Diaries.

I'm passing this blog over to me,from twenty years ago:

Sunday, 26th November, 1989
Well, here it is, the first entry in this diary! At least, I hope it is going to become a regular occurence. It's about time I got down to some writing, and perhaps by doing this each day (or whatever), it'll instil some literary discipline in me. Today is a sharp, bright morning, a contrast to the blotchy, semi-forgotten haze of last night. Outside, the air is as sharp as the teeth of some small vicious animal, and the frost makes everything spangle briefly in thebrilliant but ailing winter sun. The house, however, is warm, like a loved jumper, except for the kitchen, whose cool atmosphere reminds me of a wintry toilet seat one would rather not sit on. Next door has been emanating a considerable deal of shouting again, most of it issuing from the sewage-infested gob of the drunken harridan. Still, she's leaving. I pity the people who're going to be her next door neighbours. She herself is really rather sad: V. lonely, I think, likes the bottle demons even more than I do, screwing a chap of dubious quality young enough to be her son. Then again, she did marry a psychoanalyst. Perhaps it's to be expected. No getting away from it, divorce is a messy thing. Affected us bad enough.
The pub was the same old boring thing, the same old drunken stench of nicotine and beer. I really don't know why I bother going up there: I know what it's going to be like , everybody sitting around drinking , sayng very little. There'll be that little weasel R, snickering and smirking, playing cocky and laddish; there's SC, trying the best he can to work out the vagaries and dumb chances of the world; IP, angry and silent, thinking where he might have gone wrong with women, trying to keep his sullen calmness; DT, fat and cheerful, a regular loadsamoney type, who doesn't give a damn about the future and continues merrily with the three basics, eating, drinking and shagging.
Then there is all the rest of that merry crowd and always the smell of violence, just waiting to erupt. You can feel it: a presence as tangible as cigarette smoke. I hope I'm not there when it happens, 'cos it's going to be one hell of a scrap. Still, it's a place to drink. I just miss the university bar conversations, that's all. It was such a relief to see Eunice the other saturday. All that had been bottled up inside came spilling out, and I could get a load off my chest. Hopefully I'll see her before long. In the meantime, I really should be writing! There is this poetry competition, I've got four days in which to write a poem and send it off in the vain hope of getting £5,000, which I could do with right now. I can't think of anything else to write at present, so I'll sign off. One thing I've noticed over the past few hundred words is the change in my writing style. Normally, when I'm writing to friends, I'll write in a far more open and flamboyant manner, rather like this, but as in this, I notice my writing more resembles some frantic spidery crawling over the page. Oh well.

Bloody hell. the past is truly a foreign country.
However, I can still identify some aspects that remain the same. One thing that makes me laugh is how much I had my eye on future publishing opportunities - the references to a back story and so on.

mnurg. I feel a)ill, and b)knackered. In particular, my shoulders ache, as if I've been carrying a heavy weight all day. It's become far more noticeable to me that certain parts of me ache far more if I don't sleep properly, noticeably my legs. Since I was woken at 3 a.m. by Nur coming to bed, then by Sean an hour and a half later, after which I couldn't sleep, you can imagine how I felt at 6.30.
Getting older seems to be a mixed blessing: on one hand, I can see far more clearly the fears and errors that made my younger life so much harder, and where necessary act upon them - by which I mean, I do not need to be ruled by those fears. On the other hand, I have become acutely aware of the slow physical accretion of age - eyesight getting blurred every now and then, reaction times on the slide, injuries taking just that little bit longer to heal, and the utterly galling appearance of myself in the mirror in the morning when I can see increasingly wider patches of pink skin gleaming through my hair. It's a bugger.

Here Come The Girls - run for your life!

