On the Matter of Complaint.

‘He was a most worthy man and an example to us all,’ might read the obituary. ‘Life treated him with much unkindness and his troubles were great, yet never once did he complain.’

Why do people regard the lack of complaint as a sign of nobility? I don’t. Any reader of this blog knows that I’m never short of a complaint or two. I complain to managers of shops about their products or their stocking policies. I complain to all and sundry about the state of the world. I complain about the shortcomings of human nature. I complain about the weather. I complain about the airheaded pronouncements which drip from the mouths of policy makers and others in positions of influence. I complain about the absurdity of celebrity worship. I complain about the fact that the progress of life in the so-called developed world is largely driven by the self-interested few and the promotion of shallow and spurious priorities. Let anyone approach me and ask ‘How are you, Jeff’ and what do they inevitably get? A complaint.

I’m a whinger through and through, and I have no problem with the fact. If anybody cares to write an obituary for me, I expect it will begin: ‘He was a right bloody moaner, that one. Good riddance.’

Dylan Thomas, on the other hand, wrote: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ Did anybody call him a right bloody moaner?

I know I occasionally interrupt my natural inclination with a hint of praise where I feel it’s due, but only occasionally. I like exceptions to the rule. They are the stars in the dark night sky. 

Tonight I have a toothache. And ever since I started this new medication consequent upon my vascular procedure, the feeling of being weak, washed out and generally ill washes in and out several times a day like those waves on a beach in Tahiti I mentioned earlier. They’re the first two complaints which come to mind. The third is that I watched the first half hour of the movie Dead Poets Society tonight. The opening ten minutes reminded me of why I so despise the values held by white, upper middle class American culture. (To be fair, I think I was supposed to be so reminded.) ‘Excellence’ indeed! Do they not know that excellence is a variable concept based on a questionable value system? Idiots. The following twenty were more encouraging. I will persevere.

The Bard Being Wrong for Once.

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast

~ Macbeth

Last night I dreamed that I was young again and still married. I came home from a trip away and found two strangers sitting in my car parked on the drive. They got out and walked away as I approached.

I went into the house to find another strange man in there, and it dawned on me that my wife was having multiple affairs. I decided I would have to leave and sat down with her to agree on the apportionment of our effects, but we kept being interrupted by people calling her out of the room to discuss more immediate and important matters.

The whole thing seemed to go on for a depressingly long time and I woke up feeling betrayed, frustrated, dispossessed and a little desolate.

None of it explained anything. No knitting up of any raveled sleeve of care here, no balm for any hurt mind. I wonder whether I’ll ever get to understand life while I’ve still got some left.

Connected Notes on Decadence and Guilt.

I still experience difficulty with the habit some people have of cutting the crusts off bread when making sandwiches. It seems inexcusably decadent to me (but I do try to excuse it because, well… kids today, you know?) Posh food outlets do it as well, which is the second reason – after their inflated prices – why I never go into posh food outlets.

My early days were spent in a working class household with parents who had known what it was to live on the bread line. They had themselves spent a childhood immersed in the standard form of working class poverty, and had also been subjected to the privations of the war years. And so I was instructed by them from the moment of weaning to eat the whole of whatever I was given and be grateful for the fact that it was there at all. 

But they allowed two exceptions. The first was brains on toast. (Yes, actual brains – white, slimy stuff which looked vaguely like albino scrambled egg only shiny. Can you imagine anything more disgusting than that?) The second was grilled conger eel steaks. It seems my parents recognised that the taste of conger eel was too strong for a child’s palate and allowed me an alternative. (I never did find out what conger eel tasted like because the smell alone was enough to turn my stomach.)

 

*  *  *

And now the tone of this post has to change because any mention of conger eel takes me back to an incident in my childhood.

We were on holiday in Devon, and one evening I was standing on the quayside at Brixham when I witnessed a man trying to bludgeon a conger eel to death with a heavy piece of wood. The poor fish wouldn’t die, but wriggled and struggled for what seemed like an age on the alien concrete as the brute of a man continued to beat the back of its head with the blunt instrument. I think it was my first experience of true brutality, and it horrified me.

Even now, when prompted to recall the memory, I feel an almost choking sense of remorse that I did nothing to save the creature. Exactly what would be hard to imagine since I was only 11, but the recollection is clear and the guilt wriggles and struggles as the fish did.

