Considering the Flu Mystery.

I read in the news this morning that admissions to hospitals in the UK for cases of flu have risen 50% over the same period last year. And every year at around this time the news is full of wailing about the immense pressure under which the poor, benighted NHS is put throughout the flu season. I ask myself why that should be because in all my life I’ve never known anyone be admitted to hospital to be treated for flu.

When I was in my mid-forties I contracted a bad bout of it. It was winter and I was living in an old house which had no heating other than a gas fire in the living room. I took three days off work and rested up. In addition, for the only time in my life, I spent one whole day in bed. And then I went back to work on the fourth day. It was an unpleasant experience but something which simply needed to be got through until it burned itself out. And that was how everybody I’d ever known handled it.

So what’s different about now? Is it to do with the increasing age demographic? That hardly seems likely to explain such a rise because the age demographic isn’t going up that much. Are modern flu viruses much stronger than they used to be? Is there something about modern social habits which leads people to be more exposed to it? Or are we becoming so wimpy that we expect advanced medical treatment for everything from cancer to a wart on the left little finger?

Maybe it’s a combination of all of them. The next time I see my doctor I must ask him.

(And I still couldn’t find anything amusing to say about this one. I’m sure I would have done once. Then again, my house is uncomfortable tonight because the bitingly cold wind is in the east, and that’s always bad news.)

When Jesus Meets the Muslims.

Among the plethora of idiotic nonsense uploaded to YouTube, the following one caught my eye. It purports to come from a man who claims to have had a near death experience and went to heaven (as all NDEs do.) The video reporting his encounter is titled:

Jesus told me what he does with all the Muslims

I doubt it was a happy and accommodating experience for them, although there are several reasons why I didn’t waste my time watching it.

It raises several contentious points, of course, most of which should be obvious. But the first thing that occurred to me was how Jesus would know who is Muslim and who isn’t. Anybody can claim to be or not to be Muslim, just as anybody can claim to be or not to be Christian or Buddhist (Hindu and Jewish are different because bloodline comes into the picture with those.) Would a woman wearing a hijab, for example, be unable to contest the accusation of being Muslim?

And that leads me to a wholly unconnected question: There are several states in which the wearing of Muslim traditional dress is forbidden by law, and that includes the hijab. How would they respond, I wonder, if some major fashion designer set about popularising the hijab – presumably in gay colours and patterns – until it became a popular fashion statement? I truly wish somebody would do so just to find out.

And a second issue raises its head: I’ve noticed that there are a lot of anti-Islam videos appearing on YouTube lately. Given the high sensitivity to anything which can be viewed as being in any way prejudiced in the modern world, I’m surprised that Google aren’t being pressured to remove them on the grounds of ‘hate speech’ or ‘inciting racial or religious intolerance.’ I’m not suggesting they should, just surprised that it isn’t happening.

My own position is simple: I detest the excesses of Islamism for obvious reasons, as all reasonable people do, and I would object most strongly to the imposition of shariah law in what is effectively a secular state. But if someone chooses be Muslim and follow its dress code, I really don’t give a hoot. (Some people might remember my effusive praise of a student nurse called Sabs back around the period of my kidney operation. She wore a black hijab. It suited her.)

Flat Blog Blues.

I’m feeling a little troubled lately because my blog has gone flat, and I’m asking myself why it’s gone flat. Well, it’s like this:

I write the blog in order to have something to write. Writing has been in my blood since I was a teenager and has had several outlets down the years. It came to its high point when I was writing fiction between 2002 and 2011, and when the stories ran out I turned to blogging instead.

Let me make clear the fact that I don’t expect to change the world with the blog. I don’t see myself as an ‘influencer’ (in fact, I would be horrified if anybody called me that.) But I do like, for whatever reason, to present myself through it. I like to throw out to the universe what I am, how I feel, what my opinions are on matters important to me, how the environment in which I live functions, and occasionally what little stories I tell myself to make the inner me more worth the bother of being here. And so the blog has to be a picture of me in words – all of me (or at least most of me.)

One aspect of me that has always been prominent has been a tendency to see an undercurrent of humour in most situations. The humour was usually subtle, mostly based on sarcasm, innuendo, irony, and the surreal, and so it naturally found its way onto the blog in a significant number of posts. Not all obviously, because some subjects don’t allow even a minor diversion into humour, but I often found something funny even in the darker situations. And that’s what’s missing these days.

So what’s causing it? The health issues I can cope with, even though some of them are inconvenient at times. The descent into winter with its short days, long nights, cold accommodation, and general grimness doesn’t help, but I’ve felt that way about winter for much of my life and the humour has still managed to pop its head above the ice now and then. Being alone so much of the time can be a bit galling now and then, but not often. Mostly I prefer being alone and having my space to myself, and there are so few people I would consider amenable company that aloneness is my natural state. And my current near-obsession with mortality is not, in itself, a big issue because it’s never morbid. It’s part and parcel of my lifelong drive to discover the true nature of life and existence in general.

