Personal Blogs

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[ 5 minute read ]

Dinosaur on my window-sill

There was a bird in my bedroom yesterday. More often than I like, I hear birds fly into my window panes. They are always on the outside. I always think 'This never used to happen. Why are the birds of 'today' more stupid than the birds of 'yesterday'? ' This little bird in my bedroom was a Blue Tit. Of course, the sound of birds hitting my bedroom window brought me into the room. I ended up interacting with this one, at least a bit. 

I keep three tomato plants, that I over-wintered, on the window-sill of one of my bedroom windows and there between two of the pots was the Blue Tit. It was facing the outside but it turned its head sideways to watch me as I came near. All I was actually about to do was see why the birds from outside were hitting my window; nonetheless, I saw it. 

I don't keep the handle for that window ready screwed into it so I had to move away and then come back immediately with the handle. The bird was still there. It had made no effort to fly away from the window while I was temporarily absent. When I came back with the handle my pelvis was about 40cm from it and it had had enough and flew to the radiator on the opposite wall. It did not fly frantically around the room. It just watched me and waited for me to do something. 

Trying to open a window without screwing the handle to it is quite difficult, so I moved instead to the other matching window. The bird flew to a little ladder I have, which was leaning against the adjoining wall about six feet or 2 metres from me. Again, it watched and waited for me to do something. I think it had a good idea of what I was doing. I swung the window wide open and moved away. I pointed at the window and carried on speaking with a low murmur. It didn't fly through it until I had stopped moving backwards and was facing it and the open window. 

Of course, it was stunned by bumping into the window pane at least three times. Yet, it did not fly fruitlessly around the room AND it perched only a couple of metres away from me. Birds seem to learn not to fly into windows even if they are really clean. It must be the frame that warns them that there is an impenetrable shield thereabouts. This little Blue Tit, however, flew straight out the open window. It didn't make the same mistakes that wasps, bees and flies make when we open windows for them. I did not need to hustle it towards an open space or wait for it to accidentally find a breach in the impenetrable barrier of glass. I am certain it knew that I was opening a hole for it to fly through. I am sure it waited for me to do so. 

I am not a lover of birds; not one bit. I love the male Blackbirds' fluting evening songs. My neighbour, Sally, has a bird table and a bird-feeder in her garden, and perhaps birds have become familiar with her. You know; the presence of a human in the same area where there is a fast-food takeaway establishment for birds doesn't seem to be a perceived threat to them. But this is more. Do birds recognise kind people or people who are no threat? They see me from the bird-table tending my tomato plants. They see me pass by without staring at them with binocular predator-vision. They see I have binocular vision though.

The Blue Tit is added to my very short list of wild creatures that have interacted with me. There are the two very large ants that had each made a home in the bottom of two plant pots filled with soil and with a plant growing in each. When I pulled the pot from the soil to check the plant was not pot-bound (roots filling the pot) the ants moved their entire bodies to face me as I turned the soil and root-ball this way and that. There is the black spider that lived in my bathroom and scurried behind the sink every time I came close. It was the biting kind and eventually, after having been bitten by a spider before, I decided I didn't want this one on my towel. I had earlier been repeatedly stung by a wasp when I applied the wasp on my towel to my body. I sprayed the spider with fly-killer (Permethrin). I didn't notice until a few moments later that the spider had run out of its hole behind the sink, down the wall, across the floor, over my socked foot and somehow onto the outside of my trousers. I only discovered it when my hand brushed my thigh and I accidentally scooped it into my palm. The spider was either crazed by the Permethrin or begging for help, I don't know, but my immediate reaction was to throw it onto my living-room floor, because I thought it was planning a strategy to attack me when I sat down; like the other one that bit me in bed. This time though, the spider ran away from me, and I crushed it against the skirting board. I regret that so much because I can't help anthropomorphising it a bit. Once help was not forthcoming it had ran away to hide in despair.

I am convinced that creatures know us and what is going on with us. I had been accepting of the spider in the bathroom and even talked to it when it was not hiding. When it was hiding I spoke up close to it and it would have been able to detect the smell of my breath; and I spoke to the Blue Tit yesterday, hopefully soothingly in human terms. I feel that if we actually make vocal sounds towards creatures and animals we have an expectation of a connection on some level, yet I am puzzled as to know why I think that. But, am I? I have experience of wild creatures interacting with me. They can't be intelligent in the same way as humans, but perhaps their intelligence, not measurable by humans because we don't care to believe they have it, seems to allow a reluctant relationship with us.

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[ 4 minute read ]

En Passant

In Passing

Just in passing, I happened to go to Wikipedia to look up 'en passant'. If you know what 'en passant' means, then you will know that I didn't randomly seek an answer from Wikipedia. It is French for 'in passing' and it is a term used in Chess. By using French, we can easily pass off a particular move performed only by a pawn and at a very precise moment as, 'Well, I was just passing and so I thought, Why not?' It is actually a move that says, 'Oh no you don't, you sneaky dog!' To my mind, it is a bit like adding, 'Just saying....' to the end of a criticism or a plea to have a want met. The interesting thing about this, is that I noticed that Wikipedia used animation to demonstrate the 'en passant' move. It needs animation to understand it. I have been playing chess for a long time and no opponent or I have ever used the move in any I game I played in, nor have I ever seen it played; including in computer games.

I like writing, and I like to use a cinematographic technique of introducing a character or environment. I like to have the viewpoint move from an introductory outside scene to an indoor scene, and I like to carry the outside with that viewpoint. We see it all the time in films. Recently, I had an idea to have the outside sounds enter the inside scene as an introduction to a story. At this time I cannot reproduce my attempt to do this, even though I eventually discarded it as not being fruitful. The issue here is that if the indoor scene is stationary and there is something added to give life to it, it is perhaps cinemagraphic and not cinematographic. Yeah, I know, who cares about that little 'to'. Isn't it all cinema? This intrigues me though. I eschew taking photos of people and there are no photos of me since I was eighteen and necessarily beautiful, of course. In fact, I don't take photos at all unless it is for evidence. 'You own the bird that crapped on my car because it sleeps in your tree every night. See? Just saying....'

Some people, many people, collect photos, or, more often than not, snapshots. These are about as interesting, to me, as the proverbial holiday slides of the 1960s and early 1970s holidays preceded over by an adenoidal, nasal, host. 'This is Hilda waving from the dinghy before it got caught in a current and she was rescued by Greek restaurant waiters who waded in thigh-deep to save her. She was so traumatised that she stayed in the Hotel for the rest of the week, but she tried hard to cope. She insisted I go out on my own for the rest of the days. Bless her, she kept a smile on her face. Look, you can see her Kiss Me Quick hat.' Even I might spray a mouthful of Prawn Cocktail, in a failed attempt not to laugh, in their orange and brown room at such a holiday.

Now, cinemagraphy is something I might be able to get my teeth into. I am completely new to this....whatever it is. My understanding is that a still image is somehow perceived to move, or something, by the addition of something else to give life to the picture. It sounds a bit like a Shepard Tone to me; which, of course, is an auditory effect. I shall have to look into cinemagraphy much deeper to satisfy my interest. For the time being a question: is having a sound enter an empty room in which there is no movement, in a story, cinematography, cinemagraphy, or just so commonplace that nobody really cares to understand what it is anyway? Take a furnished room in a story. Here it is in a crude way. 'The Living-room was cold and dark. It was expensively furnished though it was hard to see what furniture there was.' There is no life to the scene. Even if the furniture creaks as the temperature rises and falls there is no life. Yet, if there is sound that comes from outside, like traffic or a dawn chorus of birdsong, the scene is lifted from stationary to moving somehow. My style is to move from that busy Parisian street into the darkened room with a tall ceiling in a cinematographic way.... In the front door, up the stairs, past the peeling wallpaper and up to the tall door to the apartment; through the hall and into the living space. I can't help seeing an open window with a gossamer thin curtain moving in a wind. But that last, is because I left the window open in the previous scene to let the noise of traffic in. If the window is shut and I use the cinematographic method the room is still stationary and even though sound can be present it must be life that is heard to animate the scene.

