Luck be a lady... now and then

Given my age, the cumulative effects of three cancer ops plus an occasional yearning to get smashed on some evening yet to be chosen, it’s not surprising I’m often in the mood to assess events since August 1935. After all, the end can’t be far off now. However, one thing journalism has taught me is it’s more fun – at least for writers – to chew over disasters than happiness. Summarised thus: happiness is self-rewarding whereas bad things continue to give greater interest. In writing that is.

But this is me. Would nearly a century of grief, disappointment, rejection, ignorance, self-condemnation – however wittily written – add up to anything other than a failed life? Heck, I’ve lived to ninety and that’s some kind of achievement. And along the way  lump sums of money have dropped into my lap.

Obviously I need a fresh angle. What about: How often have I been lucky? Mind you, luck demands a jot of qualification. It must be distinguished from rewards I’ve earned. Otherwise the work ethic becomes a bucket-load of shit.

▓▓ For one thing, VR (Veronica, my wife) has been the strongest positive influence on what I’ve become. We met on a blind-date foursome in London. She looked gorgeous - as others will testify - whereas I was only three months into a desperately loveless emigration from the West Riding of Yorkshire, suffering an adolescence which seemed to stretch out into middle age. Do such meetings qualify as good luck? Our shared interests and tendencies later had the inevitability of two jigsaw pieces but even after 65 years I find it impossible to claim I “earned” VR.

▓▓ The RAF forced me into an understanding of the theory, practice and application of electronics. Not to any great depth y’unnerstand, but in the same way a 600-page scholarly biography of Rembrandt might hint at why he’s the world’s greatest oil painter. Post National Service I’ve dipped continuously and enthusiastically into sources of science info of which I understand about 7%. Not much, you say. But much more than the international average.

▓▓ A horror that became a benison. Pursuing a larger salary, and for no other reason, I chose to become editor of two highly specialised magazines whose content I only dimly understood. Quickly I realised both were en route to financial extinction. Trying to escape I applied for a variety of jobs, most quite menial, but was rejected mainly because I was in my late forties and potential employers worried about the pay I would expect. Months passed and my terror grew.

Then, out of the blue, my ultimate boss, whom I’d always seen as a managerial dimwit, offered me the editorship of a magazine devoted to a subject I was very familiar with. And in which I subsequently enjoyed my greatest professional triumphs.

What strange deity had taken charge...?

▓▓ ...That deity reappeared eleven years later. My magazine was sold and my old employer thought I deserved compensation for losing a position which (secretly) I would have paid to occupy. More miraculously, I didn’t even lose the job and merely transferred to the new owner. The goodbye cheque was a biggie and was augmented by the receipt of a pension which started the day I left the previous owner.

▓▓ And the deity reappeared yet again on my retirement. My newish employer celebrated my departure with a shared 1945 bottle of burgundy priced at £546 ($714). Still a personal record.

A note en passant. Perhaps the three events above were “earned” rather than the outcome of pure luck. But their unexpectedness seemed more like the results of chance than of the daily grind.

▓▓ Finally... I only took up poetry comparatively recently. A year or two later, on an occasion unlikely ever again to be duplicated, I had a poem published.

▓▓ Finally plus… Is living to be ninety lucky?

Why I looked crummy serving the Queen

Joining the RAF for two years’ National Service (1955 – 1957) meant I would wear a uniform, a word with several implications. Obedience is one, something I’d never shone at during the previous nineteen years. Another is invariance, a further intellectual discouragement since variety is surely the spice of life. 

Would I disappear into the human sludge that is the ideal basis for a military force? Or would my untamed tongue get me into trouble?

These matters were to some extent put on hold. At a height of 6 ft 1½ in. I was taller than the physical norms of the average recruit and would have to wait months to be properly dressed. In the interim I wore the shabby sports jacket and even shabbier trousers (standard journo turn-out) I wore when I signed on at RAF Cardington. Made marginally more sartorially acceptable when hidden by a khaki boiler-suit.

