to use as a remedial buttress; an opinion that once it had reached his fore-brain and left his mouth would be his long-standing fall-back position because it was the only one he had. It would be a buttress to a non-existent scaffold that becomes the foundation for the next scaffold. Now that it had been recently and neatly placed on the wobbly shelves in the library of Brian’s mind, he would be attracted to its shiny newness. The attendant analogue library filing card for where it was stored, would, with its crisp corners and uncreased facade, for a long while be more attractive than its dog-eared, mis-filed, and stained neighbours. Brian had made all his relatable experiences obsolete. Thinking stalled.

James felt compelled to help Brian restart his donkey-engine, cement-mixer type mind; a mind that needed to first be pulled free from a bog of mistreatment.

Unfortunately, the mind is not hermetically sealed from the outside world and the gatekeepers in charge of inward-bound information in Brian’s mind were now baffled and throttled by newly installed governors that came in a box-set with a belief that his education was completed when he achieved a recognised teaching qualification.

Brian’s unconscious source thought was, ‘I know my subject and the University has told me that I can adequately teach it. I have experience of teaching in secondary schools as part of my degree, so I now know everything I need to bend young minds to think like me. They really should, you know, because I am right. No! More than that, because I care, I am a hero!’

He had, a long time ago, in younger years, consciously thought, ‘I am so excited. I want to help young people. I really care.’

Any observer could, in retrospect, suggest that the demons were ready and waiting to leap into him to corrupt his valiant hope while he fervently clutched his University approbation, but already they were in him, part of his core, inherited from his parents, and encouraged by his friends and peers.

‘No new information is needed. Don’t explore. You have all the information you need to teach empty heads. Relax.’

‘Well done!’ to Brian meant, ‘You have done enough. You can stop now.’

This necrotic stagnancy was starkly evident to James in the rest of their discussion. Brian had opinions on Government handouts; criminal records preventing people from ever working in their whole lives; and who might attend and be an appropriate recipient at Food Banks. James, with a robust understanding of these social issues through diligent research and empirical knowledge threw in ‘Shame on them!’ as the conversation segued from benefit cheats to habitual scroungers. This left-over salty seasoning of the stew of Brian’s opinion on righteously moaning benefits recipients was too much for Brian’s palate. But James had carefully measured that condiment into his hand to check its volume and supposed effect, and smiled at Brian’s donkey engine mind chewing on old slime and chunks of debris from his socially-conscious 1990s history, when it balked at the jet-wash of fresh briny thinking.

Brian, with his self-assurance, had already made his first mistake with James; thinking that everyone watches television and have similarly long straws that are permanently thrust into the same soup of Orwellian nonsense and thus everyone is supplied with the same delectable but mentally-hostile nourishment. One of the reasons why James did not eat media-cake was because it tastes delicious but is hostile to the body. It satisfies a want, yet secretly poisons a need.

Subconsciously, Brian was reconnoitering for people to add to his group of confirmation-bias addicts; searching for another stumbling mess of a person who prefers an easy route through a jungle of information; a route that was crudely cut by a man with a machete following an animal track, that became a track for illegal loggers. A path that is there by dint of its availability. The more people use it, the more easily it is found, due to its wide and trampled aspect. Brian was used to following the pack. His younger self would have wept.

‘They just dump their rubbish outside other people’s homes in Birmingham.’ Brian remarked, alluding to, though not saying outright, people leaving their rubbish outside the homes of people of colour, and not instead gently placing it outside white people’s homes. James was aware of that happening. He suspected that Brian thought he would jump on his band-wagon of aggrieved righteousness because James was closer in colour to Indians and Middle-Eastern people than the old-school notion of what a European should look like; Scandinavian and Danish Vikings from 1000 years ago. In any case, James didn’t bite. He went the other way in thinking and held one idea back for the shock value, if it was needed.

In his head he went with an idea that, in a lawless environment there is no infrastructure to guide someone towards making mutually beneficial decisions, which came out as, ‘Why not, everyone else is; and where else is there to put it?’ James had now set himself up to fatally fail in his mission to destroy the canker in Brian’s mind. He would never recover from this outward attitude of simplistic laissez-faire.

It was not the first time James had been mistaken for an Asian or Middle-Eastern man. He spent a lot of time outside and grew tanned even by the winter sun. Certainly, he wasn’t going to, without question, be waving a flag for a brown ethnic minority people he did not belong to, and crying foul at every mistake made by a Viking, which Brian, it seems, thought he would.

