in a fug.

ye gods, I'd forgotten how drained you feel. It's the sense of being in a permanent daze, of being a stupefied automaton at the thrall of something very small and very precious with a wail that is heartrending, soulrending, mindshredding and completely impossible to ignore. And the lengthening days, particularly the mornings, make it harder. Just like Angus, Sean is an early riser. I've spent the past few days wandering round in a haze of inattentive dullness, save for a few moments of clarity while, of all things, doing the shopping. Mind you, wandering round Tescos is enough to put anyone in a daze. Unpacking my things onto the conveyor belt before having them scanned and then repacking them (and before shoving them in the car, then dragging them home and unpacking them into new places, then unpacking them as and when and dumping the remains in one way shpae or form), it was as though all the sounds and voices came into sudden focus, as well as the colours and shapes around me, and I could almost sense the secret thoughts, worries, anger, anxieties, misery, joy and fears of those processing their shopping.
Anyway, I'm knackered.
Here's a pic.

Yes, this really is the large statue above what was the main entrance to Reading College. From the front, it looks fairly innocuous in a 1950's Socialist Realist kind of way. It's only when viewed from the west wing that it's revealed that he's having a quick one off his stone wrist.

With a statue like this...

What can you say about where i work?

post-inspection, all washed out

...which is pretty much all I have to say. The BC inspectors were fairly kind in their judgement on us: Certainly, the most important thing, the teaching, came out well. I'm now in the mood where I can't be arsed to do anything. Also utterly tired out as Sean had a v. uncomfortable night, thanks to a cough.

Angus

taken on, and posted directly from, my new sony ericsson k800. Good, isn't it?

wet sundays.

I am, quite simply, too bloody knackered. Let's hope son no. 2 grows up quickly so I can get a decent night's sleep. Time was I would have spent sunday mooching around, especially when it was a sopping wet one like today. There is a pleasure in stomping around the countryside on a wet day, but this is one of those where you need to be curled up in a chair with a decent book or three and a ready supply of wine. Crumpets may also possibly be involved somewhere along the line, as well as the smell of a roast dinner.
Nowadays, I can hardly move for the competing demands for my attention from various others - and indeed, just on cue, Sean has just woken up. Also, I have to make dinner for a guest who I drunkenly invited over after my mum's 60th birthday bash, and of which I had entirely forgotten until Nurel reminded me this morning. I miss those lazy, lounging days.

journeys.

Bug's Bottom to Shipnell's Farm, Foxhill to Middle farm, up to Kidmore farm then down to Toker's Green or Dyson's farm or maybe up to Chalkhouse Green and the back route to Emmer Green; Perhaps along to Kidmore end and over fields to Sonning Common, past the Bird in Hand and the route to Dunsden and from there back to Clayfield Copse; Possibly over Binfield Heath and past the stand of houses and past Hurley End, then towards Henley-on Thames; Or possibly just up to Balmore and look out across the broad Thames Valley, bowl of my birth, and think, as ever, of the possiblities and maybes and wherefores of the broad world without, of the lives I have met, or will cross, or will never encounter, and think, yes, there are worlds out there; And, as ever, I resent that I will never live long enough to encounter everything there is, or was, or will be. And here I am, at 39, looking at photos of my parents at my age, and remembering me as a 17-year-old, watching them and considering what it would be like to be their age, and who or what I would be; Now here I am. And of course, there is only ever now, and the fields and folds and paths I have ever and anon walked.

What was it?

