The Best Way?

To begin at the beginning is always the best way. However, sometimes it is hard to know where the beginning was. Then, just how do you go about finding which particular moment within that actual beginning, should you have found it, was the very one that began it all?

Was it the decision to go for the cup of coffee at that moment? Was it the decision to go to that one particular coffee shop rather than the other, closer one? Was it the delay at the traffic lights caused by the broken down car that meant you had to wait to cross for those few moments longer?

Was it the fact that she was already late for her appointment and was not looking where she was going? Was it the fact that she was rummaging through her bag, checking that she had both the card and the present, and was not really looking where she was going as she rushed along the pavement by the crossing?

Was it your increasing irritation at the rather rash and foolish decision of yours to come out for a – no doubt far too expensive - cup of coffee when you had perfectly reasonable coffee at home? 

Stories and Promises

It is time to move on. I have lived long enough amongst these people. I have told them all the stories I know, and, in return, they have told me all their stories.

I have promised several of those women who dared to visit me in the dark safety of the night to take each of them with me when I leave. I will not take them, and deep down I think they know, and expect that. However, I will leave them satisfied with the dreams that such promises bring. All of us have made promises we know we will never keep.

Promises are a lot like stories, I suppose. For both stories, and promises, it is important to believe. When I tell my stories, or make those promises, I really do believe. I believe that what I am saying is true and there is no way at all it could be otherwise.

Nevertheless, looking back later, I see that I - like all storytellers - was under the spell of the moment. A spell that would make me say, or do, anything to keep that audience's rapt attention, or to make that woman continue removing her clothes for me. 

Monday Poem: Lost Names

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Lost Names

An enemy makes life simple.
Drunk on heroes and legends,
uniforms and marching songs.
As if there were not enough
ordinary tragedies for them,
they marched off into history
looking for adventure
and tales for awed grandchildren.

All their names are lost now,
deep in the mud of the past
sinking far below the surface
as time smooths over all traces,
becomes indifferent once more.

Crusade! This Time It's Personal!

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Animal Rights Action

Earlier today a spokeswoman for PFFAR (People For Fluffiness Against Rationality), the 'animal rights' activists announced that overnight they had broken into Tewkesbury University and liberated over fifty "'so-called' students" from its science departments.

"These 'students', the spokeswoman," Gully Usefulidiot, claimed, "are used by the evil university to partake in unnecessary and pointless 'learning'. Some of these poor creatures are forced - or at least expected - to attend as many as two or three lectures a week where they are forced to undergo the ordeal of learning the Western hegemonic patriarchy's so-called science! This horrific and barbaric practice is nothing less than torture, inflicted on these poor innocent defenceless creatures by those evil scientists."

Asked by a journalist what her organisation had against science, Usefulidiot replied, "Isn't it obvious? Without the evils of science we would all be able to lead natural lives, like the bunny rabbits and the pretty white mice."

"But hasn't science done a great deal of good?" asked another journalist.

"No, of course not," Usefulidiot stated emphatically. "It is all propaganda put out by the military-industrial scientific cabal that controls the world, including the media. After all, science didn't cure the Black Death, did it? So all its claims are obviously nothing but evil propaganda, lies and distortions."

"Anyway," she continued, returning to her prepared statement. "We hope to liberate these poor 'students' out into the wild where, with a bit of luck they will soon forget about such harmful things as facts, logic, the scientific method, proof and so on. They will soon learn to live in peace and harmony like the foxes and chickens, the owls and the mice, and all the other cute fluffy creatures do."

However, later this morning, a spokeswoman for the university condemned the action, claiming that "these students once educated and a bit more mature, would have made a great contribution to society in all manner of fields from medicine to engineering, to veterinary work, to solving the world's environmental problems. Although it may sometimes seem cruel to make students learn things, the work we do here - in the university science departments - is vital for the futures of all of us in society. As for releasing students out into the wild, I can't think of anything more stupid, short-sighted or dangerous. Most of our students are from the middle-classes, they will not be able to survive for even a week without being bailed out by their parents. Some of the male students, for example, have never seen a frying pan, let alone know what it is used for."

The Chief Constable for the Tewkesbury police said, at a later press conference, "We utterly condemn this thoughtless and dangerous action by the PFFAR. Letting students out into the wild could have very tragic consequences and may force us into filling out several otherwise unnecessary forms. We would advise members of the general public not to approach any students they see roaming the streets, as outside their natural habitat of the campus, they can become very confused and disorientated. Although some of them may look cute and approachable, it must be remembered that most of them are still almost teenagers and therefore should not be brought into the home under any circumstances. Remember, if you do see anyone you might suspect of being a student, please contact either your local police station or the university and they will - eventually - send out trained professionals to herd the students back to the safety of their campus. Thank you."

If Something Happened

What if something happened, and you didn’t know what to do?

It happens all the time though, anyway. Every day – it seems – brings something new for you to deal with. What makes one particular problem stand out more than any of the other day-to-day irritations and interruptions? Who knows? There are the big things: births, marriages, deaths and all the thousand other shocks that flesh is heir to, of course. They will all stand out. There are the vagaries of this world and its hostility towards us, and its indifference to our fate, things like floods, storms, earthquakes, lightning strikes and other natural disasters.

Although, it makes one pause and wonder just what would be an unnatural disaster: attacked by psycho penguins and covered in mint-flavoured chocolate, perhaps?

All of it – except the psycho-penguins, of course - run of the mill stuff in a way, but still able to dominate the TV news for days at a time, providing the casualty figures, or the newsworthy-ness of the event is suitably camera-friendly, of course, or if it allows journalists seemingly endless opportunities to speculate together about possible outcomes. 

Interceding

This happens then that happens. However, to say that that happens because this happens is not always true, even though it may, especially in retrospect, seem that there must be a connection. This is – of course – one of the reasons why religions were created and why they can – even in this day and age – still seem to have some credibility, especially to the more credulous.

For if the priestly caste, or the wise men, witch doctors or others of their forebears could say that this happened and then that happened because of the way they could interact with the spirits, the powers that controlled such events, then, such interventions could increase the status of those seemingly on the inside of the process; those that could intervene with, or interpret the actions of a seemingly otherwise hostile and indifferent earth as the motivated actions of some other more powerful entity.

Thus from the spirits that animated the world were the gods born. The more powerful the god then the more power, respect and status could those who interceded on behalf of the tribe could command. That is probably why – quite often – many gods became one god – the more powerful the god, the more awe-inspiring the person who dared intercede with that god.

[See here for an explanation of these posts labelled as Fragments]

Monday Poem: Birds

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Birds

With hands that flutter like trapped birds, she sees
only the bars of her slow-rusting cage
each time she looks up, searching for the sky.

Preferring to look down and see the birds
still trapped, there, in her lap. Her dress is pretty,
a blue-green field with flowers; red and gold.
A meadow she can run in, forever.

She can escape across that open ground
away from here, to chase those birds in flight
across the endless blue-green meadow, thick
with flowers, red and gold. As free, at last,
as any bird could ever want to be.

All-Nude Chicken-Intriguing

Nasturtium Cheeseincident (1945 - 2008) began as a Chicken-Intriguer of the old school. She first learnt the ancient and noble art of Chicken-Intriguing at the knee, ankle and - on one memorable occasion - elbow, of the semi-legendary Great High Trilobite of Chicken-Intriguing - Gerrymander Ankletrouser, an adept at the once lost art of Turkey-Perplexing, as well as being the greatest Chicken-Intriguer this world has ever known.

It was only through following Ankletrouser's rigorous training regime, and strict diet of Draught Guinness and pickled onions, that Nasturtium Cheeseincident was - after many years and countless disappointments - able to achieve the highest reaches of the Chicken-Intriguing discipline, mastering such - once-considered almost impossible - Chicken-Intriguing stances as the notorious Crouching Stockbroker, Disinterested Spaniel and Loquacious Hedge-trimmer of Tipton.

