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.

Information and the Internet.

Having recently said a few words about how the Christian faith is shamelessly manipulated to match indoctrinated American attitudes, I was pleased to see this on my YouTube home page:

It’s impossible to follow Jesus and be a Christian at the same time

Maybe it was intended as clickbait, but since it’s a rare example of something I consider not only axiomatic but transparently so, I won’t complain about this one.

*  *  *

I’ve noticed something else about YouTube recently. I’ve seen an increasing number of examples of self-professed experts explaining their position on something or other in a simple and rational form of words. And then they repeat that position using different words. And then they repeat it all a second time using different words again, and I find myself thinking ‘but you said all this three minutes ago and three minutes before that.’ I’ve little doubt that it’s a recommended practice – encouraged by Google, no doubt – to drag the video out as long as possible because one of the factors used to consider the ‘value’ of a video is retention. They want to keep people locked onto the video as long as possible because that, or so I’m reliably informed, increases the fee they can charge the advertisers.

This didn’t happen much back in the days when people derived their information from books published by responsible publishers. Good editors would look out for repetition and only allow it if they deemed it genuinely necessary. The world of information availability has changed greatly since the coming of the internet, and not always in a good way. The concept of monetization has changed all that, as it has in most aspects of life.

Sound Bites, a Welcome, and a Contradiction.

These two thoughts dropped into my head while I was fetching my first scotch last night. They don’t have to be anybody else’s thoughts, so take them or leave them.

 

On Reality

There is only one consciousness in the whole universe. The illusion of individuality arises from its desire to view all possibilities from innumerable angles.

 

On Capitalism (After Churchill)

Never in the field of human endeavour have so few owed so much to the discontent of so many.

*  *  *

I had my chin licked by an ageing greyhound today. He appeared to be excusing me for disturbing his position on the coffee shop floor. I did apologise to him.

*  *  *

I’ve made the 200 posts for the year a month early. It’s an interesting fact (to me, that is) that I have no truck with targets, believing them to be a pointless facet of modern times. I do, however, like statistics. It’s just another example of the two halves of my brain falling out.

Being the Reluctant Wimp.

We’re having the first taste of winter in the UK at the moment. Down here in the English Midlands the temperature today was low enough to be considered cold even by January standards. It’s been much worse further north.

It had me thinking of times past when several winters showed their meanest faces, and I realised how much stronger, braver, and mentally tougher I was back then when dealing with difficulties and emergencies in unusually harsh winter weather.

Now, as I descend into old age, I’m becoming quite the wimp. I’m brought to depression by every ice-cold blast. I want to go to bed and hibernate until spring instead of fronting up and dealing with whatever needs dealing with. I still do deal with them of course, when it’s really necessary, but not before I’ve realised that seeking an excuse to ignore the whole thing and say ‘I don’t care; what will be will be’ simply won’t do and reluctance must be overcome.

So should I be ashamed of losing the will to fight nature’s nastier side until it retires to a safe distance? I suppose I should and I suppose I do, but life is very different from what it was back in the day. For the most part my sole responsibility is to myself and my little world. There’s nobody out there to lend a hand, so maybe the best approach really is to say ‘I don’t care.’ (But only if I can get away with it.)

Right now the night is dark and very cold and I have one room in the house that is just about tolerable, and I worry about the birds and the animals stuck out in the fields with nowhere to go and get warm. Maybe I should make that post about the talkative techie I encountered in Ashbourne last week, or the way in which my perception of life since I moved to this house has become compartmentalised around certain people and events. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or maybe I should just stop talking about myself.

Time to see what YouTube has to offer. Maybe something will be watchable.

Two Sides of the Gender Coin.

When I was 19 (which was quite a long time ago) I worked with a man who told me one day that his wife wanted to get a job. His response was typical of the age: ‘No wife of mine is going out to work’ he said with much indignation. Well, this attitude has nuances.