When Words Evolve.

When I was a kid, one of the favourite sweets was a product called Spangles made by Mars Ltd. They were cheap and came in a variety of flavours ranging from the standard fruit flavours to mint, aniseed and liquorice.

 

 

Something reminded me of them today and so I read the Wiki article on their history.  It seems they were made between 1950 and 1984, and in the early days the marketing slogan was:

Sweet Way to Go Gay!

Well now, are we to believe that the corporate world was ahead of the times in the matter of sexual orientation? Or was it a case of some mischievous ad-man putting one toe out of the closet? I don’t suppose we can ask him because he’s probably dead by now.

Reflecting on Very Little.

I keep looking for an email but it hasn’t arrived yet. I’m not sure why I keep looking for it. Is it because the sender is important to me and I will derive some benefit from the correspondence, or is it simply that I crave the ego boost of having someone recognise my presence in their world? It’s a sad suspicion that the latter is probably more typical of me than the former, but in this case I really don’t know.

*  *  * 

I’ve just been wiling away a little time reading some of Paul Auster’s short novel, The Locked Room. He’s a hell of a writer, you know. Sometimes he reminds me of me in both style and substance, but he goes much deeper into the substructure of life than I do. I’m too lazy for that, preferring to hint briefly at what I see beneath the surface rather than making the effort to offer a comprehensive view. But at least I understand him, which makes the reading relatively easy. 

*  *  *

And today I walked one of the circuits of lanes in these parts for the first time in a year and a half. It only amounts to about two miles, but when you think that I couldn’t manage even half a mile before the procedure, it was rather pleasant to be able to do the whole thing with no need of rests and nothing worse than very minor discomfort. And it was good to see the old views again and re-acquaint myself with some of my tree friends, many of whom are now in the early stages of their autumn livery.

The walk brought me back along Church Lane and I half-hoped that I would see the sun come out as I occasionally did in the earlier years of my Shire rambling. I didn’t, of course, because the person who used to draw the clouds aside now lives in a different world and probably never walks along Church Lane. And it’s a world in which I no longer have even a small place anyway. Maybe that’s why I keep looking for an email which hasn’t arrived yet.

YouTube and the Humour Barrier.

Following on from the last post about the language barrier, I now have to report a problem with the humour barrier. It goes like this:

Several times recently I’ve had comments of mine deleted on YouTube. Interestingly, none of them were overtly offensive. They weren’t even critical of the video. What they amounted to was an attempt to take a slightly more oblique view of the subject matter and impress a little humour into the discussion. It seems some channel owners don’t like that, and so they opt to decline my right to comment. Well, that’s up to them and I see no justification for serious concern.

The point is, though, I’m fairly sure that the problem is my sense of humour. It’s a little oddball even by English standards, so I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect people from other cultures to get it.

Take Benny Hill, for example. I never understood why anybody found anything he did funny, and yet I gather his show was one of the most popular ever broadcast on British TV. He even had a dedicated following in America and was invited to appear on American TV chat shows. An example: he accidentally rips the T shirt off some busty bimbo, and then runs away while she chases him in bra and knickers. Is that funny? Not to me it isn’t.

But if the psychiatrist asks: ‘Have you lived in Blackpool all your life?’ and the patient answers: ‘Not yet’, I find that funny. When Spike Milligan describes his mother-in-law as looking like ‘a dog’s bum with a hat on’, I find that funny. And when the barman asks the talking white horse whether he realises there’s a whisky named after him, and the horse replies: ‘What? Kevin?’ I find that funny, too. It seems other people don’t.

So what’s the solution? Stop making my version of humorous comments on YouTube? I could, but then I wouldn’t be commenting authentically, would I? I think I’ll start keeping count of the number of comments I have deleted instead. It will give me something to boast about during my next life on a different planet.

Phones and the Language Barrier.

I have a mobile phone, but I’m not a mobile phone sort of person. Accordingly, I use the cheapest little phone it’s possible to get (£15.99 from Tesco) because all I want it to do is make and receive calls and texts. I’m not a poking and stroking addict, and neither do I ever want to be. When I leave this earth I would like it to be said of me: ‘He died with his boots on, what teeth he had left were his own, and never once did he stoop to poking and stroking.’ Ah, but…

It was suggested to me when I was negotiating the rigours of changing provider that a modern SIM would probably work better in a modern phone designed for multi-G networks, whatever they are. And so I’ve been studying proper, modern phones on the Argos website and now I have problems.