Cheeseincident first came to the attention of Ankletrouser when she was runner-up in the first post-war International Chicken-Intriguing finals in Paris during the summer of 1960. Ankletrouser immediately offered her his services, and once the misunderstanding with Nasturtium's rather over-protective father, Benchpress Cheeseincident, was cleared up and Ankletrouser was out of hospital, her training began in earnest.

Cheeseincident completely disappeared from the International Chicken-Intriguing circuit from that point. It was assumed that she had - like so many of those once-keen young Chicken-Intriguers - succumbed to one of the many vices - drink, drugs, perverted sexual practices, or even accountancy - that plagued Chicken-Intriguing at the time. But she was deep in training with Ankletrouser at his secret training ground, deep in the heart of mysterious Wolverhampton.

It was during this period, out of the limelight, that Nasturtium Cheeseincident began to experiment with the first of the many revolutions in Chicken-Intriguing she was to bring about. Eschewing the then-typical Chicken-Intriguing costume of black rolled-top wellies, spangled leather thong, donkey jacket tied with muddied string, and bobble-hat of the professional Chicken-Intriguers, Nasturtium began to experiment with naked Chicken-Intriguing.

After first disapproving of this innovation, soon the great Ankletrouser himself became a fervent advocate of this methodology, even though he later confessed that watching Nasturtium practicing naked Chicken-Intriguing did tend to give him very sore wrists for several days afterwards.

Of course, these days we all tend to be a bit blasé about naked International Chicken-Intriguing. But, on Cheeseincidents first appearance completely naked in the preliminary rounds of the Droitwich International Chicken-Intriguing finals in 1964, the whole world was shocked, outraged and quite aroused by her. After all, Nasturtium Cheeseincident had the sort of body that makes grown men walk into lampposts, so to see it in the familiar contortions of the expert chicken-intriguing poses is enough to add several new chapters to the Big Boy's Book of Advanced Sexual Perversions.

Of course, Droitwich was only the beginning for Nasturtium Cheeseincident. Soon after winning the grand final by intriguing not one, but three flocks of chickens for almost a solid half an hour utilizing the - until then - unheard-of stance, Shoe-Shop Manageress in State of Disorientation she became the household name she would remain until her retirement from professional Chicken-Intriguing twenty-three years later.

But, sadly, her personal life away from the glamour and excitement of International Chicken-Intriguing was not such a success. She had a string of short-lived affairs with several eligible bachelors, none of which bought her any happiness. She had numerous affairs with other women too, which again brought her little fulfilment, but provided the rest of us with some very memorable incidents from her stolen home-movies. It was not until her thirtieth year when she finally retired from full time Chicken-Intriguing while still unbeaten world champion for the eleventh year running that she finally found personal happiness in her private life when she moved in with the entire North Shropshire Fire Service Amateur rugby team.

Apart from giving the very occasional Chicken-Intriguing exhibition, she gave up the sport entirely to live out the rest of her life in quiet, cosy domestic bliss with her rugby team.

She died, tragically, last Saturday at the age of sixty, when the - now nearly all badly arthritic - rugby team could no longer keep the shape of the scrum and they all collapsed on her as she lay naked underneath them. Nasturtium Cheeseincident was rushed to the hospital where they attempted to disentangle her from the lower part of the scrum, but it was all in vain and she died on the operating table. Several of the rugby team were treated for minor injuries, and one had to have a jockstrap surgically removed before being allowed out of the hospital.

On hearing of her untimely death, Gerrymander Ankletrouser - now Emeritus Professor of Chicken-Intriguing and General Poultry-Confusion at Wibble College, Cambridge, issued this statement: 'Throughout her career, Nasturtium Cheeseincident was, unarguably, the most famous Chicken-Intriguer in the world, not only for her looks, her body and her creative use of bad language, but for the whole air of serious and profound understanding of the art of Chicken-Intriguing she always possessed. She was - without a doubt - Chicken-Intriguing's first, greatest and most consummate artist. It is unlikely there will ever be another quite like her.'

The funeral of Nasturtium Cheeseincident (1945-2008), World Champion Chicken- Intriguer 1964-2000, will take place on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 at the Our Plaice fish and chip shop, Nuneaton.

God Condemns 'So-Called Intelligent Design'

At a press conference called earlier today, a being claiming to be God severely criticised and denounced the cod-scientific movement known as Intelligent Design (ID), claiming 'it has absolutely nothing to do with me at all. Self-replicating DNA, evolving organisms with random mutation - I mean, come on people, it is so obvious.'

He went on to say, 'All this creationist nonsense is so embarrassing, especially as I'm supposed to be omnipotent. Intelligent design? Putting the sex organs and the excretory organs together on the same bit of body? You call that intelligent? What about the appendix, eh? Back-ache? Giraffes, even - I could have just made smaller trees. I mean, come on, do I look like a cowboy builder?'

Asked why he had not spoken out before, God mumbled, 'Well, y'know, on the Seventh Day we had to go out and do a bit of shopping. What with all the parking problems, I admit I was away an eon or two longer than I'd expected. But when I got back, there were all these messages on the answering machine, especially all these about this so-called Intelligent Design… well… I just felt I couldn't stay silent any longer.'

'To tell you the truth,' He admitted. 'I was supposed to only be temporary. It is supposed to go from primitive animism through a pantheon of Gods to a single God - me, of course - and then on to scientific rational materialism. I was - according to the contract - supposed to retire quietly a century or two ago, and just… I dunno… fade from the scene. The wife and I had picked out a lovely little retirement bungalow down on the south coast and everything. I was looking forward to doing a bit of gardening, actually. I like gardens, as you probably know.'

'Anyway,' He sighed. 'I keep getting all these calls from folk begging me to intercede on their behalf, smite their enemies, improve their sex life, make them rich, all sorts of things. Frankly, I just don't want to get involved. It's none of my business how people want to lead their lives.'

Asked about the recent climactic disasters, God was adamant that none of them were any of his doing. 'Surely, you must have heard of the butterfly effect?' he retorted angrily. when faced with repeated questioning. 'If I try to stop a hurricane in, say Florida, the effects of that would spread all around the world. You'd end up with all sorts of odd things happening elsewhere like a volcano erupting in Paris, or a hailstorm in the Sahara desert, or have it raining frogs in Peru, or something. Nature's a tricky business at the best of times, buggering about with it is just asking for trouble, if you ask me.'

Finally, he said, 'I mean, what's wrong with Darwin? He had a far better beard than Moses had, and even if he did write a book just as fat as the Bible, it was much easier to read. The Bible… pah, all that thingy begat doodah, who begat whatsisname and so on, and on. It just got on my nerves. Actually, to be honest, I never did read all of it. It was mostly Moses' idea, really. We had a few beers - as you do - together one night, and just started making stuff up. Come on, I mean, that Noah's Ark? Be serious. What do you think would happen if you get a couple of loins crammed into a small space with a brace of zebras? Not to mention dogs and cats… and mice as well. Bloody anarchy, that's what you'd have. You need more than a few pints in you for anything like that to make sense. Anyway, I must be off now. I promised the wife a night out on the town. Good-bye, and thanks for listening.'

From The Archive: O, for a draught of vintage

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense, and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope, that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

O, for a draught of vintage - 28/09/05

On the BBC News 'Have Your Say' site there is this article: Are young women drinking too much? .

As a brave fearless pontificator about this world and all its woes, I have decided to have my say about this, and in case the BBC doesn't get around to printing my comments, I'm putting them here as well.

Are young women drinking too much?