I'm going to return in this post to one of my favourite topics - adverts. I've shyed from this subject for a while, simply because The Guardian Guide does demolition jobs on them so well. In a way, I feel writing on the same or similar topic feels just like aping, even though it's a tried and tested literary thing. Now, of course Advertistan is a fairly easy target, comprised as it is of stereotypes, models, cliches, fantasies, lazy thinking and fatuous claims, all played out under an eternal sunshine, but it's a sunday evening after a long tiring day and I can't be arsed aiming at anything else. Besides, I just want to put my own point of view on something.
The object of my ire is Boots' 'Here come the girls' advert. OK, it was a memorable ad a couple of years ago, but this year's version (and the scary thing is that this campaign seems destined to run and run) pokes a finger through the thin membrane of what we laughingly call reality and finds nothing inside, save a little dirt (apologies to Joseph Conrad for that stretching of a phrase). In other words, it's totally unrealistic. Here's the premise: an elderly couple are having a meal in an otherwise abandoned restaurant, possibly Italian. Next to them is a large table, clearly reserved. Suddenly, in burst a group of what are mainly women, obviously on an office do. I say mainly, as there does appear to be at least one bloke among them. They give each other gifts. One of the women is pregnant, and gets a gift of two 'In the Night Garden' hand puppet, to which all the women coo. the token bloke gets a beard clipping kit, the waiter (Italian? Greek? Spanish? but clearly Good-Looking Dopey Foreign Bloke) gets a present, even the elderly couple who have had to endure all the festive bonhomie on the table next to them get presents. The waiter gets a note from one of the women. Then all the girls march out, arms linked and four abreast, singing 'Here come the girls'.
And it's bollocks because?
Not a single one of them is honking, screaming, gorilla-butt drunk.
In reality, they'd all be off their tits on lambrini and Bailey's and vodka and Cava ('cos that's class). They'd be throwing food round the restaurant. Two of them, previously best of friends, would be beating seven shades of shit out of each other, while The Fat Ugly One With Chafing Issues would be seeking to be the peacemaker. The Mousey One would have trapped the Token Office Bloke in a corner, earnestly telling him about her cat and her stash of chocolates and her box collection of Ally McBeal and her mum who calls her up twice a day, while trying to relieve him of his trousers. Meanwhile, two of the really fat office ladies would have Good-Looking Dopey Foreign Bloke pinioned down in some dark corner of the restaurant, doing and suggestig unspeakable acts. Finally, they'd all stagger out, chanting 'here come the girls' while any men with any sense would flee for their lives. and trousers. Then our troop would move into the nearest nightclub to cop off with blokes called Wayne, or Carl, or Danno.
And this is why Advertistan is crap.

Huh. It's been one of those days.
I took Sean shopping and decided to withdraw some money from the cash machine. Just after slipping the card in, I noticed that there was something awry with the thing - the screen was out of kilter and the plastic slot where the card feeds in and out looked like it had been battered. After I requested my dosh, the machine tried to spit my card out, but the thing got stuck. After frantically trying to rescue it, the machine, with a final high-pitched 'beep' swallowed it. I swore, then went to complain to the customer services.
'well, we can't touch it, because it belongs to the bank, not us', replied the customer service bod. 'It's done that to several people now'.
'So why haven't you put a sign on it warning people not to use it?'
'Oh, we're not allowed to do that, because the machine doesn't belong to us'.
After a couple of minutes' spluttering on my behalf, I managed to get the duty manager to promise to put one up.
I went home, nearly running out of petrol on the way, in order to pick up my chequebook. It was only after I'd got home that I realised that was no use, as I now didn't have a cheque guarantee card, it now nestling safely in the metal bosom of a dodgy ATM. So, shopping done on the credit card instead.
I had intended to start my crimbo shopping as well this week, in a bold attempt to break with my past habit of flailing around lethargically until the last minute.
And now it's raining.
Bah.

The road to Hell...

...is paved with good intentions. 'I meant to do this', or 'I didn't mean to do that', or more often 'well, that's totally buggered - how'd that happen?'
In fact you could say that the road to Istanbul is paved with good intentions. One thing that you can never level at Turkish people is that they mean or selfish. I've never met people who are so willing to go out of the way to help, even if it means considerable personal discomfort or inconvenience for themselves. The problem is that no matter how good the intention, the execution of the act seems to go totally tits up. Often this is no fault of the person offering to do the good deed: Generally speaking, Istanbul seems to contrive its own ways of ensuring that the best laid plans of mice and men get torn up, eaten, thrown up and flushed down the Bog of Fate, simply because it feels like it. However, there is also the fact that people say they'll do something, as they feel obliged to, and don't actually think about how they will do the act - which leads to all kinds of totally screwed-up episodes. The daftest thing is that it leads to all sorts of extravagant lies in order to justify something, or the lack of something happening.