And yet the black cloud of unease and apprehension still hangs over my head for much of the time, often descending to darker depths. I suppose it could be that the issues mentioned above coalesce into a weight that’s troublesome to carry around all the time. And there’s one that I didn’t mention in the paragraph above: so many of the functional things I have around me are breaking down now, and when you feel you don’t have much longer to go the temptation is to hope that they will stay with you long enough to see you out, rather than accepting the trouble and expense of replacing them.

I wanted to close this post with something amusing, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Language and the Cheap Shot.

Something which so irritates me on YouTube are those videos which say: Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? And then they show Japanese people trying their best and failing miserably. So what do we do then? Why, mock them of course, even if under our breath. (And maybe feel superior.)

Surely it must be obvious to everybody that different languages have sounds which don’t appear in other languages, and so the relative positions of tongue, teeth, and palate to which native speakers are habituated are different. It’s well known, for example, that the Japanese have difficulty with the letter ‘l’ and the hard ‘g’ because they haven’t been trained to use the sounds those letters make. And it works both ways.

So here’s a new rule for Google to apply: Any video which says Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? must be accompanied by another one which says Can English people pronounce these difficult Japanese words? And then we can mock ourselves as well. (And maybe feel inferior.)

On Autumn and Its Faces.

I’ve noticed throughout my life that the autumn season mostly wears a small but distinctly different set of faces. This evening I decided that there are four.

The first is the pallid face when the light remains constant due to the universal cloud cover. It’s undistinguished and often wet. It drags us through the day in sombre mood and further hastens the dread of approaching winter.

The second is the jolly face when the sun bestows its beneficence from a pale blue sky and casts its glow on the warm colours of landscape and building alike. Myriad shades of red and yellow woodland delight the eye, and the low evening sun turns the dark tree trunks red while casting old limestone buildings in a shade of old gold.

The third is the face of vaporous air, less bright than the jolly face but still bright enough to encourage the dying leaves to glow in a final celebration of the inevitability of demise. And that’s the one which reaches the olfactory organs, filling the head with the musty scent of dead leaves on the woodland floor.

Finally there’s the magical face late in the year when river valleys fill with dense white mist, and floating above the fluid but impenetrable whiteness are the topmost branches of skeletal trees. There’s no colour to be seen anywhere, but there is mystery. That’s my favourite, and that’s the one I saw at twilight today.

And still I ask whether any of it is truly real. And still I ask whether anything lies beyond it, and if so what. And still I try to place it all within the concept of universal consciousness, and maybe one day I’ll know.

The Near Miss.

The route from my village to Uttoxeter begins with a narrow country lane of around two miles in length. The width varies from place to place and has quite a few blind bends, so a certain amount of caution is required. I drove it this morning.

The day was fine and dry with a low, bright sun shining from an almost wholly blue sky. It’s the sort of condition which produces the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows, and even at midday – the time I usually go to Uttoxeter – the sun is low enough to require the use of the car’s visor to keep the blinding sun out of one’s eyes.

And then there is the problem of road glare. We’d had rain the previous night and so the road was damp. That problem is best addressed with the wearing of polarising sunglasses because they’re the best at reducing glare. But the problem with sunglasses of any kind is that they make everything else darker too, and so anything in a shaded spot is almost invisible.

I was driving around a right hand blind bend when I saw her: an elderly lady only just visible in the gloom bestowed by the shadow of a hedgerow tree. She was walking towards me along the edge of the lane and my driver’s door was level with her before I knew she was there. Had she been only a little further out into the lane my car would have hit her before I’d even had reason to brake. I was driving more slowly than usual but it would still have been an awful accident.

And so there was a lesson to be learned on both sides. To a driver one would have to say: ‘be very, very careful when negotiating a bend that’s in shadow.’ And to a pedestrian one might refer to Eric Idle’s famous song beginning Always look on the bright side of life. Maybe somebody should record a new version for us country dwellers beginning Always walk on the bright side of the lane.

Unhappy Birthday.

It was my birthday yesterday. I cleaned the kitchen sink by way of celebration. The rest of the day was a liturgy of misadventures and malfunctions. In fact, it was a pretty awful day one way and another, possibly the worst of the year so far.

What surprised me, though, was my reaction to remembering of the fact, which I didn’t do until I came into my office first thing and saw the little parcel and card sitting on the chest of drawers next to my desk.

The fact is, you see, that until I reached the dizzy age of 30 I had always welcomed birthdays because they were carrying me forth to a time when I could feel my adult status to be fully vindicated. After that I gave them little attention, but this year my immediate reaction was to feel depressed. I don’t think a birthday has ever actually depressed me before. Maybe it was because it brought me to the age my mother was when she died of cancer, but I’m not convinced. I think it’s simply the fact that I’m unsuited to being old. And the period covering November, December, and January is my least favourite time of year.

But at least my kitchen sink is clean, for now.