Maybe it was having to tell a colleague, for the umpteenth time, how to install a printer on his computer, and knowing that I'll have to tell him again any time soon; Maybe it was having to pack all the stuff on my desk up, because they were moving my desk nine inches to the right and were worried about Health and Safety; maybe it was the second call from the exams officer, who couldn't work out a perfectly clear spreadsheet as to who should be put in for exams and when, because she couldn't be arsed to understand timetables; Maybe it was when one of my colleagues shoved her oar in, and started telling all and sundry that exams would be on days they weren't going to be; maybe it was another colleague who has studiousuly ignored the list of people who wish to sign up for a course, then called them to say that the course had been cancelled due to lack of demand; Maybe it's the colleagues who have had a go at me because of other people's incompetencies; Maybe it was the sense that I feel I have been marginalised and sidelined, both professionally and socially, for reasons that I don't understand; Maybe it was the realisation that the 'pay increase for sustained contributution to the university' has nothing to do with sustained contribution at all, but rather the number of letters after your name, another kind of box-filling, and the convictio that I am not paid as much as I deserve; Maybe it was the realisation of just how much I have contributed, and how little support I've actually received; Maybe it was this or that or the other, or an aching sense of loss; But I just realised, I really don't give a shit any more, and I am utterly sick of clearing up other people's crap for them. If people are so desirous of drowning in their own incompetence, then so be it. They deserve to drown. What I will no longer let them do is drown me alongside them. It is noticeable how, in any given organisation, the most competent are loaded up with work until they become functionally incompetent.

A very quick update. I've been busy on several fronts over the past week; the arrival of the laptop has proved to be, so far, a good investment on my part. Work on the Dip. has increased; I'm editing A Guide to Reading; and I'm experimenting with some other stuff too. I also downloaded OpenOffice, which I'd recommend as a replacement for Windows Office.
Booze - wise: 34 units over the course of the week.

Contingency Plan.

Everyone should have one. Currently, I'm plotting how I will deal with the predicted snowfall for tomorrow, in terms of how I shall get to work first, and then what to do when no-one turns up ofr class.

Not much to scrawl.

I haven't posted much this week, as you have probably noticed; In fact, I've been busy putting together, then rewriting, a substantial entry regarding one of the subjects I listed earlier. That, and I've been too busy. In the meantime, I didn't have any booze until last night, when I was driven from the house by my wife and her friend discussing clothes. Ended up having 3 rather dissatisfying pints of London Pride, and, on returning home, the last half glass of white wine in the fridge, and a single whisky as a nightcap. That still adds up to 8 or 9 units, however.

I kind of lost count of how much booze I consumed over the weekend, but I suspect it was at the high end of the forties, units-wise. So far this week, not a drop.
And I bought a laptop last night for £66!

Poverty.

We entered the house,my son and I. It was a birthday party for one of his friends. Everywhere, there were the signs of building work and house improvement. The hallway was half-stripped wall and bare plaster; a door for the living room was still encased in its plastic wrap; a toilet lay covered in dust, waiting to be plumbed in; the kitchen-cum-dining room, newly extended, was a hotch-potch of old furniture, dismantled panels, and packages waiting to become new furniture. Half the lights didn't work. In the year since we'd last been there, it seemed to me that little had changed, except that the hostess' eyes had more lines around them, darker circles of care. I couldn't help noticing a letter rack bulging with bills and torn envelopes. The party fare, laid out on a worn paper tablecloth, was of the kind of things that kids loved, but it was spread thinly. Cheap fizzy drinks clustered to the side; Value sausage rolls were cooling off on a paper plate, and setting in their own grease; Lurid pink iced biscuits were lumped on a tray uninvitingly.
While the kids entertained themselves, I asked the hostess how it was going.
'Oh, fine', she said, 'you know. It's a bit tricky at the moment, but it's a birthday; we have to do something for that.'
And everywhere about the place, there was that smell; the smell of clothes that had been left a little too long, a little too damp, on a dryer; the smell of bodies not quite looked after; cheap perfume, cheap room deodorants, cheap detergents, all with their bitter underscore in the nose; cheap food, exuding unhealthiness into the air like a plague; And worse, the smell of desperation, a need to rise above this seeming morass, a vast, hungry desire to make it, to be bigger, better, stronger, all of it expressed in the dust and damp smell of Home Improvement.