Well, yes they are. But then - so it seems - young men are too. As someone says in the comments this has always happened - which is certainly true. However, there has been a rather profound change over the least few decades.

This period of overindulgence used to be a mark of adolescence, almost a rite of passage from the teenage years into adulthood. By their early twenties, most people had grown out of this kind of thing. However, these days it seems that the period of adolescence is stretching further and further into the area that used to be regarded as adulthood. People in their late twenties, thirties and even their forties are still behaving like adolescents; overindulgence and binge-drinking are just one aspect of this.

This extension of adolescence into adulthood means that all the old virtues of sobriety, self-improvement, restraint, maturity and, especially, 'settling-down' are derided as old-fashioned. These days there is no need to grow-up, because without those old 'virtues' there is nothing to grow up for. The now universal popular culture with its tabloid mentality and cult of celebrity leads to short-term unreflective hedonism as the 'ideal lifestyle choice'.

Pubs have changed in recent years too, gone are the cosy quiet places where friends could meet and chat around a table with a few drinks - the stereotypical British pub of advert, soap-opera and sit-com. Instead, they have become large drinking sheds with loud aggressive 'music', big crowds and flashy hip and trendy (usually higher-alcohol content) drinks. All this designed to increase consumption and therefore turnover while driving away the older - and wiser - drinkers, leaving the young (and pseudo-young) no idea that there is any other way to drink other than to neck it all as fast as possible.

The new drinks, alco-pops and suchlike, also take away another of the rites of passage of drinking - learning to like the stuff, blurring the distinction between children's drinks (soft drinks) and the grown-ups drinks (alcohol). So another marker on the road to adulthood is lost.

It seems our glorious leader himself is perturbed by these goings on and is busy trying to find some sort of solution to them. Perhaps the next time Blair is posing in front of the Downing Street bedroom mirror with his Stratocaster maybe, just maybe, he ought to wonder if his usual solution; the short-termist, feelgood intellect-lite platitudes that pander to the illusions of those who believe themselves to be the young and groovy (just like him) could just be part of the problem, not the solution.

What Is Glimpsed

Here we have nothing to detain us. There is only a place: a place without significance. It is somewhere we pass through on the way to somewhere else. It is passed by almost without noticing it, just used as a way of signifying distance travelled and how far there is still to go.

Of course, people live here, lives go on here just as they go on elsewhere, but we know nothing of these people or the lives they lead, apart from what is glimpsed from the car as we pass through their streets, hardly touching their lives in the same way they hardly touch ours. To us they are nothing more than scenery, part of the background. While, to them, we are just traffic, no different to the other hundreds of vehicles that pass through their day on the way to somewhere else.

It is as if two separate never touching worlds exist: those that stay in place and those that pass through. It is possible for us to meet and for some reaction to occur. We could stop and have some effect on their lives, and them – or some of them – to have some effect on our lives, but we do not. We have no reason to stop and their lives go on without us, like so many other lives in the world around us.

To ourselves we are the centre around which the rest of the universe revolves, but to others we are as insignificant, as unnoticed as the farthest, dimmest star in the most distant galaxy, and just as relevant to them and their lives as that usually invisible star. 

Big Nanny Is Watching You

Rod Liddle in The Spectator does – I think have a point about

the logical consequence of an agenda driven by the liberal middle-class Left over the past 30 years, in which the common denominator is the yearning for an artificial world which is entirely risk-free.

Maybe artificial isn’t quite the right word though. My increasing distaste for this authoritarian mindset, mainly of the left, but not totally exclusive to it has grown apace over the last 10 years or so. I always used to vote Labour mainly through a real fear of right-wing authoritarianism. Now, though, that fear has been dwarfed by what the Labour party has actually done, leaving me with an even greater fear of the authoritarian left-mindset. This mindset seems to take a perverse delight in taking people’s autonomy away from them, and turning us all into children in the wise and benevolent care of the big-nanny state.

Update: See here for an excellent analysis of this left-wing authoritarianism.

The Memory Of Summers

We are not sure how to take this thing in our hands and feel its tremulous heartbeat. It seems such a delicate thing to take out against this world and all its indifference. The cold snow falls all around us and we are here huddled together, hoping for something more than mere warmth.

We have held on to the memory of summers gone, and warmer days lost, while we wait for their return. The darkness folds in upon us with the heavy blankets of the night, the stars become our only points of reference. We are here; and here we must remain, our hands wrapped together around this gift more precious than ourselves; something that will force us to move on out into the world in search of somewhere better. 

Monday Poem: Candle Flames And Butterflies

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Candle Flames And Butterflies

Would you like to see this thought
start out burning
like the yellow-golden flame
on the white candle,
skittering and stuttering
in the soft breeze drifting
through the open cottage window?

The way the flame will rise up,
leaving the candle behind and below.
Rising up towards the roof-beams
where it will metamorphose
into a red-orange butterfly.
Its wings a steady even shimmer
as dawn lights this dark bedroom.

Then the butterfly turns
towards the new morning
out through the open window
to disappear into the dawn.

From The Archive: The Common Reader

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense, some pieces from Little Frigging In The Wold, and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope, that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Common Reader – 26/04/2005

With its unerring eye for spotting tired bland truisms, The Independent today notices that the people in charge at the publishing houses don't seem to like - or even understand - book readers.

Well, yes.

It is an old story that the publishing houses once run by amateur(ish) enthusiasts are now run by faceless, heartless, soulless management types who only ever reading the accounts, and then only the bottom line.

What is really pitiful, though, is The Indy's solution to this woeful state of affairs, which boils down to that last desperate act of the brain-dead marketing droid - make reading books cool and trendy!

Now, there is an idea:

For a start, publishers have to think harder about how to reach the hordes of critical consumers of film, TV, internet and pop culture who should be reading books as sharp and savvy as all the shows, sites and bands they adore.

What? What!

It is just that kind of saturation vacuous over-marketing that has led to the current woeful state of popular culture where everything is in its niche and every thing that emerges above the dull background roar of hyper-hype is flogged - in both meanings of the word - to death, if not well into its afterlife.

Film these days is almost invariably a blend of over-used special effects and cliché- riddled tedium - marketed and sold as visual junk food for the easily mollified by the bright and shiny.

TV has become even less engaging as the headlong flight away from intelligent programming has accelerated, descending into an almost total imagination-free zone of lifestyle porn, reality prurience and inane celebrity idolatry.

Pop culture? I'm not sure what Boyd Tonkin) means by that - all of this is pop culture. I suppose he means pop music. Which in itself - including its up-market 'intelligent' sub-genre - rock - has been more or less moribund for so long now, that which is not actually re-release is re-tread, re-hash or re-cycled. If it were an emperor, it would have been arrested for public indecency decades ago.

The internet? Has some good things, a few great things, a lot of rubbish and an incredible ability to waste time. However, it is more the tool than the made object and should really be compared to the library rather than the book.

Rather than marketing down to these people, books should be shown - to everyone, not just the cool (how I loathe that moronic ejaculation) and these trendy-tedious bores that all the broadsheet press has taken to pandering-to and pampering - as a way of escaping, of rising above, this bland media and entertainment landscape of low aspiration spectacle-wank, voyeuristic wallowing in the antics of the inadequate and trite formulaic re-hashing of long worn-out prole-feed.

I suppose that what we could do with is a Jamie Oliver-type character, who will show up current popular culture for the junk-culture that it has become through over-marketing. It is now just like the junk food dished out in school dinning halls. We could do with someone who could reveal that there is something out there that is far healthier for all of us, if only we could be bothered to stop wallowing in the stupefying swill that is poured out for us.

Nameless Days

All of this exists in a place where time stands as still as the moment when it all began. I do not know what is going to grow from this moment. I do not think this is any season for growing.