Just saying......or maybe En Passant.

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[ 3 minute read ]

Thorny Thicket of Problems

Self-concept and ideal-self

Apparently, we have a concept of self; a self-concept. This is a complex set of ideas we have about ourselves. This self-concept influences how we perceive other people as well as ourselves (Eysenck, 1996). This is based on how we see ourselves and our idea of our own position in society. 

We also have an idea of our ideal-self (how we think we are supposed to be). Knowing this might give us cause to nod our heads sagely when we meet some people. The goal for all of us is to make sure the self-concept and the ideal-self match, or are at least similar. We are all aware of how fashion models give a false impression of how a woman's body is and should be. Just like imagining an audience naked when we give a speech or a performance, we might imagine fashion models to be stinky after hours and hours in front of hot studio lights, if they don't have people throwing buckets of rose-water over them every now and again. Well, that false impression is right here, right now.

Incongruence between self-concept and ideal-self can cause some people to seek therapy, in which the goal is to improve self-esteem. Incongruence between self-concept and ideal-self can also cause enough stress in an individual that a self-fulfilling prophecy unravels itself, simply because the stress brought on by this incongruence steals energy away from doing well in examinations. However, what happens if the self-concept and the ideal-self match in an arrogant person? We cannot praise them for any achievement, I suggest, because untrained as we are, we may potentially reinforce negative behaviour instead of reinforce positive behaviour. I suggest we may have a runaway train on our hands. If someone does not get the praise they think they deserve from the people around them, those people are likely to be considered, by the arrogant person, to be not clever enough to understand that arrogant person, and therefore their approbation is considered worthless as a result. No praise means they are unable to praise, so no praise is expected. 

I think when the parameters of a goal are clear but an individual feels that they, themselves, are inadequate to meet the challenge of producing something within those binding limits, the individual attacks the parameters. Well, perhaps not 'attack' but certainly, to my mind, unnecessarily scrutinise the parameters, albeit obliquely. A word limit on an assignment for a student may seem to be the problem for some students. 'How can people conform to that?' may become for others 'I can't conform to that.' This could be a disappointment for a student if their self-concept told them that they could do whatever is necessary to reach a goal. Unfortunately, their self-concept could crash down to such low depths that the ideal-self is at once and forever an unreachable fantasy. Just like that, like the click of our fingers, we can shatter our lives. 

I am often completely bamboozled that students allow themselves to be led, like sheep towards a sheep-dip, in a linear fashion by academic bodies. The whole concept of believing that there is only a single route to success or through a forest of problems dressed in thorns is just preposterous to me. It smacks of a disparity between self-concept and ideal-self. I don't for one minute suggest that we all throw fire-accelerants over thickets of thorny problems to get to our goals like some prominent public figures do; I suggest that we learn to understand the problems so we can reshape them to fit our own capabilities. That really does require an accurate self-concept that matches a realistic ideal-self, though.

I should be able to do this, so why can't I? is not the same as everyone else can do this and I am struggling to do it. On the face of it, we all, in most cases, have the same set of obstacles that prevent us achieving our similar goals. People re-shape their problems and win, that's all.

References

Eysenck, Michael, 1996, 'Social Perception', Simply Psychology, Hove, Psychology Press Limited, 2001. pp. 288, 299

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[ 4 minute read ]

Silence

Of ghosts and lamp posts

My cultural background is something I have never mentioned in real life to real people, or in writing for imaginary people to read or not. It is from this opening sentence that I can perceive a bifurcation in my upbringing, in England, that, to me, has provided twin parallel viewpoints for me today.

In my primary school years, I lived in a bungalow, down a dark lane with only two lamp posts lighting it. The first one lit the turn from the main road, and the second one was some way from my home. Between them they lit only the first tenth of the lane. The second one was much overgrown by a large bush which much shielded the whole lamp. It was like this because if anyone got too close to trim the undergrowth they invariably fell into the ditch. In those days, no-one ever got out of the ditch and they lived under the road but they always tried to use the bush by the lamp post to drag themselves out. The road was mostly dark shadow there, so in Winter, my sister and I would have to run past the impenetrable depths of blackness; but only because we perceived the contrast. We weren't scared of pitch darkness, because we played in an unlit huge garden at home with our own spinney at the bottom of it. This fear, or lack of it, is in contrast to kids in cities who were or are afraid of people in dark alleys, coughing. I think, back then, I had to go through the equivalent of a damp Autumn cemetery to get home in the dark.

Village life was largely unlit with big breathing animals lurking peacefully and those sounds were not at all scary. So, I grew up close to nature, like North American Indians, I suppose, which later allowed me to easily accept a nomadic life filled with harsh weather and hardship; only surviving by my wits and daily toil to survive; finding and collecting food and water and buying loaves of bread in different languages; and then moving on, as I walked across Europe. I slept in cemeteries and heated churches that I found in near-perfect darkness. One morning, in a village in Austria, I walked into a young woman and she into me, so dark was it. I never saw her even when our faces bumped. I only heard her calmly apologise. She dropped her bread rolls and I helped her pick them up. I knew she had dropped some things because they bumped my thighs on the way down.

Something that helped me to accept how people on the continent did things differently, was the influence my German mother had on me. We had real Christmas trees with real candles and very expensive glass antique baubles. Her mum sent us Christmas hampers with German Christmas treats in them; so Lebkuchen, Pretzels, and Pfeffernuss chocolate bakes was not at all new to me. Of course, hearing people kindly speaking English to me with their national accents was nothing to me, so I had no culture shock to inhibit my foraging and escapades in Europe, and no fear of the dark if I couldn't see a bush or tree-shrouded lamppost by a ditch. Having never been scared of looming figures coughing in the park or in alleys I slept in bushes and hedges and on benches, but never near a lamppost.

What this means is that when I later lived in a three bedroom house and there was a power-cut, I could hear the silence just as I used to hear it. I was instantly back in my childhood with my ears pricked, when I was used to the dark; so even though it was fully daytime, relying on my ears and any possible echoes of footsteps and breathing. I was more alive then than I was when the power was on. In my house, there was no telly, radio or stereo playing; the immersion heater was not on; and the cooker was off. I had no fridge to make a noise. When the power came on again, I heard the shrouded silence again. There were no extra decibels but I was deafened. Suddenly, I felt as though I had buried my head beneath a pillow and all sound was dulled; except there was no measurable sound. I went under the staircase and manually switched off the power at the mains, but it made no difference. I have, since that day only heard the same silence in Eire (Ireland)  with leprechauns scuffling along in hedges as they followed me along the lanes in the early, fully dark evenings. In that village, the diesel train jumped off its rails a mile away, and its labouring volume increased as it charged towards me on the same lane I was on. Only a huge bonfire in a field saved me from being lost to the spirit world or from being run over. I was not drunk and had taken no drugs.

It will be no surprise then if I say I write with a knowledge that there is something else there, but it isn't bad if you respect it and sometimes give way. Across the modern world we find disparities in people that are as odd as, when I could hear and then I couldn't; only a lamp post that casts a shadow by a ditch is scary and total darkness is safe; and strange food isn't strange at all, except it is if it is chocolate-covered ants. 

