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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

The Magic Sword that is England

[ 7 minute read ]

Fiction based on some much adulterated facts

According to 'The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland', [1985] (1992), Cambridge University Press, p. 78, 'By the eleventh century, Anglo-Saxon England was a rich country and her people were better fed and taller on average than for many centuries to come.' 

Ooh er! French food must have been really quite nutritious or were there less people to feed? Well, apparently the rest of Britain was largely unaffected by England's increased trade across the North Sea and the Channel. So, having Scandinavian and Normandy heritage seems to have been a good thing. Yet there is still a North/South divide that needs to be 'levelled up'. There still seems, in my mind, to be an undying battle between Vikings and Normans that simply won't die.

Both York and London were major players in decision-making. The Vikings lived in York and the Normans lived wherever the land was especially profitable as was proved before 1066 and the Battle of Hastings by the recently evicted farmers. With York and the land thereabouts harried by King Harold, it won't be much of a surprise to consider that the South and East of England had a head-start on the North of England, and that with better weather to boot.

       'Why does your wheat grow taller than mine?'

       'Oh, my parents speak French.'

       'Can I learn French?'

       'Mais oui!'

       'Jeg vet ikke.'

       'What did he say?'

        'Je ne sais pas! I think he is happy.'

       'Nescio.' shrugged Brutus. 'Anyway, you can be sure he doesn't have underfloor heating like my Roman ancestors had. Hmmm, If only we had window covering that let enough light through we could make greenhouses and grow some lovely turnips.'

       'Can you remember how the underfloor heating worked, Brutus?'

        'Far too complicated for a disorganised and motley bunch like us to control, Alfred. Maybe, Sven might know about fire. Sven? On second thoughts, no. The Vikings send fire across the sea on a ship when someone dies. Burying fire isn't something they might want to do.'

In any case, I think the Normans in the South of England might be trying to bury the thousand year old hatchet these days. With not being able to rely on the Black Death weeding out the burgeoning population in the South of England any time soon, it might be a good time to colonise the North. Wetherby will become Wetherham and Derby will become Derham to match Nottingham, Rotherham and Durham.

It surprises me that the people in the North of England never realised that there were 'sleeper' towns and cities right in their midst. I mean Manchester is the capital of the north and the Romans liked the local girls there, don't you know?

Yet, let's look closer at the area surrounding Manchester: We find Bolton, Oldham, Warrington, Altrincham, Preston, and a bunch of fords. No Vikings! The Anglo-Saxons might win against both the Romans and the Vikings after all. Good old Andy Burnham. Genetically programmed as an Anglo-Saxon in1070 to be born 900 years later and awaken in 2026. (I can't find anything interesting for 1026 to make an even 1,000 years).

In 1070, nine hundred years before Andy Burnham was born, magic was thrown over Hereward the Wake by his wife, Torfrida, who was known for her Black Arts, just after he led the last concerted revolt, from the Isle of Ely, against William the Conqueror (Christmas Day was never the same after his coronation).

In the Bruneswald, the forest that went from Brampton, near Huntingdon up to somewhere else that had an Anglo-Saxon name (maybe the settlement near the River Rother), after his loss to William, Hereward licked his wounds and he and Torfrida shared a cunning plan. First, he had to get into the court of William for their plan to work though, so he placed his hands between King William's hands and gave his allegiance. What no-one but Torfrida saw was the spell put into place. It leapt from Hereward into William and from that moment all the Norman influence would die and take with it the pesky Vikings (who might well have been Hereward's parents in Earl Leofric and Lady Godiva, but what the heck, Hereward had already dissed his dad by pretending to be his tax-collector and later raiding Peterborough Cathedral near Bourn, his birthplace). What neither Hereward or Torfrida knew was how long a spell might take to work or how it might come to work.

Neither Hereward or Torfrida knew the North of England must first be brought to its knees thrice; the Americans must kill the Northern sheep with nylon stockings; the French and the Icelandic's would have to steal all the fish from around Britain's shores (there has to be some hidden reason why a woman born in St. Omer hated the Normans, somewhere), and open-fires in houses would be replaced with boilers and immersion heaters. Oh, and Cornwall will shrivel too, but, what the heck; they had always been too much trouble for even the Romans, who unfortunately for them didn't have the benefit of having lunch and dessert in the same pastry-wrapped package. Not having to queue at the camp canteen twice must have been more efficient. Now that the world has their eating secret they can also be colonised, but only with lucky gambling rich people winning houses through lotteries. In any case, no-one really wants Cornwall these days except surfers and the people who never had to learn Latin at school to appease their long-dead masters. Don't you just love nostalgia? Oh those halcyon days of good leadership.

Now, the North of England will finally be conquered and colonised with Anglo-Saxons. The final spear shall be buried into the beating heart and the swelling breast of the long-lived Vikings, those we cautiously call Northerners in the south of England (despite recognising that the 'North People' live in Norfolk). King Alfred will rise from the swamps of Wessex (or Wales or Cornwall). 

Never mind Saint George's cross, England's flag shall have a magic sword on it, and the flag shall be called 'Caliber' (we don't want any Latin prefixes, thank you).

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Where is the battery?

Opinion 

[ 2 minute read ]

On the way back from the convenience shop I came across a young lad looking under the bonnet of a car. I made a joke about how bored he must be if he thought he would find something exciting under the bonnet.

       'I am looking for the battery.' he offered.

I wasn't surprised; I know my way around a car engine's peripherals because I grew up having to and with that confidence was able to start a road haulage business. I no longer expect people under the age of thirty to be able to do much more than put fuel in their car and that completes the technical part of their knowledge for car-driving. That isn't uncharitable of me, it is just that cars don't do the same things that they used to, what with having their own computers to tell them what to do. Let's face it, to bastardise one of my favourite maxims 'You can't fix an analogue problem with a digital solution' into 'you can't fix a digital  problem with an analogue solution, if your spanner is not also a computer chip' so why even open the bonnet these days and see what is in there? No point, these days.