The first is his assumption that he had the right to tell his wife what he would and wouldn’t allow. It’s worth remembering that although the Church of England allowed the bride’s undertaking to ‘obey’ her husband to be omitted from the marriage vows in 1928, it didn’t become normal practice until the 1980s. (I was a little older than 19 by then…)

The second concerns the accepted attitude to gender roles. My work colleague no doubt considered – as did many men in those days – that a wife’s place was in the home and nowhere else (except, perhaps, the performing of voluntary work which made no pecuniary contribution to the household and therefore broke no taboos.)

But there’s also the other side of the gender imperative. A husband considered it his duty to work in order to provide for his wife and family, and so having a working wife would have diluted that role and been injurious to his pride. Knowing the man in question, I suspect that was his major concern.

Things have changed now, of course. Wives are expected to work because relatively few husbands earn enough to provide the sort of lifestyle regarded as normal in modern developed economies. And I suspect that this development has largely been driven by the corporate world and its lackeys as part of its drive to rule society and become obscenely rich in consequence. That’s the part I dislike.

And therein lie the nuances, so take your pick. I expect people of my generation will tend to see the situation quite differently from the younger ones, and I’m tempted to think that there’s a competition going on here between what some people consider preferable and not preferable, and what other people consider normal and not normal.

Suffer the Little Children.

I had a bad night last night. It happens occasionally. I wake up in the dark and the bedclothes feel to be in a state of disarray. And then I feel disoriented, not knowing how my body aligns with the four walls of the room. I don’t know whether I’m chilled or not because some parts of me are and some not, so I sit up and look in the direction of the panel heater under the window. If the red light is on it means that the room should at least be tolerable, and at least I know which way I’m facing. And so I pull all available fabric around my recumbent form and go back to sleep.

When I got up I felt empty inside, as I do often these days. I thought about the impending Christmas season and asked whether it was worth acknowledging. I didn’t think so, but considered the idea of buying myself a present. But what do I want? Nothing, at least nothing I can afford. And when I went out to top up the birds’ feed table, I had to remove the first ice cap of the winter from the water bowl. Winter is not a pleasant experience in this house.

I decided to go for my morning walk, and as I strode down the lane I spotted a small group approaching from the opposite direction. It turned out to be a little girl of around 2 or 3 sitting astride a small pony being led by a woman, presumably her mother. The child stared at me as the gap closed, and when they turned into Bag Lane she waved. I waved back. And then her mother waved. They walked on and then the child turned to watch me over her shoulder. She waved again, which I returned again. And her mother waved again.

A sense of some substance added itself to my perception of life, and the 2½ mile walk was navigated at a slightly brisker pace. How I have come to realise that the presence and lack of inhibition in children can be such a light in the growing darkness of the times. (And why I think of mothers as being the most important people in society.)

Three Little Connected Notes.

While listening to some music on YouTube last night I was reminded of a question I’ve asked on this blog before, so I’m going to ask it again (using different words this time.) How does a composer know that if he writes a number of notes in a particular order, the effect on a person’s emotional state on hearing them played can be mightily profound. How does he know?

*  *  *

It will be my birthday in eleven days time and I’ve realised something quite disturbing: I’ve started to notice attractive women over 40. I think the end must surely be nigh.

*  *  *

And to join the two previous notes together, I’ve been hearing Roy Orbison singing the song It’s Over all day today. I’m not aware of coming across any reference to either the singer or the song in a very long time, which makes it an odd coincidence.

America's Answer to Cirque du Soleil.

I see the American political scene continues to resemble a third rate circus which can boast no more than an endless supply of clowns throwing custard pies around to amuse its eager audience – in this case the citizens of the free world.

The latest spat is between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene (or Marjorie 'Traitor' Greene as Trump is now inclined to label her, calling on that ultra-sharp wit for which he is justly famous. It seems that anybody who disagrees with Donald these days is labelled a traitor. I suppose it’s meant to have maximum effect on a population brainwashed from the cradle to believe that patriotism is on a par with godliness, since the world 'traitor' is commonly understood to be the opposite of 'patriot'.)

