Why is it that what seems like an excellent idea for a piece of writing or a poem when scribbled in a notebook, doesn’t work out when transferred to paper or a computer screen? When the germs of a concept are transcribed, they often seem trite and disjointed.
I had been moaning in my notebook about the condition of my knees and legs and feet (I like to be inclusive) and that fact that walking is painful, and it took only a moment’s thought to extend that moan into a thesaurus of words connected with personal disintegration using one of my favourite terms from an old dictionary of computers, “graceful degradation” (now known as “fail-soft”, a far less evocative term) and a general feeling that everything was leading down to death and ignominy.
I then took an imaginative side-step into the graphic work of Escher and explained my use of his art as exemplifying “everything has to be redefined”. The old certainties in a life with firm feet is now called into question when all walking must be pre-planned and calculated. “My life’s future is calculation” I have scribbled down as a statement of the fact that what I used to do without a thought, now needs consideration: how far will I have to walk; where is the parking; is there anywhere to sit, and so on.
I am aware that I give the impression in the previous paragraphs of a delicate invalid, sipping in weak beef tea, and coughing discretely into a pocket handkerchief. I am generally in robust good health, and I swim 1,500m every morning, so there is an element of indulgent introspection and just a hint of reductio ad absurdum in what I write in my notes to myself.
Then via a note which reads “underpants from M&S”, I get to a written equation “living + decisions = death” which I qualify with “eventually” and then burble on to an idea that life is algebraic, with all its unknowns, and then (inevitably) I come to the formula for solving quadratic equations: x equals minus b, plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4 ac all over 2a
It looks so much better when written out like a proper equation, but trying to type it out and get this blog format to accept it was just too difficult.
I know that there was a time when I was able to use the equation to solve certain quadratic problems. I never really understood what I was doing and, as far as I was concerned, the formula was something given to Moses by God and was found in one of the appendices to the Ten Commandments. I may never have understood it or why I was using it, but I did (very occasionally) get correct answers and that was enough for me.
As “Algebra” was a paper in the Maths O Level,
and we had to have maths to go to university, it was justification enough for
most of us as to why we were doing it. I
also had a vague idea that it was a way of finding out the value of something
you didn’t know by using figures that you did, discovering an unknown, the
value of 
. It is not hard to see
that such a process appeals to a literary mind as well as a mathematical one –
if such distinctions are real or useful.
My notes end with a description of something that I saw while I was having my cup of tea at the end of my swim: a father and young son playing a game of chess.
I realized, as I saw them, that I had not seen anyone playing chess in the pool café, draughts, dominoes, and cards, yes, but chess never. It also struck me that chess is often played intergenerationally, you can never assume that just because there is an age difference, that the older is going to beat the younger.
Father and son might have been evenly matched: the board is the thing, not the age of the hands moving the pieces.
Many years ago, I was in Norway and in a public park next to the main road there were a series of large chess boards set out on the floor with oversize pieces to move around. One game I noted was being played between an elderly retired man, and a much younger man wearing an orange mini skirt and white calf-length boots. There were spectators for that game, but not concerned with the mini-skirted man, no one looked at him, just the progress of the pieces. The game weas truly the thing.
In some way or other I felt that the chess game was connected (at least in my mind) to my other notes. But the poem is not developing.
I hope that writing this out has ordered my thinking in some ways and that tomorrow I can go back to my notes and to my sketchy draft and make something of it.
Or not, of course. Failure is also positive!