The world is retreating inside itself as winter’s fingers creep out from the shadows to grasp everything in their icy grip. The days shrink inside themselves, huddling together against the cold, lost in the mists and fog they stumble around into each other, merging into one long slow memory of dark nameless days stretching out from autumn into spring.

The mornings are dark now and we have trouble escaping our dreams to stumble out into the cold of day. It is not a day though, not until the night has been shrugged off and dawn’ hesitant beginnings are creeping slowly across the skies.

Seasons Of Change And Difference

Newness is what we look for on these mornings that grow darker and colder. It is easy in the spring to find newness growing out of all that surrounds us. It is the season for growth and blooming. Autumn is slower, ripening, more of a falling away than a bursting forth. The season where things slow down, preparing themselves for the privations of the winter.

Still, though, autumn is one of the better seasons as it moves away from the heavy heat of summer towards the sharpness of winter: just as spring too shrugs off the heavy coat of winter to coax new life out of the frozen ground.

Autumn and spring are the seasons of change, and as such are the preferable ones. The other two hang heavy, one with heat and one with cold, seeming to stand still, in stasis, waiting for the seasons of change and movement.

They are the seasons of change and difference taking us forward into the familiarity of the new. 

Monday Poem: Ribbon

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Ribbon

You wore a blue ribbon,
over white stockings
for your wedding day.

The land opened up in front of us,
spread out towards the horizon.
And you said, how the river
could be a ribbon too.

But rivers are not like ribbons.
Rivers arrange themselves in certain ways.
Ribbons fall and twist over themselves
heaping messily, falling slowly,
chaotically, to the floor.

Like that night when you took my hand,
leading me to your lonely room.

Our clothes fumbled and fell,
heaping where they dropped.
My shirt covering your stockinged feet
as you sat down on the edge of your bed
to unfasten my old leather belt.

You wore a blue ribbon,
over white stockings
for your wedding day.

Look now, over the valley below.
Could we be happy, there,
by the river surrounded by open green?
Far from the cities of our ruined lives.

Look at the village, down by the river,
enfolded inside the enclosing curves.
Where the floods of spring
will offer us the chance
to wash each other clean again.
Washing away all these memories.

You wore a blue ribbon,
over white stockings
for your wedding day.

From The Archive: Health & Safety

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense, and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope, that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Health & Safety - 03/10/2006

The British are supposed to be obsessed with the weather and all its delightful permutations. My own outlook being more akin to the Billy Connolly maxim that 'there is no such thing as bad weather, merely the wrong clothes' means there has been many a time when I have been surprised by the number of folks I see wearing, or doing, something entirely unsuited for the conditions.

It seems to me to be elementary common sense to at least be aware of the weather forecast, but these people I see; either they pay no attention to the forecast, or wilfully ignore it. Both these attitudes are symptomatic of a certain kind of foolishness that, these days, it seems the over-officious 'Health & Safety' culture is trying to protect against. Mostly, it seems to protect people who display this kind of attitude from their own stupidity.

Examples like burglars suing householders for injuries sustained in breaking into their house, people falling through factory roofs retrieving kites, balls or so on regularly feature in articles on this matter. Such things should be met with at most a shrug at most and any attempt to blame someone else for their own stupidity, let alone attempt to extort 'compensation', should only result in the arrest of the perpetrator for being an embarrassment to humanity.

Of course, I'm not saying there aren't legitimate health and safety concerns. There are, undoubtedly, but there does seem to be an endemic creeping bureaucratisation of these areas of legitimate concern which creeps ever onward until what was once preoccupied with legitimate concerns now seems to turn into a sort of parody of itself.

A similar sort of thing is happening in other areas of what might be called 'social legislation'. For much as I would like to see Tony Blair banged up - if only for being a git, if nothing else - I found it strained the bounds of credibility to see the police hounding him for being slightly disparaging about the Welsh.

This sort of meddling attitude seems embedded in the current government, a sort of desire for the micro-legislation of people's lives. It is this mentality, maybe more than their foreign affairs, domestic cock-ups and all else they've done, that has driven me away from Labour. I, only half in jest, call them the Laborg for this reason, a seeming need to absorb everything and everyone into the Laborg hive-mind where all difference is legislated away.

This desire to control, to shape the world into an image of their own making possibly goes some way towards explaining the hopeless naivety of their foreign policy and all its blundering. But then so many of them were heavily into student politics (a long established oxymoron) where naïve foolish but noble-sounding gestures are de rigueur. The problem is when you let people like that get their sweaty little mitts of the levers of power you end up with… well, you end up with what we have now.

The Winter Is Coming

The years grow shorter and pass almost in the blink of an eye while the world closes around us, holding us tighter and tighter until there is no chance of escape. There is no free space around us and there is nothing we can do to shrug off how this world holds onto us.

I grow tired and can’t seem to find my way out of this darkness. The winter is coming, bringing the cold and the dark for us to hide inside, away from the world. We live these separate lives far away from each other and unable to touch, bundled up inside our winter lives.

Here, there is only the darkness of the lengthening nights that hold us inside them, huddled against the cold and the dark. We wait for the comfort of warmth and the touch of skin against skin to remind us of the warmth of living, and how it will fight against the all-enveloping cold and dark. 

How Long Before

So how long is it before we find the things we have been seeking? How long before the search is over and we discover those things that we know we have been lacking for so long?

All our lives we have felt incomplete, as though there is something missing from us, some phantom limb, some secret knowledge, some quiet understanding of the nature of this world and how our lives shape themselves to fit it, that we feel we have always lacked.

Others we see, on the street and throughout the world, they seem to know something that we don’t, have some understanding that we lack, have some other invisible limb that has a much firmer grasp on this world than we feel we have ever managed. Our grip is so light, tentative, a strong breeze could blow us off this world forever, never being able to reach out again to hold on, watching the world recede into the distance through our tear-filled eyes.

We never – it seems – learnt the easy language of the others who can make sense of this world to themselves and talk easily of it to everyone they meet, as though this universe holds no mysteries for them. It is as though they understand the intricacies of how matter, energy and time bend themselves into this creation, to build everything out of a single instance of less than nothing. 

Monday Poem: Between Words

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Between Words

Her hands took flight and moved to sculpt her words
to give shaped elegance to all she said.
She made each word a frozen moment, held
beyond another wave of moving air.

I heard the silence held between her words,
seeing her careful hands take each new word
and shape it beyond the limitations
of language, giving every word a life
to take across the space between our chairs.

And I? Still I could only sit transfixed
by all these sculptures, as she lined them up
on the still-breathing summer evening air,
before just waving them away like smoke.

She held up those same hands, once more to me
and reaching out to where I waited, still,
to take me deep inside herself. She held
me there, unmoving, as her now still hands
enclosed my face between her gifted palms,
and crossed her long slow legs across my back.
I knew, finally, I was captured then.

From The Archive: Junk Journalism

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Junk Journalism - Date: 04/10/05

At the BBC News Magazine site this article has the headline Is Junk Food A Myth based - it seems on 'A controversial new book' and requests comments. My comments are reprinted below, in case they don't appear on the BBC site.

This article seems to be more a case of Junk Journalism rather than any serious investigation into the story. Yet again, we have someone with - unsurprisingly - 'A controversial new book' to promote who - in fact - creates that very controversy in order to generate publicity for that book.

As several people have already pointed out in other comments, e.g. Jack:

Saying that there is no such thing as junk food only a junk diet is like saying there is no such thing as taking a single step only walking a mile.

Marks is doing little more than semantic juggling with the concepts of 'junk food' and 'junk diet' and not really saying anything new, or 'controversial'.