Talking of godliness, Ms Greene’s response to Donald’s invective was 'I don’t worship Donald Trump. I worship God, and Jesus is my saviour.' I expect something as weak and frankly ludicrous as that was meant to appeal to the single brain cell shared by the mentally challenged denizens of the Bible Belt. Can’t think of any other reason why she would aim so low with her dish of custard.

And of course, there remains the inevitable irony: if Jesus of Nazareth was anything like the character pictured in the canonical gospels, I doubt he would have had anything to do with a firebrand Republican politician from Georgia, USA. And I expect Donald the Dunderhead would have been one of the money changers he swept out of the temple.

Contrasting Habits.

On my walk this morning I was approached in a friendly manner by one dog, one cat (most unusually), one donkey, one horse, two cows, one woman from the village, and one man from the village. That’s a lot for a morning walk, isn’t it? Guess which ones were welcomed in return 

*  *  *

It occurred to me today that when we refer to people’s parents we always call them ‘mum and dad.’ (Or mops and pops if you’re a southerner, mother and father if you’re being formal, mater and pater if you’re very posh and at least 100 years old, and ma and pa if you’re American.) What’s odd is that in western culture it has generally been the norm to place the masculine ahead of the feminine. So why the difference?

The Dubious Side of YouTube.

There’s a thumbnail in my YouTube recommendations which is titled:

What Would Happen If All the Scandinavian Countries Combined?

It’s accompanied by a map showing the ‘Scandinavian countries.’ Only it’s wrong because it includes Finland, which isn’t in Scandinavia. This is ignorance and therefore regrettable, but at least it’s probably a genuine and relatively common misapprehension, so there’s little harm done.

What is much worse is the habit of peddling outright lies in order to get clicks. A recent example was ‘King Charles III Abdicates!’ No he didn’t, and there’s no reason to think that he might have done. This has become so common now that the practice of lying to get clicks is apparently regarded as acceptable.

When did this happen? It’s long been accepted in modern civilisations that deliberately lying on a public platform in order to make money is at least frowned upon and usually illegal. This practice on YouTube is akin to those unscrupulous peddlers of coloured water in the Old West who assured the ignorant that their magic elixir was a guaranteed panacea and particularly efficacious against rattlesnake bites.

And money is what it’s all about. The more clicks, the more advertising revenue, so both the YouTuber and Google are happy. It’s inevitable to conclude that it’s why Google apparently makes no attempt to put a stop to it, and why YouTube has become an object of suspicion as much as a means of acquiring information and entertainment.

Losing Community Approbation.

I blotted my copy book while out clearing the road grids today – twice.

First I mistook a little boy for a little girl. ‘What’s your name, miss?’ I asked. ‘Bear.’ ‘Sorry, did you say Belle?’ ‘Bear,’ intoned his mother. ‘He’s a boy.’ Whoops (but he did have long curly blond hair and that’s as good an excuse as any.)

And then I saw Lydia coming down the road with her little girl (I think) and her new whippet puppy. It being the fourth time I’ve encountered Lydia at school run time, I felt that sufficient familiarity had been established to regale her with the Lydia the Tattooed Lady song. She was unimpressed. She carried on walking and muttered something I didn’t catch. And she declined to allow Gwen the dog to come over and smother me in canine affection, even though Gwen the dog seemed desperate to do so.

I think I’m becoming ever further removed from the tolerance of the Shire dwellers, but that’s no problem since there are so few of them I want to be tolerated by anyway. I don’t mind being thought a fruitcake, you see, but it does concern me a little that I might be becoming creepy in my advanced years. I wouldn’t like to become – or even be thought – creepy, but it’s such a difficult characteristic to define, isn’t it? What’s creepy to one person is eccentric to another.

Still, it’s life and life only, and as long as the horses and dogs accept me for what I am, that will suffice.

Clued-Up YouTube.

This is an amusing little example of how well some YouTubers know their subject. The title reads:

This gorilla is seeing a human baby for the first time.

The picture shows a woman’s arms holding a young baby out to show it to an Orang-Utan.

A Techie Turncoat and Barmy Bureaucrats.