For a start, the product information has obviously been written by people who lack even the most basic fluency in English. ‘Why should they be fluent in English?’ you might ask. ‘They have a language of their own and it’s a perfectly good language.’ ‘I know,’ I would answer, ‘but they’re trying to sell me a phone and English is the only language I know. So I’m not a polyglot. I’m inferior. I don’t care. I just want to know what I’m buying.’

The second problem is that the writers of the marketing blurb are transparently engaged in making a product which is tediously basic (judging by the price) sound like the latest in 22^nd century technology. But they’re doing it in a version of English which wouldn’t pass muster with a 5-year-old. So how on earth can I trust it?

And then there’s a third problem. I skip over the ludicrously overcooked hyperbole and concentrate solely on the technical stuff, but then I find that they use terms and abbreviations which are completely alien to me. I’m a simple, if rather reclusive, sort of chap who’s been using a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile for the past eighteen years and still thinks that waving it about in the supermarket is my passport to the world of normal people.

Clearly it isn’t. Clearly I need educating, but where do I go? To a mobile phone shop? Do we still have mobile phone shops? I expect we probably do, but then I would be faced, no doubt, with the prospect of dealing with some snotty young millennial who isn’t giving me his or her full attention because he or she is worrying about where I’ve left my walking frame in case somebody falls over it. Life and millennials can be cruel like that.

And so I ask you: is there any prospect of rescue, or must I live out what’s left of my sad little existence with a phone signal that washes gently in and out like the waves on a beach in Tahiti? (I expect they speak quite good English in Tahiti, but that’s little consolation.)

 

Incidentally, I don't have a walking frame (yet.) That was a joke.

Finding the Gap.

Considering the fact that I’m the sort of person whose perceptions and responses are driven more by emotion than reason, it’s perhaps surprising that my emotional armour is generally quite secure. (Or maybe it isn’t so surprising. Maybe people driven more by emotion than reason are good at making armour.)

The fact is, however, there are chinks in it – gaps big enough to allow entrance to sometimes seemingly innocuous bits of sensory input, thereby sending my mind to states of elation, excitement, despair or depression. This video is of the elation variety.

I’m completely hooked on it and watch it nearly every day. There are several stars on show, but for me the greatest stars are the kids dancing with their instructor. I bow the knee to them, I really do. They bring fresh air to a jaded mind, encouraging the view that the human race might be worth belonging to after all, and even that there might be hope for a world which I think is heading for severe difficulty. They even encouraged me to try some of the moves myself, whereupon two things happened:

1. I got a sharp pain in my left ankle.

2. I fell over (well, nearly.)

Shuffling is definitely for the young, so long may they have the will and physical wherewithal to practice it.

The Little Tea Bag Tale.

Something odd happened this morning. After I got up I went into the kitchen to make a mug of tea and followed the usual routine:

Put some water into the kettle, switch it on, take the mug which has been standing on the drainer overnight with a little water in it, throw away the old water and rinse the mug, place the mug on the worktop, take the tea bag container from the cupboard, remove a tea bag and place it in the mug. But here’s the interesting bit:

When I came to place the teabag into the mug, there was already a fresh, dry teabag lying in it. So how can that be? I can think of only two explanations:

 

1. Some other-worldly or other-dimensional being did the job for me.

2. I performed the same action twice within seconds of each other but only remembered doing it once.

Both possibilities are intriguing, just in different ways. And do bear in mind that of all the odd things which have happened in this house, the majority happened in the kitchen.

Me Again.

I sometimes wonder why I make the posts that I do, since most of them are of no value whatsoever to anybody but me. I usually conclude that they are little bits of the current me seeping out into the ether, like steam from a valve or the overflow from a flooded slurry pit. And as such, they have value of a sort.

But I sometimes wish I were less self-aware, and spent my time engrossed in TV soaps and cookery shows instead. Critical awareness of self and circumstances might have done Carl Jung some good, but to most of us it’s a recipe for discontent.

*  *  *

And a Russian correspondent in the comments section of YouTube told me today that in Russia, bad humour is known as ‘English humour.’ I didn’t bite.