After about an hour of explaining what the lad might do with his entirely flat battery, he still wanted to wait for his parents to come back despite admitting that they probably don't know as much as I do about the practicalities of maintaining a car. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Parents are like superheroes to most children.

I really wouldn't be able to drive a vehicle if I didn't know what to do if it suddenly breaks down in the outside lane of a motorway, for example. Nope, no chance. Are modern drivers brave or happy in their ignorance? i am not saying I am a control freak but I am not sure if I could be a passenger in an aircraft if I didn't have a quick go in it first, you know, in case the pilots jump out the cockpit windows one day, or more realistically, eat the same in-flight meal.

       'Budge up, captain, hand over the keys. Where's the clutch pedal?'

Sometimes I am the nutter on the bus that no-one wants to sit next to. On an airliner, I would take great pleasure in explaining to other passengers how I would have done something different to something they never even noticed happening.

       'Oh dear! We are doing a go-around. That probably means we nearly landed on a plane taking-off.' and, Oooh no! I wouldn't have done that, ooh dear, oh no!' and 'What a shame! If the pilot had gunned it we might have slipped through that gap on the runway.' I would save the best for the most implacable passengers when the plane is affected by turbulence, 'I think the pilot has dropped the vodka bottle again. and is reaching for it on the floor. It must be rolling around a lot.'

I don't do any of that, but I can't help feeling that despite all the knowledge I have on the internal combustion engine I am still an evil passer-by who is intent on causing a young man to destroy his car with a spanner, while his parents are somewhere else and cannot tell him they don't know enough to help. 

       'Best take it to a mechanic, son.' The thing is, they wouldn't even consider whether their son should or shouldn't wear a shirt and tie when he approaches the garage with the car.

Oh well. Life is like that.

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Fried bread

[ 5 minute read ]

Opinion 

Thanks for the memory

I just cannot fathom why people eat fried bread. I tried it last night and it made me really quite ill; I ended up sticking my fingers down my throat and throwing it up so I could sleep. If I rearrange my thinking I might direct my questioning a bit more towards myself and avoid blaming other people for my actions; I cannot understand why someone who knows how much a factory-sliced piece of wholemeal bread weighs would consider surrounding it when, after frying it, it weighs more than three times as much as one of the slices still in the bread bag.

Someone in the past called me an idiot to my face, that is how stupid I must have appeared at the time; he had no fear of being wrong because he believed that I am so dumb that many other people would have expressed their astonishment at the level of my doltishness out loud, and by now I must be believing it for myself. On that day, I was being silly but he didn't know how I was being so. I am allergic to wasp and bee stings and definitely hornet stings. I got stung by one of them while I was towelling myself dry one morning before going to a forklift training course. I had to cycle sixteen miles to the town where the college was. After about eight miles I had difficulty breathing because my tongue and throat was swelling up.

       'Blast!' I thought, 'I am in the middle of nowhere and there is not a house in sight. Perhaps this is why people carry mobile phones.' 

Hmmm, I had to just keep cycling. At that time I didn't know I had a bee, wasp, or hornet venom allergy but I did know what an anaphylactic reaction was. Erm, I might die if I lie down and wait for a rare passing car. I cycled on, slowly. When I got to the college I was lucky to find a young woman who suffered from hay-fever who gave me two anti-histamine tablets. The swelling had not gotten worse from when I recognised my mortality, which is why I didn't go to the hospital, and I had waited three years to get on the fork-lift training course. What the poison-dwarf of a fellow who called me an idiot to my face didn't realise was that every day that week I was thoroughly overdosing on anti-histamine. It makes you dizzy in your thinking; Lots of things do! Except fish.

'Poison-dwarf' is not a portmanteau of my own invention. I read it somewhere. I am trying to recall where; it is on the tip of my tongue. That  is what overdosing on anti-histamine is like. I am someone, just like everyone else, who is confident that I can start a sentence, when I talk, and the middle and end will match the beginning. I suppose my memory was afflicted, and although I can't be sure, the end of my spoken sentences were just blurred echoes of beginnings that offered no conclusions, during the whole of that week. 'You're an idiot' was probably quite fitting. 

His statement cut to the quick though. Something I noticed a long time ago was how emotionally vulnerable I am when I have a hangover. I don't know if the mental processes I use to protect myself are quiescent then or what, but I am convinced that my marriage suffered, not because I was drunk but because I felt every insult and barbed thrust my wife cared to air when I had a hangover. And, right there is the thing; her words were  barbed. They stuck in me and changed the way I thought about me, my life, and especially her. My wife had a penchant for trying to cut my legs from under me; pent up frustration I imagine.

I really am foolish though. Why would anyone eat a piece of bread so saturated with oil that a question formed in their head as to the validity of the idea to eat it, and still eat it?

       'I didn't think....'

       'You just didn't think, that's it, isn't it?' My dad would interrupt me.

It is possible that I am not allergic to wasp and bee venom and I was stung by a hornet three times. I did  have three marks on my upper arm and it did swell up and turn an angry itchy red. Maybe the venom dose was just a bit too high and my body wasn't ready for it that day. A hornet flew into me at three in the morning. They are so fast and heavy you can really feel it, and they are loud!

It is a conjunction of events that have wounded me so deeply. The idea that I have never recognised that the world perceives me to be lesser than they perceive themselves to be, never occurred to me before I was called an idiot to my face, by someone I then regarded as beige, vanilla and limited. A positive lesson I learned is that I should not indisciminately dismiss opinions. Unfortunately, while emotionally vulnerable because chemicals were interfering with my thinking, similar to when my wife twirled out her invective like someone spinning a rotary washing line too fast, I was whipped in the face by a careless statement that has stayed with me for years afterwards.

