Earning the Shiny Armour.

There was a little girl walking through the town today accompanied by two elderly women. She was holding a long ribbon to which was secured a gaily coloured helium balloon crafted in seductively shiny foil which hovered dutifully about two feet above her head. And then a rogue gust of wind snatched it away.

Her two companions were powerless to act, of course, being neither fleet of foot nor possessed of sufficiently keen reflexes. But JJ was at hand, and JJ was always good at catching things (he always fielded close to the bat when playing cricket, don’t you know, for those who comprehend the significance of the fact.) And so JJ caught the ribbon and arrested the errant balloon, and then returned it to its rightful owner who smiled a sweet smile of relief and thanks. (He thought she looked a little awestruck, but then JJ was ever given to dreaming of helping little ladies in need of rescue.) In any event the episode ended without tears and everyone was happy, and at such moments does life look a little more deserving of the effort it takes to live it.

And it might be more than mere coincidence that I’d just come out of the Asda store where the self-service till had given me an extra 2p piece in my change. I’d naturally offered to return it, being the sort of person I am, but they’d told me I might retain the fruits of my good fortune with their blessing and congratulation.

I think I ought to celebrate, but I’ve forgotten how.

Mexicans, Mongols and Walls.

It’s interesting to compare Trump’s Mexican wall project with the Great Wall of China. On the surface it might be seen as an example of history repeating itself, but there are a few differences:

1. The Great Wall is a lot longer. Even without the many branches it’s equivalent to about twice the width of the USA.

2. Those who conceived and ordered its construction – mostly the Ming Dynasty emperors – would, I think it fair to say, have been wiser, more erudite and much broader of mind and vision than the creature known as Trump.

3. It was built to protect the most enduring of the world’s great ancient civilisations from attack by barbarian hordes. The real threat posed by mediaeval Mongols was not quite the same as the current perceived threat from modern Mexican migrants. And, let’s be honest, the USA is not exactly a great ancient civilisation.

There is, however, one similarity which might come to fruition. For all its might and expert engineering, the Great Wall ultimately failed to keep the Mongols out. Time will tell.

Questioning Received Wisdom.

I was looking at the pieces of coal in the coal scuttle tonight, wondering whether there were two pieces anywhere in the world that were exactly the same. I remembered being told at school that while snowflakes were all of the same general pattern, no two were identical.

I wanted to ask a mathematician whether it was possible that variations on a fixed pattern template could be infinite and allow no repetition. It seemed unlikely to me, and if the mathematician had said that the number of variations was calculable and finite, and that repetition was a random possibility, then the teachers would have been either misguided or lying. Unfortunately, I never knew any mathematicians so I never got to find out.

TV Education.

Tonight I caught a few seconds of one of those super hero films. I came in at the point where the pouty young blonde woman with hair that’s just spent ten hours in a poodle parlour is doing mean about as convincingly as Trump does being a president. She screws up her eyes by way of indicating a snarl and shoots fiery bolts at the big bad guy with the bulging bronze pecs who then goes up in flames. Only he doesn’t because bronze doesn’t burn easily, so the handsome young good guy wraps him in black polythene and the world is saved from a fate worse than paying money to go and watch that sort of stuff. And it occurred to me that it probably had a PG rating, and it further occurred to me that there’s a rating missing from the list. U7: not suitable for persons over the age of seven. And then I fell asleep.

When I woke up the adverts were on. Ad after ad showed people ordering a range of lifestyle peripherals online using a mobile phone, and I really wasn’t sure for a while whether I was watching an ad for fancy furniture or an ad for mobile phones. (I had the sound off as usual.) And you know what? I somehow managed not to care.

I also noticed that there are a lot of TV ads at the moment trying to sell holidays to those with enough money to afford them. Anaemic people attired in innocuous dress and sporting smiles that are at best vacuous but mostly merely simpering look dreamily out onto a blue paradise while brown skinned people with artificial grins bring them plates of something unidentifiable to prove how wonderful life really is. And I thought of all those countless millions of poor people in the world who are suffering for want of food and clean water because all they had was taken from them in the name of imperialism so that the dreamily unaware could be persuaded to make a very small number of people disgustingly rich. And then I fell asleep again (because I’m still recovering from eight weeks of sleep deprivation.)

And then it was time for a re-run of a Father Ted episode. Ah, that’s better. Tonight’s running joke was ‘Oh no, Father, she’s not a nun. She’s a woman all right.’ And a level of sanity was restored at last (although I couldn’t be sure whether the rest had all been part of a bad dream.)

Passing on the Porn.

When I first got a new TV and became the excited recipient of Freeview channels, I explored the rarefied selection newly on offer and discovered that there were a few porn channels to be savoured late at night. I watched one (purely to serve my sense of curiosity, you understand) for about thirty seconds.

It consisted of some overly endowed thirty-something lying on a bed wearing only a pair of scanty knickers and talking rubbish to a dangerously inadequate bozo on the phone. Every so often she would wiggle her rear end and shake the mammaries with seductive intent. It was about as erotic as a five-day-old abandoned banana skin rotting in the gutter behind the gasworks on a wet and windy Wednesday night in Wigan, so I never bothered again.