The new kit took some time to arrive. And six weeks’ square-bashing (Initial training. US: boot camp) wreaked havoc on my “civvies”. But there was one advantage: I was left out of any marching for formal occasions. Think badly stuffed scarecrow.

What happened next was heavily ironic. Against my expectations and my formal education the RAF decided I would train to be a wireless (ie, radio) technician in a course lasting eight months, mostly sitting at a desk wrestling with Kirchoff’s Laws and the calculus associated with the hysteresis curve. By now I was uniformed, but not appropriately. The rest of the class wore Working Blue whereas I wore Best Blue, my Working Blue had still to arrive.

RAF Working Blue. More compact

battledress format, despite its name,

was more fitted for sedentary work

Here’s the irony: Working Blue has a battledresss format jacket ending with a tightly belted midriff. By contrast the Best Blue jacket is much longer reaching halfway down the bum. Battledress or not, Working Blue is much more resistant to crumpling for those doing deskwork. The speed with which my Best Blue started to wear out was horrifying, given that I would have had to pay for a replacement.

RAF Best Blue. Flounced 

bottom half of jacket tended

to get crumpled and worn
when wearer worked at a desk

Happily, Best Blue lasted out the course and I was posted to Far East Air Force there to wear lightweight shirt and shorts. National Service done, I hung Best Blue on my bedroom door back home in Bradford and the moths finished off the abrasivon resulting from desk work at the technical training camp.

CODA: My Working Blue finally arrived but it distorted my appearance: seemed as if my belly started at my sternum and stretched halfway down my thighs. Being a techie helped just a bit. 

Is yours under-used?

This is a tapeworm. It may have meaning

When all other diversions – telly-watching, advanced cakery, tree pruning, over-the-garden-wall conversation, drinking oneself into oblivion, reading novels that are beyond us, being cruel to our nearest and dearest, pretending to understand quantum theory – have turned into dusty, dried-up riverbeds we are left with that final and most  private resource: thought.

Most times it begins accidentally. We are reminded of a single fact, although, without the faintest idea of its meaning, I am tempted to say factoid. Sounds more profound, doesn’t it? It could, if I let it, be the starting-pistol signal to a line of thought. But I won’t. I’ve half a mind to be philosophical. Or do I mean philological?

Whatever.

The fact (-oid) may take any form. It could be a person, a word that grabbed our sense of rhythm, a sensation within the gut, a foreign incomprehension, the taste of a passion fruit, an event in history (Yeah. This is a great opportunity to explore The Don Pacifico Incident. But somehow…). Rejection by a member of the opposite sex who should have been grateful for the opportunity. Dadaism. A sin committed in youth. A conviction we are uglier than ever we thought.

Anything. And the process of thought may take us in any direction. Like as not, though, the first response will probably be propelled by one of Kipling’s “six honest serving men”:

… they taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When.
And How and Where and Who.'

The cliché stepping stone would now be to provide an example but that’s the easy way out. What’s fascinating about thought is the process itself. The fact that each move along the way presents us with the same infinity of possibilities. Thus Susan Sarandon may metamorphose into the instincts of a tapeworm. In the blink of an eye.

This would be the result of uncontrolled thought, day-dreaming. The alternative would be controlled thought, whereby we try to profit from our ability to think, forcing it into useful revelations. Understand we’re talking about thought, as opposed to mere problem-solving. Being driven by the belief (hope?) that – ahead – there are flattish stones waiting to be turned over leading us to a miraculous understanding, say, of why the scale of C-major seems inevitable. Even pretty. And which could explain why our head occupies a space at the top of our spine.

There’s lots more to say but if I could be granted a wish I’m hoping you'll break off from Tone Deaf and try out this process yourself. As to some extent I did when I first arranged the words: “When all other diversions – “

 

Why blogging still counts

Just read a review of a book analysing friendship. Why, out of all the book reviews that slide into oblivion, unread, did I slow down the avalanche and start concentrating on a subject potentially woffly? The answer lies at the heart of blogging and I’ll get to that… perhaps.