This is a good example of Junk Journalism, journalism by regurgitation of the press release. Lazy journalism that sees the magic word 'controversial' and suddenly all journalistic judgement flies out of the window.

This journalistic laziness is so often these days used by people wanting, or needing, to get media attention for their latest product, wheeze or scheme. Creating an artificial 'debate', 'controversy', 'argument' or whatever sees to be a sure way of getting media attention, whether justified or - more often - not.

Journalist - and their editors - must break free of this lazy junk journalism and actually investigate whether these claims - usually from 'mavericks' (another journalistic buzzword) have any merit, rather than just regurgitating all the PR that is fed to them.

This is not a trivial or insignificant matter. We saw during the MMR 'controversy' the damage that lazy junk journalism can do. Journalists should reject the notion that 'balance' matters more than truth or accuracy in reporting.

Review: House of Meetings – Martin Amis

[Fiction 2006]

Money by Marin Amis was one of the best books of the 1980s, an almost perfect satire of that awful decade. It is therefore almost inevitable that any novel Amis writes will be compared to that tour-de-force, and often unfavourably. House of Meetings, unfortunately does not stand up well in comparison to Money at all. In fact, there were times when reading this when I almost checked the name on the cover was actually Martin Amis, and not some pale impostor. This book seems to lack almost all of those authorial traits, touches, call them what you will, that enables one to feel an authorial presence, lack Amis himself. There are only a few – far too few – examples of his – almost trademark – linguistic dexterity and flights of fluency. Also, probably, for the first time ever with a Martin Amis book, I cannot remember laughing at all, not even smiling, as I read this. In fact, I had no sense of engagement with it at all, and felt very little authorial engagement with it either. In the end, it became a chore just to finish the book.

The novel is the story of a love triangle between the narrator, and his brother Lev and the woman they both love Zoya set in 20^th Century Russia. The central point around which the novel revolves is ‘The House of Meetings’ a place set aside for conjugal visits in the Russian slave camp where both brothers at incarcerated, and where Lev and his then wife Zoya meet for such a visit.

Of course, the tragic events of communist Russia, and post-communist Russia, are played out around this story of these three characters. Unfortunately neither the love-triangle story, nor the greater tragedy of Russia itself seems to engage the reader to any great extent, everything seems distant, almost an exercise, as if all the tragedies, crimes, mistakes and so forth of a triangular relationship, and of the history of 20^th century Russia are being ticked off on a list by the author.

It is a shame really. The world could do with yet another great Martin Amis novel, but this one isn’t it.

Secret Paths

What can we say? There is nothing. There are no words left to use. We used up every word we could say to each other before this began. Now it is over, there is nothing left to say.

The words are like autumn leaves, brown and brittle, we watch as the wind blows them away from us, heaping them in places too far for our reaching fingers to touch. All the words, the precious ones and the wasted ones, are now heaping together under the bare skeletons of trees. Trees that were once verdant green, sheltering us under their protecting shade, protecting our naked skin from the heat of the sun and the eyes that would only condemn us.

These secret paths no longer lead us to our special places. They only take us away from each other, separate and alone once more. We go back to our empty lives, full of words that sound, but have no meaning; and actions that have no time for gentle gestures of momentary tenderness. 

Monday Poem: Burst

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Burst

If I had words that could burst
through the dark of your night
like sudden fireworks of desire,

to cover you in a healing rain
of gold and silver, green and red
and all the possible colours
that make a rainbow of understanding,

then I would launch myself
up towards your night-time skies
taking all I could show you
far beyond the reaching fingers
stretching upraised arms up to the sky.

From The Archive: The Same Freedom

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Same Freedom – 09-10-2006

Of course Muslim women have the freedom - if they so desire - to wear the veil in this country. The same freedom Salman Rushdie had to write The Satanic Verses. The same freedom that, in the west, allows the pope to discuss the minutiae of theological history. The same freedom that allows Danish cartoonists to caricature whomsoever they like. The same freedom that allowed Theo van Gogh to make a film entitled Submission.

The very same freedom that allows other western women to dress as they feel like without being called sluts or whores. The same freedom that lets the women themselves decide if, who and when to marry, if and when to have children. The same freedom that allows women to have a life outside the home, to be free, to be independent, to have an education and/or a career, to make her own choices and decisions. The same freedom that sets women free from the dictates of so-called religious, or other moral, 'leaders', who attempt to prescribe how women should dress and act. The very same freedom that sees women and men equal in the sight of the law.

The very same freedom that allows them, their brothers, sons and fathers to join the British army and do what they can to help prevent their fellow Muslims from slaughtering each other in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The same freedom that was won with great difficulty and struggle from religious censorship, oppression and intolerance. The very same freedom that can all too easily be lost if people do not care for it, fight for it and cherish it.

Ideology And Religion

Here we are then, just another day. Each day passes. Each day starts with the same few words and sometimes the same sentences. It is hard to know how to start a new day without the ritual of beginning the day.

I ought to go out and find some new words, a new ritual for the start of the day. For this is how religions grow, out of such routine observances. There is no real difference between ideology and religion, both eventually lose touch with the world and insist that they are right and it is the world that is wrong.

We do not drop these things when they lose touch with reality – that is where the danger lies.

Monday Poem: Your Own Dreams

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Your Own Dreams

So, do you turn away, back into the night
like you used to, all those years ago?
Diving deep into your own dreams

to swim across the night time seas
in search of that one far-off land,
that one magical kingdom

where you can walk the streets
like the one true princess you know
one day you will rightly be.

Standing still at the busy centre
as exotic bazaars bustle around you
and urchins plead for your desires

and how they can be satisfied.
While you stare up, unheeding,
at the high white-walled palace

where solemn guards patrol
and even the songbirds are hushed.
Because, deep within a cool bedchamber

the young and beautiful princess lies
sleeping the hot afternoon away
dreaming of a strange misty country

where a woman, just like her,
swims across the seas of night time
to dive deep into her own dreams.

From The Archive: The Clocks Striking Thirteen

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Clocks Striking Thirteen - 25/03/05

At first, I thought this was just the typical 1984 piece - missing what I see as the most important and interesting things about the novel - but towards the end he begins to touch upon some of the reasons why 1984 tops my list of the most important books of the 20^th century.

The article finishes with this:

Yet, beneath the surface, Orwell's imagination seized on something more radically true, and which increasingly we can see all around us. The futurology of 1984 is less important than its understanding of a malign tendency in certain strains of government, namely an intolerance of difference, variety and privacy. The misuse of Parliament in order to criminalise hunting (of only certain kinds, of course), and the steady, irrational, vindictiveness shown by the government towards private schools, should remind us that, notwithstanding our material prosperity, we are not so far from 1984 as we might like to think. The object of power is power, says O' Brien. Beneath all the solemn nonsense of pledge cards and targets, this too is the watchword of that sanctimonious relative of Ingsoc, New Labour.

I do think there is a certain amount of validity in the Ingsoc / New Laborg comparison. But I don't think it is an especially New Laborg condition. Orwell, along with others like Koestler, identified this authoritarian aspect of the left back in the thirties. Although being more sympathetic - in general - to the left rather than the right, I have never really felt that comfortable with socialism, and it is mainly because of this - often rather puritanical - authoritarianism. It is - I suppose - rather ironic that the New Laborg have dropped socialism, but held onto its authoritarian aspects. Of course, as they say, it is all done in the very best interest of the people, but I can't help feeling nervous about it.

Another aspect - related to this authoritarianism - is that infamous rallying-cry of the right Political Correctness, or, to give it it's full title Political Correctness Gone Mad! This too appears in 1984, in the concept of Thoughtcrime. As the recent Summers case in America and the British law against incitement to religious hatred shows, it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak out on matters that that liberal orthodoxy has deemed beyond the pale. To hold and express - even in private - views regarded as politically incorrect is enough to get people dismissed from their jobs.