The most common one involves estimates of times it takes to get anywhere. If someone says, 'it'll take us 20 minutes to get to Sisli', you should, being pragmatic, allow at least an extra hour to get there. And, while you are either stewing in a marinade of humid heat and petrol fumes or shivering at a foul, miserable and rainy day, the driver will inevitably say something along the lines of 'well, just yesterday, it only took me fifteen minutes to get here...', and to be honest, this should be accepted as the good-natured bullshit that it really is. I think it's one thing that British people really don't get - this need to lie to cover up organisational screw-ups, and to have them accepted for what they are.During my recent foray to Istanbul, I'd totally forgotten this aspect to the culture, and so spent a large chunk of the time simmering with anger and frustration at things ot working. It's not as if anyone deliberately set out to bugger up the holiday - everyone was full of the best intentions: it's just everything got buggered in one way or another.
Actually, we Brits are just as bad. We're full of good intentions: We're just better at covering up the reasons for buggering things up, such as The Wrong Type Of Leaves, or Adverse Financial Conditions. In other words, we create an official reason for things going all crap, as it were, rather than relying on an informal and far more inventive way of explaining why things haven't gone as planned.
I suppose that we all have our own cultural-specific ways of buggering things up.

ride the horse.

Apologies for not posting for so long. The truth is, I just haven't felt like writing anything, and I haven't had the will to, either. Each time I've opened the 'new post' page, I've stared at the screen and slunk off like a man with a pocketful of air, staring at the shop window display at the things he wants to buy. Still, I want to get back into the saddle, so I may as well start from wherever I can and go on, even if that leaves me sounding like a disjointed drunk on a soap crate.
I've felt myself getting more and more frustrated recently - the outcome of several things, I suspect: Coming to the end of a very intense period of work, worries about the increasingly rudderless senior management at my workplace and what that may mean for my job, worries caused by the credit crunch and what it's doing to my money, worry about money itself and the perennial difficulties about saving, mild depression engendered by the fact that the next Prime Minister will be a tory version of Tony Blair, a smooth-faced careerist with his eye on the main chance, a mountebank pretending to Care with a capital C, worries, worries. Plain and simple I feel anxious!
Yet when I just focus on the now, I should really wonder what it is that I'm worried about - after all, I do have all the perceived trappings of having a good life, along with my health, most of my hair etc etc - from an external perspective, so far, so great. However, I can't help but focus on the future - in fact, it's always been a thing with me, to ignore the jam today and fret about famine tomorrow. And then, of course, I look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
I am beginning to think that it's time to move on, career-wise, and not necessarily stay in teaching. I haven't moved at all in several years, and all that seems to be happening now is that more and more work is being laded on with little or no reward of any kind. But what should I do next?

wine and computers - just say no.

Buggeration. My netbook (an Advent 4211) decided to have a drink last saturday - a nice refreshing glass of red wine. While I managed to turn it upside down fast enough - well, you don't want good wine to go to waste - the keyboard's buggered, so now I'm writing using a cheap old USB keyboard. So far, the only replacement I've managed to find costs £32, for a component that probably costs only a fiver. And I can't find the receipt for the computer, so I can't get anything done under warranty. Bugger.

a new toy for word fans

I was pointed in the direction of Wordle, and wondered what would happen if I put my 2004 novel into it.

Lacunae

I'm in the midst of a lacuna - and no, that's not a make of car. Having finished doing my Diploma in Teaching in the lifelong learning sector (DTLLS) and my Level 5 ESOL Specialist Qualification, and currently waiting for the results, I feel at something of a loose end. Even though I'm still busy at work and have plenty to do, I can't help but feel that I'm not doing enough, and I don't seem to have any interest in anything. hence the reason I feel that this is a lacuna - a break between things, a pause between actions.
In fact, it would be easy to say that my life is one long story of frenetic bursts of activity followed by lengthy periods of torpor, longeurs if you will (they're certainly not shorteurs). For some reason, once any given period of intense activity ends, I find it immensely difficult to become engaged with something new, or the next phase of a project. I'm damned if I know why, either: it's not for the sake of my health. One thing that becomes immediately apparent once I finish something is that I become extremely irritable, bad-tempered and generally depressed. My assumption on this is that this is probably a result of an alteration in brain chemistry - I suspect that the stress of an intense work project makes me produce a shedload of endorphins, and once the pressure is off, production subsides, leaving me feeling as I do - withdrawal? If it's the case that I feel so crap after finishing something perhaps it leads me to feel reluctant to move on to the next thing.
What is always worrying is the fact that it takes me so damn long to move on to that next thing. I'm far happier working hard than not - so why these breaks in the action? And, as you can see, it means that I don't write on this thing as often as I would like. Forgive the most recent lacuna.