More truthfully I was propelled backward in time, to my salad days when I got paid for doing journalism. More precisely still, I’d been visited by a journalist’s golden benison, a solid kick-off line; here goes:

It’s important to say what friendship isn’t. Sloppy writers may equate it with love; they shouldn’t. Lovers often spend time at each others’ throats, friends less so. Love is passion, friendship is fun, forgiveness and felicity; and, on the whole, friends aren’t linked by that other f-word. Lovers tend to operate in the present tense, friends reflect a lot. Lovers hate gaps between meetings, friends may actually profit from year-long absences. The differences between love and friendship are most notable when friendship happens between different genders. I could go on.

I don’t have too many friends: as a presence I’m inclined to get on others’ wicks. I favour unpromising subjects for conversation, ask too many probing questions, punctuate long periods of showing-off with startling – though happily brief – bouts of unexpected shyness, am bad on social etiquette, pedantic about language and am probably unjustifiably confident with regard to science.

All these failings and more are evident in what I write but then reading allows more control than being part of conversation. As a result the majority of my friends (It’s no great sum, I assure you.) are from those who have commented, and still do, on my blog. Most of whom I have never met but whose qualities I treasure.

In fact friends may often be regarded as distant to each other when observed by an impartial observer. In my case distance is reality and not mere judgement. Foreigners in fact. For me Brexit is a wound that still bleeds.

Why I'm in profit

No, it's not mine; I have a much
better developed hippocampus

That familiar noun – the brain – has at least two meanings: 1. The squishy entity that resembles baking dough based on suet. 2. A location in the human body where unparalleled feats of inter-communication occur even among the most inert of Trump voters. But did you know that the brain also underwent its own evolution just as far-reaching as the process whereby our ancestors crawled laboriously up the beach and shed their flippers for pairs of arms and legs? But not exactly in the blink of an eye.

In a two-part series which started yesterday on BBC2 Professor Jim Al-Khalil summarised the 600m years during which the cerebral equipment of an average mud-hopper eventually manifested itself, much improved,  in 2025 in the person of, let us say, J. D. Vance. Not only that but there were show-and-tells.

We saw a tiny living worm blessed with the most primitive brain presently extant. This Model T brain not only existed way back but actually worked; lab experiments demonstrated it could differentiate between left and right, making it superior to a large percentage of the folk in the county where I currently live.

It only took another 100m years – give or take – for another milestone to be reached: the faculty of imagination, notably to envisage possible future events. Allowing the user to plan to his/her own advantage.

And it’s here that I leave the prof. and become personal. BTW those Brits who have a smart TV may watch both episodes on I-Player, one of the rare advantages of living in these embattled islands.

Imagination! (And yes, the screamer is justified.) It’s presently active in the shreds of tissue I call my mind. After a hiatus lasting several years I’ve managed to resume writing my novel Rictangular Lenses (Misspelling intentional.) The word count, an auto-feature of Microsoft Word for those who asked if I used my fingers to help me arrive at this total, has risen from 65,000 to 70,000.

And I'm presently working on this bit: X (a woman) has put information in front of Y (a guy) wondering if he’ll arrive at what would be a desirable conclusion; Y (a typical guy) is struggling but won’t admit it. For me it’s not just a question of laying out the facts and the deliberations, I have to make them entertaining. It’s a hard ask but I love it. 

It’s what I was put on earth to do.

Yeah, The Man With The Scythe may be just round the corner but XXXX him (count the letters); I’m happy imagining. And I'm thinking thank goodness the worm, the mud-hopper, various lizards plus one which learnt to climb trees, a whole slew of gibbons plus a figure in the fog that may be The Missing Link all took up the options they did. Retrospectively they deserve my gratitude and my hope is that they - like me – also experienced the sheer joy of creation. In the words of William Faulkner: bringing to light that which never previously existed.