Lost in Uncertainties.

I once wrote a post proposing the idea that nothing actually exists as we perceive the definition of ‘existence.’ It was a very simple proposition: The past doesn’t exist because it’s gone; the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t happened yet; and the concept of ‘now’ doesn’t exist because the flow of time never stops.

But of course, the counter argument is that it’s a matter of how we perceive the phenomenon we call ‘now.’ We tend to regard it, rather lazily I suppose, as a fixed concept. The boss might say ‘I don’t want it tomorrow, or next week, or even in an hour’s time. I want it now.’ And that’s the simple reason why certain people of moderate wisdom argue that now is the only thing that exists. It’s just a matter of understanding that ‘now’ is a feature of existence which is in a state of continuous motion.

That’s fine, but existential enquiry gets more complicated than that. We could argue the case that solidity has no objective reality, and that colour is not a quality of an object but is created entirely in the brain. We could consider the theory that every fact of existence – past, present, and future – still exists because experiences do not move through us with the passage of time, but that it is actually us who move through a permanent state of experiences. And that’s before we consider the nature of time itself, the study of which I admit goes over my head. And where in all this is the dimension generally held under the all-encompassing banner of ‘spirituality’? That’s where the edge of the continental shelf is reached and beyond it is only unknown depth and impenetrable darkness, some of which certain people claim to have explored. But how do you know whether to believe them or not, and whether their findings were truly real?

And that’s the point of this post. I’ve been engaged in existential – and particularly spiritual – enquiry ever since I saw through certain absurdities inherent in standard Christian doctrine at the age of about 12. I’ve gained many insights but I still have a massive jigsaw on the table before me with only a few of the pieces in the right place. (At least I think they’re in the right place.)

But now I’m growing tired of it all. I’m considering whether I should shut it all out and concentrate on the delights of nature, the fortunes of my local football team, and whether there is a person somewhere in this world who might one day make me a baked Alaska. And time is running short.

I don’t know whether I can shut the matter of existential enquiry inquiry in a locked box and put it away; it’s too big a component of who I am. But I think I might try.

Tricks and Trash.

I was browsing my YouTube recommendations this afternoon and learned a few interesting facts. One channel, for example, informed me that the streets in China are littered with dead bodies and the country is in catastrophic meltdown. Another said that Paris is little more than a pile of shattered masonry because the city is collapsing. New York is also collapsing because huge gangs of angry people are setting fire to everything. And China is currently preparing for war with Japan. It didn’t take long to find those four. YouTube is full of outrageous claims like that because clicks are profitable, which is preferable to being authentic.

I was mildly disappointed that I never came across ‘Aliens ate my hamster’, but reasoned that even the average YouTuber would know that that story was debunked about fifty years ago.

So then I started to compile a list of the phrases used by YouTubers to convince the gullible that there’s something deliciously hidden to be found, and this video will let you in on the secret. Surprisingly they were few and far between in the couple of minutes I was looking, and so I’ve only picked up three so far. There’s usually more than that. They are:

… will shock you

… which they don’t want you to know

… it’s not what you think

I’ll keep looking and add some more another time.

I find it sad that a platform with the potential of YouTube should have degenerated into having a large proportion of its output clearly aimed at those for whom The National Enquirer has become too highbrow, but it appears that there’s a growing consensus that it’s just the way the western world’s mentality has progressed over the past few decades.

*  *  *

And I think I need to put a notice up somewhere in the village:

Lost: JJ’s sense of humour. Please check your sheds and outbuildings, and if you find it call this number urgently. No reward, I’m afraid, except that attaching to the attainment of virtue.

When Money is a Distant Irrelevance.

Very many moons ago when I was writing my fiction, an indie publisher (of sorts) took four of my short stories and said: ‘If JJ Beazley wrote a story about watching paint dry, I bet it would be interesting.’ That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it (even if the editor involved was training to become a Catholic priest and might have had as much literary nous as Dougal Maguire.)

But then this week my daughter told me that whenever I relate the latest goings on in my little world, I always make it an interesting story. She certainly has more nous than Dougal Maguire so maybe I should take the compliment seriously after all.

Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t go all out to make a living out of my fiction, since it’s the one thing I apparently do passably well. It’s because it was never written for monetary reward. I had something like twenty five stories published by different levels of the indie press – some of them more than once – and had two of them included in ‘best of’ anthologies, and yet I think my total earnings from the lot amounted to no more than about £200. The novel and novella which I self-published are available online at all the main book retailers and they’ve enjoyed a similar lack of attention.

And that’s fine by me. I was never ensnared by the pecuniary principle which so obsesses and rules modern culture, you see. I only ever wanted to do what I wanted to do at the speed and in the way I wanted to do it. Money never really entered the picture because my writing habit occupied a part of my mind far distant from that in which monetary reward lies.

But I did take up the challenge of writing a story about watching paint dry. It’s here if anybody wants to read it.