Sociopaths Have Feelings Too!

I was astonished at one of the many Tory party scandals just before Christmas. They have been coming so thick and fast that I've lost track of them, and I'm sure you have too.

Anyway at this particular one in the series, Sajid Javid had been invited on to the BBC Breakfast show to talk (I think) about something else. But he was 'too upset', and declined to appear.

Now, apparently, senior executives at KPMG are 'upset' that the financial regulator has found them to have been at fault in the Carillion accounting scandal.

Why the poor little lambies!

Under those sharp dark grey suits and hiding behind those monstrous incomes and hills of cocaine, are tender-hearted wee babbies who feel pain just like the rest of us!

Bless!!!!!

Thoughts Inspired By Dry January

I stopped drinking before I was 50. 

Booze is a great cushion, a great drug. 

It enters your life with an air of sophistication, guilt, daring, promise, and exits with shame and humiliation.

I stopped because I realised that it had halted my life (and that of others) in a very dark place, and that escaping from that and making changes that would protect people that I am responsible for, was more important than carrying on with a pretence that a situation that looked safe to outside observers, did not feel at all safe from the inside.

I caught myself drinking the dregs of some particularly delicious wine when I was tidying up alone after a party. 'What a terrible waste', I told myself. But halfway through it, I started wondering if there was a problem with what I was doing.

Very soon after that, I stopped completely. I learned how to surreptitiously tip a glass of wine down the sink, and I learned that it was better to accept an alcoholic drink and not drink it, than to try to explain what had changed. 

I have never been sure whether to categorise myself as an alcoholic. I sometimes yearn on a hot day for a Spanish beer with a slice of lime in the top. I like the taste of alcohol in stews and baked things. But the idea of re-learning how to drink wine escapes me, and the idea of changing my conscious thoughts by drinking alcohol has completely vanished.

I can never bring myself to moralise about this, because I know how much I loved getting pissed. Personally, I don't miss it, and I still enjoy the company of drinkers until they get to that point where they are so drunk that they repeat themselves over and over again: but that happens very rarely. 

In general, drinking company is convivial company.

I have met two recovering alcoholics who never completed the 12-step programme, and who pretend that they have. Alcohol makes sly people of us all. 

I could indeed by lying now, couldn't I?

Sun Bear From Sunday Drawing Club

 

Buses In The Rain

If you travel by bus, especially on a rainy day, that's the way you get to know an area whether rural, town or city. Margaret Thatcher was famously disparaging about people who caught buses, but actually you come into contact with real people when you travel by public transport, and you come across even more real people if you travel off the beaten track. 

Buses are slow travel. There you will meet elders, schoolchildren, young mothers or fathers with toddlers and children in pushchairs, people with disabilities and their carers, all the people who are hidden away from mainstream advertising, and who are trodden on by rich men in tailored suits who think about money and cocaine all the time.

In some parts of London, the upstairs back-of-the-bus is a youth club. Groups of teenagers with school bus passes can spend a whole evening travelling around the route listening to music that plays from their phones and singing along at the tops of their voices. I wonder how much crime is averted because of this?

You hand your fate over to the traffic. You can't rush a bus: road rage is futile. Your driver sets the mood, and you say thank you when you disembark. Thank you, public transport.

Postscript

I'd almost forgotten. Through a paned window at Capel Manor, there was a wall with life-size models of horses heads hanging on it with bridles draped on them. There were saddles, too. There was something Gormenghast about it all. It must have been a teaching tack room, I think, and it's begging to be drawn.

Fact: when we were little, McDad used to take us to the Hancock Museum in Newcastle. There was a wall of stuffed animal heads, and the first time we went there with him, he told us that on the wall in the next room we would see the rest of their bodies.

The Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom

What do we have? A man like that children's game where you blow up a balloon and let it go. It shoots rapidly around the four corners of the room, up and down, diagonally, farting as it goes, barging into things and knocking them off the shelves at random, and ending up an empty and useless sac on the floor.

What do we need? A statesperson, able to imagine the future, able to manage money and social issues including health, culture and education. Someone with dignity, and some good in their soul.

Is despair too strong a word for it?

The NHS

I literally feel that I would defend the NHS with my life.