Another quote:

But in the West, aside from some isolated palpable hits, 1984 must have quickly seemed unrelated to at least the surface of life. Orwell's description of "proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally" is still on the mark:

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

Well, manufactured pop acts, along with trash TV like Pop Idol and all its equally inane siblings is the first thing to come to mind here. There are, also, such things as ghost-written Celebrity autobiographies and novels, seemingly endless quantities of lowest-possible-denominator TV. In fact, all the detritus that has turned pop culture into junk culture. A dreary mindless 'entertainment' that is as bad for the mind as junk food is for the body.

And his snippet of mathematically-ignorant proletarian conversation on the lottery – "Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!" – is wickedly accurate.

There are the parallels between the Camelot lottery and this, as well as all the other fascinations: astrology, mediums, alternative medicines and therapies and other headlong flights from the rational and empirical.

I don't think, either, that it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to see parallels between so-called Reality television - Big Brother indeed - and the show trials in the novel. These programmes always seem to produce a baddie for the totally-mashed couch potatoes who make up the audiences for this drivel to demonise in their tabloid-led two minute hate.

The constant war against Eurasia or Eastasia also has contemporary echoes. I remember saying to someone around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union that America - if not the West as a whole - would need to find itself another enemy as soon as possible.

Luckily, central casting was able to come up with the almost perfect Goldstein-esque villain in Osma Bin Laden. If had not already existed, then it would have - eventually - become necessary to invent him (who is to say that some of his more… demonic… aspects are not invention?)

The future belonged to the proles? Does it? Did Orwell himself still believe it? At the end of the novel, does Winston? Is it a cry of hope and possibility, or of desperation, or of despair?

After all, the working class never did live up to what the middle-class socialists expected of it.

When The Mud Settles

So, the days pass and we can expect nothing different. Out here, all the days do is pass, one after the other; until one day you look up and years have slipped by without anyone noticing.

Of course, back in those days it seemed so hard to make sense of anything. That was when I was young and I hadn’t realised that nothing ever does really make any sense. You – as you grow older and, maybe, wiser – just learn to live a bit easier with the confusion.

Sometimes, it seems as though it is about to make sense in some way, and then it slips out of your hand and is gone. It’s like trying to catch a small fish in a stream with your bare hands. You think you have it, then there is a sort of muscular hard twitch between your fingers and you feel it slip away. Then it is gone, lost in the eddying mud your urgent grabbing has boiled up.

When the mud finally settles, the fish is long gone. The water is clear again, but you know that is just a cover for the many secrets the mud still hides. 

Acts Of God

The rain falls and it falls on everyone, no matter what we do or how we live our lives. Tragedy too is arbitrary, showing that so-called ‘acts of god’ are nothing of the sort. The good as well as the bad, the innocent as well as the guilty are smitten as indiscriminately as the religious and non-religious, the old as well as those too young to have ever sinned against such a god.

This should be obvious enough, but there is something in the believers’ mindset, or – more probably – the lack of something in the mindset of believers that makes them either ignore such contradictions or fabricate elaborate explanations for such evidence that contradicts or shows up their belief for the absurdities it contains.

They are always making up excuses and rationalisations for any set of circumstances that questions their concept of a god involved in human affairs and controlling the world and yet the obvious answer – that no such being exists - is the one they seemingly and wilfully refuse to countenance. 

Families

We pass the treasure from hand to hand slowly. Each one of us traces the delicate surface work with our fingers. We all know the patterns now, after so many years, but still the ritual is important to us. Knowing such things is so valuable.

Such things hold so many more memories than we ever could. Our minds are small, filled with all the necessities of staying alive. It is only at these special times, times when the objects can show us the way, that we can break free of the chains that bind us to this place.

Our families have lived here for a long time. We have grown and prospered, sending many bands of third children out to found new families of their own. It is possible, these days, to walk for many days in any direction and only see families that grew from our families.

Sometimes we wonder if we are the only people in these parts. 

Monday Poem: Cunning

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Cunning

A roundness of curving and taut
skin stretched tight and neat
round from the curved bottom
between the opening thighs.

A warm heartbeat of a place
snuggled deep in its forest hide.
It waits, ready to wake and open
like a flower to the sun's touch.
It waits like an eager princess
for the magic of a kiss.

A tongue to tease along the folds,
to open for the journey inside.
A moistness, juicy as summer fruit,
a taste of all the seas of dreams,
a taste of sweat and sweetness.

Deeper inside, on the way back
to the place of all beginnings,
then the return out and upward
to tease the shy retiring bud
that promises and, hesitantly,
will deliver, if treated well.

The legs clench, tight as a promise
pulling deeper, deeper inside
demanding a deeper desire.
A shudder shivers a deeper sigh
tension paused, stiff arching.

Then a slow easing deflation
and that one final lingering kiss
that reawakens a quiescent desire.

 

 

Worldwide Admire Your Own Genitals Day

Now, it just so happens that today is the day for doing stuff that there is no other special day for. Only yesterday, for example, was National Staring At Cheese Day. So, no doubt you spent several deeply-fulfilling hours gazing in awe at a Wensleydale, or - for the more daring - at a Double Gloucester with Chives and Onion.

Tomorrow is - of course - the fiftieth Annual Worldwide Admire Your Own Genitals Day, a time for otherwise busy people throughout the world* to take one day off in order to have a long lingering look at their own genitalia.

Several national newspapers throughout this country, for example have jumped on the bandwagon have joined in the fun by stating that with tomorrow's editions they will be giving away long-handled mirrors especially designed for self-genital contemplation. For the less fortunately endowed, the NHS is giving away special magnifying glasses for the day.

The following day is - at least in the UK - National Bite A Stranger's Ankle Day, where we will see footage on the Evening News of the traditional ceremony where all the leaders of the major political parties from throughout the British Isles all line up to be bitten on the ankle by senior members of the Royal Family. Not forgetting the traditional Tupping-on-the-Marsh Tormountrisehill Hill Ankle-Biting Festival, where sometimes as many as seven people gather on the hilltop to bite each other's ankles in a ceremony dating back to the days of Mick Jagger.


*Apart from those in strict Uttabollux countries, of course, where even being in the same room as your own genitals is strictly Nhastistuff (forbidden).

Crossroads

Now I do not know which way to turn. I arrived here expecting to know and understand by now. However, things these days are not so straightforward or so simple.

Things do not get easier as you get older; you just learn to leave certain things behind. Even though it is still too easy to do the wrong thing and go chasing after dreams you suddenly find you no longer believe in or do not want; but only when it is too late.

You find yourself suddenly in a new place, standing at a crossroads like this, wondering about these things, and too hesitant to take a step one way or the other. 

A Beginning

A beginning? These things always need somewhere to begin, a place where we can find ourselves. A place before something like this came along and changed all our worlds. Sometimes it is easy to find some instant in the stream of time, around which, and from which, all new events flow, like a large boulder breaking free from the mountain and rolling down to splash heavily into the stream, sometimes diverting the course of that stream completely.

Other times, though, it is hard to say just what event caused the stream to change its course. It could be something as small as a twig being trapped between two stones, which has little perceptible effect on the flow of the stream at first. However, as time passes, that twig captures some more flotsam, then some more, and so on and on, until one day there is a blockage, a natural dam, which the stream can no longer ignore. 

Monday Poem: Ambition

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Ambition

All those bodies left in fields
blood seeping, soaking deep
like rain into the thirsty ground.

I thought I knew then.

I thought, I believed
I was there to wear the holy crown,
But I was no real king,
only ever really the fool.

Ambition gnaws away at the insides,
turns others into ciphers
for the yearned-for end.   