Sometimes I’m glad I’m not young any more. When I was young I had to exercise and balance my tastes, my predilections, my standards and my strangenesses. It was very complicated at times.

Being of Robin Mind.

I had an email tonight from a special person I haven't seen for some time, a woman I’ve known for more than twenty years ever since she was a 1^st year student at the university in my home town. It seems she’s always known something I thought only I knew.

It’s interesting that we seem to give off signals without knowing it. We think we’re in control, but really we’re not. I always behaved towards her with proper restraint and respect; there was no meaningful meeting of eyes across a crowded room or anywhere else. I never made any advance of any kind because we were both in settled relationships. And yet she knew. Maybe women are good at that kind of thing, or maybe it’s because she’s Chinese and the Chinese are good at that sort of thing. How would I know? I’ve long since given up trying to solve the mysteries of life. She says she’d like to see me again, but I’m not so sure.

The robin springs to mind, you see. In my experience, the robin is unique among birds. All wild creatures get used to our habits and respond to them, but only the robin actively anticipates them. Only the robin makes eye contact with curiosity written all over its handsome little form. Sometimes it even seems to be willing you to get on with it. That's why the robin is my favourite bird.

And there’s an interesting fact about robins: they disappear in late summer after the breeding season is finished. According to the bird experts, it’s because they retire to secluded places to go through the moulting process. It seems they dislike being seen in a raggedy condition, and it’s a fact that I’ve never seen a robin looking raggedy.

Well, maybe it’s the same with us when we’re getting older. Getting older means becoming ever more raggedy, and maybe some of us don’t like to be seen in a raggedy condition. It’s a human thing, or maybe it’s a robin thing.

Cornucopia..

Every day of the week somebody, somewhere, is writing a new piece of music that is different from every other piece of music. It's being going on for a very long time. Where does it all come from?

Musing Again.

Even as the wind grows stronger and its strident voice ever more insistent, I just heard the sound of a commercial airliner going overhead. One plane alone in a wild sky, full of people I don’t know going I know not where. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

And I’m currently listening to this, which is rather nice. I gather it comes from the film Flowers of War which I decline to watch because I fear the subject matter would choke me to death, but I’m told it’s very good.

On Death and Social Detritus.

After a mild, bright and pleasant day, tonight has turned filthy again: cold, wet and windy with frequent rain squalls clattering at the windows seemingly intent on gaining access if only they could. That sound always makes me wonder about homeless people. How on earth do they cope on nights like this?

There was a homeless man who used to wander the estate where I lived as a kid, only we didn’t call them homeless then. They were known simply as tramps, or more euphemistically as ‘gentlemen of the road.’ (Oddly, there were no ladies of the road. The gentlemen were hard to spot, but the women were completely invisible.)

Our local gentleman used to hang around garden gates waiting for the soft hearted ones – like my mother – to take them a little food and a hot cup of tea, and then he wouldn’t be seen again for weeks. I suppose he and his kind had a territory, rather like salesmen. There were far fewer of them in those days, of course, unlike these more enlightened times when the Free Market God has grown so much more powerful and the wealth gap between rich and poor so much more massive in consequence. The pressures on people to conform are all but irresistible now, and those who fall through the cracks are easily swept aside.

The odd thing is that I never knew what happened to him. Nobody ever said he’d died, but he obviously must have done. It’s odd, isn’t it, that you rarely hear about the finding of dead homeless people. Is there a homeless person’s graveyard somewhere; or do they, like birds, die in some wood or hedgerow away from prying eyes never to be seen again? Or do the local authorities have dedicated teams (what a fine expression) who go around at dead of night collecting society’s detritus – rather like the ‘night soil men’ of old – and disposing of it quietly? And do the media quietly ignore the work of the bone collectors because those of us with homes and cars and insurance policies and multiple televisions don’t want to know? We are, after all, the successful ones, and it is rightly decreed that the failures are the architects of their own downfall and fit only to be ignored.

The Ones Who Drifted Away.

I’ve suddenly taken to reminiscing about the lost ladies – those who beckoned with their come hither eyes and invited me to join them on their cloud, only to drift away at the last moment leaving me to plummet unceremoniously and unsatisfied back to earth. Besotted then, I’m merely sotted now, which is my excuse for making this my first post of the new month.

There was Angie and Janet

And Sarah and Sue

And Hélène and Zoe

And a few others too

I’m not bitter. I don’t do bitterness. A toast to you ladies, wherever you are (and however old you look now.) And I suppose I should confess that Hélène was not strictly one of them. She was just a brief and unrequited encounter, but it’s good to have a bit of Gallic chic in a ditty, isn’t it? It is.

Hearing a Sinead Lohan album and an old Beatles track brought me here (as they say on YouTube.) Forget the Beatles, though. They never wrote lyrics half as good as Ms Lohan. I was besotted with her, too, back in the 90s, but nobody seems to know where she is or what she’s doing nowadays. Sailing by, I expect.