Understanding the Medium.

What impresses me about this is the way Dmitri moves easily from Russian into Viennese and back again. And it tells me that he understood melody and rhythm in the same way that Van Gogh understood colour and the palette knife.

Wise Words Wasted.

When my mother was trying to instil in me a proper level of respect for the fairer sex, she always concluded with the same old adage:

There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.

As I understand the saying, it might be translated as ‘Be diligent through all stages of any process. Maintain your concentration, for stumbling blocks lie ever in wait for the unwary.’

I never heard it that way. Being unusually rational for a teenager, I always put a more literal interpretation on it. (Ahem?) Had I been more open to the value of metaphor, I might now be able to indulge my passion for savoury munches with an endless supply of healthy (but expensive) unsalted cashew nuts, instead of an over-indulgence in unhealthy (and cheap) ready salted crisps. There is a connection.

JJ is going to wonder who wrote this in the morning.

A Tale of Two Women and Goldilocks.

I spoke to a woman from the Shire this evening. Her dog led me to her. (Don’t they ever?) She was the first person I spoke to after I moved here in May, 2006, and I remember thinking at the time that there was something oddly familiar about her, and yet something else just as oddly mysterious. I had the same feeling tonight, even though we haven’t spoken in 8½ years. She has a way of looking at you which suggests she knows something you don’t, or maybe has some kind of power that is not for your understanding. I have no doubt that it’s all a product of my fertile and often feckless imagination, and yet life does occasionally weave strange patterns.

Meanwhile, the ex-Priestess is re-defining sordid. I have no reason to care, and so I choose not to.

It’s too early to be making this post. It belongs to the post-midnight period when a different JJ inhabits a different universe and doesn’t care who’s listening or how weird they think he is. Some mornings I read posts I made late the previous night and wonder who the hell has been sitting in my chair, eating my porridge.

Plumbing New Depths.

I’ve noticed over the past few months that my Watch History on YouTube has occasionally had an advertising video added to it. It happened again tonight. Let’s be clear: I never watch advertising videos on YouTube or anywhere else, which means that I didn’t watch the video that has appeared on my Watch History. I assume this is Google’s doing.

I understand that the adverts on YouTube pay for the service. I accept the fact that there will be adverts because I’m grateful for the free facility. I don’t like it because I find it bordering on sordid that nothing comes free in a free market economy. I dislike the fact that money rules at every turn, but I have to be realistic and accept that however crass, however irritating, however intrusive, however inappropriate, however objectionable the adverts on YouTube are, the service belongs to Google and they have a right to put them up.

But not on my Watch History. My Watch History is the one tiny bit of YouTube that is mine, unequivocally so, because these are things I’ve watched. This is my history, nobody else’s. To add things I haven’t watched is dishonest and a step too far.

Being About Bugs.

I just went into my kitchen to make a cup of tea, and saw a beetle scurrying away as fast as its little legs would carry it. It eventually took refuge in the dark place under the fridge. I like beetles. They’re inoffensive little creatures which just want to be about their business and keep out of your way.

The first year I lived in this house we had a hot summer and there were lots of bugs about. Late one sultry night I was sitting at my computer, frequently wiping the sweat from the side of my hand because it was making the desk wet, when I spotted a beetle – one of those handsome bronze ones that are a bit bigger than the commoner black ones – walking lazily across the rug. I imagined it was humming (or maybe whistling) an ancient beetle tune that had been passed down from generation to generation of handsome bronze beetles.

Now, call me odd if you like – I had imbibed rather a lot of barley juice if my memory serves me right – but I was suddenly possessed of the urge to get down on my hands and knees and stroke it. I tried, and it ran away as fast as its little legs would carry it. See what I mean?

Seriously Interpreting.

This is MC Escher’s picture Three Worlds. It’s one of my favourites, and there’s a print of it hanging about four feet from where I’m sitting.