I met a man today who’s spent his working life to date as a tech consultant. He was probably in his mid to late forties. He told me that when he started out he loved the ingenuity of modern technology and enjoyed working with it, but now he feels very differently. He said it’s moving too quickly, it’s too full of glitches, and it’s allowing all manner of ne’er-do-wells to know your business and habits. And that enables them to cheat you, manipulate you, and steal from you. He said it’s a world he doesn’t want to work in any longer and is looking for ways to scale back and live a simpler life. So maybe I’ve been getting it right all along.

*  *  *

I read this morning of a woman in London who took a used cardboard envelope to a public bin to dispose of it. She found the bin full, but there was a pile of cardboard next to it awaiting collection so she put the envelope on top and thought no more about it. And then she received a letter from the local council accusing her of fly tipping and fining her £1,000 which she hasn’t got (lots of people haven’t.) This is the wild, wondrous, and wonky way of bureaucracy in modern Britain. The cataract is beginning to look inviting.

 

*  *  * 

I wish I could remember where I put my sense of humour and my aptitude for a neat turn of phrase.

On Posts Made and Not Made.

I lost some money on Sunday at the retail park in Uttoxeter. As part of my latest crusade against the system (it’s a use it or lose it thing) I decided to pay cash for my purchases in Tesco. The change was £4.25 but I forgot to pick it out of the tray when I left. I’ve lost several things on that retail park and have decided that it has a bad vibe about it.

But then I met two lovely horses accompanied by two young girls at the other end of the park, so I chose to consider the matter of good and bad fortune to be in balance after all. I’ve never seen a horse on a retail park before.

*  *  *

I considered making a post about last night’s strange dream in which a man committed suicide and homicide in a single action. I used to make quite a few posts about strange dreams back in the early days of the blog, but I doubt the details would be of interest to anybody else. I can’t think for the life of me what it was supposed to mean, especially since the Lady B made a brief appearance at the end.

I also considered making a post about the Israeli hardliners’ latest descent into the sewer of mediaevalism. I’m not going to do so because it would be hard to avoid mentioning the name of the most objectionable of said body of ne’er-do-wells, and I don’t want it polluting my blog. They say that words have power, and I think they probably do.

The Sprint and Stumble of Emma Watson.

Emma Watson is coming in for a lot of stick on YouTube lately, and she received a particularly stinging rebuke from her old friend and mentor Joanne Rowling recently because of something she said in an award ceremony speech. There are now a lot of pictures of Ms Watson looking upset on YouTube’s recommendations pages, and it’s causing a certain dichotomy in my view of her.

The thing is, you see, over the course of the Harry Potter franchise the character of Hermione Granger was my ideal child, my ideal adolescent, and ultimately my ideal mature woman. I know full well that it’s a big mistake to confuse a character with the actor performing it, but I was inevitably left with a warm impression of the lady Emma.

But all that changed quickly when it became evident that, having virtually owned the biggest spotlight in the film franchise, she set out to achieve mainstream starlet immortality, first by resorting to some dubious (in my opinion) modelling, and then by taking up an activist stance and revealing what I saw as a juvenile and rather silly nature. And so I went off Emma Watson big time. Fine, you might say, Emma Watson is just an actor, she’s no concern of mine, so let the whole thing go and think no more about. And so I did, until now.

The problem for me is that I separate cause and effect in such matters. I can’t just say ‘Emma Watson brought all this criticism on herself so she deserves the brickbats. End of story.’ When I see somebody being attacked for views and behaviour which they held honestly, if a little immaturely, such an attack feels unjust and my sympathy gene is immediately aroused. Occasionally I have seen that tendency as a fault, but it’s who I am and I’m not likely to change now. I don’t even want to change. Why should I?

And so that’s why I want to have a long confabulation with Ms Watson to see whether my imperfect INFJ mind can say something to help. It isn’t going to happen, of course, but at least I managed to get a blog post out of it.

Taking Refuge in the Cryptids.

I have time to make a post tonight, but as luck – good or bad – would have it, I have nothing to make a post about because nothing of consequence has befallen me today. I suppose I could augment the post stats to the tune of one by saying:

The views near and far around the Shire today were decorated by countless tracts of arboreal gold glowing in the still, misty air.