Neither was he about to run around shouting ‘Up the Vikings!’

‘Is that what you think happens, Brian?’ James thought, ‘Brown people will always have opinions that support only brown people?’ He never said it, though, because he still believed he held the central position in the game of chess, that was, to him, their conversation. He knew that attack would cause Brian to defend, and then there would only be a game of attrition; Brian would never have a confident gambit if he was forced to defend himself. It was his opponents’ gambits that James liked to publicly dissemble.

Brian still believed that James was from the same economic background as himself and maintained his ‘friendly pontificating over a Sunday pint in the village local’ attitude. He breached the subject of criminality and having a criminal record forever preventing young adults from getting jobs. As a teacher, he’d had an enhanced criminal record check because he was working with vulnerable people. He presumed that everyone has the same check; James knew they don’t.

‘On application forms, hopeful people, in the UK, must confess to any convictions within the last ten years. After ten years, their records are deleted, and they are considered reformed and no longer a threat to themselves, the shop-keepers’ sweets, or other people. Actually’, James continued, ‘the records are not deleted. Convictions for most offences are simply not revealed when requested by a potential employer, except for certain crimes.’

Brian looked uncomfortable at this, inconveniently sure that young criminals were eternally doomed and condemned to be forever unemployed by their foolish earlier actions. By this time in the conversation, James knew that Brian, the ex-teacher, still foolishly believed that education universally solves unemployment in all environments, and is the sole and absolute requirement for opportunities for success to emerge. Brian, born in the North East of England has lived in the south of England for too long, and, in James’ mind had forgotten his home. When James added that as an employer, he had worked closely with recruitment agencies to get people at very short notice for some of his contracts, Brian’s spluttering, pollution-spreading engine of a mind encountering a steep incline in the road to progress, switched on the automatic choke because its core temperature still remained too low, and so more stale fuel from his tank of denial was sucked in, at the expense of fresh air. He refused to learn something new or believe that he was wrong. He did not recognise that he needed to purge his system.

Brian shifted back to talking about food banks, believing that it was, in fact, James who was clearly exhibiting signs of mental disorder, and he tried to link education, criminality, and poverty with a circumstance he had read about and seen on the news. From his self-imposed, though much supported by his peers, elevated position of superiority over mentally aberrant individuals, such as this moron before him, he thought that James would agree with his confused and blind belief that all visitors to food banks are food-poor. ‘How can he not see the truth? It is in the newspapers, for goodness sake!’, he irately pondered.

However, when Brian demonstrated this fabricated empathy for peasants living on bread and water, James had to make sure Brian knew that many of them indeed eat cake. He had attended a food bank perhaps five times over as many years. Extra money went out as a larger direct debit than he was anticipating and five more times because he was ineffective in temporarily saving money by switching utility providers.

‘As someone interested in social enterprises, I spent a lot of hours talking to the organisers of local food banks and hubs.’ James explained. ‘All of them complained about rising numbers and how to tax people with a set ‘donation’ of around five pounds for each visit. My input with them was, as a general rule, to not allow people to attend if their benefit is paid that same week.’

James was now beginning to reveal his ruthlessness, but he knew that the same people week after week were getting free food so they could buy luxuries such as eating out and expensive day-trips with the money they saved. This at the expense of both the needy and the food-hubs which spent money on food to accommodate the greedy as well as the hungry.

‘Shame on them’, he said again.

Brian, in his turn, was irritated by James’ arrogance and finally ended the conversation when James tried to explain how needs and wants change as people mature, so financial income has a different utility for different age groups.

‘I really must get on with painting this shed. My wife will kill me if I waste this paint.’

James turned his bike around. A duck in the pond laughed when an opportunistic jackdaw who had delightedly watched the whole thing croakily called, ‘Hear! Hear!’.

Brian blinked and stared, confounded, and watched, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, while James pushed his bicycle away, towards the gate at the edge of the allotment and back to the road.More cars were parked at the gate.

James, alone with his thoughts again, was convinced that he had proved himself right. Students really are held back by coasting teachers. Yet, blindly, he had corrupted himself because he had no evidence to back this up. It was still supposition. Nonetheless, he closed his thought-experiment examination of teacher and pupil interaction, and added one more theory to his collection of completed thoughts.

The duck, unable to keep the smile off its face, put its head beneath the water, then needing air, withdrew it,  shook it, and laughed again at the jackdaw as it shamefacedly flew away.