I write with 'Saudade' (Portuguese) which when I first came across it, I understood it to be a longing for something that isn't there. I think it is the same as what a young woman, Erica, said to a 'No Doubt' song, called 'Don't Speak', 'This song reminds me of a boyfriend I never had!'

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[ 2 minute read ]

Sold

I want to be fooled

I recently read that it is almost impossible to make someone want something they don't already desire. I studied marketing for two reasons: because I needed it in my business, and I wanted to be able to undo the work of the nasty, puppet-masters in the shadows. 

I read that people cannot be forced to buy anything they don't desire. I don't believe this for one minute. I think it is a short-sighted fool who believes this. I never desired a mobile phone (cell phone) or a home computer until they were marketed. When farmers were polled at the turn of the nineteenth century as to what they desired, they said, 'a faster horse'. Henry Ford sold them the internal combustion engine. Now, farmers want better tractors and trucks. Offer a fast horse to a farmer and he thinks about whether he has a daughter or a sporting neighbor, or not.

I still don't relish having a mobile phone (cell phone) and I never crave a faster computer; just smaller operating systems. I desire what we had in the past. That is called nostalgia. We all get it; it is incurable. 

It is true that I would not be forced to buy a time-machine to go back in time and do nefarious things to make sure the mobile phone never evolved beyond a phone without a wire plugged into a wall. I MUST own a mobile phone because they were so successfully sold to the world in the first place, by marketers. I am not forced by today's marketers to buy a new amazing mobile phone (cell phone); I am forced to buy a second-hand phone both because we now have to all have one, and because I absolutely do not want any phone that has A.I. in its operating code from the outset. There is no reset that eliminates and removes all the crazy updates that new phones allow, to reset it to A.I. free, because its code positively seeks more A.I. updates.

Modern marketing seems to be ever-seeking the next thing to sell. It doesn't seem to try to sell us what we once had. Go into any UK village in 2026 and you will see a bunch of outsiders updating the village. They don't preserve it. They visited and loved the village. Oh wow! they said, This is heaven. Lets change it!

The dispensing pharmacist at my local doctor's surgery wanted to talk to me about my blood-pressure and cholesterol levels and how I could have stats (an update or a patch to fix a bug in my human software?) I have high blood pressure because I am stressed and don't get appropriate treatment. Even if I do have high cholesterol levels, it is probably because I eat too many free eggs. Of course, the 'chat' was necessary to the pharmacist because I was weighed by my doctor more than three years ago, and I was very slightly overweight according to the Body Mass Index (BMI) chart. Most people are so used to aimlessly being updated that they think they desire it. I don't think they do. I think it is like asking an alcoholic if they want a drink; they will invariably shake their heads as they say yes, we just can't process two things at the same time. 

     'Are you in a relationship?'

     'It's complicated.'

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[ 4 minute read ]

Maybe and might

I was in Tesco a while ago. I needed to buy some dried beans. I used to be a professional juggler and the first thing we learn with are bean bags; but I was going to eat these beans not start sewing cloth around them.

There are different ways of looking at things and they are highly contexualised within certain groups. When I had a job that required me to have good musculature and enter homes, 'Pop in for a cup of tea if you are in the area' sometimes meant one thing if their husbands and boyfriends were going to be at work, or 'get a free drink and rest for a while if you need to.' The funny thing is, I may have imagined the former being real. But if you hear it enough, is easy to get an idea of veiled intent. Except, the veil was more on how the offering of a cup of tea was made. It was always said in front of the husband or boyfriend as though it was truly innocent. No-one ever trapped me in the hall and seductively slurred, 'Come up and see me sometime!' with hooded eyes, peering meaningfully into mine, above a suggestive smile. I never did go back to visit any of those houses; I really would not do that, and also because just like if any single women had cornered me, if I had gone back during work hours I would have been in the vulnerable position of being about to be rejected. Nobody likes that. So we often speak in code and double-talk and innuendos and double-entendres.

One of my neighbours delivers eggs to my doorstep. I like her because she intrigues me. I could really like her. She does have highly attractive facial expressions that suddenly appear onto a blank canvas; and that intrigues me. She measures her behaviour. The moue of slight embarrassment I once saw is something I want to see again but not if I am the one to embarrass her; you know, not with a gentle jest or tease. Maybe, when she gets home each day she just enters a regeneration period and does precisely nothing interesting. Maybe.

In Tesco, because we are coming up to Easter, there were some little toy, chicks for sale in sets of three, and all made with felt (3 centimetres tall or so). There were also three pigs and three rabbits; all of them anthropomorphised in some way. I remember as a small boy my mum would include little toy fluffy chicks with our Easter Eggs, and they really were nice to have. I originally bought these nine figures to put outside my house for parents to take, but I now think that my neighbour, with her obvious measured consideration would be an ideal recipient.

There she is on the stage, all bashful and surprised. 

     'For measured and considerate behaviour towards your neighbours, you, Sally, have been awarded the coveted prize of nine cheap felt animals'

     'Oooo! Thank you very much! I would like to thank Martin's mum for bringing him up to like felt animals, even though he was surrounded by real ones; and of course, the architects who designed our houses and make the trip next door so easy. My thanks go to the wonderful chickens who laid the eggs I give him, and of course, his nearest neighbour who has so far resisted stealing them.'

I left the nine felt animals in a freezer bag on her doorstep; so, she will not get a standing ovation, and she will no doubt want to share them, because she is like that. The problem with that, is with that last; will she be able to break an unwritten code of not giving away received gifts? She is sensible and mighty clever and really considerate so she just may share them. Good!

Sometimes, living in the maybe moments are more favourable than the real ones. I suggest, it is something every one of us enjoy but I think we don't provide it for others as much as we might. A lot of the time, if I am honest, I am a bit afraid of how appointments and meetings may turn out and I push for order and reason.

I have been looking into how language is used in creative writing and went to Beth Roars, a voice coach, on YouTube to see what she says about singers. After hours of fascinating stuff she told me about 'The Fate of Ophelia' by Taylor Swift. Now, let me be clear, I have always considered Taylor Swift to be a bit whimsical and childish in her singing and writing. Let's face it her target market was teenage girls. One cannot deny that she is a huge hit and writes at least some of her songs (I think she is in fact a contributor to all her song lyrics). Without the guidance of Beth Roar and the accompanying Fate of Ophelia video, and Beth Roar obliquely pointing out that the song references Taylor Swift's current boyfriend, herself, and Shakespeare's 'Ophelia' in Hamlet, the whole message of the song would be entirely lost on me. 

Taylor Swift, it seemed, did not allow herself to live in a 'real maybe', if there is such a thing. 'Maybe' is almost entirely based on hope and probability, and its make-up is measured (if you can measure 'maybe') in differing amounts for everyone. 

You may note that I described Sally, next door, as 'measured in her behaviour' which if I did not make clear, comes from her careful consideration for possible outcomes. What a wonderful trait! But what a terrible place to live in if it is a place where everything has a known quality and any combination of events has a known outcome. 

It seems that 'maybe' might only exist when things are new, like surprises. 

Oooops! Deja vu!

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mental health

[ 8 minute read ]

WARNING - evokes thoughts and ideas on bestial violence, division and hierarchy (dogs fighting)

This is about how the pen is mightier than the sword

Get a licence

'He should be on a lead!'

Throughout the whole of yesterday, inspired by a headline on one of the online news websites, I had a mind to show how evoking emotion can lead people towards a conclusion that can be cemented by confirmation bias; with conclusions that confirm an idea that has lain transparent, gossamer-thin, and nascent, but, through skillful nurturing, becomes more opaque; and as it does so, less open to good counter-argument. I 'hemmed and hawed' at how I would do it; whether I can do it, even whether I should do it. Can I pull it off? I had a theme in my head that I am certain would draw support even though I intended to present it in a surreal way; an oblique approach allows others to make their own minds up; I believe this is the strongest and most abiding force, that of being guided (tricked) into transmogrifying a narrative into something that fits one's own perception and interpretation of the world.