  

The point is this: I interpret the three worlds as being

1. The surface world of phenomenal reality which you can reach out and touch.

2. The word beneath the surface, evidence of which you might sometimes see, but exploration of which would mean learning the required skills to dive to unknown depths.

3. The world above the surface, which you can only occasionally glimpse in reflection because you don’t yet know how to lift your head up.

I don’t make the slightest claim that such interpretation is definitive, not even to me. It’s just an interpretation based on one of my favourite notions as to what reality might be about. I don’t know what Escher intended, and I don’t want to know because I don’t want to be directed or even coaxed into any prescribed view of things. It’s why I don’t read books by gurus any more.

And if I get around to making another post later, I promise to try and make it a damn sight less serious than this one. Being serious is too much trouble these days, except when I’m bored.

Suspicious in the Shire.

The weather has turned unusually warm for late September. The balmy air is full of midges, the birds are singing spring songs, there are butterflies on the wing, and I’ve got the sneezes. It’s very pleasant, but it feels quite unnatural.

Maybe that’s why several people in passing cars waved at me when I went out for a walk this evening. I’ve no idea who they were; I didn’t recognise any of them. But they were all smiling, like they were planning something.

On Being Watched.

I dislike being watched unless it is my express will that I be watched. Being watched without such permission is intrusive, being furtively watched unhealthily so. It's like having a stalker.

I used the word 'debt' in a recent blog post, and now I'm being inundated with ads from credit companies. Well, we all know which internet giant is doing its damndest to be the world's biggest stalker, don't we? Maybe I should say:

I'M FILTHY RICH.

I expect I will now be inundated with offers to invest my millions and become even richer. Unhealthy and unwelcome.

A Reason to Hide.

All my life I’ve had a singular problem. I’ve always wondered why everybody else looks normal and I don’t. Even extremely ugly people look more normal than me, and it’s coming to something when you can’t even see yourself as extremely ugly. Or handsome, or distinguished, or anything else. Just odd. The way I look is, by definition, abnormal.

I remember standing in a public toilet once, washing my hands. My friend Alan Steele was standing next to me, also washing his hands. He looked like the second bloke from the left in this picture of the Beach Boys:

  

There were mirrors on the facing wall. I looked at his face, and then at mine, and then back to his, and thought ‘Why can’t I look normal like him?’ (It was at a pub in Bagnall, Staffordshire. I have a good memory for face issues.)

Random Aside:

Poor Alan. He emigrated to Australia in his early twenties and embraced the lifestyle. I met his sister many years later and she told me he’d become a suburban, 250lb couch potato living entirely on junk food and having difficulty making it to the local takeaway and back. Such a shame. When I knew him he was fit and strong, and had a reputation for doing crazy things like diving into an ice-covered pool and having to be rescued and resuscitated because he was semi-conscious and probably would have drowned otherwise. (I was the one who took charge of the resuscitation procedure because I’d learned about that sort of thing in the navy. Clever, aren’t I? Strange-looking, but clever. I suppose it’s compensation of a sort.) We were all in awe of dear Abo, as he was affectionately known, and it helped that he looked normal.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the cool uncle Dmitri, with whom I have one thing in common…

  

…those lines across the bridge of the nose. But is it enough to have prominent frown lines? I don’t think so, somehow. I frowned in jest at a friend’s little daughter once and she backed off, whimpering. She’d done well to cope with the way I looked generally.

So what do I do about it? Nothing. Too late. What I need now is a bell tower to live in and some gypsy dancing girls to rescue. Some hope.

Creative Coincidence.

I just glanced at a dating agency ad on one of my Flag Counter pages. It had pictures of several young women, one of whom gave her interests as painting and reading, and another whose interests were photography and writing. It interested me because I could never paint for toffee and was never a particularly avid reader; my expressive outlets were always photography and writing.

So is this just a coincidence, or is there a connection between the propensity to photograph and the propensity to write? Is this something else I have to try and work out now? Isn't the nature of reality enough?