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

[7 minute read]

A moment of sonder

If I ever, one day, want to create characters for stories, I think I would try to remember all the snippets of conversations I had inadvertently overheard while waiting in a queue, or just passing someone, and I would write them down.

In London, England, I overheard a young woman, with a slight, maybe French, accent say, ‘Don’t be mean to me just because I am young!’ I was struck by this because it was something that seemed only possible to enter the head of someone who is not British. Maybe I am closeted by confirmation bias – I had never heard a similar comment in a British accent, yet I can’t help thinking that her upbringing included a reasoning that youth is no bar to intelligence or understanding; not a sense of entitlement, more an understanding that she was not fettered. She seemed to recognise that she lacked experience but that was all that was missing for her to instantly understand something that other people had heuristics for, or for British people in England just grew up knowing.

I had a French female friend who told me that while she was still learning English, she had put too much powder on her face, and so asked her new English boyfriend to ‘blow off’ on her face. (Blow off is English slang for farting). She said he looked really shocked, because he didn’t know her very well. As an invite to me to freely visit, she once told me to ‘just come in and pop’. I think she was attempting a euphemism though; sort of a ‘double entendre’. Let’s face it, the French know what a ‘double entendre’ is. I really liked her then, but just smiled, not really knowing that she liked me back; she told me later, just before she moved away from the area.

I was on the same bus as a young mother with a baby that incessantly cried. I didn’t mind; I just felt really sorry for her. Her look of concern and helplessness was so pitiful. I couldn’t help though because I had just had eye surgery and was blind in one eye on a moving bus. She didn’t know that the bus engine noise would be extremely loud for a new baby, and she didn’t know how to comfort her new baby. When I passed her to get off the bus, I noticed her melting face filled with gratitude for the three elderly women attending to her and her baby. To this day, she might think how wonderful the ladies were in quietening her child, but I suspect she should thank the driver for delivering us all to the bus station safely, and naturally switching the engine off.

Surrounded by people, I overheard a man of perhaps 30 years, say to himself, ‘I just want someone to talk to.’

As I passed someone queuing to get into a music gig, I overheard him say to his friend, ‘I wish I didn’t know so much.’ I think he had a high IQ and didn’t know what to do with it.

I overheard a woman in a supermarket in the summer of 2020 almost shout to a shop assistant that she has a breathing condition. She wasn’t wearing a mask (Covid 19 lockdown in the UK). I suspect her boyfriend was one of those people who think it is cool to have maximum agency over their lives despite how negatively it affects everyone else. I imagine that he knows he annoys people and that is his signal to himself that he is in control over his life.

I overheard two people about twenty feet apart in a residential road:

Exasperated, one said, ‘Why don’t you just come to me if there is a problem?’

The other called over his shoulder, ‘Because you have no respect for other people, and so you can’t understand a single word I say to you!’

I used to play a game with my children in the car. Later, I played the same game with some of my employees while we were travelling abroad. ‘What do you think that person there is thinking?’ I would point out, or earmark someone in our view, across the street at traffic lights or in a park we were passing. Usually, the answers were quite mundane. But, I would always offer something like, ‘At last it is raining so I can test this umbrella I bought from a trader in the Sahara desert’; or ‘This is the fifth time this month that someone has stolen my car!’ when someone was walking or cycling; or ‘If I sit on this bench long enough perhaps the Council will put a plaque on it as a memorial to me.’ If I saw someone dancing and looking down, I might say something like, ‘Oh no! I know where my son’s stick-insects are now!’ My children and employees never seemed to understand that there is much more going on in other people’s lives than is evident to onlookers. They had never experienced a moment of sonder, or ‘the feeling one has on realising that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles’. (Dictionary.com)

I would have been delighted if the people we were observing were playing the same game and had targeted us, pointing their fingers and laughing.

‘Sonder’ is also Africaans for ‘without’ from the Dutch word ‘zonder’.

In searching for the word ’sonder’ in a thesaurus, I came across the word ’spissitude’ which I think means ‘density’. I would definitely have a drunk character in a play say ‘spissitude’ rather than ‘density’.

My 1962 Roget’s Thesaurus does not have ‘sonder’ in the index.

My 1982 ‘Concise Oxford Dictionary’ does not have ‘sonder’.

The best definition I can get for ‘sonder’ is from the OED www.oed.com under ‘sonder-cloud’. I used my library card to log in, under ‘Institutional Access’.

‘Now historical and rare.

A cirrocumulus cloud.