Such is my expectation that the drive of the subject, by dint of it being contentious, would evoke, what may indeed be biased agreement in a large segment of the world population, I, perhaps foolishly, made no attempt to even try to consider a different way to demonstrate the power of words and how they influence opinion. I was going to write a short story but I realised that I cannot control any after-effects. I decided that it is better to present the scaffolding and not the facade. Hopefully, this will cause some people to read a bit more objectively. So, make no mistake, I have an intention and an agenda, but it is an open one.

     'Did you hear? You have to get a licence now if you want a live-in boyfriend?'

A long time ago, people in the UK needed dog-licences if they kept a dog. The details of it are not really the point here. If dog-breeders needed the same licence is beyond my guess. I think the idea was born from a melding of bifurcated opinions that had emerged from both the dogs' perspective and from dog-bite victims. How can we protect the public?

I suppose many dogs were a bit wild and perhaps mistreated and were more than a little scared of strangers and defensive. I think a dog, as a pack animal, needs to assert its authority by it's fighting prowess. Annoy a dog and you can expect a warning snarl and then a nip, perhaps from lying down position, and then an aggressive standing stance with head lowered, and then a violent advance that will be something that you cannot extract yourself from. You must now fight it.

     'Did you hear? We no longer need to buy dog-licences because dog owners are better at understanding their pets' needs.'

That, if you got the connection and ran with it with your own thoughts, is how, by tapping into a long-standing, not yet fully fully considered, belief that men are brutes, gives us the idea that a comparison can be made between a woman's higher intelligence and reasoning ability and that of a less intelligent animal which presents itself (the animal) as though it acts solely on some kind of primordial instinct. People need a licence to keep a dog and women need a licence to keep a man. The point is a higher and reasoning intelligence is considered apt to be in a controlling position over a lesser more instinctive intelligence. Dodgy, huh?

Clearly the two speeches above are uttered from, first, a female perspective and then, from a universal perspective. Now a speech sentence from a male perspective.

       'Did you hear? We can now check to see if our girlfriends are sane by whether she has been granted a licence or not.'

What may first have appeared to be a device (a licence to keep a man) to protect women in my dystopian world as recognising and portraying men as 'cavemen' brutes; and as such need to be kept on a leash, is now a psychometric test as to the suitability of women as girlfriends, from a male perspective.

Now I have opened a can of worms. For many people, I have pulled the rug from under their feet. I expect the overriding thought, for them, is that I am a misogynistic brute. However, to some extent I have deliberately tried to make this happen. The task for me now is to be successful in assuaging (negating) that feeling. Instead of dampening the heat of a blaze though, I must take away the smoke of poorly consumed wood that I intentionally added to the fire, along with the dry tinder that acted as an accelerant.

I am a man. Like a dog, I sometimes act instinctively. And, like a dog, I am a pack animal. Just the same as a dog, I will have picked up bad habits right from birth, through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. But, even as an adult, because the world is changing, much of what once seemed proper behaviour, that arose from attitudes of a past time, is now 'deemed' to be inappropriate. Even the use of the word 'deemed' leaves opens the subject; just like a flare-up in a fire when a piece of paper is thrown onto embers. It offers an idea that I do not agree with an idea formed by others, of which I am contemptuous. But it slips quietly in because it follows the word 'seemed' in the same sentence.

There is now a burgeoning world view that social media has some kind of effect on children, social development and behaviour. There are moves and pilot studies to understand the effects and how to eradicate negative influence and effect from social media activity.

Psychologists debate which has more effect on an individual's behaviour; nature or nuture. Was the successful person pre-determined to be successful because they had good genes, or was the parenting and social education of the successful person influential in allowing a good academic education to be absorbed and implemented.

When dogs fight, the owners have their expectation that dogs will fight suddenly realised. The attitude, in the main, is to drag them apart and one owner will probably berate the owner who did not keep their dog on a leash. When men fight on a Friday and Saturday night in the UK, as long as no-one is not hurt too badly they are dragged apart by friends and bystanders and everyone gets to go home. The wounds remind the fighters over the next few days that they should be wary of a probability of future wounds if they act in a similar way. The police, if they deal with men fighting, are loathe to lock them up, but invariably do if they consider that a flaring up is inevitable, and then later release the fighters, after they have calmed down and sobered up.

You can see that, in the UK, men are indeed considered to be similar to dogs. Hence, there is a need for responsible people to register their men with the local authorities. Since dogs cannot be the owner of other dogs, it falls upon women to step up and claim men as their possessions. 

Here then I have introduced some ridicule into the subject. It is crazy to think that men need to be licenced right? What you may have missed in considering this comedic conclusion, is that I have inferred that women are a different species. Anyone who said to themselves, 'Yeah, he has a good point, men should be licenced, and who better than women to apply for those licences', no matter how briefly they held that weird thought, they unwittingly absorbed a potentially damaging concept by way of a back-door.

This post is not intended to create any long-standing ideas of any differences between males and female, or humans and animals. However, by highlighting animal behaviour, there is an expectation that many of the peripheral thoughts around supposed differences were illuminated in our minds, were momentarily considered, reshaped, and stored again. That is how opinion can be deliberately, and inadvertently, changed by both canny and poor writing, and of course, careless reading.

By the way, I would be grateful in knowing if a woman wants to claim me as being potentially useful to her. I am house-trained and have learned to use my hands to eat.

UK

Samaritans - phone 116 123  'Call us any time, day or night' - 'Samaritans works to make sure there's always someone there for anyone who needs someone.' 

https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Childline -  Open 24hrs & days a week. Contacting Childline Call us free on 0800 1111 or find out how to get in touch online. Whatever your worry, day or night, we're here for you. 

https://www.childline.org.uk/get-support/contacting-childline/

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[ 6 minute read ]

Parasite or milking Farmer?

It doesn't seem very long ago that I had a strong standpoint on promoting oneself. (I was about to continue the sentence with 'in public' because the sentence, to me feels incomplete, but it isn't). Social protocol and introductory salutations were always a problem for me; do we say what we do, or are good at or not?

     'Hello. Pleased to meet you. I am a doctor in Physics'

     'Oh, yes. Hello. I am a plumber.'

     'Ah. Interesting. Do you work locally?' (No doubt I shall have use of a local plumber one day)

     'Yes, I live around here.  (I doubt you can help me with anything).

There is an imbalance. The physicist is useful, but not directly to their community. The plumber, on the other hand, is eminently useful. I am in complete agreement with myself in thinking that all tradespeople should promote themselves and be proud of what they do. They are builders, while many other people are merely hangers-on; but not to the coat-tails of the tradespeople or fabricators of society.

I think in West Germany strangers when they met would introduce themselves by name and profession. I may be wrong. It may have been a twee idea I read in a picture book on learning German. You know how some of the phrases are stilted. In truth, when I worked in Germany, I never met anyone who told me what they did. There is a part of me that wouldn't mind if people in the UK did state their job as part of their introduction. Fat lot of chance of that happening; I have had conversations with strangers for over an hour and not even learnt their name. Asking someone's name is like asking for someone else's telephone number if you are attracted to them. It means I hope we meet again. It no longer means, if we meet again I should be pleased to be polite and use your name.

Consider this:

     'You, yes, you, take my bag, would you?'

     'Yes, Guv.'

