Any leads?

In the endless hours of peaceful contemplation, which is life without school (that’s not strictly true, but near enough when compared with teaching!) there is time for the consideration of the more spiritual things in life. No matter how much I vaunt my atheism there is always the nagging attraction of numinous speculation. The belief in an all controlling deity was pushed into the forefront of my thoughts by something seemingly trivial: isn’t it, as they say, always the same?

Modern life, for someone of my persuasion is fraught with difficulties. Try as I might to live an uncluttered existence there are elements which seek to complicate my chosen path. I speak, of course, of electrical leads. When you have as many gadgets as I possess then certain drawers are writhing masses of serpentine lengths knotting and gendering and entwining themselves in an inextricable mass of black, white and grey.

What, you may ask, about God? Where does s/he come into it? Well, as far as I can remember, I place each lead in the drawer carefully and as neatly as I can. I do not have a giant wooden spoon to stir up the leads into a plastic stringy soup. Yet, whenever I need to power up a gadget, the extrication of a specific lead is next to impossible without drawing into daylight about fifty of its near neighbours. When gentle shaking has dissuaded some of the fellow travellers to drop back into obscurity, the remaining two or three are locked together in a fiendish way which reminds you of the intricacy of an impossible three dimensional puzzle devised by a sick tormented mind. Trying to separate the strands defies Newtonian physics and you need a mind which is at home in a universe formed as a Möbius Strip lying on an Escher staircase if you want to stand any chance of success in encouraging the lead you actually want to emerge free and usable.

And this is where God comes in. Scorning to appeal to the theological writings of the Early Fathers of the Church to explain the twisting of electrical leads, I turn instead to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, where the Babel Fish was clear proof of the existence and therefore (as any god worth the name would obviously not need proof) the non existence of God. The Entwined Theory of Leads postulates that inert strips when placed in any sort of conjunction will combine and twist to the negative reciprocal of their root and lead to denial of Humanity, Sanity and Divinity in their attempted unravelling. So there.

All that because I lost my temper in trying to get the earphones separated from the lead of my ipod. (ibid et passim) At least I feel better now, the dispersal of anime by orthography.

Peter Alan, the Estate Agents, are now on the scene: and so far, so good. After a quick check round the house, photos were taken and within an hour of the agent leaving the details of my house were in the shop window with printed details and photographs ready for me to check and OK. The efficiency of the first part of the process has reignited by enthusiasm. Hope is still springing eternal.

Hadyn came for coffee and asked me to phone up the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid which is putting on a Howard Hodgkin exhibition because he was unable to go. I first thought of waiting for Toni to come home and then I thought that I really should do it myself because this will be the way of my future life. So I did and found myself listening to a fast speaking recorded voice which didn’t even give me the option of leaving a message, which I (sort of) did anyway – just in case. My second option was the phone the ordinary reception of the museum. I talked to a receptionist who made no concessions to my halting Spanish, kept me on hold and eventually told me she could no reply from the appropriate person I needed to speak to so I should phone again ‘tomorrow.’ [The only reason I did not put that word is Spanish is that I do not have the correct symbol for the enya.] I eventually got Toni to write an email. Such is life.

Tomorrow visiting an art gallery in Museum Place in town, collecting the tickets for my trip to Reading on Wednesday and perhaps lunch somewhere self indulgent!