1816 Cirrocumulus, or Sondercloud, i.e. cloud consisting of an aggregate of clouds asunder (from A.S. sond, Old Eng. a-sonder and sonder): the distinguishing marks of this cloud being that of separate orbs aggregated together, and the change to this cloud from others is a separation of continuity into particules.

(OED 2025, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/sonder-cloud_n?tab=meaning_and_use )

So, if we apply this wonderful definition of cirrocumulus sonder-cloud to people, we can have a ‘cloud’ of people casting a mottled shadow on the world. Shadows are not necessarily bad though, they provide shade from the searing sun, and contrast in an otherwise too brightly lit environment. Alternatively, we might like the idea of a lesser chance of sunburn. Because cirrocumulus clouds are so high up, we on Earth only detect a dimming of light and not distinct shadows. So, a ‘cloud’ of people are probably more portentous, than distinctly instrumental in changing an environment – more of a feeling at the back of one’s mind of a lesser quality of life in the present yet the reason is not immediately evident.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=sixth+sense (my blog on sixth sense and shadows)

Cirrocumulus clouds are those ones that look like lambs tails, or when there is about to be a change in weather, they might be seen when a sky is described as a ‘mackerel sky’.

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

[14 minute read]

Part Two

 Mental Health issues

All I wanted was a pair of glasses, but I got a whole series of tests beforehand.

I actually know more about my eyes than the optician.

I have a tiny, tiny hole in one of my retinas. It is so small that it is extremely difficult to detect; an ophthalmologist will not see it. A consultant ophthalmologist, on the other hand, might find it, might. My local hospital / eye clinic is a very good one. It is not relying on poorly educated or harried staff to make quick judgements with quick examinations of patients. I have glaucoma and have bi-annual checks that everyone else might get at their UK opticians. However, my checks are a little more intense in the hospital; I get tipped in the chair so I am horizontal and my eyes are minutely scrutinised. A typical examination takes about forty minutes to an hour. 

Unfortunately, I am used as a guinea-pig for ophthalmologists to learn how to spot irregularities in eyes. A consultant ophthalmologist can very quickly see the extent of damage in my eye when they are aware of it from my medical record. The hospital ophthalmologists simply cannot and need to be instructed by the consultant on what to look for. What hope can a high-street ophthalmologist have of finding an anomaly in the short time they have to examine a customer? The amount of time looking left, right, up, and down with a light shining in both eyes and the high street ophthalmologist looking for monsters is about one twentieth of the time that is spent looking in just one of my eyes during my examination every six months at my local hospital.

‘Your eyes are fine. I cannot detect anything wrong.’ (other than a slight myopia and astigmatisms).

I happen to know that I have damage to the optical nerve in one eye and a small hole in the retina in the other eye. This is why when I wanted new glasses/spectacles I mentioned that I just need the sight test. I already know the pressure in my eyes and there are recent photographs of the beautiful interior of my eyes.

I just need something simple but they take my agency away and give me something needlessly complicated, time-consuming and inadequate for requirements. I don’t even need vision correction to legally drive on the road.

Go online for a very quick search or wait for the computer to stop hogging the WiFi bandwidth and download speed?

Sometimes I want to just Google something, but my computer is subjugated by the operating system and its time is taken up dealing with the boorish and over-bearing demands to process instructions. Essentially, commands are given to the CPU, calculations are done and information comes out which gets used to make up new commands for it to process. We could liken this to a small child relentlessly asking a parent, ‘Why?’ except there is a good reason to educate a child.

The operating system on my computer wants to update all the programs, software, or apps, every time the computer goes online. I don’t want updates; not even security updates. The more processes that are running the less agile is the system. The larger the software is, the longer it takes to run. I don’t store files on my computer. This is for two reasons; both of which are based on digital security. Ironically, the purpose of updating software, particularly security software, is to supposedly, make personal information that is stored on internet-ready devices more secure. For me, it actually makes my personal data less secure. Let me tell you why.

If I want to upload a Tutor-marked assignment, I typically will not have been connected to the internet while I am finalising the TMA. Before I upload the TMA it must be saved to a flash drive or memory stick with the appropriate metadata such as my name and identity number. Now that we can inadvertently download AI software that wants to help us (no thanks) I cannot leave any trace on the device that is about to connect to the internet so I often MOVE the file to the memory stick instead of copying, pasting and deleting, which does leave a trace. It used to be that if we deleted something the file still existed, and only the first letter of the filename would be deleted; in effect, making the file still recoverable yet at the same time invisible to the user and the computer, so it would be written over with new files. So, if you wanted to remove traces from your system you should move it. The data file stored on the computer would have an entry that the file has moved and is no longer accessible. Today, AI, inadvertently downloaded as a system update, makes recovery of the contents of a moved file recoverable but without the original formatting. What this means to me is that, I need to completely reformat my Hard Drive and reinstall the operating system every now and again so AI cannot generate an accurate profile of me to upload to a database for marketers, spies, hackers, and miserable and lonely people to dissect and make my digital life an abject misery for me.