And this:

     'Hello again, I believe we met some time ago.' (You were so insignificant to me I didn't bother offering my name to you, or accord you any civility in asking you yours.)

The latter greeting is no more polite than the former. But why? In both cases the initiator is in need of something, physical labour in the first, and mental stimulation in the second. An attitude of greater-than-thou, or mightier in some way, is clearly evident because names are not considered to be important and so there is no personal approach. In both cases the meeting has an element of parasitism. We are all parasites in many respects. I can heat my home because someone else has done some work and thinking in the past. But that is a result of people specialising in a job role, and is indicative of a former meritocracy. Someone, long ago, in the dark Winter nights, when no more fieldwork could be done due to the darkness, made an extra pair of boots by candlelight, and their neighbour liked them, and because they were better made then anyone else made in their community, bartered for those boots. Blacksmith, thatcher, cobbler, they all arose through meritocracy.

Do we expect that the tanner in the same village would give away the best pieces of leather to the cobbler, so the whole community could wear good boots? Did the blacksmith shoe horses and forge iron for nothing so the village could thrive; so farmers could get to markets, and tools could always be on hand? 

No, that is communism or, more kindly, altruism, and thriving would only mean self-sufficiency, because if it means thriving in a competitive market there is going to be a metric of some kind, and I strongly suspect it would be in the form of banking; either a harvest, storing fat on the body, or a universal currency; money.

     'It takes a village to raise a child!' Yes, the hunter teaches basic rabbit-skinning skills; the farmer teaches basic food production skills and how to predict weather; and the potter teaches basic clay manipulation skills (removing air pockets before firing).

Modern life in 2026 has the internet and YouTube videos to teach us those basic skills albeit in a classroom and not 'in the field'. When someone introduces themselves as a teacher of young people what should we do? Give them all the knowledge we have despite the possession of that knowledge being the only thing that makes us worthy of a wage? Despite having spent years honing our skills and distilling information down to useful and pithy tips, we should give it away to teachers? Schoolteachers today are paid the same universal currency that we all are. If we could see into the future and see the financial damage we might do to ourselves if we give away material that should have been copyrighted, would we, when we meet a schoolteacher suddenly clam up about what we do? Are schoolteachers parasites that will take knowledge from people they meet and sell it to someone else, albeit with the payment coming indirectly? Those questions, I feel, are a clapper on a cracked bell for many people. They are discordant and terrifying.

     'Hello. My name is Martin. I am writing a book on inventions that have not yet been constructed or implemented. The book has a section on good ideas too.'

     'Hello. I am an inventor. I have some ideas and inventions that no-one has heard about. Would you like me to tell you about them?'

     'Oooo, yes please!'

     'Will you get some kind of reward, money, fame, or something when you publish your book?'

    'Well, yes, I will be considered by my professional community to be eminently useful and I shall make some money.'

     'What will I get?'

     'You will have helped society, of course. It takes a village to raise a child, you know?'

     'Do you consider yourself to be a milker or a parasite?'

     'Good day to you. I feel an important appointment is looming elsewhere.'

     'Well, that is what happens if you moo a lot. You should expect to be milked.'

Like I said, many philosophers state that altruism only exists when it comes to raising our own children. Sacrifice, that is.

If a schoolteacher DOES NOT reveal that they are a schoolteacher, are they being deliberately false, because they intend to parasitically milk information from unsuspecting others and use it for their own advancement?

It is only a thought-experiment that has no resolution in my mind today. It is however, a child of considering cyber-security and fraud.

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[ 3 minute read ]

The room faded

That Mulberry Molasses you have at the back of the fridge since forever, tastes good in black coffee with a drop of vanilla essence. You can really taste the dark, and strangely seductive fruity promise of a full relationship before a wash of vanilla reason joins the briefly intriguing conversation. The taste is complex and is much like walking on a quiet beach at dawn with the attractive person from the party, not looking for, but open to a hiding place, only to be hailed by the person's partner. You search each other's faces for the same desire you both feel and see it reciprocated and then look towards the cheery but woolly interruption. Again, a glance at each other and then you exhale. 

Oooo! The first sip was sharp and bitter, but there was something in it. Ah, perhaps the pairing was not quite right. But just as you find some features in other people queer and then they become quaint with anticipation, the second sip carries with it a knowledge of what to expect; it allows a deeper sense of flavour to be appreciated. It is much more like the long snog after a first kiss on New Years Eve; hungry and explorative; and mutually giving. There is a mustiness like a light perspiration of flavoured alcohol has permeated the freshness of perfume and scent that was applied hours ago. The kiss and the smell is organic. It is almost primeval and immediate in its intent; now it is tasted. With the kiss broken the taste lingers. But it will be a memory of that moment when full desire of an illicit encounter was unfulfilled. A look into each other eyes and then another deep promising kiss, and then the sounds of the noisy room comes back and you are separated by the crowd; the moment and chance has gone.

I drank only one cup of coffee like that yesterday afternoon and didn't finish it; but there was still some left in my large mug, so I made a fresh coffee over the top of it. The mulberry was still there and the vanilla accompanied it and if I had been looking out a window out of a party I would have seen them leaving together as they should do. I would have looked longingly at one of them and known that without the other, the promise would have been filled but the guilt would surpass the pleasure. Despite the overwhelming sweetness it has in itself, Mulberry Molasses without vanilla makes coffee dark and bitter. It fails to sweeten it. Adding a fruitiness it competes for dominance and fails. Instead it highlights the dark and bitter nature of black coffee that even added sugar cannot erase. I can tolerate eating sugar from a spoon but an equal amount of Mulberry Molasses is too sweet. In coffee, it is a quick and hungry grope in a dark alley; good-looking but ultimately cheap and treacherous. In marriage, it is better behaved and mature and must always be only a soft moment of 'maybe' and never something that needs to be secret.

I wonder, if I add milk to the coffee, mulberry molasses and vanilla,  I might legitimise my relationship with Mulberry Molasses in coffee. With milk acting as a soft blanket, the vanilla, if I add it, might be the smell of a home that comforts us as we embrace. The sharpness will still be there in the background, but it will be a memory of our first kiss when our teeth and foreheads bumped, and the touch was truly and honestly ours, without guilt, secrecy or regret. 

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[ 8 minute read ]

Elements throughout this post tie in with the Tuesday 17th March 2026 'Why did they suddenly brake?' post on pressing SNOOZE, braking distances, foreign holidays and English Summers. (Tags: English Summer, snooze, holiday, micro-sleep, alert)

What are you up to?

     'What you got there then? Been newting?' I asked.

It just came out as I cycled up behind a man carrying a black plastic bucket. I didn’t know him and had never seen him before. He visibly jumped in surprise. Most people can hear my bicycle tyres on the lane, but he didn't. I suppose the surprise of a man on a bike suddenly by his side and the, what turned out to be, very direct and relevant line of questioning caused him to answer with words that surprised me in return.

     'I have been collecting frog-spawn. It is illegal to collect it now, but I shall maintain that I am relocating it to my pond.' I assumed he meant his pond in the back of his garden. But I was a little confounded that he was confessing to a crime to someone who may just work for the Environment Agency. Who else would ask about 'newt-napping’ with no preamble or introduction? Amazing!

We fell to chatting and named ourselves. He was alarmed that I used to drive at 65mph on motorways in one of my vans while thinking about how I could improve my business. That, to him, was indicative of someone in dire straits and driving too fast to fulfill a contract they were late for. Why would anyone think that? It turned out he used to be an upholsterer and sometimes he had to deliver his finished chairs or things in a van. He considered, it seemed to me, that the slow and easy pace of upholstering also requires gently allowing a van to roll merrily along back roads and giving way to proud Shire horses pulling large open farm wagons (wains).