What are you thinking?

"what are you thinking?"...
The car zoomed down country lanes last sunday. I looked out of the window as a gated estate was flung behind us, a quick glance at an advert - 'new development exclusively for over-55's only!' - and thought how the self-imposed ghettoization of a group, in this case of a specific age group rather than an ethnic, religious or cultural group, while seemingly desirable at first glance, is actually more likely to foment more overarching cultural problems. for the subgroup in question, of course sticking together seems to be ideal - any given community that shares a relatively common set of ideals tends to be healthier and longer-lived, according to several statistical studies - yet this leads to the identification of any other given subgroup within society as a whole as 'the other', as Sinfield sublimely investigated in his exploration of Shakespeare's plays, following on from other studies. In other words, these putative 55+ - year-olds would typify anyone below the age of twenty as aggressive little thugs, and the same under-20s would typify them as doddery old fools, feebly waving sticks from behind the compound gates.
This lead on to consideration of how we tend to identify various social groups as 'the other' , and ascribe all our social ills to them, and then to how it is that true evil begins when we see our fellow humans as nothing more than numbers or units or selling markets. This in turn made me consider the unit cost for a pair of jeans in Primark, and wondering how much of that final retail cost actually reaches the person who made the things - considering that a pair of jeans there costs about £7, it's highly likely that virtually bugger all gets to the person in whose sweat they were made. In other words, I perpetuate what is effectively a slave system whenever I buy cheap clothes.
Zooming down the road, impatiently overtaking a Rover (how do I know it's a Rover?) I remark upon the wonderful fresh green of the trees, a miracle of chlorophyll, and think how they will become a darker green thanks to a pigmement that renders the wonderful reds and ambers of autumn; then I consider the fact that, before the advent of the high-speed steam engine, somewhere in the middle of the Victorian period, no-one had ever travelled faster than 25 miles per hour, apart from those unfortunate few who'd managed to fall off a sufficiently high cliff, and even then they wouldn't have been able to reach the average terminal velocity for a falling human body. A couple of phrases from Milton then intruded, then, for no discernible reason, Andrew Marvell's 'the garden', followed by a snatch of The Ancient Mariner...
...and my answer?
'Oh, nothing'.

Brilliant bike ride!

While my sister was puffing and panting round London in the marathon (and getting a perfectly respectable time), I decided to go out for a ride on the bike. The weather was utterly perfect: sky a wonderful bright bluey silver, the temperature just about right, the landscape filled with the freshest, brightest green you could imagine - it was about as close as it is imaginable to cycling through Heaven. With added alpacas. I cycled past this farm outside Whitchurch and had to do a double take - I thought the farmer might have been exceptionally cruel to his sheep at first glance, but then realised he'd shrunk his llamas. as I was scooting down the lane, thinking it couldn't possibly get more bucolic, it did - two boys with stripped willow switches were walking three bullocks down the lane! After that, I passed a wonderfully pastoral scene involving sheep, then woods with bluebells and bright blue skies.
It wasn't a long trip - only twenty miles or so - but it was utterly wonderful. The only shame was that no-one else was tagging along with me.
And of course, the next day, it was absolutely tipping it down and I found my rear tyre flat as a pancake, and somehow I'm managed to run out of tyre cement and couldn't repair the thing.
pictures: Mapledurham House, with added cows; Alpacas; sheep being pastoral; bluebells; English woodland doing an impersonation of rainforest.
(edit) sorry, forgot to say the route - started out, went over Balmore Park, down to the Thames, went as far as Kennet Mouth, changed my mind, followed the Kennet to the town centre, cycled back to the Thames, went to Caversham Bridge, then through St Peter's and down through the Warren, off to Mapledurham, then followed the Bridlepath to Whitchurch; following that, went up the hill until the turning for Goring Heath, through there and past The Sun pub, then uphill and through the forest past the King Charles Head, then up to the Mapledurham crossroads and back home.
(another edit) I've added the route on here from Google Earth.

something in my ear.