The United Kingdom is still, just about, the fourth largest economy in the world, a fact that never fails to stagger me when I look about and see how many people in this country are quite clearly living in poverty. Now, I'm not talking about the gut-churning, soul-wrenching horrors of the Brazilian Favelas or slumtowns of Nairobi, to name but two, or the abject existence of the average Chinese peasant (don't be fooled by the economic miracle there - most of the population still grinds out a living from the land) - no, I'm talking the poverty of lives that are truly unlived. It's a poverty that ironically takes its shape from having a glut of things, a riot of choices - all of which are placed in front of the punter with no information given as to how to use them. And without knowledge, all choices are necessarily bad, because we don't know what to do with them.
I've mentioned before my profound mistrust and, indeed, hatred of advertising, and the main reason why is because it sells nothing but dreams, and grinds our faces back into the apparent nightmare of our own existence - I say apparent, as all ads imply that without the product being sold, we are somehow inadequate. Adverts essentially exploit poverty, or the perception thereof, leaving people unhappy with their lot. This has become especially noticeable, in Britain at least, over the past twenty-five years or so,certainly since that nemesis of honesty and decency, Margaret Thatcher, pronounced that there was no such thing as society, and opened the floodgates of the morass of greed we find ourselves in now.
I have to go back here a little bit, and describe my family as we found ourselves in the mid-70s, and one particular incident that etched itself on my mind. It was, if memory serves me correctly, my mum and dad's wedding anniversary. My granddad and nan had bought them a pine welsh dresser, and I remember thinking then, as it was unwrappped and given pride of place in acorner of the living room, 'Wow! Nan and Granddad must be really rich!' Also, another incident, visiting one of my uncles, and being impressed not only by their detached house with large (to my eyes) garden, but also their top-of-the-range family tent, resplendent in 1970's orange and brown swirls.
I still have that welsh dresser; its base sits in my living room now, a rather nondescript piece of not very expensive furniture. Its top is in my shed, being used to house various garden implements. In other words, a rather cheap piece of household goods impressed me with its wealth way back then. And it is only in the past few years in conversation with both my parents that I have realised just how poor, in real finacial terms, we were back then. However, it was something I never noticed at all. I never realised that I was supposed to be counted as being one o f the poor, and I daresay that my parents never contenanced this either, at the time.
Yet things change. How would we define poverty now? Who do we see as poor in our own society, let alone in the developing world? It strikes me that the goalposts have not been so much shifted as raised to almost impossible limits. You MUST have that iPod, You MUST have that plasma screen telly, you MUST have those trainers, you MUST have the right kind of flooring, you MUST have white teeth, glossy hair, perfect tits, even more perfect sex, the best set of wheels, perfect abs, brilliant mates et cetera et cetera ad fucking nauseam.
And it's impossible to be that! In other words, we consign ourselves to an apparent failure, one tinged with that odour I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the scent of poverty's desperation. However, it's important to remember this one important fact: The vast majority of us are born into 'poverty'. Look around you at the world: of the other five or six people born in the same second as you were, you are the only one of them, statistically speaking, who is actually even able to read this, let alone having access to the internet; two of them are almost certainly dead due to poverty-related diseases.
In reality, we must distinguish the different forms of poverty that afflict us all. Now, I could go on about Maslow's hierarchy of needs at this point, but I'm not going to - if you're interested, do some googling on the subject. Basically, there is objective, real poverty, based on a lack of those things that are essential - shelter, clothing, clean water and adequate food. This we all know, and I think it is fair to say that no-one in the UK can say that they lack any of these - or that should be the case. Notice, by the way, I say adequate food, not necessarily healthy food - that should cover some of the crap Brits are liable to consume. No, other forms of poverty haunt us: a subjective poverty, based on our measurements against how well or badly others are doing compared to us; Poverty of choice, being stuck in a rut or a situation that one cannot escape; A poverty of education, meaning we cannot exercise choice in a meaningful way; And a poverty of mind, a bleak outlook that informs us that we are defined by how we appear and what we consume rather than by what we really are.

two pints of Magner's, two glasses white, one glass red and a sleepless night.

half a bottle of white.

tuesday night: three small glasses of white. two single G&T's.
wednesday night: two and a half glasses of red and a single raki, plus an argument with the wife because I couldn't get Sean to sleep - 'You're worse than a Turkish man! You just think of yourself and no-one else! You're a lazy, typical man! You don't give me enough money!'
I suspect she was pissed off because Sean's crying interrupted her having a chat with her best friend on MSN messenger.