I like that sort of autumn day. They’re atmospheric, especially if you can find a wood to walk through. I’m a little suspicious of woodland these days, though. My forays into the nature of reality have led me to consider the question of cryptids, you see, and I watched a video last night about the strange sightings on Cannock Chase.

Cannock Chase is a large area of forest and heath not far from where I was brought up, and one of the subjects of such sightings was of the creature known as ‘dogman’ (although they referred to it as a vampire in the documentary, which is something quite different and just goes to show how much ignorance is frequently encountered in the documentary form.)

The point is, however, that dogman is pretty big, horribly black, and presumed to be homicidal when it’s hungry. It isn’t something you’d want to encounter while wandering through the woods on a still, misty day in autumn. But fortunately there was an expert on hand to give us the rational explanation for dogman sightings.

He said that a Red Deer stag (cut to a picture of the Monarch of the Glen replete with antlers) can look surprisingly like a dogman when it stands on its rear legs after dark. Are Red Deer stags in the habit of standing on their rear legs after dark? Does something with the head of a deer (replete with antlers) really look like a hound from hell with a humanoid body? I suspect that this particular expert was not being entirely rational (and it’s not the first time I’ve said that) and had probably been gorging on Far Side cartoons.

The Lying Channel and a Little Mystery.

I complained in an earlier post about the sheer fakeness proliferating on YouTube, and one aspect in particular is bothering me. More and more videos on YouTube are being introduced by thumbnails containing outright, and often outrageous, lies. One recently claimed that King Charles had just abdicated, another that a city in England was ‘ablaze’ due to rioting amounting to civil war, and several others claiming that a well known celebrity had died, only they hadn’t.

It troubles me that people are prepared to lie to this extent purely to get more hits and therefore more money from the advertising, but that’s just the latest example of a sad truth about the modern age – that the pursuit of money outweighs the application of basic standards in nearly all circumstances. What troubles me more is that nobody seems to want to put a stop to it, which indicates that lying on a public platform has become the new norm and is therefore acceptable. Well, not to me it isn’t. The importance of truth is ever paramount.

*  *  *

I put a comment on a YouTube video recently. (I often do.) It was a simple exposition of a point I wished to make and the grammar, syntax, and spelling were –as you would expect, I hope – impeccable. And it was written in English, as you would also expect, since it’s the only language I know well enough to engage with people. Yesterday I received a reply written in one of the East Asian languages, so I clicked ‘translate.’ This is what it said:

‘Your Japanese is perfect but your English is a little casual.’

What the hell am I supposed to make of that?

Glitches and a Dubious Celebration.

It began when I woke up this morning. I looked at the clock and saw that it was forty minutes later than the time I’d set on my phone alarm for a wake up call. My alarm has always been reliable, and quite loud. And if I don’t silence it in the correct manner it goes off again ten minutes later, so either I was sleeping too heavily or the phone had a glitch. And that was only the start.

Next up was the computer behaving like a right ne’er-do-well, and then the car exhibited a few glitches, and when I attempted to pay for my groceries in Sainsbury’s, their computer system was faulty and it took six attempts before the transaction was complete. ‘It’s like this all over the country,’ said the cashier. And then there were other misfortunes which I won’t bother to relate. (Although I might the mention the pigeon which had become trapped in one of the charity shops and appeared most distraught, poor lady.) It was that sort of day.

It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is this all just coincidence, or is it the configuration of the heavenly bodies, or is there something up with what we generally rely on as reality? I’ve been surprised over the last few years by how many people I’ve heard say ‘I think the matrix is crumbling’ and I’m quite sure that some of them weren’t joking. I used to think that only strange people like me said things like that.