Capel Manor On A Sunny January Afternoon

It's a pain in the bum having to take a malfunctioning laptop across London to be fixed, but it's marking season and I have a pile of work to do. The computer said 'no' and I needed an engineer to persuade it otherwise.

When I got home, the resident poorly person reminded me that we had a plan to visit Capel Manor Gardens in Enfield, and it was such a lovely sunny day the thought was irresistible. We spent an hour marvelling at the variety of plants, shrubs and trees, which look just as good in winter as they surely will in spring and beyond. It's an agricultural college and I peered through a window through which you could see plaster horses heads poking out of the walls, draped in bridles and other horsy accoutrements. There is a small zoo featuring a white crow, and two Scottish wildcats who are there as part of a conservation programme. They were hungry, and were glaring at anything they thought might be worth hunting. One of them emitted some very deep 'miaows'. There is a small maze, and we managed to get to the viewing platform and back without crying- or cheating, as we did in Kielder Forest when we went with Kenji and Till.

What a lovely place. I'm looking forward to going back in spring.

Two chaps winter gardening; an avenue of pleached limes; a small alpine house; a triangular flowerbed, one of three; scented witch hazel; white barked birch; giant thistles.

Photo By Alan Harrison from The Cluny, Newcastle, 2012

 

Every Single Black Comb

I have tangly black and white hair on my head that it takes a sturdy comb to plough through. In the last couple of weeks I thought I'd lost every single tough-guy black comb that could fight through this mess. It was an upsetting mystery that nibbled away at my psyche as I went about everyday tasks.

I've just found them all, hidden horizontally behind some empty bottles. The bastards. What a time to play hide and seek!

I Threw Away My Lyrics Book

I had a big clear-out of papers and things before Christmas to make some space, and I think I threw away a lyrics book. This could be a disaster, but I've done stuff like leaving one on the tube after a long day at work, so it's not such a terrible thing. I think of these things a life's natural edits.

I have been listening through to my three-quarters-finished album today at the kitchen table. Offsprog One has her friend round so I listened quietly. Two things happened: firstly, through listening after weeks away from it, stuff that I thought was not very good seems much better. Secondly, listening at such a low volume meant that it was really obvious what I have to redo. For instance, a song where I thought the guitar rhythms were off-kilter, it was actually the vocal feel that wasn't right.

I have entirely lost the Logic file of one of the songs, but it's not such a hard one to start again with. It was heartening to listen through the album, actually: listening re-booted the bit of me that gets all used up by teaching. All I need is a clear day to sing on, a sunny day and a bird-throat mood, and I can do both the vocals that are missing and replace the dodgy ones. I have a guitar part that finishes a couple of bars before then end for no apparent reason, but that's just a pure guitar'n'vocal song so that will be a case of supple fingers and determination. I am thinking about guest musicians and what they might do. I feel motivated, dude.

(As I walked up from the tube station today, a very posh mummy was saying to her son 'I do wish you would stop using that word dude, darling'.

2000 Year Old Yew Tree

This tree in Totteridge is reputed to be 2000 years old. It must have lived through so much change- and it's still sprouting new growth. Decorated by fairy lights in the churchyard, it loomed out of the drizzle as a majestic reminder of the passing of time and the ultimate insignificance of humanity with our silly little lives, staring at miniature screens so hard that a lot of the time we don't notice the beauty around us. Big guy, we noticed you yesterday in your rainy garden, and we love you.

Working The New Year In

Every year I spend New Year's Day marking student work. I don't know why: it just happens that way. Being an academic is weird, because you have huge influxes of work at times when other people are holidaying. Last Christmas, for instance, I spent the week before Christmas marking, and then the entire Christmas period attending to corrections the subeditor wanted in my book. I knew if I didn't work on it then, it would never be finished: time was chasing it from behind. At times I was almost in tears of frustration, and there was no time to recover from doing all that, because the new term started and I was straight into working again.

I am hoping to spend a bit of time working on my new album, but I will have to work on it very quickly and intensely. I know what I want it to sound like, and I also know it will have to be recorded in between a lot of other things that need time and energy. I have chosen the songs and deliberately stopped writing anything else temporarily, because if I do I'll interrupt the flow of what I've chosen and try to shoehorn in one of the new ones.

January is full of pandemic and other question marks, and around them life will continue in some form of normality, or abnormality.

A Lot Of Dogs Had A Walk Today

 

Happy New Year!