Needless to say, there are no files on any of my devices that have my name, address, telephone number or identifying details on them. There are never photographs of people I know on my internet-ready devices. There are, of course, photographs of film stars because AI searches for photographs of people in order to build a network of people known to each other. I suspect that klaxons go off in government departments if a computer that is known to be for private use has no detectable traces of human contact. Of course, AI knows who is an actor and who isn’t, because everyone has told the world about themselves. Thanks a bunch!  ‘Awake ye drunkards and weep.’

I use a separate computer to put my name on a file to be uploaded, which gets placed on a memory stick that goes into a different computer, that I shall connect to the internet so I can upload the file. I do not want to wait while the computer connects to the internet and checks for updates; remember I absolutely do not want updates. I must wait until the numbers at the bottom of the screen show no internet action before I can insert the memory stick (which not very strangely initiates internet activity). I then need to upload the file as fast as I can before the whole contents of the memory stick is uploaded to a cloud somewhere, and then quickly remove the memory stick. Obviously, the memory stick does not have only a few files on it, because they would be almost instantly uploaded within a second. Instead, the memory stick is almost entirely full with rubbish as well as the important file. Typically, the memory sticks I use have at least 4GB storage and the upload speed is insufficient to upload all the files before I disconnect from the internet.

All I really want to do is write files on a computer and safely upload them whenever I want without all the other files being interrogated and uploaded somewhere else. I have no agency over my own digital security without lengthy and complicated procedures that are necessary because I cannot control my computer’s operating system. If you listen carefully, you can hear me repeating, just under my breath, ‘Just do as I tell you, and stop making decisions on my behalf.’ My computer doesn’t listen; for all its wonderful computing power, it is still stupid enough to allow itself to be enslaved by someone else’s (not my) idea of what is relevant or desirable.

By the way, my computers have manual analogue switches that prevent inadvertent connection to WiFi. They absolutely do not have digital switches that send a current through a circuit board to a transistor to switch the power on or switch off. Imagine a toggle-type light switch and you get the idea. Why do I insist on these switches? Because, like mobile phones, computers can be remotely switched on while we are asleep. If a computer, or phone, has automatic connection to the internet all the files stored on it will probably be uploaded to a data storage centre. Don’t worry though, it has already happened during the day, anyway, when you knew your phone was on. That photograph of you on holiday in The Maldives will get you targeted for the marketing of holidays in Tunisia, and The Seychelles.

Get lots of water quickly at low pressure or have a small volume of water at high pressure so the bath fills slowly?

I like to not use more water than is necessary. This means that I might, rather than fill a bowl at the kitchen sink with warm water and washing liquid, run a plate, cutlery, saucepan, etc, under a cold tap after having applied water and a smidgen of detergent with a sponge to the items. I want to rinse the suds off. If I turn my tap on water spurts onto the items and sprays across my worktops. Turn the water pressure down, you might suggest. It is not the water pressure that needs adjusting; it is that little device in the tap that restricts the flow of water to supposedly reduce the volume of water in favour of increasing the pressure, to what? Resemble a pressure-washer? Don’t be daft! Whoever, thought that the tiny spurt would force debris off a plate and de-grease it at the same time is clearly in cloud cuckoo-land. If they had thought for a moment they would have recognised that detergent must be applied, and in the application, scrubbing will ensue to shift reluctant and recalcitrant food debris. Isn’t that what those little green things are for? Those flat mats of mild abrasion?

So, now I have to flavour the dishes, pans and cutlery with detergent, scrub a little, and dip them into a bowl of cold water twice, with a refill of the bowl for the second rinse. This is so I do not spray water across my kitchen and need to mop up my floor afterwards.

All I want to do is save water, but the water-saving widget prevents me from doing that. I want low pressure water with a high volume, not the other way around. Why? Because, although I rarely take a bath, I want the level of water in the bath to reach a preferred level quite quickly. Specifically, within a short period so I do not have to sit and watch the pitiful, but excited, flow pretend to be the best for the job. Bless it, it tries, but it really is practically useless.