Oh ye millions I embrace you (Quote: LvB)

Something to hide behind?

A stream of personable, competent and energetic women known as carers help me look after VR, my wife. At least half of them carry tattoos. "Is it mandatory for carers?" I ask. They shake their heads. I'd like to ask "Why?" but I fear pursuing a true answer might be thought intrusive. The halfway-house answer would be tattoos  are presently popular  (among men and women) and tattoo parlours have sprung up in the High Streets; fashion is being followed.

Tattoos are, I suppose, decorative but I'm not similarly inclined to discover the rationale behind, say, necklaces. The difference being that tattoos are more or less permanent, True, they can be removed, but the process is said to be far more painful than the original needlework. 

Are they meant to be seen? Given that some tattoos are imprinted on faces, I'd say yes. Only the need for a broader canvas had led to their appearance on arms and chests, thereby spending most of their existence covered up by clothing. Yesterday, my regular hair-dresser, S - source of many interesting revelations - obligingly pulled down the back of her blouse collar to reveal a religious symbol between her shoulder blades, to which an unexplained mandela had been  recently added. In blue. Obviously for private viewing.

But I return to the permanence of tattoos. Might one justification be that the wearer was dissatisfied with mere bare skin? 

And there's the the risk about tattoos being invalidated by the passage of time. During one's impulsive youth one might wish to celebrate falling in love with X, then later marrying Y. And being forced to wear pyjamas even on very hot nights.

Tastes change. In my teens I admired the pop singer Guy Mitchell; remember him? But  I'm glad my admiration didn't run to submitting my flesh to the needle.

Once, under the influence of my High Tory Dad, I thought Conservatism was the way to go. Had I recorded this on my right arm amputation wouldn't have been too high a price to pay in 2025.

And yet I am no nearer to finding a plausible answer: Why tattoo? Please help.

The corpse speaks

Our recent celebrations were muted, what mattered were the family groupings. I found myself taking a back seat, reflecting rather than yapping. Thinking about the way things had turned out over the years, when bad times had evolved into good times and then into unexpectedly even better times. With flaws of course.

A slow process which cannot be caught in the brevity of a celebration. Worse still is how the language of celebration undermines the good that is being celebrated. Ah, that tired vocabulary, unimaginative syntax and vain attempts to emphasise phrases that have long since lost their ability to connect with people. The pathetically dried-out husk known as cliché, in short: dead language.

Theoretically dead language is no threat. “But we knew what he was trying to say,” is the cry of those who see no harm in the cliché. Arguing that the speaker had tried to articulate no doubt genuine feelings, had failed and was simply “making do”. But if those feelings were truly genuine shouldn’t we be ashamed of under-selling them? After all this might be the only occasion we will have to express an important sentiment. And yet we’ve sent our listener away with the echoes of a fifty-year-old ad slogan.

No doubt the first person to say he was “over the moon” got a laugh. These days not an eyebrow rises. Unsurprising since the phrase dates back to the 1700s. Unlike cheese and decent Bordeaux jokes don’t mature with age.

But clichés may hide another grievous shortcoming: laziness. People who believe themselves to be reasonably literate often resort to their equivalent of the bovine lunar leap. It is, of course, difficult to put words to feelings of sorrow or joy. Fact is, many don’t try. Or only as far as coming up with a single word, usually an adjective, less desirably an adverb, most abominably the catch-all “very”. Take heed: all the single-word solutions were used up at about the time we went from BC to AD.

Significant happenings deserve effort, especially when addressing, say, a recently bereaved widow or a five-year-old who has come last in the sack race. Internally we may want to gush but gushing doesn’t parse well. You could always try the initially unexpected:

To the widow: Jack was hopelessly wrong saying no one would mourn. I, for one, am completely gutted.

To the five-year-old: I’m not at all surprised. Billy may have won but I overheard his parents say he has a third leg. Hides it up his bum.

At my post-mortem piss-up: That should shut him up.