Jim Carrey, in the film 'The Mask' (1994) said, after being invigorated by its power, 'Someone stop me!' Hear my bleat - Someone stop me. No, really, someone stop me eating fried bread.

From now on, the place where I shall keep my confidence checking, as in inhibiting, thoughts will be in a mental drawer labelled 'Fried Bread'. 

I gave myself a day-mare a couple of days ago when I remembered sailing five miles from the estuary of the Medway river in Kent to Southend in Essex in a seventeen foot sloop with no engine and no sailing experience or training - I did read a book on sailing though. It might have been useful if I had been stung by a wasp, bee or hornet and the chap from the forklift training course was standing on the jetty where I bought my boat.

       'You're an idiot!' Oh thanks! You may have just saved my life. If my life had been saved by not attempting the crossing and I somehow came to know that, I would have no choice but to be eternally grateful to a 'poison-dwarf' (not my portmanteau) who insults people. It is with much regret that I must now shake the hands of my future enemies for potentially saving my life. Someone once said if you are threatened with attack, supposedly physical, do something strange or weird because it throws them off track. How surprised will verbally abusive people be when they get a handshake and a double cheek-kiss? 'I hear you! I hear you! Thank you so much!'

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or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Early Nuts

[ 2 minute read ]

Opinion 

There will be a lot of young walnut trees in my garden next spring. The squirrels have seemingly decided that the early fruits are a boon and should be buried right away. It is only September and I consider that they might forget where they have put them by the time they periodically wake from their hibernation unless they intend to gorge on midnight banquets when snow is thick on the ground. in any case, there is no hurry and I suppose they will manage to bury the whole tree before they get cold.

If they are using the rusty bike with no saddle leaning against the ivy-covered fence as a marker they will later be disoriented. The fence is falling in slow motion with the added weight of being damp and mouldy from decades of inattention. It sags against the peeling dark blue paint with duck-egg blue undercoat that was once pristine coats covering the shed. If the squirrels are familiar with this they will lose the nuts to the soil. Six years ago, a charitable and creative person might have described the shed as 'shabby chic'. Today it is wet and smells of fungus. 

I am only waiting to hear a bell or a cry from the street, 'Any old iron. Any old Iron' and the bike will be gone. No-one calls that anymore. The only people who collect unwanted metal from households are Roma trying to make what they see as an honest living. The English, though, just drive to tips now. Nonetheless, the flaking rough textured bike with shades of orange at its welded junctures will be gone before the year is out, and the pull of gravity will draw the shed and the once black feather edge fence down. The longstanding green and white furry texture of the fence will help to camouflage it in the long grass; the grass that no-one cuts anymore. It is the same grass that in summer hides the forgotten, soil-filled terracotta plant pots, some of which are broken, stacked against the slippery shed walls; the same grass that withers in winter, its stalks too long to cope with frost

On the other side of the garden, furthest from the walnut tree that is two neighbours gardens away, I feebly dug where the brambles had been. At least I have applied some effort and focus there, but only for tomato plants to grow. The squirrels buried acorns there last year; the acorns I left in a bucket for the Muntjac deer to eat when the ground is frozen. The small oak trees were lifted, and died in plastic pots in the drought, and the tall tomato plants bear a late display of green fruit impatient for the same searing sunlight of just a month ago. It is an incongruous and confusing combination for the experienced squirrels. If they navigate by the now abundant and leafy dark green leaves after the recent rains they will lose their treasures to the soil. In October the frost will strike down the plants and the scene will be different. Only the Giant Winter Leeks will signpost where the middle of the garden is and steer the drowsy and cold squirrels to their hoards. 

There will be a lot of young walnut trees in my garden next spring

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

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

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Those ticklish words

[ 4 minute read ]

Opinion 

I sometimes like to watch YouTube reaction videos and I often have a hankering to listen to Pink Floyd's album 'Animals'; in particular the tracks 'Pigs' and 'Dogs'. There is one reaction video in which the woman listens to 'Dogs' and seems genuinely stunned at the end. She is speechless and eventually says it is uncomfortable and brutal. Her reaction is priceless. 'Dogs' is seventeen minutes and twenty five seconds long though, and there are long periods in which to drift into the music. However, I soon realised that she had been listening to the words, something I have only just started to do when I listen to songs and tunes. Pink Floyd songs are really quite depressing. I had heard a lot of people say that but thought they were talking about the album 'Wish You Were Here' which along with 'Dark Side of The Moon', I think, mourns the demise of Syd Barrett, one of their former band-mates. 

I have some of the lyrics for 'Dogs' ready to include here but, really? They might be indicative of a time, and that time seemingly having a similar sentiment as today but I always, with fabricated nostalgia, thought the mid-1970s as being somehow a cooler time to be around. The lyrics seem to negate my ideas of the cool seventies.

One of the comments on the YouTube reaction video I watched is what I think is a prime example of 'Show and don't Tell'; a version that doesn't waffle on about a character's feelings through metaphor. If this is 'Show and don't Tell' then everything in the world will be just dandy again. Here it is:

       'I bought this tape and "The Wall" while hitchhiking in England in 1985. Listened to them on a portable cassette player I bought in Birmingham at an outside market. Listened while riding the trains and thumbing it. Burned through tons of batteries. I would sleep under bridges to save the money for more batteries. Shaped the person I am today.'

I totally get what he is saying (said). The whole album for many people, including me, is utterly compelling to listen to again and again. I have even broken my 'Golden Rule', well, one of them, of not hanging on the coat-tails of other people. Anyone can write tomes of personal critique about people and their work and with only the slightest tweak make it acceptable, even if it entices the reader towards anger and resentment. The goal, after all, is to evoke an emotion in the reader. Except it isn't if you post videos on YouTube. There the goal is, if you make reaction videos, to hang on the tails of significant people and monetise one's 'work'. I believe it starts off being easy fun and then once video editors and production people are hired it becomes real work. I suppose it is the same as writing one's own book.