*  *  *

Today, November 5^th, is Bonfire Night in the UK. It’s a celebration remembering the day in 1605 when a group of Catholic activists planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament with thirty six kegs of gunpowder, with the intention of killing the King and many other notable personages. They failed because somebody snitched on them anonymously, and the man designated to light the fuses – one Guy Fawkes Esq – was caught. He was subsequently executed most horribly and now we celebrate his failure by lighting bonfires, setting off fireworks, and burning effigies of Mr Fawkes himself. (They’re simply known as ‘guys’, as in ‘penny for the guy, mister.’) For my part, I’m inclined to investigate the cost of having a T shirt printed with Guy Fawkes for Prime Minister.

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The fakery, the naked lies, the disinformation, the persistent irrationality, and the sheer preponderance of half-baked trivia which now constitutes a large percentage of YouTube’s output are getting on my nerves. I’m seriously considering giving it up.

On Ladies and God and Things.

Today was a day of Lydias, Lady Bs, and a near-multitude of women called Megan. The coincidence of so many Megans suddenly appearing in my life encouraged me to investigate the name. Seems it’s the Welsh diminutive of Margaret and comes from the Greek for ‘pearl’, which is odd because Megans and Margarets are very different sorts of people.

Did I ever mention that my name at birth and for the first eight years of my life was Jeffrey Godwin? If you trace both names back to their Germanic roots, they both mean something approximating to ‘friend of God.’ No wonder it got changed.

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I watched a video recently on the differences between the UK and the USA on the meaning and values of Christianity. She said that in America it’s considered good to be wealthy because it indicates that God is pleased with you. That being the case, I wonder how they circumvent Matthew 19.24. Or could it be that Matthew 19.24 has been redacted from the American version of the canonical Gospels?

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When I went to bed last night I suddenly remembered, for no apparent reason, the film The Elephant Man. In particular I remembered the poignant scene near the end when Mr Merrick decides he wants to go to sleep lying down, knowing that the cranial condition to which he is prey will kill him if he does. That’s why he’s doing it, of course. I remembered the sense of the moment when he said it, and as I was climbing into bed I felt the same sense. I thought it entirely possible that I might not wake up in the morning, but I suppose I must have done because several people waved at me today.

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My Lady of the Day, with whom I’m becoming a little fascinated and possibly even enamoured, is Mary Magdalene.

Preparing the Answer.

You know, I realised only yesterday, when I was putting a glass of scotch and a pastry out for the little people at midnight, that my birthday falls precisely four weeks after Halloween. Fancy not noticing that before, and at my age too.

On similar note. I’m waiting for somebody in the Shire to ask me: ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ I have my answer ready:

‘That’s like asking me whether I believe in ghosts and whether I believe in God. There are two answers to all three. The first is “I don’t do belief.” And the second is “It’s complicated.”’

And then I’ll walk away with the sort of detached air which befits the sigma INFJ.

Trump and his Qualifications.

I was reading this morning of King Donald’s massive reduction in the USA’s immigration quota, and particularly of his intention to give priority to white South Africans. Sounds a bit racist, doesn’t it?

‘Oh no,’ says Donald, ‘it’s not racist at all. It’s because white people in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in large numbers by nasty black people. I have photographs to prove it.’

And then he smugly produces photographs of body bags stacked up and awaiting disposal, and expects us to believe it. Meanwhile, Reuters points out that the photographs didn’t come from South Africa; they came from the Democratic Republic of Congo thousands of miles to the north. They have nothing to do with South Africa. The White House, apparently, declined to comment.

So I’m still a little confused as to why the majority of American people voted to make Donald their President, but I have a theory.

(A Little Aside: I think I know why Donald wants to take possession of Canada and Greenland. Not satisfied with being merely King of the USA, his ego craves the title Emperor of the Americas. He wants to be added to that star-spangled list along with Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Ming the Merciless. Donald the Dunderhead fits nicely. But I digress…)

The theory: We all know that the world is mostly ruled by idiots, psychopaths, cheats, and liars, so Donald probably has the perfect qualifications in the minds of the majority of Americans, he being able to tick all four boxes with supreme confidence. And who can blame them? America is, after all, still a fledgling culture. It didn’t live through the Middle Ages and learn the error of its ways as most of the rest of the world did. Could that explain it, I wonder.

(And I must just mention again that some of the finest people I have ever known have been Americans, just not the majority.)