How are you?

Such a simple question; You ask it, and get the reply, 'Fine', or 'Not bad'. And most of the time, that seems to be enough. There's a peculiarly British dread of asking 'How are you?' and then being told in exact detail how the person is - their moans, their gripes, their various ailments and arguments with their families, friends and enemies. This is because the question has become debased to mean just 'Hello', and the reply - 'Fine thanks', 'Not bad', 'Mustn't grumble', and so forth - a mere acknowledgement of this. I have had many students left perplexed at how a question that carries notions of concern, sympathy, and love within it is regarded in such a cavalier fashion. Turkish people always reply with 'Thank you' to it, and depending on the level of relationship between the person asking and the answerer, leave it there, or go on to develop the conversation. The Poles I have taught tend to ignore its cognate - Jaksiemas? (any Polish speakers, please feel free to correct my spelling of it!) - as it is an invitation to spill all. A simple 'Hello' suffices.
Yet there are times when I want to say 'How are you?', or 'How are you?', or even 'How are you?', and mean it sincerely, and be interested in and sympathetic to the reply. I want to be asked the question in the same way, and be able to sincerely say what is in my heart, whether it be a burden or a joy - to say 'Today is not good, because of this and that and the other', or to look the asker in the eye and tell that person how I feel, how much I love them and what they mean to me, how my day has been lifted by the simple action of being asked such a simple, such a complex and fraught, question.
Such a simple question, yet so hard to articulate truthfully, in its asking and in its reply.
So I ask you: How are you?

edit: drank 1 bottle of red last night.

A crab wandering on sand.

So, after a day of feeling really crap, I should be in bed, sleeping soundly, ready for the travails of another day; Yet I can't. Instead, here I am at nearly midnight, scratching an entry out onto the page and drinking red wine. And as I write, I'm puzzling what it is I'm trying to say, trying to exude onto the pristine white screen facing me, like a child faced with a virgin parchment of snow early in the morning, wanting to implant his first footsteps before all others, only to leave random bootsteps going first this way, then the other, directionless. The night, the house, are silent; The boys and Nur are abed, nuzzled in warmth and sleep; even the vixens in the stand of woods at the valley's lip are quiet, their yowling silenced by the cold.
What should I write? My frustrations at the everyday burden? My 'humble' opinions on this, that, and the other? By the way, whenever I hear someone begin with the words 'In my humble opinion..' I feel a need to punch the pompous fucker in the gob.Opinions are never humble. I could write of my readers, the strangely scattered number of you who read this. I check you out, you know. I look at the meter to the right of these entries, and it shows me a map of who has had a look, and I wonder why some posts seem to be more popular than others. Why is someone in China having a peek? Why is my diatribe against Rolie Polie FUCKING Olie so popular? Who is it that finds my discussion on the need to vote correctly in elections so interesting?
Here is a list of some ideas I'd like to write about on this blog. Whether I'll get round to it is anybody's guess.

• Poverty - its various guises, not necessarily the lack of lucre
• Ignorance - its relationship to poverty, and why they are both my enemies
• Stupidity - let's face it, we're all guilty of this, but why?
• A deterministic versus a relativistic universe - why the former is deeply scary, and the latter even scarier
• creation myths - how they have been hijacked by idiots full of the top three discussion points on this list
• why all faiths are at the mercy of fuckwits
• booze - me keeping faith with the original ethos of this blog
• why all politics, which, after all, is only another guise of faith, is at the mercy of ambitious fuckwits
• my sons, my family, and all the other things that conspire to drive me completely bloody mad, love them though I do.

And this week's score is...

46 units! with an acceptable margin of error, of course. Better, but still 16 over target.

quick booze update

thursday: dad's birthday, so went round and had one small beer there, followed by another in the pub, then three glasses at home.
friday: one pint of cider, then three glasses of red.
saturday: one G&T (single) and three small glasses wine.
so far tonight, four glasses white wine.

so there.
I have also kitted out my shed as an office, so I shall be doing (hopefully) plenty of writing there.