       'I am going to write a book,' announced Mimie.

       'What will you do, waffle for a while and hope it sells?'

       'Of course! You have always said I am the master of invention. You say it every time we bicker. See, you thought I never listen!'

       'Touché' Billy replied as he pulled his sabre out with one hand while holding a rapier with the other.

I think the reality is that writing anything that is acceptable to an audience requires more than a modicum of effort and skill. However, you never know you can do something if you don't try. The thing is, from the lowest edge of communication, sitting on a bar stool like a fat toad and spouting uneducated invective to all who are in earshot is both irresponsible and lazy. The whole point behind that rude action is to gain some favour in the reluctant crowd ordering drinks at the bar by piquing their interest. Anyone who directly responds to this toad makes themselves into something similar to a fly; a fly that will alight on other people's sentiment and vomit there to soften their walls of resistance. And, just like a fly, they will suck up the mash, the now conjoined opinions seasoned with confirmation bias, to repeat the operation elsewhere. Ugly stuff, huh?

You gotta be careful with words, real careful. Elma Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny with his shotgun is not the role-model we should be following; we need to be more careful, especially because Bugs Bunny is so much smarter than Elma Fudd. The pen, as we are told, is mightier than the sword (the expression first used by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839?) so when Billy drew his sabre and rapier Mimie started writing on the back of a used envelope. 'I am leaving you. You have lost your mind.' She crossed out 'mind' and wrote 'imagination'. To many of us 'mind' means opinion; imagination; mentality (sanity); and is even a catch-all for our maxims; as in 'I am minded to ignore your comments.' You gotta be careful with words.

I felt misunderstood as a sixteen year-old abandoned by my parents into the hands of an older nineteen year old, psychotic psychopath brother. I bought a thesaurus, a Collins Gem Pocket Thesaurus. I was keen to learn new words to explain myself. I was not a good conversationalist and I recognised I had just moments to make my 'elevator pitch'. Unfortunately, I learnt words that other people did not know along with some appropriate ones, so the size of the people who tolerated my company grew smaller and smaller; it did weed out the iguanas from the crowd though. Just remember not to step on them, I thought, some of them bite.

       'Proper tickle me, do words. Can't get enough of them. The missus can't stand them so she just stares at me over breakfast before she does the washing up. Shame really. She makes a good breakfast, does my wife, and the house is clean. it's a marvel really, what with her being the breadwinner n'all. If she would only talk more life would be so much better even though I am happy, but she don't like words.'

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or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Windscreen wipers

[ 2 minute read ]

Opinion (contains content that was indicative of young people of a time)

I try to be a man of contrasts. There is no real defining line or drive that binds my thoughts. A while ago, someone who thought themselves clever and wanted to draw out just how sexist or misogynistic I really am asked me a question.

       'What in your mind is the main difference between men and women?'

       'Women can bend their arms further at the elbow than men can. They go beyond just straight.'

He was confused, He expected something else, no doubt from a list he had in his head. On the other hand I can be crude, at least for humorous purposes. My mates and I used to play 'word association' and inevitably being young, one of them would bring the tone down and say, 'Tits'. I was tired of this, not least because anyone can reel off words associated with sex. The game dissasembles into a string of synonyms for body parts and the temporary conjoining of two people. I had heard a comedian on the television years ago make a joke, I think when I was twelve, and I longed to tell it but never felt that it was ever a good time because I think it was dismissive of women and somewhat abasing. I waited twelve years until the prime time came up.

Now, when we played the word association game, if someone said a word that was deemed by the others not to be associated with the previous word the person would be 'out'. By the same token, if someone was challenged thus so and the word is shown to be associated the challenger would be out. All I had to do was be the person whose turn followed someone who said 'tits'.

       'Windscreen wipers', I said. I was immediately challenged by everyone. I moved my head repeatedly from side to side in an arc while making kissing sounds. The joke from twelve years ago was revealed at last.

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or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Knock Knock

[ 2 minute read ]

Opinion

A couple of things. Someone knocked on my front door last night at a quarter to nine, 20:45 o'clock; you know when the big hand is on the 45 and the little hand is on the 20; except it would be closer to the 21. That is a nod to the schools which have removed analogue clocks because they have discovered that many school kids can't tell the time.

I didn't have time to answer the door immediately and when I did I spotted a parked car with its lights on almost directly outside my house. Despite me putting on the exterior light the driver didn't notice I had come to the door and drove off. Oh my Good Crikeyness! How could someone do that to someone with a fertile imagination who is not expecting any visitors. It didn't keep me awake but I did fantasise a bit.

Ooh! Someone has realised I am fascinating and just has  to spend a few minutes in my presence. Perhaps they wanted to take me to the theatre, or just fill me up with alcohol in the local pub and hear my slurred utterances of uninhibited wisdom. Perhaps, someone needs my help to rescue a broken down car or coax someone from a motorway flyover bridge. Did the person knocking on my door last night read one of my OU Personal Blog posts that said I was going to take ballroom dancing lessons and mash it up with modern funky dancing, and they themselves thought they might give me a lift to a place of our mutually shared hobby?

Of course, a few fleeting ideas brushed my consciousness but I chased them away because I eschew banality. Did their drone crash-land in my garden? Did they want to buy my neighbour's car but think I own it? It happens a lot. 

I am much more inclined to invent and dwell on the fantastic. Were they looking for their cat which my neighbour stole to use in some kind of spell to be normal, a spell he thinks the rest of us have all spun for ourselves? Do I have a long lost relative that has just flown in from a remote airport after having been wandering in a jungle? Was it a manifestation of a spiritual warning that I failed to receive? Has someone secretly enrolled me in the Postcode Lottery and I won? The best of all would be if it was the girl I fell in love with while we were at school and loved for the next ten years without us ever getting it together knocking on my door and falling into my grateful arms when she says, 'You haven't changed a bit; you are gorgeous!' But, oh dear, she has gone.