There is the difference between us; it was my job to be efficient, and everything I could control in my job was firmly in transport and logistics. His job, on the other hand was about fine finishing. 

     '65mph is quite fast enough for me', he said. 'Me too', I thought, because it costs exponentially more money the faster we drive while the extra time saved for each extra unit of speed diminishes.

Let me tell you that it is only at the lowest speeds of travel that the greatest savings in time is made. Assuming one can drive at a constant speed for 150 miles we can see the amount of time saved diminishes as the speed rises:

30 mph – 5 hours

40 mph – 3 hours and 45 minutes (75 minutes quicker than 30 mph)

47 mph - 3 hours and eleven minutes

50 mph – 3 hours (45 minutes quicker than 40 mph)

60 mph – 2 hours 30 minutes (30 minutes quicker than 50 mph)

70 mph – 2 hours and 9 minutes (21 minutes quicker than 60 mph)

80 mph – 1 hour 53 minutes (16 minutes quicker than 70 mph)

90 mph - 1 hour 40 minutes (13 minutes quicker than 80 mph)

100 mph -  1 hour 30 minutes (10 minutes quicker than 90 mph)

110 mph - 1 hour and 22 minutes (8 minutes quicker than 100 mph)

Remember this is at a constant speed over 150 miles.

All well and good, if you can actually drive at those speeds from your doorstep to your destination. In France, on the motorways you can. In the real world in the UK, you need to drive exclusively on motorways and dual carriageways at night and with no other traffic delays for those timings to be considered useful. Our road network and traffic flow just isn't like France though. In the UK, I used to drive from a town right next to the A1 (The 'Old North Road' - Ermine Street - goes through that town) with excellent North, South, East and West roads local to the town, to all parts of the UK, and drive to all parts of Europe, doing 65 mph whenever I could, and the average speed over 10,000 miles, according to my dedicated SatNav, was just 47mph. 

See the AA Route Planner image below for a route from Stoke-on-Trent to central London, that is mostly on motorways. (3 hrs and 9 mins for 158 miles) which is very close to an average 47 mph. Stoke is connected to the M6 by the dual carriageway A500 at Jct 15.

In Town, outside ALDI, I met a man with a £10,120 electric bicycle that does 30 mph. In the UK, it should only be able to reach 15.5 mph, he told me; but by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on his digital internet device, he managed to get it sent from China. I think that means it avoids some kind of check on it, even import duty if the value is so high. Isn't that smuggling? It, like many mountain bikes had a small front sprocket so a very low gear could be engaged to get up those really, steep hills. But it has a seemingly unrestricted electric motor to make this happen! Another cyclist came along with a small front sprocket on his bike and the two of them rattled on about stuff that just went straight over my head. I did manage to hear that the electric motor on the £10,120 electric bicycle was a top of the range one. The whole bicycle is more expensive than a secondhand, 2009 Kawasaki ZZR1400 that has done 11,863 miles, for sale in 'Exchange and Mart' for £5,590; a 2024 Honda CBR650R with 2,196 miles on it, for £6,990; or a brand new moped for less than £3,000.

It seems there is no accounting for taste. From illegally collecting frog-spawn (he only guessed the gloop he gathered is frog-spawn) to illegally importing an electric mountain bike, I come to tax and insurance dodgers.

The UK Government, I heard, intends to crack down on online-sellers to seek lost revenue from tax evaders. As a process to glean more revenue, it might just work. As a device to make the UK population pay more for even more stuff it will indubitably succeed. Yet, on the DuckDuckGo index pages, which reads the Google indexing and others, the 'postoffice.co.uk' entry has 'Start your online selling side hustle with our guide.' to attract 'beginner' online-entrepreneurs to its site. I am pretty sure a 'side hustle' is a slang term used to denote a personal income that is beyond or outside of normal and regulated work activities. If you own a sawmill and openly sell planks with invoices and pay appropriate taxes, the side hustle is selling the normally wasted sawdust to pet owners and stables for cash, 'under the table' so to speak, or as a 'back-hander' in other words, not declaring the sales to the tax collector in the relevant country. A side hustle is not a legitimate business, is it?

I have a very eager chap who keeps phoning me to try to get me to take on a delivery contract. He expected me to give a 'yes' or‘no’ over the phone a couple of days ago. Of course, I told him that I would need to start a new spreadsheet and link it to a number of other spreadsheets to ascertain the feasibility of his offer. It really comes down to opportunity cost, with money thrown into the lengthy equations. One of the key factors for self-employment in transport and logistics is insurance, specifically commercial insurance for a motor vehicle; Goods in Transit insurance; and Public Liability insurance. It took me about five minutes to see that the job wasn't really for me as it stands. However, 48 hours later, I am still adjusting and rewriting whole sections of spreadsheets to fit in any new opportunity, as a value adding programme for new avenues of revenue (in this case, offsetting costs). Even though, I declined the contract, he has phoned me three more times. I don't answer his calls because I still haven't satisfied myself that I have examined all the facets of a myriad of new opportunities and their future viability that such a contract throws up. Just like students flipping burgers to pay for a new future, I have to consider doing undesirable jobs or contracts if they might provide a route to a more favourable position. Money, in my head, is not really measured as having value, as much as it is for its utility (what it can be used for).

Let me explain: Taking on a new contract such as the one I am currently assessing will mean hiring a van. Hiring a van is a fixed cost that heavily impacts on any income stream a new contract provides. Normally, this would be enough to determine whether a contract as a single enterprise is feasible. But feasible doesn't end with 'money in' and 'money out' calculations. The cost of a hire vehicle can be offset by the poor but adequate revenue from a new contract, which means that any other low revenue contract that uses the same van considered as solely providing income, with only the variable cost of fuel to be considered, and of course, time. In the current financial climate there is no choice but to hire only an EV (electric vehicle).

However, time is also a fundamental issue. How much time, as a resource, is used? Time spent 'here', is time that cannot be spent elsewhere. Much as I like to quickly and easily generate income, I also, am not about to skip doing diligent research into paying tax and insurances; nor will I be driving too fast to save useless time; start smuggling; or take protected wildlife in my spare time.

***

According to the BBC web page for Thursday 19th March 2026: 'Stretching 2,689 miles, the world's longest coastal path opens in England' - (About 80% of the route is now open and most of the rest of the path is due to be completed by the end of the year.)'

'The new English coast path links with the Wales Coast Path - an 870-mile route encircling the Welsh coastline. It was completed in 2012 and was the first path in the world to follow an entire national coastline.

There is no single official coastal trail in Scotland, though much of the shoreline is accessible thanks to Scotland's "right to roam" law passed more than 20 years ago. Estimates of its mainland coastline vary depending on how it is measured, but it is often put at around 5,500 miles.

Taken together, a continuous coastal walk around Britain would therefore total some 9,000 miles. At an average of 15 miles a day, it would take almost two years to complete, assuming no rest days.'

For context: The flight route to Perth in Western Australia is about 9000 miles from London, UK.

Now, a trip around Britain including the new 'King Charles III England Coast Path' is an experience I just might be attracted to, tent and sleeping bag and all. 10 mph on a bicycle, where allowed, would take 900 hours, or over a month if you never sleep. A 14 hour cycle ride at 10 mph every day would be 64 days.

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Snooze through an English Summer

[ 8 minute read ]

Pressing 'Snooze' on your alarm clock means you miss out on English Summers.