I have no ambition left.

It is long gone, seeping into the ground
like the fresh blood of a young fool
who believed in all the visions,
who followed an older, but no wiser, fool.

And for what?
For ambition? For glory?
And what is glory?

Peacock's feathers.

Intermission

There will be no new posts here until 03/11/08.

From The Archive: Turn Your Computer Off, Now

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Turn Your Computer Off, Now - 09/08/05

Here's an excellent, thoughtful article in the Grauniad, by Marina Warner about why books are better than computers. It is something that should be so obvious as to not really need mentioning.

I know I - for example, spend far too much time reading stuff, most trivial stuff like blogs - the overwhelming majority of which - if not all - are like this one- a complete waste of time for both their writers and their readers.

Perhaps - it increasingly seems to me - the book is the pinnacle, at least as far as fiction is concerned.

More and more I seem films as a very poor substitute indeed for books. There is nothing so depressing - as in the recent War of the Worlds - as hearing of yet another film adaptation of a favourite , or even just well-regarded, book.

I have given up on the TV adaptations of 'great' books too. They miss so much out of what makes a great book a great book.

The irony of reading this article on the web, on a computer is - of course - not lost on me. I used to like - still prefer - the physical fact of a newspaper. Not the tabloid comics, of course, but a real newspaper.

However, there is - these days - just so much wasted paper in them. So much lifestyle junk, so many Polly Fillers and incestuous media-land gossip, trivia and oneup(wo)manship. It seems the larger, the more supplements, a newspaper gets the less there is in it I want to read. Simple economics has necessitated my move from print media to reading newspapers and magazines (where possible) on the web.

But why do I need all this information I so assiduously gather? Am I like one of those big-gobbed whales that hoover up the plankton as they unconsciously swim through it?

The Joy of Sex

It was a spring day, but rainy and cold. As we dressed again, awkward in her small car, she spoke of her husband. How he had never learnt how to do any of those special things I had so eagerly done for her, despite all his army years travelling around the world, acquiring tattoos and getting drunk in foreign brothels.

She said that, if she had even half the money he had spent in the mouths of cheap foreign whores, we could have spent our meagre lunch hour fucking in the comfort of a more expensive car. 

Take Away

I remember her name, and how she laughed easily, chatting like the rice frying in the back kitchen. I was not used to it - the attention, I mean. She looked back, over her shoulder, she was nervous too. Her father, she explained, raising her eyes towards the ceiling fan.

I nodded, I understood, or at least, I thought so. But maybe that was only superficially, sudden media images of inscrutable Asians and family bonds much tighter than blood throbbing in veins or dripping on floors.

Her sleek careful fingers touched mine as she gave my change. Such dark eyes. She smiled and then we both knew.

She took one step back, looked down, away, as the back door opened and her father thrust the hot brown paper bag, neatly folded, without a glance at his daughter, he smiled, briefly, at me.

I smiled back, hoping he would not notice my real desire, not notice whom I really wanted to take away. 

Happen

It has been a long time since I thought about it. Time can pass by so easily; hardly noticed, hardly recognised for what it is.

What is a second? What is a minute? Mere paltry things, which do not often go remarked upon. But, minutes make hours and hours make days which make weeks, months and years.

Years slip by so easily. You would not think they could, but they do. Ask yourself this: What has happened to the last ten years of your life; has it all gone by while you were not looking? Have things changed greatly in those intervening years, or is everything much the same as it always was?

If it has changed a great deal, do you feel as though it was through any action on your part, or did it all just happen around you?

It always seems as though things happen to us, things beyond our control. No life is left untouched by the world around it. Interaction is necessary, if not essential.

We cannot walk through the world without disturbing it in some way, leaving footprints. It touches us and we ought to reach out to touch it too. There is no point in hiding away from it. 

Review: In Defence of History – Richard J. Evans

[Non-fiction – History 1997]

The dreary trite pseudo-‘insights’ of post-modernism reappear again; this time with their feeble attempts to turn history into just another ‘text’. However, as Evans so splendidly puts it in this, his robust defence of history:

Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and connate be seen as either a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.

History as Evans argues has a long established methodology, which is itself constantly under scrutiny - as this book itself demonstrates by its own existence and its long line of antecedents - for establishing the veracity of historical events and the value of historian’s attempts at explaining the relationship between those events.

As with all other areas where postmodernism has tried to elbow itself into, there is little – if anything – that postmodernism itself can add to history, or history’s self-examination that is not trite, superficial or painstakingly obvious before the weight of postmodernism’s own contradictions smother it’s pseudo-profundities and irrelevances.

Postmodernism et al, of course, grew out of the failure and collapse of Marxism and all the theories and suppositions which had grown from it. Marx’s own idea that history had a purpose (or – at least – discoverable laws) and direction was – of course – destroyed by Popper (among others), and – most tellingly – by the course of history itself.

History does not make the claims that postmodernists accuse it of – of being the absolute truth about past events – and so their destruction of this strawman is not the masterstroke they seem to believe. Historians, and those of us who read their work, know that there is always more to the story than we get from any history book. History is not a science in the strong sense of that word, but it does have a rigorous methodology, enough to make both historians and their readers feel confident that they do get as close to truth as they can within the limitations of history itself. For example, historians are very aware that historical documents are written by fallible human beings, often for a variety of reasons conscious or unconscious and take into account many other factors like the context of the document, the nature of the document and so on. So the postmodernist claim that a document, or ‘text’ as they like to call it, can no longer be regarded as having one fixed meaning which is bestowed upon it by its author at the time of writing. As Evans says, though ‘it is doubtful whether anyone, in fact, has ever believed that meaning can be fixed in this way.’ He also demonstrates the falsehood of po-mo’s claim about the arbitrariness of language, demonstrating that language evolves through contact and interaction with reality, rather than just being about itself. In fact, Evens states ‘…the postmodernist concentration on words diverts attention away from real suffering and oppression and towards the kinds of secondary intellectual issues that matter in the physically comfortable world of academia.’

Of course, a great deal of po-mo – pace Foucault – is rather simplistically obsessed with what they like to see as power relationships between various actors within societies, but, Evans points out, this could be more a case of the po-mo academics themselves trying to claw back some power and influence for themselves. Hence, with postmodernism’s disdain for truth and reality:

The past no longer has the power to confine the researcher within the bounds of facts. Historians and critics are now omnipotent. To underline this, the postmodernists have developed a new level of specialized language and jargon, borrowed largely from literary theory, which has rendered their work opaque to anyone except other postmodernists. The enterprise thus seems not only self-regarding but, ironically in view of its criticism of hierarchy and prioritization, elitist as well. Its narcissism and elitism can both be seen as compensatory mechanisms for the loss of real power, income and status suffered by its academic practitioners over the past ten to fifteen years.

Constantly, throughout this book Evans – like so many other critics of postmodernism in many other areas beyond history – demonstrates that po-mo must always fail because of its inherent contradictions. For example, if all theories are equally valid, then why give any special credence to po-mo, rather than more realist theories? If all knowledge is relative, then why bother believing in po-mo and its practitioners? Why ‘privilege’ postmodernists over anyone else?

Evans, does in the end allow po-mo some limited room in the practice of historical scholarship, but only in terms of the way it makes historians more aware of the limitations of their approach and areas of study, but that is what a good historian should do anyway, it seems.

Anyway, postmodernism is well on the wane now, in areas beyond history. So soon, books like this will become objects of historical curiosity only, like books on or about so many of the ideologies that came promising so much and – in the end – delivered little or nothing of any lasting worth. Just like so many theories, ideologies and other ‘grand narrative’, po-mo became quasi-religious and ended up talking only to itself about itself within constraints that it engendered itself which kept out so much of the awkward reality that cannot be held within those constraints without the whole edifice crumbling to dust.