In reality, I have to surmise that it was just a fast-food delivery person trying to deliver to the wrong address but was redirected by the real recipient before I answered the door.

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or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Bigger is Better

[ 5 minute read ]

Opinion

So Africa is bigger than we thought, huh?

Apparently the Mercator maps represent Africa as being the same size as Greenland which is in reality about fifteen times smaller. That should deter some day-sailors from trying to sail around the coast of Africa in a weekend. Africa should be taken seriously. From my perspective, I already wouldn't lie down on the ground to sleep in Africa without at least something between me and the ground; something I have done countless times in Europe. I had an officer friend in the RAF Regiment who told me about his training in Belize. Although Belize is far from Africa I think there are similarities in that my friend's story related to one of the soldiers lying down on the jungle floor and then days later finding that larvae were erupting from his arms. Whether this is a true story, now I look at it in hindsight, is highly suspect. In fact, I now realise that it is a fabrication to scare trainees to NOT lie down on jungle floors without some kind of barrier. On a training exercise they would, of course, been scratching their arms and the larvae would not be allowed to erupt before medical attention was administered. In the 'wild' when you are fleeing the enemy or creeping up on them, you can't just stand up and pop over to the medical clinic or field doctor. In any case, the point was made and no doubt well received. My officer friend did say it happened to someone else; always someone else, eh?

The move to represent the size of Africa in two dimensions, as it relates to the size of other countries was almost unanimously voted for by the UN except for one country which voted against it and six abstentions. I shan't name that country that voted against it because their National Security Agency is hot on the tails of independent thinkers, including those outside their own borders. Suffice it to say that 'size matters' and the concept of demonstrating the true size of Africa on two dimensional maps relates to the consideration of investment. There is, I presume, more opportunity for savagery in a big country than a small one. Rapacious desire has more room to develop where there is land that no-one can see from the nearest town. You know; digging a small hole in the Lake District to bury your dead pet will get noticed by the locals or the visiting walkers. Scraping off square miles of the earth's crust to look for ilmenite ore, the source material for making titanium dioxide (the whiteness of paint and toothpaste among other stuff), in Africa won't be noticed by the town dwellers hundreds of miles away. Mineral poachers only have satellites to hide from.

The potential of Africa being a good investment due to its size was the UN's focus, but this was first conceived by the African nations. All they have to do now is make sure corruption is reduced to a manageable level for outside investors to feel comfortable. My understanding is that when diamonds were first found and the locals were employed to dig, the locals stole the rare big ones and handed in the myriad small stones. If I was a treasure hunter I might not need a boat to look for Spanish gold or sunken pirate ships, I might just need to know a bit more African history and speak to the right people in small villages. Yet, surely, I am being prejudiced by snippets of information I have egregiously stitched together to form a flimsy heuristic, which rule of thumb, in the light of day, many people would call out as racism. I wouldn't argue against them. I wouldn't because the one member country in the United Nations that voted against revealing the true size of Africa wants to be shown as more important than Africa, and has in the past been shown as almost as big as Africa on Mercator maps. Jealousy I have no time for and denying an entity any approbation or validation for potential is, in my eyes, just plain wrong. But, I am not considering the new world order when trade significantly shifts from the Global North to Africa. In the development of Africa we have another potentially cheap Asian-type workforce with access to rare earths and modern technology banging on their doors.

I was lucky to be able to ask a PhD graduate about his chosen field of study. It was Romano-Britain, I think. I floated a few layman questions and eventually understood that the reason that after the Romans left Britain the locals went back to their old ways and did away with underfloor heating and building with lime, was because the Romans took with them their ability to organise and specialise in singular tasks. Entering into an agrarian society with organisation could, I suggest, potentially produce a larger entity that could be a considerable threat to the rest of the world, both economically and physically through armed combat. But what do you do? Suppress the African nations? The African?

If we consider that China has a lot of investment across the world in developing countries and other countries want to stymie China's economic takeover effort, we might need to understand that allowing the manifestation of a potential superpower continent is not necessarily in the hands of the Global North. It is organisation that is the key to the opening of an African Pandora's Box. Taking the blindfold from the eyes of the African innovators may be only a few years away if creativity outside of necessity becomes available to a wider population. Reducing poverty in Africa would, no doubt throw up some interesting and novel work-arounds in hostile environments that currently cripple improvement. 

The Global North is indubitably a jealous entity which, I suspect, will be reluctant to hand over any significant control on economics and combat capability and so fairness is, I suspect, coloured by an executive decision to control growth; likewise China and India should be equally alarmed about the potential labour-force of Africa becoming organised, if it is not themselves who are the puppet-masters. Yes, I have just maligned the African and reduced them to being controllable wretches but what do you do? We saw the same in England during the Industrial Revolution when country-folk leading agrarian lifestyles 'upsticked' and handed themselves over to industrialists, future liability to debt and workhouses and even prison. While I have no reason or desire to offer African country workers as being two hundred years behind England, I do feel that a loose comparison to the plight of poor people in the past is a valid one and bears consideration. While many comfortable people bemoan the colonialism of empires past, I might metaphorically stand at their rallies with a placard that says 'See the present and look to the future.'

Perhaps though, the single UN member who voted against showing Africa as having even more potential by dint of its new perceived size is presenting a reality that the rest of the charitable world chooses to ignore simply because they want to share and be fair. Unfortunately, I feel that having an emotional force contribute to decision-making can create a manifestation that has a life of its own and will one day bite the hand of its feeder.

Just like lying down on a Belize jungle floor, any Global North entity is going to want a barrier between it and the tooth and claw of an African jungle. A jungle that is now likely to be considered more interesting than it was previously perceived as being before a new map becomes the standard.

