Down and Out in Dull Britannia.

After ten days of weather that would have been respectable in July, the rollercoaster that is the British climate these days has plunged again. Temperatures are back down in the low fifties and they’re even forecasting the likelihood of a frost tomorrow night. Today has been unremittingly cold, wet, dull and windy.

Taken together with my lamentable physical state and – maybe worst of all – the fact that I might have hurt the Lady B’s feelings, the resultant mood does not augur well for cheery blog posts.

Maybe a hot bath and a few scotches later will rekindle the old passion for a bit of silliness. Doubt it, though.

Being Inconveniently Un-British.

The TV at lunchtime, at least on the main BBC channel, was utterly swamped with the Queen’s Jubilee. There must have been hundreds of cameras, technicians and presenters in every corner of the land, covering pageants, street parties and a whole range of other events. They interviewed countless members of the public, and that was what I found interesting.

There they all were, out in the cold, murky, wet streets of an unusually cold, murky and wet June day here in Britain. Thousands upon thousands of them, all wearing union flag hats, union flags shirts, union flag trousers - and waving union flags, of course. And they all looked so happy and involved. Why?

I decided it must be an identity thing. These people were clearly connecting at quite a deep level with a national and cultural identity, and I suppose they were connecting on some level with each other in the process. That’s what I can’t do. That’s my failing (well, one of them.)

I can see myself as being British at a fairly shallow level – if I’m watching an international sports event, for example, or pointing out to damn Yankees how superior we Brits are. But that’s just kidding, a bit of lightweight fun, nothing to take seriously. These people were being serious.

I can identify with being me, I can identify with being a committed member of a partnership, and I can identify with being a compassionate and concerned member of the range of sentient beings that inhabit planet earth. But I find it irrational to connect closely with an identity that depends on a leader I didn’t choose and a land boundary established over a thousand years ago by people I didn’t know.

So there you have it. That’s my failing, the guilt that hangs heavily off my shoulders. And maybe it’s why I’m an example of that fairly rare animal, the extrovert loner.

Waving, Not Drowning.

It’s twenty hours since I made a blog post. That’s a long time for me.

I felt rough yesterday, in ways I’ve never felt before. I kept thinking that it was simply a result of having overdone the manual work during last week’s fine weather. I thought the fatigue problem was on its way out, but it seems it wasn’t and I overstepped the mark. You’re not supposed to do that, apparently, but it’s an easy mistake to make. Gardens don’t wait for fatigue problems to go away!

Nevertheless, it had me wondering again – musing on the question of mortality and death, and how I feel about it all. It wasn’t morbid musing, just philosophical and practical. I keep wondering lately whether I have anything left to do in this life, whether there are any more adventures to be had, any more aspirations to achieve, any more connections to be made, anything else to contribute, any sparks left to ignite the will to push forward. I’m still a long way short of the average age for shuffling off, but so what? Is that any reason to hang on pointlessly?

No, not morbid, just curious.

To some extent it’s been the story of my life – always looking for the next spark to come along so I can grab it and ignite the next phase. I’m not the most patient of people and I find the doldrums tiresome.

Now I’m mixing my metaphors, which won’t do, so I think it’s time for lunch.

Learning the Rules of Lonership.

The village Jubilee celebrations have been much in evidence this afternoon. The village hall and school are only about a hundred yards up the lane, and the bottom end of the festivity site is almost opposite my house. Part of me wanted to go, but there were several personal reasons why it would have been a bad idea. The main one is private, but there's another that might be of interest in a general sense:

I’ve been a bit of a loner all my life, and if there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s this:

Being alone in a crowd is fine as long as it’s a random crowd – say, a town centre, a theatre or a football match. Such crowds are made up of unrelated individuals and groups, so most of them don’t know each other. A loner mingles easily in a crowd like that.

Something like the village Jubilee event is different. There, everybody is with a group, and most of those groups are well known to each other. It’s a community thing, almost like an extended family. Being alone in such a crowd imparts a heavy sense of isolation which even I find unpleasant. I’ve been in that situation many times and the principle holds true almost without exception. And I’ve found – also virtually without exception – that it’s a myth to suggest that people in such situations make the lone person welcome. Generally, they don’t.