I seem to be suffering more than usual from tinnitus, a perpetual buzzing and ringing in my ears. For starters, it's ongoing to the extent that it makes it dfficult to fall asleep and secondly, it seems remarkably loud - to me, anyway. I've had it at this time of year for quite a few years now, and I suspect that it's possibly due to having spent the best part of the previous few months in rooms made arid by central heating. It's probably something to do with ear wax. What seems different this year is the sheer persistence of the damn thing, and the fact that each ear seems to be slightly different - my left ear is a high-pitched whistle, while the right is more of a ringing sound. It's bloody annoying.
More annoying, however, is having a tune lodged in one's head. The German phrase for it translates as 'earworm' - a persistent piece of music repeating itself ad nauseam. For some reason, the current earworm is Beyonce's 'All the Single Ladies' (Aka 'If you liked it you should have put a ring on it'). It's annoying because a) it's a catchy repetitive rhythm, but mostly because b) it's a load of infantile drivel. It'sthe kind of song that you just know some dickwit of a DJ in a nightclub would put on just after Gloria Gaynor's 'I will survive' and just before the Weather Girls' 'It's raining men'. It's the kind of stuff a bunch of drunk women, one or two of whom have just split up from boyfriends/husbands/feckless idiots, dance to: the first song with defiant faces put on, the second whooping it up, the third celebrating drunkenly - just before the Dumped (Dumpee?)/Dumper breaks down in tears, mascara and Chardonnay-flavoured vomit.

What really pisses me off about Beyonce's song is the notion it implies: that a woman is only fulfilled by becoming engaged/married ('If you liked it you should have put a ring on it'), thus reducing one half of humanity to the status of chattel. It's demeaning and thoroughly infantilising, and the singer should be thoroughly ashamed of herself, if she has an ounce of intellect.
And the damn thing is still buzzing round my head.

"Farewell to the flesh"

Today is Shrove Tuesday, and, befittingly, I am stuffed on pancakes. I was discussing this with my students this morning - it being Pancake Day, that is, not my being stuffed - and we looked at traditions in verious other countries. The Polish contingent mentioned feasting on herrings, while the Germans mentioned the carnivals in various towns, in particular the one in Cologne that begins in november and continues until today. The Italian student mentioned perhaps the grandaddy of all these public festivals, the Venice Carnival, and she mentioned the festivities, the costumes and the riot of licence that pervades it.
The word 'carnival' derives from the latin Carne Vale - literally, 'goodbye to meat', or less prosaically as I have titled this post. It is the last chance before Lent to have a blowout, a bit of a party, a bit of fun, before the forty days of fasting and penitence that is Lent. It might seem strange to have a period of abstinence just as spring is round the corner, but think about it: in European latitudes at least, and certainly for our ancestors, this is the time of year when there is dearth and lack, when food supplies are at their lowest, when there is still the long and anxious wait before crops begin to sprout forth, animals grow, things to ripen. Now, as you traipse down the aisles of Tescos, buying strawberries in the dead months, you might not automatically make this connection, but there it is. By making a virtue of starvation and lack, lent creates a sense of communality - after all, everyone is (or rather was) supposed to follow the rules about what you could and could not consume - hence the reason why all the fat in the house had to be used up before the beginning of the period.
In Islam, of course, you have Ramadan, which follows very much the same principal - a month of conscious fasting and abstinence, with people coming together for Iftar at nightfall. The main difference from Lent is that it follows the lunar calendar, so it moves forward by ten days or so each year. This means that someone will always experience the discomfort of a long, hot summer of fasting at least once during their lifetime. It doesn't have the literally visceral connection to food production and lack of the Christian tradition, but it does focus the mind on how it feels to starve like the poorest. Its message is ' here's what it's like to have no food at all', while Lent reminds us of how little we need to actually live on.
And at the end of both? A great big blowout on sweets and chocolates.
All we are asked to do is say farewell to the flesh for a brief time. And, as ever, my birthday falls right at the beginning of the period! So, as I say Vale to my forty-first year and Ave to my forty-second on this planet, I wonder what new things, what changes will happen, and what else shall come.