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Paranoid Prejudice

[ 7 minute read ] - 280 words per minute

Opinion

Something is wrong. I am confused. Yesterday, I was in my local Co-op and overheard an alarming conversation while I waited for two shoppers to move away from the chilled vegetables cabinet. Here then, is a series of problems that seem to be based on supposition.

I had heard a couple of phrases as I entered the Co-op.

       '.....he is sitting in reception in the school.'

That conversation withered as the Co-op staff person wandered off, ostensibly to investigate. I should make it clear that the school is directly over the road from the Co-op shop. A customer approached the elderly lady with questions.

       '.....he has been seen wandering in people's garden carrying a sleeping bag. No-one knows him.'

       'Where is he now? Does anyone know?'

       'He is in the school reception, just sitting there. You know, the kids.....?'

The conversation between these two customers took more than three minutes and was conducted in front of the cool cabinets. I wanted to get sweetheart cabbage and some carrots, but the elderly lady was practically leaning her back on the acrylic door. Such was the rapidity of the interchange between these two provocateurs that I couldn't get a word in edgeways.

Eventually, after finally selecting the produce I needed, when the man customer moved on, I postulated my reasoning towards the elderly woman, though loud enough for the man to overhear.

       'I have intentionally made myself homeless a few times and hitch-hiked and wandered across Europe. I slept in churches and people's greenhouses on allotments in winter and drank nothing for days at a time. I didn't steal anything or damage any property. I just moved on to a different place with a final destination in mind. Just because someone is carrying a sleeping bag doesn't make them any different to the same person not carrying a sleeping bag. Perhaps the man is seeking help from the best place he knows in the village. The school is, after all, a government building and the staff are trained to deal with crisis.'

       'You are right, it is prejudice.' exclaimed the man shopper. He turned towards the self-service tills and left the elderly lady and I.

       'I don't think the school is open yet so all we really have is a man sitting in the school reception. Anything else you add is prejudice.' I announced.

Just then, the Co-op staff member involved himself by stating that I was accusing the elderly lady of being prejudiced. I didn't; if she added anything to the basic fact that it is a man in the school reception then she must be considering it to be relevant. Already, I was holding my tongue and hadn't said if the person in the reception was a woman with a sleeping bag we would not be having the same conversation. The reality is, there is nothing significant about a man sitting in a school reception on the day before school opens, or even when it is open. It is the sleeping bag that was attracting attention. Anyway, because the shop worker had muddied the conversation and egregiously caused the woman to believe that I had insulted her, from some distance away I heard her confused wailing, though not close to crying.

        'I am not prejudiced. I am not. I am not prejudiced at all.'

To me, all I heard was, 'I live alongside Asian and black people and I don't judge homosexuals.' The usual stuff. Unfortunately, our conversation was cut short by the shop assistant before I'd had time to ask her if she would be concerned about a man in a suit sitting in the school reception or even wandering around the playgrounds during the last days of the school holiday. I'd had no time to question her on preferred speech patterns, accents and dialects. Market research has shown that a Northern English accent is deemed to belong to a more trustworthy person than someone with a southern English accent; it goes on and on. No matter; I had made my point and she wasn't going to wear it any time soon.

More Assumption

Here's the thing. Because both the elderly woman and the man shoppers thought they were onto something significant, they assumed that I was also of the same temperament, and they overrode the concept of normal behaviour in a supermarket; to whit, if you are blocking the aisle and there is someone standing close and facing you, you move to one side. Initially, I just wanted to go about my business because I know they just won't 'get' my take on anything I say. However, I was incensed by the elderly woman's blindness to her own faults. I get racist attitudes thrust towards me sometimes because I tan really easily and deeply, even in winter, despite being able to trace being English back to the 13th century through one parent and German through the other. Now, we know there was quite a bit of ethnic cleansing in Germany not so long ago, so it is highly unlikely that an Asian family was allowed to thrive in Germany, even if there were any when my parent left the country. In effect though, I really am the son of an immigrant. I tend not to introduce myself as such. That last sentence is both provocative and takes a lot of explaining.

Worse

The Co-op worker stopped a conversation on the dissemination of prejudice. Oh dear! That should never happen. If prejudice is even suspected in a workplace to which the shoppers are members of the organisation that operates on the property, then it should be openly discussed. My suppressed point is: because the shop worker was in the same mental camp as the elderly lady and initially the male shopper; that is, the man is acting suspiciously because he is carrying a sleeping bag and is in the school reception, the same man upon entering the co-op shop must be considered to be different to any other shopper solely because he has a sleeping bag and not because he was in the school reception. I was not allowed to point this out to the Co-op shop worker, who kept insisting that the absent children could be kidnapped.

I remember when I left primary school and spent my first day at secondary school. I was terrified and cried at home for hours afterwards. Here is a scenario that might explain a man sitting in a secondary school reception with a sleeping bag:

Mr and Mrs Smith are divorced and live far apart, Mrs Smith has custody of their children. Miss Smith, the eleven year old girl is about to start at secondary school and will attend, just as her classmates will, on a day when the school is not fully open (a week or day before). Miss Smith is in regular telephone contact with her father, Mr Smith, and feels that her mum, now she has a new partner, somewhat sidelines her and is not good support on her first day at secondary school; in any case her mum has told her to 'just get on with it' because she can't be there since she has to work. Mr Smith is mortified to hear this and despite having no ready money for trains and accommodation determines that he will travel the length and breadth of the country to be there for his daughter, even if it kills him. He hitch-hiked and arrived in the village disoriented and sought the house where his daughter and her mum lives to no avail. Strong in his desire to be present in his daughter's scary day to help her, he approached the school to ask if he can see his daughter and give her support. Of course, the school would never just grant that request and would need to make appropriate checks before that is granted. Hence, there is a man with a sleeping bag sitting in the school reception. I think the probability of that being so is greater than him being a kidnapper. 