Yesterday, I used a hose-pipe attached to the same bathroom tap and the water came out at a low pressure but with the same volume. Thank Heavens for laminar flow and chaos. Imagine the water closest to the material of the hose pipe being slowed down by friction, and the most central part of the flow in the hosepipe being only slowed by the friction with the slower water surrounding it. You can probably imagine that turbulence and vortices are created in the hosepipe. This is what I must do to have agency over whether I need to mop water off my worktops and floor when I wash a dish in the kitchen.

Finally, when I apply for a job, these days I must first impress a recruitment agency who have only their own reputation and profit as their goal. Then, once I have been deemed acceptable to their client, I have to cause the potential employer that to believe that using a third-party is a good use of their finances. About half of the jobs I apply for are re-posted three months later when the successful applicant either leaves or the probation period had expired. Just hire me, I don’t apply for jobs I can’t do. In fact, I have to dumb myself down for most of the jobs. But you know what? If I want to work until the project is complete I am considered to not be suitable because the UK, with all twenty or more paid holidays each year, has adopted a policy of requiring a good work/life balance from the USA who get far less days off. I go to work to work, not plan to take days and time off. I have no agency over my work-life these days because I enjoy work. Thanks recruitment agencies, I don’t think! If people are concerned about having days off to recuperate they are in the wrong job. Don’t get me wrong – most people have to work because they chose a path that they thought would give them pleasure or gave them a suggestion that they would be free from too much suffering. But, I also think we gave up our agency over our lives to strive to meet a fantasy. My happiness today, is hugely marred by agents I never wanted, nor hired.

Here is the irony: if you have a degree and so can demonstrate focus, a drive to succeed, and convergent thinking that evinces a mission to achieve the formulation of a specific outcome, we will consider you for a job with us. However, if you put that you are ‘goal-oriented’ on your CV, we will not give you the job because you need to show divergent thinking that is evinced by emotion and mental fallibility.

Long ago, job application forms used to ask the applicants what their hobbies are. Job application forms do not ask that these days. Just saying!

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

[ 18 minute read ]

This is a framework of a story I came up with which I used to explain three types of competition in economics. It begins with a family of weavers of fine wool carpets, who own their own sheep, in the 14th century Indus Valley, India. I had to learn about sheep to help me understand markets! Please help yourself to the ideas and the explanations.

The actual interaction between the characters, you will have to imagine for yourself.

Three types of competition: pure, imperfect, and monopoly.

If there were once four siblings who were all taught by their parents how to make fine carpets in the Indus valley, in 14^th century India, the same way, to the same design, and with the same dyed wool from their own sheep, and sold these carpets in the market place in the village square alongside their father and mother at such a low price that no-one else could make a profit selling carpets in the village, that family would have a monopoly selling carpets in that village. 

If, in the region in which their village lay, there were sixteen other carpet makers who were also sheep owners and wool spinners, and they produced carpets to designs that very closely resembled the designs of the two parents and their four offspring, and sold their carpets at a very close price to each other, and no-one else in the region could match their prices there would be perfect competition. Perfect or pure competition is when a firm producing near identical goods to its competitors, has some control over its prices. Since all these producers or families have vertically integrated businesses the barrier to entry into their market is high to carpet makers who own no sheep and cannot process wool. These new carpet markets wanting to enter the market would need to buy wool either locally or from further afield, and the original producers could sell their carpets at below the production costs, including the cost of wool, that new entrants to the market would necessarily have to pay. Most importantly here, is we must realise that no-one is getting rich in this regional community; they are only taking the opportunity to make sufficient money to feed the family members and care for their sheep (sustenance farming and production).

Two marriages and worrying times

If two daughters of one of the sixteen competitors married into our first described family there would be extra mouths to feed there, notwithstanding that a dowry would go along with the brides because they were considered to be a drain on resources in ancient civilisations, as in, take my hungry, weak and useless daughters away. This dowry could well be a bunch of sheep going along with each bride. What we have now is a larger flock of sheep owned by our first family AND two extra very capable shepherdesses with sticks, who are also wool carders, spinners, dyers, and weavers. Three outcomes can occur, 

a) the quantity of extra sheep provides only sufficient revenue to continue to live hand-to-mouth for a household of, now eight people;

b) each of these newly married brothers go off with their brides and their new sheep and produce carpets to the same design elsewhere in the region; or 

c) these two brothers and their wives go off, taking their sheep with them, and make carpets to a new design elsewhere in the region.