Head in the clouds.

a day out at Popham airfield, in a two-seater microlite, courtesy of Nur's birthday present to me last year for my 40th. Just in time for my 41st.
[edit] - I forgot to say:
I WANT TO SO DO THAT AGAIN!
the microlite looks, from the front, much like any other small plane, but it really is tiny - the fuel tank is directly behind the seats, and the whole thing is more or less made of plastic. It took off in an incredibly short space - less than 50m - and got up to a thousand feet in just a couple of minutes. Michelle, the pilot, was very helpful and explained a lot in the short space we were aloft. what really surprised me was how receptive the controls were - they just required the touch of fingers. The way the plane bucked and dipped was a bit unnerving at first, but it was just, in the end, like riding rough water.

5 minutes

That's the title and theme of this, and for how long I will write this particular post. It's based upon something I've been trying out with students, which in turn was based upon something I read about the novelist Anthony Trollope. Apparently, before going to his job at the post office, he would write for exactly three hours every morning. If he finished a novel at, say two hours and ten minutes, he wouldn't stop: He'd start a new novel.
Well, I wondered what would happen if I let my students write for five minutes, no more, no less, about a given subject, and tell them not to worry about spelling or grammar - what would happen? In fact, it has so far been an interesting exercise in what happens - newly learned vocabulary appears to be produced with far greater ease, while certain errors, mainly of spelling, disappear.
I then wondered what else can be done in five minutes, so I've just done a load of mini-tasks so far today - clearing up a letters tray, phoning the council about a grant, choosing a couple of birthday cards - and so far, it seems very productive. And there's my five minu

music

get spotify. I've been listening to it while working on some rather tricky stuff, and it's kept me going for nearly four hours. That's all.

Hard day at the office...

he actually fell asleep standing up, with his head resting on the sofa.

Annnnd.....breathe.

It's an automatic process, of course: the exchange of gases within the spongy sacs that fill our thoraxes, the gentle rhythmic pull of the diaphragm, drawing air in, expelling the voided gas. Did you know, however, that with any given breath or exhalation, you only expel, on average, about 10-15% of the used up stuff? Athletes do a bit more, but not much.
Yet when was the last time you really, really focused on the act of breathing, or noticed it? There are days when the air really is like wine, a intoxicating heady rush, eager to fill your lungs; there are times when air blasts through you, cleaning you out - I once experienced this in spectacular fashion, while climbing Carnedd Dafydd, and I encountered a sudden updraught of pure, stromg cold air that didn't just clean my sinuses, it seemed to fill me with an wild, cold fire, and I felt I could have run for hours and hours; then there are days when the atmosphere is laden with perfume from honeysuckle and jasmine and late flowering trees and all is a lavish, luxurious drug of drowsiness. And still we breathe.
Yet when do you focus on the act of breathing itself? Try it: close your eyes, and carefully count the breath in, the breath out, diastole, systole. Feel the air moving through your nasal passageways, in, then out: sense how it feels against the mouth, the throat, the nose, the lungs. Feel your chest rising and falling, then become aware of how your pulse has slowed, and how much slower you are, all of a sudden, breathing. Now, if you're brave enough, stop counting the breaths, and let them flow, and now watch the show inside your head of your thoughts rising and falling, vying with each other to be heard, some gentle, some strident, all needy.
I must admit at this point that I've stolen this idea from Marcus' journal. The act of counting your breath, that is. And what I've found is remarkable. As I seek to focus on the breathing, suddenly I become aware of tens, hundreds of voices, all striving to be heard over the bell-toll of my counting my breaths, or the magisterial silence as I try to let even counting go. And eaach voice is a bit of me, all parts of me articulating worries, fears, anxieties, boasts, terror. Yet while I'm in counting mode, I can look at all this shouting audience and understand, REALLY understand, how trivial or important something is, and get it done if necessary.

ch-ch-ch-changes

I have, for my sins, or possibly just out of sheer torpor, just been watching the 1995 romcom The American President, featuring Michael Douglas as a singleton POTUS wooing Annette Bening. God I'm sad. There's one scene that stuck with me - the bit where the president is ordering an attack on some building with the full knowledge that a lot of innocent people will die. Just got me thinking: right now, someone, somewhere, is doing something that will have an impact on your life. It might be major, it might be minor, you might barely notice it, but because of someone else the course of your life has been changed, just because someone has said this or done that, or possibly because they HAVEN'T done this or said that. It might not be as dramatic as having the shit bombed out of your house, as Hamas and Israel between them have managed to concoct between them for the poor sods in Gaza, but nevertheless the path has been altered. And a small turn here ends up as a big diversion later.
Of course, this is a continuation of the theme of the last post. Who knows - maybe this entry has changed the course of someone's life by just a bit.