Going on holiday to hot countries, I suggest, unless the heat there is oppressive and hated, makes British people indifferent to their homeland. I think it is a bit like pressing 'SNOOZE' on our alarm clocks, every morning. There is a moment at waking when many of us think to ourselves, 'Not yet, just a few minutes more.’ There follows this thought, a wonderful feeling of warmth and comfort, an unfelt feeling when we first lay down to sleep. Many of us consider this to be a prime moment in our lives. I suggest that we are no more rested after those wonderful five minutes than we were before we pressed SNOOZE. Except it isn't five minutes of wonder or perceived comfort, it is more likely to be between three and seven seconds before we are asleep again.

I read somewhere that if we press SNOOZE each morning we are not allowing our body-clocks to set a routine or schedule for sleeping and rising. Simply, the idea is that the brain would eventually settle into a routine process of restoring itself and the body with a 'recognition' that it must accomplish this within a set time. I suppose it is constantly measuring enzymes, hormones, and blood sugar levels, among other things, to know when it should wake up. But what if there is never enough time for the brain to do what it needs to?

My understanding is that the brain can 'micro-sleep' for between 0.3 seconds and a whole three seconds. It does this even when we are driving at any time of the day (or night).

Some numbers

According to the RAC, the thinking time, if we need to do an emergency stop, at 50mph is 49ft (15m) and the braking distance is 125ft (38m); so the overall stopping distance is 174ft (53m). At 70mph the overall stopping distance is 96m or 315ft.

The internet gives us: 1 mile is 5280 feet or 1609.3 metres, so 3 seconds of inattention or micro-sleep is 220ft (67m) travelled at 50mph before the braking time for an emergency stop even starts.

With a micro-sleep of 3 seconds the overall stopping distance at 50mph is 125m. The overall stopping time for an alert and wide-awake person driving at 90 mph is 122m. Poor sleep that results in three seconds of micro-sleeping could be the same as driving unchecked at 90 miles per hour in a 50mph zone.

https://cfm-calculator.com/calculator.php?utm_source=/physics/Stopping-Distance-Calculator.php

In case you need to think about that a bit more (extraneous numbers)

With 0.7 seconds delay (the average reaction time) the thinking distance at 50mph is 15.6m, with an extra 0.3 seconds (micro-sleep) the thinking distance is 22.3m at 50mph. 

The whole stopping distance with a reaction time of 0.7 seconds, thinking and braking distances, at 27mph is 22.7m. This means in a 30mph zone an alert driver will have stopped before someone micro-sleeping for only 0.3 seconds will have even started braking.

But this isn't about about safety, it is about quality of life. By driving around in much of Europe I have seen a whole bunch of beautiful places, countryside, rivers, valleys, mountains, cathedrals and castles, cobbled streets and animals. If I had never seen any of it, I might be more interested in the Muntjac deer that eat the shrubs in my garden. No, to me they are pests, not at all like the magical creatures in Europe that live alongside snakes, wolves and bears.

     'What's your point, Martin?’

Tanned and with skin still fizzing from the UV light of cloudless skies over pristine dry beaches, we look back at the days of fun and easy relaxation; there was no work to think about; there were no school uniforms to sort out, or gym kits to wash. There was no cast-iron budget to adhere to – that was covered by our judicious savings over the year. Now, at the airport, there is a little sand in our shoes and some fragile souvenirs in our luggage. The kids need to be verbally corralled, quietened and shepherded, and we are starting to put ourselves back into our own boxes; the places we need to be in to marry ourselves to our home environment. Along with this airport experience the knowledge of how an English Summer is not reliably hot or dry is beginning to bubble up from our memory. On the plane we are already nostalgic for the warm Spanish, Jamaican or Thai evenings and the exciting scents that come from our fellow diners that mix, sometimes incongruently, with the spicy foods. Again, we look forward in time to when the plane alights (lands) and we may need to put that sweater on over our holiday tops and T-shirts; that sweater that we have in our hand luggage or on our laps. Before we have even gotten into British air-space we have written off any hope of joy and frivolity in our English Summer; at least with any realistic consideration for its possibilities and futures and predictability.

     'The one predictable thing about English weather is it's unpredictability.' A twangy voice from a few rows away reminds us.

It is done; we are no longer on holiday. We are constrained to making only sketches of plans with no contingency plans written in. Perhaps we can visit a ruined castle, but if it rains on the day we will just stare at each other in our homes until we separate; the kids upstairs and the adults periodically commenting on the weather from the window.

     'It's still raining.' Even the sound of the ice-cream van is still discordant and cannot lift us from our disappointment, but we expected all this all along.

According to The Met Office, Summer runs from the 1^st of June to the 31^st of August, which is thirteen calendar weeks. There are thirteen obvious weekends that may be warm and sunny. I would not wager that a Saturday and the following Sunday would both be warm, clear and sunny. It doesn't matter to me if they do not match. After a long period of no rain, as a teenager, I danced in the street, semi-naked, when it finally rained. I have seen, decades later, teenagers do the same. Both times, the rain was warm and there was no hurry to dry ourselves, and both times, the dancers, including me, were laughing; once when I danced and once when I watched.

It is the unpredictability of English Summers that make them so good. But there is more. There is a lushness to our gardens and the countryside when the weather behaves itself. There is an aroma of newly warmed grass and flowers that, drenched in water freely give off scent-laden moisture. There is the sudden appearance of insects that today, warm and humid, and a bit muggy from the shower yesterday, splat on our windscreens, that yesterday were clear; and then there is the smell of windscreen washer rushing into our open car windows accompanying the little flecks of wetness.

But for those who were in Spain or Jamaica or Thailand earlier, or for those who are planning on going abroad at the very end of the school Summer holidays, none of this will be seen or heard, or felt, in the same way as someone who has never been abroad.

     'Huh, it's raining.’

     'Not long now, love.’

     'Have we got everything we need.’

     'Darling, we have been planning this since December.’

     'New Sandals!’

     'Sandals!’

In a job interview, the employer started to tell me about the mandatory holiday days that we can all expect in England. I foolishly told him that I think the reason we need to take time off work is because we are not happy at work. My statement carries too much baggage with it. There is a train of carriages that are pulled by the engine of those words. There is never enough time to unpack them all. I didn't get the job.

My point? That delicious snooze when we really should be getting up makes us resentful of the beginning of the morning. We nominally drive at up to 90 mph in a 50 mph zone, we missed a few important sentences in the morning meeting and because we failed to make in-roads into setting up a sleep routine that our brains crave. We are going to miss out on the joy of being fully awake again, because just like we compare the whole English Summer with two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, we will press 'snooze' again tomorrow morning because warm and comfortable snoozing, just like tanning on a sunny beach, is preferable, in a sensual way, than good sleep, or a trip to an English field on a wet day.

'Snooze' writes off our perception of good sleep. Two weeks in Spain, Jamaica, or Thailand, I suggest, writes off our appreciation of our home Summers.

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Caught by Cats

[ 5 minute read ]

People of 'yore' (olden days) were far more able to know what was happening in their villages than anyone in the modern world can with their digital devices today.

If the villagers in the past saw a wet cat they could easily infer that there is disease in the area. It might even have been possible to borrow a cat a while ago.

QUOTE 'A magical method of transferring any disease was to throw the water in which the patient had washed, over a cat, and then drive the creature from the house.’ (Encyclopedia of Superstitions). However, black cats should never be driven from the home otherwise the household can expect bad luck and misfortune. Someone, maybe a young family member, may, beyond the little story (below), be scolded.

In this little story we have Blackberry, a cat so named because he was born at Michaelmas, the end of the blackberry season; Spew, a Tortoiseshell cat; and Fluffy, a skinny cat whose fur has mostly fallen out.

     'Hey Blackberry!'  mewed Spew, a Tortoiseshell cat.