In Defence of History is a very good, readable, book that ought to be read by more than just historians and those with an interest in how history comes about. It is a strong defence of academic rigour and a warning that, without that rigour -which postmodernism tried so hard to undermine - if the academic, or indeed any, mind is left too open, then anything could crawl in.

Monday Poem: Becalmed

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Becalmed

This morning all my thoughts are gone.
Gone to wherever thoughts go
when they are lost in their own seas.

No longer tossed by vindictive waves
that churn and boil in useless fury.
But becalmed on seas stretched taut
like glassy silken sheets spread
from horizon to distant low horizon.

A British National Day

If you have been stultified by the abject tedium of the recent debate about the nature of Britishness then you will, no doubt have heard all you want to hear about the need for a 'National Day'. However, if it does mean a chance for another day off work where we can all join together in one long national traffic jam along the routes to all our out-of-town-shopping-centres, then maybe, just maybe, there is some merit to the idea. After all, we could all do with another day off, couldn't we?

The question therefore arises as to which day that day off should be. 'Why not today?' is as good an answer as any. For today is - as you well know - the anniversary of that significant day in British history when Sir Hedgerow Sausageincline first offered a spatula to Queen Elizabeth I as she waited for news of the Spanish Amanda..

The Spanish Amanda - as every schoolchild knows - had launched a thousand ships; by head-butting them down the slipway, in an act of revenge against England for the day King Harold the Confessor had poked her in the eye with an arrowroot biscuit at the battle of Birmingham New Street. So, consequently Queen Elizabeth I needed the spatula to use as a cricket bat in her infamous game of ten-pin bowling (the rules of this game have long since changed, of course) against W.C. Graciefields, who - as everyone knows - played naked except for a muddy cape, and his team of Plymouth whores.

The rest of the story is etched on the national consciousness. The two armies the British 'Mods' or Cavaliers against the Spanish 'Rockers', or Puritans stood face to face on the Brighton beach as the traditional British Bank Holiday rain lashed down upon them. Not waiting for her army, Queen Elizabeth strode up to Spanish Amanda as soon as she stepped on the beach.

Crying 'we will fight them on the beaches!' Elizabeth slapped Amanda hard around the head with her spatula, severely lacerating Amanda's paella, before Amanda could even begin to set up her deckchair.

Disentangling herself from her deckchair the humbled, and slightly-bruised, Amanda turned and ran across the beach, followed by her shame-faced army of Rockers. To the loud jeers of the British Mods, the Rockers headed back to sea in their pedalos, and peddled off towards the horizon, never daring to return to these noble shores again.

Although, there are many proudly patriotic British people who make it their sacred duty to commemorate this day by going to Spain each summer to spend a whole fortnight throwing up over as much of it as they can, this day is not really marked on the British calendar or celebrated in the way it should be.

Maybe we should change that.

Airstrip One

Orwell’s 1984 is one of my all-time favourite books, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in it.

It was meant – as they say – to be a warning, not a blueprint. And yet we have the Newspeak of political correctness, the Thoughtcrime of various recent pieces of legislation that outlaw any unauthorised thoughts about religions, terrorism and anything else the government decides you should not think about, Junior Spies, the prolefeed of popular culture, and – of course – the CCTV telescreens. Now from the Ministry of Love we have this.

Words

Words do not like to be caught. Poised, frozen on the sheer plain whiteness of the page.

Words, there are a lot of them about. You will often hear them muttering together in the shadows, plotting, scheming.

Words will take over your mind, fill it with promises, tell you stories, share your secrets. They know what you're thinking. They will sing all your songs. They will fill your memory with stories.

Words will take you by the hand and lead you up the garden path. They will promise you everything.

Words will tell you lies.

Words will leave you empty and silent whenever you need them most.

Words will say the wrong thing for you.

Words will say what you did not mean at all.

Words will list all your mistakes.

Words will remember all your lies and evasions.

Words will hold you in the darkness and words will help you through the night.

Words will open the universe to you.

Words will tell you everything.

Words will hide away inside all your books, waiting just for you.

Words will keep the world just out of your reach, standing between you and what you can touch.

Words will be there at the beginning, and there right at the end.

Words. 

Like Dust

Walking down that road, we will see what we can find when suddenly turning a corner to discover a new day before us. Here we are then, doing the same thing we do every morning and wondering how it can be made different, how can something new grow from these old stories?

They are old tales, old when this world was young. People like us have lived lives like this from before history began. We live, we grow old and we die, almost forgotten, and then are forgotten as memories die after us.

Our moment is here, and then it is gone like a cloud passing before the sun, like a leaf floating down the stream, like something brittle crushed in the palm of the hand and then left to scatter like dust on the breeze. 

Monday Poem: Discarded

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Discarded

To search for what is found, there by the edge
of roads and pathways. Places where time is still
against the movement taking all the world
to somewhere else, just the same as they left
behind. To find there what is left and lost,
discarded and forgotten. Now ignored
by those who pass by, only unaware
of what is there – beyond their easy reach.

A history waiting to be found again.
A chance to connect, break the hold of time
that keeps us here, apart from those past worlds
we only reach through fragments left behind.
All that remains are fragments, nothing more.
and all we know and all we are and were
is all we leave behind too, nothing more.

From The Archive: Elitist, My Arse

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Elitist, My Arse - Date: 23/08/2005

I've recently finished reading Ian Hamilton's Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth Century Poets (an excellent book, and - I would think - a very good introduction to the subject for the neophyte) in one of the essays (I Forget which, but I think it was on one of the beats, or post-beats) he says 'we must stop flattering the young.'

Yes, I do think that it is time we stepped away from the blind worship that has resulted in the adultescent, binge drinking and a high proportion of the stuff that blights our modern world. So much of it seems to involve pandering to the young and aping the (inevitable) simplicities of their wordview.

Then there is this in the Grauniad about The music that dare not speak its name. and how

the perceived classical music market (grey, old) and the Observer's (and Guardian's) target readership - the assumption being that anyone aged 25 to 45 regards classical music as an entirely closed book.

I'm 46 (a month or so ago), so - apparently - I now fall outside that demographic, but I have been 'into' classical for a long, long time.

The author Meurig Bowen states that 'I certainly don't regard popular music as junk food', but it is slowly - and somewhat reluctantly - what I'm beginning to believe, and not just pop music, but the entirety of popular culture these days. There was a time - the late 60s/early 70s - when it seemed as though popular culture could offer something beyond mere entertainment, but those days are long gone now.

One of my strongest memories of my first hesitant steps into the strangely beguiling world of classical music is of one day in a record shop (back when there were record shops, and when those shops sold classical recordings). I remember listening to two almost archetypal Black Country working men (both in flat caps, but sans whippets) vigorously and knowledgeably discussing the relative merits of the available versions of a Brahms symphony. So… elitist, my arse.

What those two blokes knew, and what we seem to have forgotten of late, is that there is stuff out there that does have a greater value than other stuff. That it is not all relative, and that most insidiously anti-human, anti-freedom, anti-rational, anti-intelligence, almost fascistic notion - that it is all a matter of taste and nothing more is a complete load of relativistic bollocks.

There used to be evening classes, night school, worker's colleges and so on. There used to be a BBC that took seriously the idea that it was there to educate, entertain and inform and was not frightened of showing the difficult stuff to the masses.

But, nowadays, as Bowen says, if chips and Turkey Twizzlers are all that's served up, that's the taste and preference created. And it is us that are the poorer for it. We have thrown away so much, wasted so much time, chasing after an illusion of egalitarianism that has - instead of embiggening us all - has taken away so much possibility, leaving us with so much unfulfilled human potential wasting away to nothing.