       'So that's fine until a child goes missing. Last year there was a man wandering around the school. That is why there is extra fencing.' I had been told by the Co-op staff member.

       'Is this the same man?' I asked. The answer was that it is not the same man. Realistically, then, this is a probability problem. If an incident occurs at a home address and the residents then move out, there cannot be any expectation that the new residents will recreate the same incident without further information, surely. Same address - different people.

The overriding problem is the prejudiced paranoia that has been handed out on a plate to susceptible people who use it as an heuristic. I am fairly firm on that because the school has a public library on the premises which is a little difficult to find, and if you are new to the area and have never visited the library you might find you are wandering across playgrounds in search of it without recognising the alarm this might elicit. The newly erected fence is to guide new library users in the right direction!

Clearly, I am using logic to understand how prejudice can manifest in vulnerable people and these people be unable to assess themselves. Perhaps the police were rightly called, and the man had a suicide vest on. I don't know. It could  happen so panic is acceptable, I suppose.

The obverse

I am engaged in studying English Literature in which students are required to 'feel' the mood of the writing and so on. Logic has no part in understanding the text in the set books, it seems. The weird thing is that the books are disseminated in hindsight. Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth' is supposed to be comedic and I have information to tell me how this is accomplished. One of the literary techniques that Zadie Smith has supposedly used is: the protagonist is ironically  using the flexible tube of a hoover (vacuum cleaner) near the Hoover building nearby. I happen to know that the Hoover building is on the A40 as it enters London. I also know where Willesden is, the setting of the story. Hardly anyone outside of West London who has not driven both past the Hoover building AND through Willesden would ever be able to make the connection between the building and the vacuum cleaner pipe. I would never anyway. I submit that the connection did not exist in the writer's mind and is instead an invention that can only be made by a reader who is intentionally seeking references in the story to make a point, and that point made in hindsight; as in the whole book has been read beforehand.

I also suggest that the average reader is unaware of what will take place in the story, so the opening sentence which clearly stamps a time to the unfolding events may be significant to the rest of the story and may be found much later in the book. It is not comedic because it is so intense and turns out to be insignificant, not at all, quite simply because until the last page is read the reader cannot know if it is significant or not. Clearly, any suggestion that the writer deliberately included the time-stamp at the beginning of a debut book for comedic effect is, to my mind, based on knowing the full story and ignoring using timestamps being a common technique for starting a story because it grounds the writer to the scene. 

Here then, we have a necessity to know the whole story to be able to extrapolate devices and techniques for telling the story. 

Knowing the whole story is key to understanding how we interpret the world. First, we need to know it all, and then we can make comparisons with what we assume reality to be.  The problem I see is that an omniscient view can obscure the view that belongs in the present; literary devices may be accidentally employed and they are only recognisable once the sum of the parts is known.

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or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Technology slows me down

[ 4 minute read ] 

Opinion

One of things I sometimes like to do is read the news. 'Ha ha ha. Read the news!' You can't 'read' the news; we never could. The 'news' has to be experienced in person, and even then we only get a single facet of it. 

       'Let's look at the back-story to this.'

Let's not.

Once upon a time a news story broke and the country heard about it with updates throughout the day. S'okay, because still other news got reported; like a tree got hit by lightning, which set light to a mansion where the impressive library burnt to the ground and killed the pastry chef who was stuck in the pantry with the housekeeper, but the heat from the blaze brought the daffodils out early, so not all bad then. Not any longer; there is no news other than a single story. Journalism, I feel has taken a different approach with the technology of the day leading the way. Now, in-depth coverage including satellite imagery and records of the past is the order of the day. I really couldn't care less; just tell us the new bits.

Most days, I look at a couple of websites with stories on them. However, the trend is for reporting the news with videos, which speeds the production of the news presentation up. Plainly, it takes longer to write coherently than it does to edit a video for a website upload, I suppose. Contrawise, it takes longer to watch a video than it does to read the transcript. My time has somehow been transferred to the news channel to make their lives easier, or might I suggest, to be used to help them be more efficient?

If reporters have more time to report then why don't we get a wider scope of news? I suggest the reason might be shaped in a similar way to manufacturing production runs. Long production runs are way more efficient than short production runs. Quite simply this is because it takes a lot of time to change settings on machines, and the cleaning of contaminants from one production run is paramount before another one can begin. Stopping reporting on one subject means closing avenues of information and initiating the opening of others, not least is the production of introductions for news pieces. The general public, I suggest, simply cannot get up to speed on a subject as fast as the news channel can provide information.

       'There have been arrests over the fire in a Polish industrial area.'

       'What fire?'

So, rather than 'waste' time with a series of introductory pieces for a wide scope of interesting news, it is preferable to just re-iterate the same waffling, especially since it all comes from the same sources. Waffling for a long time is cheap and opinions are free.

I sometimes check I have internet connectivity by clicking on a BBC news icon. The time at which it takes the BBC.co.uk site to appear indicates to me whether I have a connection or not and perhaps the speed of it. I mentioned to someone outside ALDI that I use the BBC site as a marker in this way.

       'That's not a news channel!', the man on his mobility scooter scoffed. I know, and his pitted nose that resembled roiling froth frozen in time told me more about him than I could trust the BBC had told me about the world in the past 24 hours. Let's face it, if you don't want people to turn up for a planned protest somewhere in a field, just send a BBC reporter to any muddy field holding an umbrella to tell us that conditions are dire and will get worse. The suggestion of personal discomfort instead of a mass rollicking romp and general meeting up with friends sometimes de-energises willpower.

Sky News (sky.com) have moved in a quite decisive way towards uploading video instead of written news stories. I can read faster than I can understand speech. It is not the spoken word that I don't get, it is the spoken word spoken at the same rate of how we read that I find difficult to comprehend. Contrary to my former belief, competent readers don't read a single word at a time; we chunk words together, about three or four at a time. This means that spoken words are linear because they are delivered individually in series. The written word, however, is delivered in a series of what might be considered to be conjunctive words, that is 'together'. This is a far faster mode of communication. Why then has technology, which we are all led to believe will 'speed things up' been used to slow things down?