Do? Don't do? Mean to do? Do be doo?

And still the snow falls, and still the students straggle in. I was half hoping that no-one would turn up. Well, no, I was fully hoping no-one would turn up actually, but there you go. In fact, from what I've seen, my class is the only one with anything near full attendance today. Bah.
I've been sat here for the past hour, thinking over ideas for lesson plans, but distracted by other thoughts, mostly along the lines of 'I meant to do this and that, but..' I suspect it's the trip up to North Wales that's got me in this vein of thought. How much time have I spent pondering this very statement? I meant to study more. I didn't mean to become a teacher. I meant to do this. I didn't mean to say that. And so forth and so on... The fact of the matter is, we are who we are because of what we do, or don't do. Inaction is as bad as action, sometimes. Whenever I say 'Oh, I meant to do this (but didn't)' , isn't this an admission of some kind of failure? Isn't it me owning up to being an inert lump?
My failure, as a person, has been to be too analytical, too cautious in moving towards action, and thus end up not doing anything much. I have been afraid of action, its consequences and possible harm to others, to the point that not doing seems safer. Yet not doing is harmful in its own way, to myself in my self-esteem (because I don't do the things I want or should do) and to what others need from me, especially my children.
My aim this year, and yes, I know this seems like a late new year's resolution, is to move away from saying 'I meant to do...' and just do it, and avoid 'I didn't mean to do...' by doing the right thing - for myself, at least.

More Ice

Walked up to school with Angus this morning. There'd been a hard frost, and the hill that we have to walk up was one solid gleaming sheet of polished ice. It wasn't too bad underfoot, but cars were having a torrid time getting up. There was a queue of Mummy Tanks going nowhere quickly, stuck on the steepest part of the hill. Quite frankly, I felt absolutely no sympathy for them. These were people who were just driving a few hundred metres to take their kids to school before turning right round again.
Regular readers will know that I have no small antipathy to people in big cars, especially Mummy Tanks: These huge, seven-seater 4wd vehicles that are used solely for the ferrying of a couple of small children and the week's shopping, have never been used in an environment that would require 4wd (except today, of course, and then the Mummy Tank drivers didn't have a clue how to use it), and are there as sops to the egos of fearful, fret-filled souls. Why the hell use them? All you do is literally burn money in order to drive an extra half-tonne of metal around. All for the sake of showing what aBIG car you have, what a LOT of money you must have, what an IMPORTANT person you must be. And also, it shows what a bully you are, and how little you care for your own kids' future as you burn up just a bit more fuel and pollute just a bit more, just because you can.
I also despise them because they are the most poorly-driven cars around. Most of my near misses have been because some arrogant bitch in her Mummy Tank thinks she can drive any which way she likes - she's not going to get hurt, because she's in a big tank, and damn everyone else. However, they are not the only tits on the road. Men who drive vehicles with names like the Mitsubishi Warrior - they're high up on the list of Road Twats. why on earth do you NEED to drive a car called a Warrior? to show that you're a MAAAAAN? That you're macho? Or that you're a sadly deluded middle-aged fatty who's overdosed on pies? 'cos you ain't a warrior.
One of my favourite names for one of these stupid vehicles is the Pajero - this is because, in Spanish, it's slang for 'wanker'. And that sums it up nicely.