     'Hello, Spew.’

     'Ugh! You're all wet.’

     'Yeah, homeless again, as well! It's alright for you.'

     'What do you mean. I get wet too.’

     'It's coming up to May and your tail is needed to rub on warts to make them fall off.’

     'But only in May. In June, I get wet.’

     'I just leave the home before anyone washes. I mean more than once a week, anyway,' chimed in Fluffy, who had sauntered up to join them. 'I used to get fooled by people offering bowls of milk and I would go in, but not anymore.’

     'No,' maiowed Blackberry. 'It is the cow barn for me from now on.’

QUOTE 'In some parts of Europe, cattle were believed to acquire the gift of speech on Christmas Eve. It was however, dangerous for any human being to listen to their talk. Whoever did so would meet with misfortune..’ (Encyclopedia of Superstition). Apparently, the listening person might hear of their own death. It was believed that during the Holy Season of Christmas animals had foreknowledge and knew what might occur on the farm.

     'Wait for us. We're coming with you,' mewed Spew.

A damp warm smell met the cats’ delicate noses. This was not the farmyard of our playful childhoods that we read about in twee books. This was a farm with astringent and corrosive uric acid that threatened to burn the back of the throat, and rampant bacteria that slowly dissolved the wooden walls with its fecal acidity. Yet there were islands of comparative comfort and safety in the guise of heaped straw in one of the corners and in the loft above.

Ignoring the three cows chewing their cud, with nothing else to eat, the cats made their way up to the loft by careful and studied leaping. Spew climbed the ladder. She remarked on the health of the three beasts below.

     'What's up with the black and white one lying down?’

Even though the cats had recognised that there was a man seemingly dozing in the stored hay, they did not expect him to answer Spew's question.

     'I offered to buy it, but it was not for sale. It is probably going to die, so now the farmer has to sell it.’

‘I have heard of you. You are the glue-man's son or assistant, aren't you? Your father buys ill cattle and makes glue from their horns and hooves.’

     'That is why I am hiding, cats.’

     'You make them ill by offering to buy cattle that are not for sale!' hissed Blackberry. He arched his back and fixed the rising man with his piercing green eyes.

QUOTE 'To meet a black cat is usually thought to be fortunate, especially if it runs across the path of the observer. […] In East Yorkshire, while it is lucky to own a black cat, it is unlucky to meet one.' (Encyclopedia of Superstitions)

In America, it is white cats that were lucky and everything about black cats is to Americans, attributed to white cats and vice-versa; so Americans were appalled to see Europeans petting white cats and not minding if they crossed our paths from left to right or turning back on themselves.

     'Oh no you don't.' Blackberry mewled,  'You are not going to stroke me  three times for good luck to save your skin from the farmer.’

     'You will get no luck from Blackberry.' offered Fluffy haughty with her wisdom.

     'Too right!'  mewed Spew.  'He won't even enter anyone houses uninvited anymore. He just won't give anyone free luck.’

     'They keep getting ill. I am still wet from the last time!' moaned Blackberry.

Fluffy pondered for a while and then announced, 'You know what? If the villagers catch you and kill you, I might jump over your coffin so your soul is haunted by what you do.’

Spew laughed because he had noticed two hefty looking lads in the byre (barn) doorway looking up to the loft. His attention had been drawn by a warning low from one of the cows.

     'I reckon that's him.' said the tallest one with tousled hair.

     'I reckon it is, and crazy too. He's talking to the cows.' Neither of the lads had seen the cats half buried in the straw, only the looming, rising man.

     'Karma', lowed the black and white ailing cow before letting its head fall for the last time.

     - End -

Cattle diseases were, like those of human beings, often attributed to witchcraft. So, in medieval days, once the glue-man's son or assistant is caught he would be looking at being dunked in the village pond to see if he drowned or not. If he did drown he would be free of guilt for witchcraft and Fluffy would probably be chased out of the church where his coffin might lie for a while. In 1964, when the Radfords compiled their book, I wouldn't be surprised if offended people made him, or people using magic, look at a full moon through glass or something, or perhaps they might have handed 'magic' people a slippery mirror, hoping they might drop it and have seven years bad luck.

References

Encyclopedia of Superstitions, E. & M. A. Radford, edited by Christina Hole, 1974, London, Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers) Ltd. [1964]

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You made your bed so you lie in it!

[ 4 minute read ]

In my book, 'Encyclopedia of Superstitions' by E. & M.A. Radford, written in 1974, and edited by Christina Hole, there is an entry on 'Beds'; 'If three people take part in making one bed, someone will die in it within the year.'

Roald Dahl wote some short stories of mystery and intrigue. I think he might have had fun with this superstition. Either three siblings are eager for their parent's treasure and one of them lays on the bed later in the same year; or there might be a coroner's report stating 'Death by natural causes' and then it comes to light that the deceased's three offspring innocently, or nefariously, shared the housekeeping duties for one day in the last year, including making the bed.

It can get more intriguing if the bed-making occurred in Oxfordshire:

'If one day you should wed,

Turn your bed from foot to head.'

The three plotting siblings may inadvertently kill their ailing parent's new spouse.

By now, in any good story, the three siblings may even have advertised their assassin services with cards in telephone boxes across the UK (in the 1970s and 80s of course).

It was just an unfortunate series of events

In court:The house-help nervously chewed on her bottom lip.

     'I was told to take the day off because his children thought I was very kind but needed to take a bit of a break. Gor Blimey! I needed one!'

Later, the barrister in friendly, almost conversational tones asked the oldest sibling,

     'Your father was quite unwell by this time. Did you or your siblings help around the house?'

     'Yes, I believe we did on occasion.'

     'Clean the floors? Make the bed?'

     'Yes, Matilda, Mary and I shared the tasks when the help took a day off. We told her she needed one.'

     'Do you have much experience with housework?'

     'Good Gracious, no! We even had to share making the bed together.'

     'All three of you! Is it a big bed?'

     'No, not really, but it took all three of us to turn the mattress and then remake the bed with sheets and blankets. You know, sort of tuck everything in.'

     'Quite.'

***

It is unlucky to enter the bed on one side and leave it next morning by the other.

Joke:

Sister Mary was walking towards the chapel for early morning prayers when she suddenly stumbled.

     'Goodness! Did you get out of the bed the wrong side?' asked Sister Jude.

     'No, I just tripped' replied Sister Mary.

After prayers, Sister Mary, in the refectory, stumbled again and dropped her bowl as she moved towards a table to eat.

     'Goodness! Did you get out of bed the wrong side today?' asked Sister Grace.

     'No. The floor is uneven,' replied Sister Mary.

Throughout the day, Mary was asked the same question, 'Did you get out of bed the wrong side today?'

Eventually, Sister Mary was asked by Mother Rose. By now, Sister Mary was puzzled.

     'Why does everyone keep asking me if I got out of bed on the wrong side today, Mother Rose?' asked Sister Mary.

     'You're wearing the Bishop's shoes.' said Mother Rose.

***

In keeping with the secret tryst idea. 'In Northumberland, it was deemed unlucky for one person to be the sole owner of bees. There should be a partnership between a man and a woman of different households. Joint ownership by a man and his wife was not enough, presumably because they were considered to have been made one by marriage.' (Encyclopedia of Superstitions).

     'I am just going to see to the bees, dear.'

Sally, a superstitious woman, looked at her husband and then looked out the window at the flock of birds flying from left to right and thoughtfully nodded. 

     'That's fine dear. I have to pop out to make a phone call.' She knew there was a card with a telephone number on it in the phone box at the end of the lane that advertised 'Housekeeping Help by Three Siblings', and thought she might stay with her sister for a year or so.