I suggest technology is not about function anymore. The washing machine was invented decades ago; there isn't now anything to invent that is both functional and innovative; the dish-washer is a washing machine without a spinning drum, isn't it?

No, technology at our end of how it works is all about getting lazier and recreation. While it is quicker to upload to a website a news video which has been made in the normal course of reporting for the television, the public readily accepts this medium as normal, even preferable. Take your brain out of gear and let someone else read the transcript for you. We all like a story read to us, don't we? Technology then, I may go on to suggest, is about never growing up and never learning to be responsible for our own decisions.

       'That's right, just relax, let it wash over you. Nice and warm? Yes, that's right, almost pre-orgasmic isn't it?'

Me too! It is uncomfortable to read that and I ummed and ahhed at it.

I don't watch the sky.com videos on their site because there is no speed button. If I am inclined to watch them I need to go to YouTube because there is a speed button. It means I can hear the reporter at 1.5 and 2 times normal speaking rates. I have NO interest in the pictures or video behind them and I am irritated by the time they take to pause at commas and full stops as we should do in polite speech. Mind you, I don't want them to speak like some people from the USA who never observe punctuation.

I think public speaking as taught to public speakers from best men and bridesmaids at weddings to court officials and parliamentary discussion and on to speakers at dinners has been egregiously considered to be appropriate for visual journalists. Its the news; speed it up and cut the blooming evocative words and emotional weighting on spoken words; just 'tell' us and stop 'showing' it by living it for us. No wonder there are still newspapers that have no whining journalists' voice overlaying the information, which are still bought across the nation. Another illusion, I suspect; considered reporting of news is a far more effecctve sword than 'off the cuff' though, still scripted no doubt, video reporting in the field.

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or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

I am not on YouTube or social media

Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Strange

[ 4 minute read ] 

Opinion

I couldn't sleep last night. My face kept tickling. Of course, I know why I couldn't sleep and my face tickled; my neighbour has come back from charging the batteries he uses to power his malevolence. I kind of feel sorry for him because he doesn't know he is an ogre. Don't worry, I know I am being uncharitable, well at least in trying to understand him. I gave up trying to engage him in conversation long ago. He simply wouldn't stop and say a single unsolicited sentence. Hark! There is a chorus of elderly voices calling that he probably just wanted to be left alone; for six years?

No, he has a hatred towards the world because, I suspect, he doesn't understand it. His misanthropy I have witnessed and I have been shocked at the breadth and depth of it. My face tickled last night because his throbbing cynicism moved the spiritual air and my face felt it like single threads from spider webs being dragged across my skin. There were other parts of my body that tickled last night but I don't have an answer for that yet.

I eventually got up. Do something you are good at, I thought; make yourself happy and relax. I, of course turned on a laptop and explored. Being in my living room is a fairly safe place from my neighbour's influence even though I sometimes get the feeling there is a zombie overlooking my shoulder as I work on some of the files. He doesn't believe I am an undergraduate so I thought I should, like many other students waiting for their academic year to start, do some preliminary work. That should soothe the looming aspect of my neighbour's projection, if he stumbles across me in my home. It is incongruous for an idiot to be studying anything so his confusion continues uninterrupted. Job done; he will just move on and wake cats and dogs in the neighbourhood as he passes through kitchen and bedroom walls. A few people will toss and turn until he leaves but no real harm will occur.

Every now and then I download some stuff I think might be useful. I don't run any MicroSoft software, as far as I know, so everything is cool; if I believe that the software developers are not foreign spies or hackers. The British hackers are all kind and helpful and make software to help elderly people cross the road, don't you know? It is rare that I ignore the probability of Trojan Horses cantering through my operating system but sometimes you just have to recognise that you might have to spend six or seven hours reformatting your hard drive because you couldn't be bothered to save everything only to duplicated memory sticks, and just download stuff in that same recognition.

I might wave my laptop towards my neighbour the next time I see him, to see if it makes any difference. Files that I lost when I moved partitions on the hard drive might come back but they may also be quite ephemeral and covered in spiritual cobwebs and so be unusable. 

       'Hey, Camelly! Come closer. Wooo! Wooo! Thanks.'

All I need is a Spiritual File Reader or SFR. Amazon will probably have one, if not them then definitely Temu. I might not like the cost though; it would likely be a piece of my soul. Well, there's an epiphany; I think my neighbour has allowed monsters to nibble away his soul or his own introspective nature has been like a solvent on it. I think the monsters might like the by-product of his dissolved soul and that is why he is empty of empathy. So sad.

You think me cruel. I am. I have detached emotions and it is my wont to caricature real life. It is even my escape. If I am honest, which I usually am, if my soul and my neighbour's soul went into a spiritual clothes shop for a fitting we would both come out wearing the same clothes in the same size. However, I would look incredible and he would look like a muddy puddle with a broken umbrella in it. Do you know why? You have to embrace eccentricity and weirdness; claim it as your own and never hide it. You should never be embarrassed by your... (at this point I shall consult my Roget's Thesaurus for some tasty words) Cue the music 'Left Bank Two' by The Noveltones (Link to a YouTube video of the Vision On Gallery music) while I search.

Ah ha! You should never be embarrassed by your... wackiness or your oddity; by being zany, kinky or queer, or by having a funny obsession. People will love us for it. If we hide it, people will cross the road because we are weird. Wear a top hat; sing while you cycle (I doff imaginary hats to fair maidens and dowagers alike); tell people how loud an egg exploding in a bowl of water heated in a microwave is; laugh at your image on the back of a spoon; or pull faces at the moon; who cares?