A weekend away

Oh my thumping head. I've spent the weekend in Bangor, attending the UCNW Stage Crew 25th birthday bash and going up a mountain. I went up by train last sunday: I was going to hire a car, but after working out costs and petrol, it worked out cheaper to go by rail. Besides, it allowed me to have a drink or several. And, when I got to my destination, to have several more, and then some. I stayed at the Eryl Mor Hotel, which conveniently enough was directly opposite the pub. It also boasts, as I found out the next morning, a spectacular view across the Menai Straits, Bangor Pier and harbour, and the wide, snow-flecked sweep of Snowdonia.
It was great to meet up with a few old faces - I wasn't sure that I'd recognise anyone, or whether they'd recognise me. In a couple of cases, it took a bit of intent peering behind fading hair and wrinkles to work out who was who. Besides, alcohol was involved, which didn't exactly help things at times. I'd half-expected that we'd be meeting up at the Student's Union, but no: apparently, it's hardly open anymore, it's losing money and it's about to be pulled down. It was a bit of a shame, because I would have liked to have seen the old place one more time. However, its failing state suggests that its heyday had been when I was a student there, in the times when a room with a fire safety limit of 125 persons was regularly filled with more than 4 times that amount, where the air was thick with cigarette smoke and cheap 80s perfumes and body spray and beer fug and a frantic joy. Whether this is a good or bad thing, I'm not sure. I did walk past the place as I went home, and I could see the toll of the years - if it didn't get pulled down, it would fall down. Some things hadn't changed: the faded Welsh graffito on the wall of Jock's bar, the signage painted by green algae, the curtains on the upper floors in their half-open, half-torn, mostly stained state - even a half-drunk bottle of Newcastle Brown, placed behind a pillar and visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, could have been there since 1989. Overall, though, I think we did best to stay in the comfort of the Tap and Spile.
On Saturday morning, nursing an aching head and a stomach full of a Full Welsh Breakfast (that's an English Breakfast, coooked in Wales), I took the bus up to Llanberis for a climb up Snowdon. My intention was to get the Sherpa bus to Pen Y Pass, then go over Pyg Track and down the Llanberis Path. Once I'd arrived at Llanberis, however, I quickly revised my plan. First, there was an awful lot of snow on the mountain: second, there was a freezing cold hard wind blowing gale strength. I realised that meant my original plan would be impossible to undertake because of the wind direction and strength and because the snow on the Pen Y Pass side would probably make any Snowdon ascent extremely difficult, even if well equipped. Instead, I took the Llanberis path, which is a tedious, dull, hard and very long slog up the mountain. There were plenty of other people going up the path, and it didn't cease to amaze me how poorly equipped some of them were. I went up with my trusty Berghaus boots, waterproof trousers, winter jacket, walking poles and a backpack with map, lights, food, medical pack, water and other useful bits; One chap I saw, while wonderfully coordinated in his clothing choice, had skimpy pixie boots, a lightweight summer jacket, a tastefully chosen bandanna and a jaunty little knapsack. Others were plodding up as though they were just popping back from the shops, including carrying a plastic shopping bag with a few bits and pieces in.
After getting past Clogwyn Station, the snow appeared, but it was deep snow that had been lying for quite a while and had turned into a very hard crust, with soft and rotten snow below. It had blown into drifts in some areas higher than my head, and left only very thin paths up, especially at the point where you walk under the rail line and look over Pen Y Pass towards the Glyders. I trudged on up, fighting my hangover and the wind and the cold, until I go to the point where the path deviates higher up from the rail line, under Carnedd Ugain and towards Clogwyn Coch, and saw a few groups of people sitting on the snow. Some where shuffling gingerly upwards on their bums, while others were shuffling gingerly downwards. After a few more steps, and not without a slightly rising sense of horror, I realised why: the snow had turned into an extremely dangerous sheet of ice, pointing down towards a sheer fall. I tried probing the snow, but it was quickly obvious that it was a solid icy crust. I also realised that I would have to be extraordinarily careful in order to turn round and get the hell out of there. It was brought home to me how you need crampons and ice axes whenever on the side of a snowy slope like that. Amazingly, some idiots with minimal equipment were still trying to get higher up. I decided to turn back, with lots of very small, careful steps and judicious use of walking poles. I wasn't helped in this by the wind, which was doing its best to unbalance me. What was also worse was the wind direction - from the south, meaning that it was relatively warm, meaning it was melting the snow, meaning that it was a rapidly increasing avalanche risk - if not that day, then later. Anyway, as you can tell, I made it off safely.
The next day, two brothers, in their 30s and both married, fell and died, less than 100 metres away from where I reached.

I don't fancy yours much..

This is what happens when you pour alcohol down my mum and sister's throats. These were taken at dad's birthday dinner, at Picasso's on Caversham Bridge. Mum's put far nicer pictures on Facebook.

that's about right...

Your Word is "Why"

You see life as complicated and intriguing. The only thing you know for sure is that you haven't figured it all out yet. You question everything and believe very little. And whatever you believe is likely to change. You are interested in theories, philosophies, and religions... even if you don't buy into any of them. You are also fascinated by how things work. You'd like to understand as much in the world as possible.

What's Your Word?