Solutions, but it won't be easy

a) despite there being a larger quantity of carpets available for sale by one whole larger family it only fills the gap left by the lessened production of the families from whence the brides came; and these families have less sheep to produce wool. There is no change to the market in terms of supply or demand, no riches made and no competitive edge is manifested. Nonetheless, this family of eight would have a larger share of the carpet market in their village.

b) the supply of carpets in the village is reduced as a result that our first family has lost key workers when the brothers depart, yet the quantity of raw material, being the original remaining sheep, stays the same (the same number as there were before the two brothers left, taking their hungry mouths with them – and their wives). Now, there is a surplus of sheep and not enough people to process their wool, or there is a surplus of wool and not enough people to process it into carpets. In any case, either the sheep are sold or the wool is sold. In the first case, there is an opportunity for a new entrant to the market to set up a virtually integrated business by purchasing sheep; or in the latter, a business buying wool to make carpets to a new and exciting design that competes in the same market square in the village as the plain and similar designs already sold there. Nothing has really changed by the entrance of a new design until the old carpet producers recognise that the demand for the new design is undermining the demand for their plain designs. At this time, some of the existing carpet makers may change their designs to represent their family history. This is product differentiation. Now, in the market square there are many different and exciting designs and the beginning of brand awareness and brand loyalty (initially through family connections with one or other family of carpets makers). This is monopolistic competition. Monopolistic because the designs represent individual families and their ancestors and no-one else will ever make the same designs; doing so would disparage their own family and ancestors. Yet there is still competition in the market sector.

c) the two brothers, their wives, with their dowry sheep, form a collective and farm the same area. They have to because they cannot care for the sheep, shear the sheep (actually primitive sheep had wool that could just be pulled off (by ‘rooing’), wash, card, spin, and weave the wool into carpets, and sell the carpets in their newly found village market square when they are existing only as two pairs of people. Such is the lack of labour, this band of carpet producers, recognising that a good design sells well in another market, weave carpets to a design that has vivid colours that deeply contrast, but due to time constraints and lack of labour settle on designs apropos to nothing; one that any carpet maker could easily copy or use as a design idea (deeply contrasting colours). When other carpet makers produce similar carpets to the brothers and their wives, there is perfect competition, where a large number of small firms supply an identical product. In this example, identical means vivid contrasting colours apropos to nothing in wool carpets.

Sibling Rivalry Aside

As yet, there is nothing to propel a producer into having an advantage; there are no real constraints in design, no recognised regulations, and no changes in efficiency or production costs.

However, when the two brother’s parents die, their two unmarried brothers who were living with their parents have, now surplus, sheep and wool that could be sold as carpets but would provide more than enough money for two mouths, if they could only process it and have the time to sell it. They could sell the sheep, sell the wool, or form a company with their married brothers and their wives to make only the new and exciting carpet designs, which sell really well but so far lack brand awareness and brand loyalty.

So far no change, you think, this is simply going back to six mouths to feed (four brothers and two wives instead of two parents and four brothers). Yet the dowry has swelled the flock in two distinct ways; by direct addition; and by husbandry.

Numbers in this example are kept to a value that is easily understood. Ten ewes and one ram will typically produce ten lambs per year, which can be sheared / (rooed) to keep them cool in hot weather. When the lambs are two thirds of their adult size/weight they can be tupped or mated. This could be when they are one year old to give birth when they are eighteen months old, but more likely on poor soil and with primitive sheep, tupped when they are two years old and birthing at two and a half. But let’s say there are lambs every year. (for ease of counting and multiplication)

Yet, by the addition of four more ewes as two dowries, two more female and two more male lambs could be born.

Without eating any, and with impressive shepherding and predator deterrents, and no other losses, the original flock of eleven in the year 1300, (ten ewes and one ram), with each ewe producing one lamb a year, could in six years time (1306 AD) be a flock of:

30 new ewes from the original ten ewes (and 30 male) Total 60 lambs were born

Born in 1301 AD and tupped in 1303 AD, five ewes being the first home generation would produce in 1304 – 1306 AD perhaps two or three female lambs in each year (total 7 of each sex over three years)

Born in 1305 AD to the first home generation two or three ewes in 1305 would be tupped and produce one or two lambs in 1306 AD

- making a total of 35 new ewes ready for tupping in 1306 AD and thirty nine male lambs that have been for the cooking pot over six years

plus the ten original ewes equals 45 ewes ready for tupping in 1306 AD

With four extra ewes (dowries) there is the immediate addition of four ?fleeces and then:

2 new female lambs from the dowry ewes (and 2 male) every year for six years (total of 12 lambs of each sex)

1 new female lamb born each year in 1303 AD to 1306 AD from the first dowry ewe’s offspring every year (total of 4 lambs of each sex over three years)

The flock size is now 69, including the original 11 and 4 dowry ewes. Unfortunately, a ram cannot service this many in a short period and it is preferable to have lambs born in safe seasonal weather so there needs to be three rams for this flock size (so a bit less to eat for the owners then) which makes the whole flock size 72 sheep, twenty one of these ewes are four dowry ewes and their seventeen descendants.

In reality, ewes about to give birth experience a reduction in immunity to internal parasites and die or give birth to stillborns. Increasing the size of a flock will not change the incidence of this type of death. However, increasing the size of a flock will reduce the percentage of losses to predators, yet, will require greater shepherding with big sticks. So, here, there is a human resource problem that could inhibit flock size. On top of that is the ground and area on which a flock feeds which may support a specific flock size but cannot also provide the extra nutrition that ewes need in the final month of gestation (Approximately 70 percent of fetal growth occurs during the last month of pregnancy). So, nutrition is a contributing factor in inhibiting flock size.

Time to say goodbye

The four brothers and the two wives cannot hope to increase their market share if they all live in the same village with the same pasture. So, their market share remains the same in their respective villages. However, we have a workforce of six young persons and a large area of grazing, separated into two, which was not available in the same quantity or quality as when there was two parents and four brothers. Furthermore, there are more sheep to breed from (dowry) and a larger quantity of lambs born per year on a wider pasture to the same number of people with hungry mouths; these mouths and stomachs are now better satiated by eating the respectively larger quantity of male lambs. Hence, there is a surplus of raw material (sheep as ewes) that will eventually be constrained by land and nutrition resources.

The 'Six'

We might look at this as the four brothers and two wives (‘The Six’) having a reduction of average costs; but since this is a vertically integrated business we are primarily considering the reduction in opportunity cost until we realise that already the six people are fully occupied in husbandry and wool processing, so there is no reduction of human interaction or no spare time. Or, we could consider an economy of scale; but there would now need to be employees to add to the already overwhelmed labour resource. Luckily for ‘The Six’, because no-one could enter the same perfect market as they and their competitors, there are available workers in both villages who could be paid to process wool, or the surplus wool can be sold off cheap to them to process for themselves. This is the stage at which sustenance farming changes into specialised jobs within an industry. The brothers may fight the sheep predators, grab handfuls of wool (rooing), and weave and sell carpets while the wives and workers process the wool and also weave carpets. As long as the production costs do not rise too significantly the rate at which ‘The Six’ can produce funky carpets will increase. This is an example of an economy of scale because the unit cost is reduced, but only in terms of opportunity cost. However, specialised focus on a single task brings about faster production and superior quality products as aptitude for a task is better utilised and experience grows more rapidly. However, there is an attendant cost of wages for extra workers in this example. Faster processing from developed skill-sets may cover the wage costs and result in higher carpet production rates, thereby reducing overall costs.

Where there is a competitive advantage, such as an economy of scale, a perfect market is destroyed and an imperfect market takes its place. An economy of scale that cannot be matched is a barrier to entry in the market.

In addition to declining costs, other barriers leading to imperfect competition are legal restrictions, (patents or government regulation), high entry costs, advertising, and product differentiation.

In this whole example, towards the beginning, we have a loyal customer base buying traditionally crafted carpets from separate families who design and make carpets specific to their family ancestors, with each family making a different design. This means that the producers could set their own price as their carpet is somewhat more or less desirable to a buyer than a competitor’s as the buyer’s loyalty wins out. A new design with a strong contrast of colours entered the market as a free-to-purchase item with no guilt attached to the buyer. Then ‘The Six’ produced the funky carpets in high volume in two villages. Because the same funky designs are available in two villages advertising at no financial cost is established. A buyer can buy a carpet made by ‘The Six’ closer to their home and more people, as visitors, will see those carpets, especially when the carpets are taken out of the home to be beaten outside. 

Of course, in 14^th century India not many people travelled beyond the next village. However, in a city, just like the prevalence of sheep in remote areas, the more incidences of something the greater the multiplication of reproduction. So, more incidences of funky carpets creates a wider reproduction of wondrous perception and experience in passers-by or home visitors.