In the final analysis, you have to be who you are and know what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s what comes of following your own road, and that can’t be bad, can it?

The Mountain Approaches.

I was flicking through the TV channels while I was having my lunch, and came across a re-run of an old Inspector Morse episode. I watched it for ten minutes and saw the most remarkable thing.

There was a scene in which Morse meets a young woman off a train at Oxford station. She’s in some way connected with his investigation, so he drives her out to the countryside where he can talk to her quietly and in pleasant surroundings. It suddenly hit me that she looked almost identical to somebody I know.

The shape of her face was the same, the set of her eyes was the same, her body type was the same, her body language was the same, her hairstyle was the same, the timbre of her voice was the same, even her accent was the same. The only slight difference was that her hair wasn’t quite as dark. Here before my startled eyes on the TV screen was the very person who has been causing me a little disquiet of late.

And then it amused me to think ‘If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain...’

It also occured to me that sometimes we see what we want to see.

The Backbeat.

It bugs me. For something like fifty years now, the tyranny of the backbeat has held sway. It has defined the mediocrity of mainstream popular music. If you want music for a middle of the road audience, especially if it’s only to be a vague presence in the background, you have to have a boring drum kit playing a boring backbeat.

I have nothing against rhythm. I like rhythm, especially when it’s being provided by something like the bodhran or the tabla. It’s mediocrity I have a problem with.

I heard a backbeat thumping across the school playing field from the vicinity of the village hall this morning, which just about clinched my decision not to take part in the Jubilee celebrations. It isn’t the only reason. Others include the fact that it’s raining and I would be living a lie. But mainly it’s the risk to my poor cardiac muscle, which doesn’t feel quite 100% at the moment. I won’t bother to explain that one, if you don’t mind.

Get Well Soon, Peanut.

Since Andrea isn’t feeling 100% at the moment, I thought she should have a little ditty.

I’d like to go to Tennessee

And play the English toff

And sit on ADH’s knee

Until she shoves me off

Just think, when I'm eighty and smell like a baby, she might let me.

The Banner Pic.

Just in case anybody’s interested, each month I change the banner pic and use one that was taken during that month.

Just in case anybody’s interested...

A Nice Little First.

Today I received a 2013 calendar in the post. I hadn’t ordered it; it was sent to me because they’d used one of my pictures on the cover.

During my time as a photographer I had pictures used in all sorts of publications, including calendar pages, and for lots of other purposes as well. But, do you know, I never had a picture used on the cover of a calendar. So now I have, and I even got paid a modest fee for it.

On Lemonade and Connections.

When I was a kid, my parents used to like driving to a country pub some evenings for a drink. Being a kid, I had to go with them, and British pubs weren’t child friendly in those days so I had to stay in the car. My stepfather always brought me a packet of crisps and a small bottle of lemonade with a straw. I didn’t like lemonade, and occasionally asked for something else. I got lemonade. I didn’t like straws either; I wanted a glass. I got a straw. Being grateful for small mercies was the lesson, I think.

It doesn’t take long to drink a small bottle of lemonade – even when you dislike the stuff – and eat a small packet of crisps, so the following three hours were a bit tedious. I had no portable games, and what books I possessed had been read to death. There isn’t much for a child to explore on a pub car park, so I filled the empty hours with my thoughts. I don’t remember feeling rejected as such – a little sidelined maybe, a little resentful of the lemonade, but mainly just bored. I suspect I was feeling the first stirrings of the need to be independent of my parents and everybody else.

But maybe there was something else going on in that kid’s little brain, because he haunts me occasionally. He’s haunting me today for some reason. I keep remembering the time we were on holiday in Devon. My parents knew a couple who lived down there, and pub visits were frequent. That year, though, the woman’s elderly mother was staying with them – a wizened old Welsh lady with a stiff gait caused by bowed, ageing legs. She was kind and stayed with me in the car, telling me stories from her life, and especially the time she'd spent in the Australian outback living among the aboriginals. She told me they’d taught her things about the mysteries of life, and said she would pass them onto me when she thought I was old enough to understand. I think I was twelve at the time. When we went back to Devon the following year, she was dead.

All of which is probably good preparation for a life spent observing without connecting. And maybe even being grateful for small mercies.